Tag: Communications and LL

Forum changes: Keira Linden speaks

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Linden Lab

There have recently been a number of changes make the the Second Life Forums. Some of these are physical (layout, requiring an additional log-in to view some topics, and so on, while on July 29th, 2022, the Lab rolled out new Policy and Participation Guidelines for all of the major forum Topics.

Most of these Guidelines are relative innocuous (e.g. no advertising products, no solicitation, etc.), and each set has been tailored to define the function of the Topic to which it relates and (particularly) was is / is not permissible in terms of discussions / thread within the Topic.

However, some of the new Guidelines – such as the General Discussion Policy and Participation Guidelines and those that relate to Topics that might be seen as allowing discussion of non-Second Life specific subjects – have been worded in such a way so as to generate an understandable amount of concern, as has what has been seen as a sudden, and at time apparently heavy-handed, increase in forum moderation by the Lab.

Because of the latter, Keira Linden – who, as the Support Operations Manager, now has Governance directly under her management – attended the August Web User Group meeting to try to provide insight into the reasoning behind the policy changes and their implementation.

The meeting was recorded by Pantera Północy, and will be subject to one of my usual Web User Group summaries. However, for the benefit for forum users who prefer to read notes rather than watch video, I am using this article to offer a summary of the comments and feedback from the WUG meeting, together with a relevant extract from the video.

When reading the points below, please note:

  • I have attempted to organise the comments made and feedback given into some form of logical order, so this summary may not reflect the order of discussion in the video.
  • This is intended as an objective summary of comments made at the meeting devoid of subjective feedback from me, so that those most affected by the changes can directly digest the comments and feedback for themselves.

Keira’s Comments

  • LL believes it has always had a fairly “open-door” policy towards discussion on the forums: so long as threads and comments adhere to the Lab’s Terms of Service, Second Life Terms and Conditions and Community Standards, they have – in general – been allowed.
  • However, in the last few years there has been a lot going on in the world which has generated an increasing amount of “hot button” topics within the forums which have no direct relationship with / bearing on Second Life per se, but which have significantly complicated matters of moderation.
  • As a result, and after internal discussions, etc., the decision was taken to implement the new Topic-specific Policy and Participation Guidelines.
  • It is understood that some of these new Guidelines are proving unpopular, as people do see them as impinging on their ability to discuss subjects that are of import to them as a global community – but it was felt that approaching matters in this way was the most direct means of encouraging the core aim of maintain the focus of threads and discussions within the forum on Second Life, and not on world affairs.
    • As a result, moderation (and the potential locking) of threads deemed to be “inappropriate” will now be more stringent going forward.
    • However, due to their “historic” significance some threads and discussions will remain “as is”.
  • While this has been a change driven entirely out of the Lab with little in the way of forewarning to users, Keira is open to hearing feedback on the changes, and people can e-mail her via keira-at-lindenlab.com with their feedback / opinions / suggestions for alternate approaches.

