Category: News

Marketplace Update: DD migration pushed to August

Posted on by Inara Pey

Updated 19th May: The Commerce team have responded to payment issues. See the comments after this article.

The Commerce Team issued a further update on the status of ongoing work to fix various issues relating to both Direct Delivery and listings problems. Indeed, the announcement itself may have been prompted by a cascade of Tweets directed at Linden Lab’s CEO by frustrated merchants late on the 16th May These both requested help with the non-payment issue (outlined later in this piece) and appealed for news on Direct Delivery issues given the revised migration deadline of June 1st is fast approaching without any clarification on matters from LL having been received since April 26th.

The update is reproduced here in full. For those concerned about Direct Delivery migration, please note the final paragraph of the announcement.

[UPDATE: May 17, 2012]

We continue to work outstanding Marketplace issues.

Performance continues to improve on the Marketplace web site. With our deploy last week, we fixed a couple of JIRAs and order processing sped up, which led to some orders getting stuck in the Queued state (which means no money has been taken from the customer nor have any items been delivered). Orders got stuck because other portions of the system struggled to keep up. Stuck orders were Aborted, and a fix was made to decrease the number of orders getting stuck in the Queued state going forward while we work on a longer term fix. 

Here is the status of the remaining issues:

  • (WEB-4587) Listings show up with images from other Merchants listings
    Current status: we have identified the problem and are working on testing the fix.
  • (WEB-4696) Deleted listings appearing in search results for consumers and in Merchant Admin.
    Current status: we continue to work on this issue, and have decreased the incidence of these occurrences.
  • (WEB-4441) Orders stuck in Being Delivered
    Current status:  we are actively working on this issue and will focus our fixes on Direct Delivery purchases.
  • (WEB-4567) Bulk delete failing.
    Current status: the work-around on this is to delete each item. We continue to work on resolving this.

One other question that has come up frequently as we get close to June 1, is around Direct Delivery migration dates. We will not be requiring Merchants to migrate to Direct Delivery before August 1, 2012, and will give at least a 4 week notice for any shutdown dates. [my emphasis]

The Commerce Team

In the meantime, Merchants are becoming increasingly concerned over the non-receipt of payments from good sold. The crux of the issue has been raised in a forum post (which itself links to an earlier and more involved post on the subject). A JIRA has also been raised on the issue as well. So far, there has been no response from the Commerce Team on this latter issue.

Linden Lab roll-out Region Idling

Posted on by Inara Pey

Simon Linden has posted to the Server topic area of the technology forum about a new SL server feature, “region idling” which commences today, Wednesday 16th May.

This will see those regions that do not have any avatars either in them or camming into them to lower their frame rates and script processing, thus reducing their load on their host CPU. This should in turn improve the performance of the other regions running on the same hardware.

The idling itself should be entirely transparent to users, with the region immediately returning to “full speed” should anyone enter the region or cam into it. However, Simon does warn of a possible caveat to the transparency:

We expect this feature to be totally transparent to users. Residents will not see or be on regions that are idling. Scripts, however, may observe the effect if they are using the llGetRegionTimeDilation() function, and may require fixing.

There are some additional points to note with this capability, which are addressed in an FAQ also posted to the forum.  These include:

  • Regions are not turned off or shut down. They merely run at a slower frame rate when nobody is there. They will appear exactly the same way as before in search, the world map and other Second Life features
  • Region idling cannot be manually disabled for a region
  • Any scripts that use LSL network functions will suspend region idling for a short period of time to allow them to function normally.  This will allow scripts that connect to outside services via email, http and xmlrpc to run as expected.

The roll-out of the function will commence with the Blue Steel release channel, and will then be progressively rolled-out to the rest of the grid in the coming weeks. Anyone suspecting region idling is having an adverse effect on their region is requested to file a JIRA (no specific project given), providing clear information on the problem and the exact times it happened.

Related Links

SL scheduled maintenance – next 3 days

Posted on by Inara Pey
Grid maintenance 8 through 10 May, commencing 18:00 SLT, for up to 8 hours. Disruption expected.

