Dear Linden Lab,
Things have never been easy in Second Life, for you, for us, for anyone. But once upon a time when you were about to start working on something that might affect us all in world, or when you discovered something was going borky, you’d have the decency to tell us. There would be a nice little blue pop-up appear in the top right-hand corner of the screen advising users of this, that or the other. When issues were resolved, there would be a nice little notice telling us so.
It was informative; it was helpful; it was reassuring to know you guys were out there, keeping an eye on things and letting us know what was going on. It gave us a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside. In short, it was communicative.
And then one day it stopped, leaving us with no option but to find out about Things Going Wrong or that planned maintenance had started by experiencing it the hard way: through teleports failing or transactions going astray or No Copy items poofing into the ether, never to be seen again.
Now, I appreciate that you cannot be on top of absolutely everything. The unexpected isn’t exactly predictable; that’s why it’s called “the unexpected”, right? I mean, I understand that. No-one can reasonably ask you to always get the word out before people start having issues and problems. But when you are aware of problems or when you yourselves are about to start Doing Things, is it really too much to ask that you actually, well, let us know in-world?
Yes, I know you try to keep us informed via the Grid Status Page and Twitter; but frankly, not everyone has a Twitter account. And even those of us who do find that having to keep one eye on it and one eye on the Grid Status Page tends to be a tad disruptive of the old immersive in-world experience we all know and love.
Surely it’s not that hard to renew the old in-world notices to all and sundry? After all, what is preferable: being told database maintenance is underway and that logins are suspended, or deciding to log out for a few minutes while you make a cuppa only to have the log-in screen gloatingly inform you you cannot now log back in?
I know which I’d prefer. So how about it? Pretty please?
Sincerely,
Disgruntled of Second Life.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
A company that fails to properly inform customers of major issues/maintenance through all reasonable means on a timely basis is a company that does not respect its customers or appreciate their business.
Sure, posting updates to Twitter is good, and I think knee-jerk reactionary folks who whine and bitch and complain that the Lab says NOTHING when they post to @SLGridStatus should drink a nice steaming cup of STFU and subscribe to that feed, but you’re right: the Lab needs to cover all based and post blue notices and Concierge posts about ANY major product/service impacting event.
Especially when they’re pushing people to the resource-hog Viewer 2 that makes it harder to run other applications alongside it, so you can’t keep V2 and Firefox and Twitter and all that going at once… BOOM crash.
-ls/cm
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I have wondered if a solution for this might be to automatically enroll everybody in a group (an optional 41st group?) that is LL announcements-only for things like rolling restarts, etc. This would allow the userbase to choose to turn off the announcements if they didn’t want to see them for some reason, or if they were going to be away for a time and didn’t want whatever notices went to the group to cap their IMs.
Yes, this leaves the group size limitations and IM cap issues on the tabe, but it would give folks a choice. Not that I think many people would want to opt out, but if they wanted to monitor Twitter, more power to them.
For me, as a 2.x user, I’m not sure that grid-wide notices would help much. I miss notifications, and they tend to pile up for extended periods of time. It might just be my intattentive nature, but I am not sure they will help much if important notices are simply politely going to the queue off 15 unread notices already at the bottom right of my screen. 🙂
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Leave your comments, votes, watches, here if you’d like this to actually get into the viewer:
Emergency Grid Broadcast System
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-20081
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Thanks Cinder! Both watched and voted for.
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I can only concur with this. When I say: I feel that I speak for the majority of residents, in that we’re not too fond of having to click outside of our viewer for such things. I’m being sincere. It’s enough that events have to created externally now (though the system used does offer a better user experience). But read-only notices? Something which we would simply have to look at and dismiss, could gain more attention if delivered via an in world dialog, in the very same way that we’re informed of region restarts.
Imagine if every time a region restart were being executed that individuals would have to visit an external web resource to gain information. There would be little forewarning involved, and besides the fact for some of us being lazy, it really does add encumbrance.
This is coming from someone who has started to take up a habit to forward grid status reports to his group members in world via notices. A number of people do gain awareness about incidents before its too late but most remain out of the know.
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It’s so nice when someone else takes the time to write out my thoughts for me AND they get it right. Hamlet can take a promotion now and go hang out with the other “real” journalists that manage to lie 90% of the time. OH I know … he should run for a political office O.o
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ah crud … well feel free to move this comment over to the correct post 🙂
Love your blog all the time … usually from me email 🙂
Don’t Stop!
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Would that I could move it, but sadly, WP doesn’t seem to offer that capability! But never mind, your feedback is appreciated, and thank you for the kind words as well. 🙂
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100% agreed.
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