User Feedback at the Meeting

  • As implemented, the changes are still allowing some of the issues they were designed to prevent – such as political derailment of threads – to persist, whilst giving users the impression that they can no longer engage in general banter or any discussion of “real life” for fear of receiving a warning.
    • Keira indicated that the Lab is still trying to be flexible in its approach to issues of derailment: where it happens but the topic / thread “self rights” to get back on topic, than there is an attempt to recognise this and not use blunt force moderation.
  • Other critiques of the changes voiced at the meeting included:
    • While there is a large LGBTQ+ community in SL, few engage in the forums, as they already feel unsafe because of the more virulent political commentary, and some of the new Guidelines do little to make them feel any safer.
    • Those who lurk in the forums reading rather than posting, feel less sure about engaging in threads due to what appears to be unevenness in response to posts by the moderators single the guidelines came into force.
    • The changes appear to be predicated on the idea that Second Life “is separate” from matters occurring in the physical world – yet Linden Lab itself raises political and other discourse through its support of physical world issues such as gender equality and BLM, its public stand against transphobia and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, etc. In this, it was further noted:
      • That the specific clause within some of the new Guidelines marking “Social Justice Issues” as being “not allowed” ignores the fact that these issues which exist within Second Life, and have thus formed a part of forum discussions.
      • Trying to place a fence between Second Life and “real life” within the forums is damaging, because for many SL users, the platform is an extension of their “real lives”, not something entirely separate.
    • Even the wording of the moderation warning being send out for “casual banter” appears to be overly aggressive [“Additional violations could result in your forum access being revoked, or additional action taken on your account”] and potentially discouraging users for continuing to use the forums.
  • In response to these critiques, Keira noted:
    • The Lab does try to look at threads, content and comments on a case-by-case basis and in context, rather than immediately turning to moderation / warnings, etc., the set wording of warnings notwithstanding.
    • In terms of written warning, she acknowledged that things can be adjusted where required, and is willing to discuss specific cases with those involved.
    • The Lab is not trying to force any form of separation between “SL” and “RL”, but is rather trying to address / remove complications of forum moderation and management that have notably increased over the last few years, noting that some forum discussions could better handled through other channels – including discussing them in-world – rather than using the forums.
    • She also noted that the intention is not to preclude elements of “RL” discussions from the forums:
      • So long as such discussions / threads pertain to, or reflect on, people’s SL activities / lives (or on Linden Lab / Tilia) in a reasonable way and reflect the TOS / CS, then they shouldn’t be a problem.
      • The Lab would just prefer not to have to moderate / manage forum threads on topics that have absolutely no bearing on / relationship to Second Life [e.g. “post your RL pet pictures here!”].
  • With regards to Keira’s comments on moving the discussion of some topics in-world, Reed Linden reiterated that insofar as in-world discussions and conversations, Linden Lab has always been, and remains, committed to the individual’s right of positive expression. Thus, there is no reason why topics such as transphobia, BLM, etc., cannot be openly discussed in-world.

Footnotes

  • While general comments are always welcome on this blog, please note that if you have specific feedback / suggestions on the above that you wish Linden Lab to read, please ensure that you forward them to Keira Linden via e-mail (keira-at-lindenlab.com) – or perhaps via in-world note card if you prefer not to use e-mail. While this blog is read by the Lab, there is no guarantee that ides and suggestions posted here will be read & recorded by Lab staff.
  • My thanks to Pantera for recording the meeting and making the video available via her You Tube channel.
  • Please note that the extract was set-up to play the relevant part of the meeting video (from 1:48 through 17:12). However, it appears You Tube may have nerfed the use of both a start and end time stamp in the same iframe code (preferring the use of only one OR the other). So, if the video plays on beyond the 17:12 mark, feel free to tell it to shut up 🙂 – the rest of its contents, as they pertain to the Web User Group meeting can be found in my summary of the rest of the meeting.

 

“A ballet in a war zone, beautiful, terrifying, and glorious” – inside LL’s Ops team

Posted on by Inara Pey

secondlifeIn May of 2014, Landon Linden, aka Landon McDowell, the Lab’s VP of Operations and Platform Engineering, wrote a blog post on the reasons why a series of issues combined to make Second Life especially uncomfortable for many.

At the time, and as many bloggers and commentators – myself included – noted, the post came as a refreshing breath of fresh air after so long without meat-and-veg communications from the Lab in terms of what is going on with the platform and why things can go wrong.

Now Landon is back explaining how the Lab’s Ops team responds to issues within their services, the communications tools they use – and why the tools are so effective.

An Inside Look at How The Ops Team Collaborates is once again an interesting and informative piece, delving into not only the technical aspects of how the Lab respond to problems within their services, but which also encompasses the very human aspects of the dealing with issues – handling emotions when tensions are high, opening the window for those not directly involved in matter to keep an eye on what is happening so that they can also make better informed decisions on their own actions, and more.

Landon McDowell, the Lab's VP of Operations and Platform Engineering and his alter-ego, Landon Linden
Landon McDowell, the Lab’s VP of Operations and Platform Engineering and his alter-ego, Landon Linden

The core of the Lab’s approach to incident communications is the use of text chat (specifically IRC) rather than any reliance on crash team meetings, the telephone and so on. Those who deal with the Lab on a technical level won’t be surprised at the use of IRC – it is a fairly strong channel of communication for the Lab in a number of areas; but what makes this post particularly interesting is the manner in which the use of IRC is presented and used: as a central incident and problem management tool for active issues; as a means of ensuring people can quickly get up-to-speed with both what has happened in a situation, and what has been determined / done in trying to deal with it; as a means of providing post-mortem information;  and as a tool for helping train new hires.