The following has been posted in on the SL Grid Status page:

[Posted 9:45am PDT, 8 May 2012] We will be performing scheduled maintenance today, Wednesday and Thursday of this week (May 8, May 9, May 10), beginning at 6:00pm PDT each day. Each maintenance is scheduled to last around 8 hours. Please save all builds and refrain from rezzing no copy objects, as some regions may be taken offline and remain offline for extended periods of time. Please follow this blog for any updated information. [emphasis mine]

So for today, Wednesday and Thursday, expect severe disruption to SL.

Whether or not this maintenance is related to recent service outages / issues, the most recent of which occurred some 24 hours ago, is unclear. However, the forewarning is appreciated.

While I have been prone to avoid personal opinion in “news” items, that there is upcoming maintenance does prompt me to ask Linden Lab as to whether they could also broadcast a reminder in-world prior to the work commencing, for the benefit of those who may not routinely read the Status Page or who are not engaged on Twitter?

Microsoft Skydrive: Viewer crashes

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update: Latif Khalifa reports encountering the problem on Singularity, so the issue is likely to affect V1-style Viewers as well, and provides a potential workaround for those encountering the issue (see comments, below).

There have been a number of reports of mysterious Viewer crashes of late, specifically in relation to file operations (saving a texture or snapshot to disk, attempting to upload, setting your cache location, etc.).

The problem appears to be manifesting itself in V3-based Viewers, and the culprit appears to be Microsoft Skydrive.

A JIRA has been raised on the issue in general (VWR-28843), with reports that uninstalling Microsoft Skydrive eliminates the issue. This is obvious not the best solution for the situation, but those experiencing the issue may wish to check the JIRA and consider WATCHing it.

With thanks to Innula Zenovka. 

Metareality podcasts

Posted on by Inara Pey

Metareality is a weekly podcast by Kimberly Winnington of Sand Castle Studios, whom is perhaps better known in-world as Gianna Borgnine. Each week the show covers a range of topics, mostly focused on SL. The show is a mix of conversation, comments, insight and humour which features regular guests as sounding boards for topics Gianna has selected for discussion (although some come from the guests themselves).

I’ve been a semi-regular listener to the podcasts for a while now, and can recommend them as generally being a good listen.

This week’s podcast features Qarl Fizz (formerly Linden) of the Parametric Deformer fame, and Crap Mariner, adroit and wryly-humoured observer of SL who should be featured a whole lot more; so if you haven’t tuned in before … go – listen!

Marketplace update April 26th

Posted on by Inara Pey

With trying to cover / enjoy Fantasy Faire last week, I missed the following when it came out.

On Friday 26th April, Commerce Team Linden (CTL) provided an update on attempts to sort out the ongoing issues with the Marketplace. The update reads in full:

[UPDATE: April 26, 2012] We are continuing to work on outstanding Marketplace issues. 

The most significant issue that has been addressed over the past week was slowness on the Marketplace website, which occurred intermittently between April 18 and April 21. Page loads should be much faster now. 

Here is the status on additional JIRAs:

  • (WEB-4587/WEB-4601) Search results, best-selling lists and related items showing up on other merchants items or images. Current status: other merchants’ listings should not be appearing in store search results, best-selling lists, related items, etc. Other merchants’ images may still appear on your listings, but this is less likely to occur as we work on a solution.
  • (WEB-4676) ANS for SLM does not populate the Location field with internal ID. Current status: this is in progress and will be deployed soon. 
  • (WEB-4696) Deleted listings appearing in search results for consumers and in Merchant Admin. Current status: we are working on resolving this issue.
  • (WEB-4441) Orders stuck in Being Delivered. Current status:  the orders stuck here due to unicode problems was addressed, and we continue to investigate remaining orders stuck in this state.
  • (WEB-4567) Bulk delete failing. Current status: the work-around on this is to delete each item. We continue to work on resolving this. 
  • (WEB-4574) Direct Delivery products are re-delivered to purchaser instead of recipient. Current status: we are working on resolving this.

We continue to work on the other Marketplace JIRAs and will provide additional updates as soon as possible.

My apologies for not catching this at the time of publication.