These benefits start with what is seen as the sheer speed of communication chat allows, as Landon notes:

The speed of text communication is much faster. The average adult can read about twice as fast as they can listen. This effect is amplified with chat comms being multiplexed, meaning multiple speakers can talk intelligibly at the same time. With practice, a participant can even quickly understand multiple conversations interleaved in the same channel. The power of this cannot be overstated.

In a room or on a conference call, there can only be one speaker at a time. During an outage when tensions are high this kind of order can be difficult to maintain. People naturally want to blurt out what they are seeing. There are methods of dealing with this, such as leader-designating speakers or “conch shell” type protocols. In practice though, what often prevails is what one of my vendors calls the “Mountain View Protocol,” where the loudest speaker is the one who’s heard.

In text, responders are able to hop out of a conversation, focus on some investigation or action, hop back in, and quickly catch up due to the presence of scroll back. In verbal comms, responders check-out to do some work and lose track of the conversation resulting in a lot of repeating.

He also notes that not everyone is involved in a situation right from the start. Issues get escalated as they evolve, additional support may be called-in, or the net widened in the search for underlying causes, requiring additional teams to be involved, or the impact of an incident spreads. Chat and the idea of “reading scrollback” as the Lab calls it, allows people to come on-stream for a given situation and fully au fait with what has occurred and what is happening in a manner not always possible through voice communications and briefings, and without breaking the ongoing flow of communications and thinking on the issue.

The multiplexing capabilities of chat also mean that individuals can disengage from the main conversation, have private exchanges which, while pertinent to the issue, might otherwise derail the core conversation or even be silenced in something like a teleconference – and those engaged in such exchanges can still keep abreast of the central conversations.

For an environment like the Lab, where operations and personnel are distributed (data centres and offices located in different states / on different coasts, not everyone working from an office environment, etc.), chat has proven a powerful tool, although one that may take time getting to grips with, as Landon notes about his first exposure, saying:

I … just sat there staring at the screen wondering what the hell had just happened, wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into. I thought I was a seasoned pro, but I had never ever seen an incident response go that smoothly or quickly. Panic started to set in. I was out of my league.

However, the benefits in using it far outweigh any need for a degree of gear shifting required by ops staff in learning to use the approach. As Landon states in closing his comments, “when it works it is a wondrous thing to behold, a ballet in a war zone, beautiful, terrifying, and glorious.”

This is another great insight into what happens inside the Lab, and as such, the post makes very worthwhile reading, whether or not you have a background in Ops support.

Why things went wrong recently with Second Life, by Landon Linden

Posted on by Inara Pey

secondlifeWe’re all aware of the recent unpleasantness which hit Second Life over the past few weeks and which culminated in the chaos of Tuesday, May 20th, when the disruption not only caused issues with log-ins, but also caused both a curtailment in server-side deployments on Tuesday and a rescheduling of both deployments for the rest of the week and the postponing of a period of planned maintenance.

As noted in my week 20/2 SL projects update, Simon and Maestro Linden gave an explanation of Tuesday’s issues at the Serve Beta meeting on Thursday May 22nd. However, in a Tools and Technology blog post, Landon Linden has given a comprehensive explanation of the broader issues that have hit second Life in recent weeks.

Landon begins the post:

When I came to Linden Lab over five years ago, Second Life had gone through a period of the coveted hockey-stick growth, and we had just not kept up with the technical demands such growth creates. One or more major outages a week were common.

In my first few months at the Lab, we removed more than a hundred major single points of failure in our service, but several major ones still loomed large, the granddaddy of them all being the core MySQL database server. By late Winter 2009 we were suffering from a core database outage a few times each week.

It is that core MySQL database server that has been partially to blame for the recent problems, having hit two different fatal hardware faults which forced the Lab to stop most SL services on both occasions. As the blog post explains, work is in-hand to remove some of the risk in this database becoming a single point of failure by moving it to new hardware. This will be followed over the coming weeks and months to try to further reduce the impact of database failures.

But the MySQL issue wasn’t the only cause of problems, as Landon further explains:

A few weeks ago there was a massive distributed denial of service attack on one of our upstream service providers that affected most of their customers, including us, and inhibited the ability of some to use our services. We have since mitigated future potential impact from such an attack by adding an additional provider. There have also been hardware failures in the Marketplace search infrastructure that have impacted that site, a problem that we are continuing to work through.

Landon Linden: why things went squiffy with SL
Landon Linden: explaining why SL  has suffered servere issues of late

He also provides further information on the issue which impacted users and services on Tuesday May 20th, expanding on that given by Simon and Maestro at the Server Beta meeting.

At that meeting, Simon briefly outlined Tuesday’s issues as being a case of the log-in server failing to give the viewer the correct token for it to connect to a region, so people actually got through the log-in phase when starting their viewer, but never connected to a region.

Landon expands on this, describing how the mechanism for handing-off of sessions from login to users’ initial regions is a decade old and relies on the generation of a unique identifier (the “token” Simon referred to). Simply put: the mechanism ran out of numbers – but did so quietly and without flagging the fact that it had. As a result, the server team took four hours to track down the problem and come up with a fix.

Referring to this particular issue, Landon goes on:

Having such a hidden fault in a core service  is unacceptable, so we are doing a thorough review of the login process to determine if there are any more problems like this lurking. Our intent at this point also is to remove the identifier assignment service altogether. It not only was the ultimate source of this outage, but is also one more single point of failure that should have been dispatched long ago.

Such open honesty and transparency about technical matters is something that hasn’t really been seen from the Lab since the departure of Frank (FJ Linden) Ambrose, the Lab’s former Senior VP of Global Technology, who departed the company at the end of 2011. As such, it is an excellent demonstration of Ebbe Altberg’s promise to re-open the lines of communication between company and users, and one which is most welcome.

Kudos to Landon for his sincere apology for the disruption in services and  for such a comprehensive explanation of the problems. Having such information will hopefully aid our understanding of the challenges the Lab faces in dealing with a complex set of services which is over a decade old, but which we expect to be ready and waiting for us 24/7. Kudos, again as well to Ebbe Altberg for re-opening the hailing frequencies. Long may it continue.

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Ebbe: the promise of better communications and a more open JIRA

Posted on by Inara Pey

Since his first official blog post introducing himself, Ebbe Altberg has not only been immersing himself in the activities required of a new CEO on joining a company, he’s been making the time to respond to a series of SL forum posts made in a thread started as a result of his blog post.

In doing so, he’s demonstrated the same candid feedback which has marked many of his Twitter exchanges with Second Life users, and also shown during his recent meet-and-greet with a number of us.

LL's new CEO, Ebbe Altberg, seen here on the right in his guise as Ebbe Linden at a recent meet-and-greet: laying the foundations for improved communications from the Lab?
LL’s new CEO, Ebbe Altberg, seen here on the right in his guise as Ebbe Linden at a recent meet-and-greet: laying the foundations for improved communications from the Lab?

On Communications

One of the major topics of early exchanges with him via Twitter and through various blogs has been on the subject of broader outward communications from the Lab.

Commenting on the forum thread, Amethyst Jetaime raises communications, saying in part:

However I hope you at least take our opinions to heart, take our suggestions when you can and honestly communicate frequently through the official SL channels. Not all of us use twitter and facebook or third-party forums …

His reply to her is encouraging:

Everybody I’ve spoken with here at LL want to improve communication with our customers as well…funny that…

He expands on this in a subsequent reply to  a similar comment from Venus Petrov, in which he says:

And they can’t wait to do that…most common question/issue on both sides of the “fence” has been the same thing! I’m getting love from both sides when I’m talking about fixing communication. I don’t know when/how it got strange but we’ll work hard to make us better at it…motivation is not an issue at all. We just need to figure out process for doing it effectively at scale…

How this will be achieved is open to debate; but the Lab has the means at their disposal to make broad-based communications far more effective, and I tried to point to some of them in my own “Dear Ebbe…” blog post on the matter. In that piece, I particularly look at both the official SL blog and the opportunities presented by e-mail, both of which would appear to meet the criteria of scalability, with an e-mail approach additionally having the potential to reach out to those no longer directly engaged in SL on a regular basis or at all and perhaps encourage them to take another look.

On the Public JIRA

Elsewhere in the thread, Pamela Galli takes the issue of communications to point to the closure of the public JIRA in September 2012:

… In the opinions of many, a good place to start is to make the JIRAs public again so we will know whether an issue is a bug that has arisen, or something on our end. Very often, residents working with Lindens have identified, reproduced, and even come up with workarounds if not solutions to problems. Closing the JIRA felt like a door being slammed, esp to those of us who are heavily invested in SL. (Just grateful for Maestro, who posts in the Server Forum.)

Again, there is an encouraging response:

Funny, both engineering and product heads here also didn’t like that jira was closed and want to open it up again. Proposal for how is in the works! I hope we can figure out how to do that in a way that works/scales soon.

Later in the thread, Innula Zenovka who provides one of the most lucid, clearly stated reasons why a complete closure of the public JIRA was perhaps more counter-productive from a technical standpoint than the Lab may have appreciated at the time. Ebbe’s response is again equally reassuring:

Yep, that’s why we will figure out how to open things up again…plan is in the works…

Whether we’ll see a complete re-opening of the public JIRA remains to be seen. I rather suspect the Lab will be looking at something more middle-ground, such as making the JIRA public, but restricting comments to those currently able to access it, together with those actually raising a report also gaining the ability to comment on it as a means of providing additional input / feedback.

While not absolutely perfect, it would mean that the Lab avoids any situation where comments within a JIRA become a free-for-all for complaints, accusations, and arguments (either directed at the Lab or between comment participants), while offering the majority of the advantages which used to be apparent with a more open JIRA mechanism.

Of course, optimism around this feedback – and particularly around the proposal for the JIRA – should be caveated with caution. Not only may it take time for changes to be implemented, it may also be that technical or other issues may impede something like a more open approach to the JIRA from being achieve to the extent that even the Lab would like. However, that there is a willingness to discuss the fact that matters are already under consideration at the Lab would hopefully suggest a reasonable level of confidence that things can be done without risking the disappointment following the decision that there would be no return of last names back in March 2012.

Whatever does happen, there’s enough in these replies to give rise to a cautious and reasonable optimism that things are likely to be changing for the better down the road. Most certainly, it is good to see an outward follow of communication from the Lab’s CEO that is open and candid.

Long may it continue once Ebbe has had to turn his attention more fully on running the company, and others have stepped in to fill the void, and to ensure the follow-through is both achieved and consistent.

 

Silence may be golden, but it also weighs heavy

Posted on by Inara Pey

I keep promising myself I won’t start banging  on about Linden Lab’s inability to openly communicate. That was more-or-less the tone of things in this blog back in 2011 (see my views on business, communication and growth, and the growing frustration over the Marketplace situation in 2012, and weel as point in between and after, if interested). However…

Rod Humble may have gone, but the Lab apparently has yet to issue any statement in reponse to enquiries from the media
Rod Humble may have gone, but the Lab has yet to issue any statement in response to enquiries from the media

Friday 24th January saw the news break that Rod Humble had departed the Lab. According to his own comments pass to others at the time of the announcement, he’d left the Lab “last week”. If so, this could mean the Lab has been absent a CEO for about two weeks, and they have yet to say anything on the matter.

It’s not just the fact that repeated enquiries from the likes of Hamlet Au and I (among others) have gone without response – we’re still small fish in the ocean of blogging / journalism. Where the story has been picked-up by the games media, it also appears that enquiries made to the Lab also remain unanswered.

True, the message has been somewhat slow in spreading to the media at large; only Gamesbeat picked-up on the news in the 24th along with as did Games Industry. Since then Gamasutra covered the news on January 28th, as did  Massively. Nevertheless, one would have thought some message would have been forthcoming from the Lab in order to squash the potential for speculation or negative rumours to become established as fact.  Or could it be that Rod Humble’s annoucement was a knickers-around-ankles moment for the Lab?

See what I mean about speculation?

Beyond this, as Ciaran Laval observes, there is still ongoing confusion and upset relating to attempts to cash-out and  / or tax ID requirements.  A part of this seems to be down to the Lab possibly being overwhelmed by the inflow of documentation, and it is taking time to clear things up. However, the fact that noting is  – once again – being done to communication matters and provide some form of open feedback really isn’t helping matters at all.

Of course, the Lab may well feel secure in its position that the majority of SL users are likely to be oblivious as to what is going on, and are happy knowing that SL is still there for them when they are ready to log-in. But in terms of those who are investing time, effort and money into helping make Second Life a place people want to log-in to and enjoy, not actually taking the time and effort to offer reasonable clarification of what is going on as requires things like cash-outs and tax (and, indeed, what is and isn’t required ahead of time) doesn’t tend to send a positive message, but does tend to add a little more weight to an overburdened camel’s back.

In writing about Rod Humble’s tenure, I pointed out that communications had started on a downward trend prior to his arrival, and had continued to sink throughout his time there, despite his own initial attempts to ramp things up. This smacks of a deep-seated cultural element within the company (driven out of the board?) which doesn’t see communications as having any real priority. As such, I’m not holding my breath in the hope that things will change, even with a new CEO, when (if?) we ever get to hear about one being appointed.

But even a short-term upswing, as witnessed in the months immediately following Humble’s arrival at the Lab prior to the downward trend resuming, would actually be better than we have at the moment.  I won’t borrow from Tateru again and use her Silence of the Lab logo, but I can admit, I’m sorely tempted to do so.

LL look back at 2012. Will they learn to communicate in 2013?

Posted on by Inara Pey

Linden Lab  published a blog post on December 20th looking back over the last twelve months and looking ahead to 2013.

This year hasn’t been a particularly sexy year for Second Life in terms of Big News. The Lab has been more focused on working “under the bonnet (hood)” to sort out a lot of the mechanical aspects, as it were, of Second Life. It matters not as to whether some of what they’ve been working on are things people feel should have been “sorted out years ago”. The fact is that the Lab are working on long-standing issues and is also trying to bring new capabilities to SL which do serve to improve out in-world experience, and that is deserving recognition.

However, it is when there have been “major” deployments through the year that the Lab’s inherent weakness and seeming inability to learn from its mistakes comes to the fore. In particular, the blog post points to three major roll-outs in 2012: advanced creation tools, pathfinding, and Direct Delivery. While one of these, the advanced creation tools, did initially hit problems when first deployed to a Release Channel, the matter was quickly dealt with such that they could be safely deployed and properly announced by the Lab. True, we’re still waiting on the updates to the permissions system, but at least we did receive decent and widespread notification of their deployment.

Pathfinding: let down by poor Lab communications
Pathfinding: let down by poor Lab communications

Alongside the advanced tools, pathfinding was one of the “big things” for SL in 2012, trumpeted by Rod Humble himself. In many respects, pathfinding was potentially a “bigger” release than the advanced creation tools, so one would have thought it would be more prominent in the Lab’s communications with users.

Not so. While we did get a sneak peek in September, the Lab relinquished all attempts to communicate the project to their wider user community, leaving it almost entirely up to bloggers to carry the message. And while no-one set out to deliberately misinform people, the fact remains that pathfinding was so complicated that the lack of clear-cut information from the Lab did lead to misunderstandings which in turn led to reports that it would result in a “Tsunami” of problems or would have a huge adverse impact on SL as a whole once deployed.

In both instances, people at the Lab did move to try to clarify matters and redress the misunderstandings. However, by the time they had, the damage had been done. In abdicating all major responsibility for communicating with their users, the Lab had opened the door to misunderstanding, misconceptions and mistrust, with the result that the negative perceptions of pathfinding continue today, with the functionality remaining disabled across many private estates.

With Direct Delivery, the situation is somewhat worse, with everything from the initial deployment through to mounting issues across the Marketplace as a whole becoming something of a catalogue of errors in which a complete unwillingness on the part of the Commerce Team / Linden Lab to engage in a decent level of communication with merchants has played a major role. Even Rod Humble’s own intervention in matters on two separate occasions, the first via Twitter,  the second time on the Commerce forum itself, have proven hollow. Despite all assurances to the contrary, communications on the ongoing issues with the Marketplace remain minimal, with little indication that matters are approaching any form of resolution.

Failed subscriptions for August - courtesy
Listing enhancement issues have been a repeated cause of upset for merchants through 2012, one of a litany of errors and problems occurring within the Marketplace during the year; some of them apparently as a result of the introduction of Direct Delivery  (image courtesy of Ry0ta Exonar)

Both of these situations point to a need for Linden Lab to be more openly proactive in communicating with users – and there really is no excuse for them not to do so. A recent response from the Lab to the question of why they don’t routinely blog any more was that “no-one reads the blogs”. However, this is hardly an explanation – it is an excuse. Keep the blog reasonably up-to-date with information, be it news or periodic updates, give people a reason to read it – and they will.

In 2013, we’re promised some more new capabilities and options which can and should significantly improve th look and feel of Second Life and do much to improve the overall user experience. Things like materials processing and server-side avatar baking. These are all to the good and will hopefully be “nice to haves” when they arrive.

What would also be nice to have in 2013 is more proactive and widespread, informative communication flowing out of the Lab. Sadly, the cynic / realist in me is not holding her breath in anticipation.