Just a reminder (or advanced warning for those who may not have seen it): Second Life will be subject to up to 4 days of network maintenance, commencing on Monday, May 13th. This work may possibly run through until Thursday, May 16th.
Our engineers will be performing maintenance on the Second Life network May 13 – 16. We hope to perform most of the maintenance early in this window, but it may extend several days if needed.
Residents may experience problems connecting to, being disconnected from, or an inability to log in during this time, as well as possible issues rezzing objects, teleporting, or crossing regions. We hope to keep these disruptions to a minimum and greatly appreciate your patience during this time as we work to make Second Life more robust.
We will resolve this status once the maintenance has been fully completed.
So, if you do experience issues at the start of, or during the week, be sure to keep an eye on the Grid Status pages for updates to this announcement.
Fran Swenson (Fran Seranade) and her daughter Barbara Richard (Barbi Alchemi) – image courtesy of San Diego Union-Tribune / Bill Wechter
On March 7th, 2019, I sadly wrote about the passing of one of Second Life’s most recognised residents, Fran Seranade (Fran Swenson in the physical world).
Fran, a Parkinson’s Disease sufferer, came to prominence in Second Life and in the media due to the remarkable positive effect her involvement in the platform had on her condition. I had the privilege to write about Fran’s story far back in 2013 in Of Parkinson’s, Second Life and a story worth reading, after coming across an on-line article by the San Diego Union-Tribune. Her situation became both the focal point of studies into the benefits of virtual worlds on a variety of physical and mental conditions, and was the trigger for Fran’s daughter, Barbara Richards (Barbie Alchemi in-world), with the help of her brother (AlmostThere Inventor in SL), to establish Creations for Parkinson’s, designed to raise funds to support the work of The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research and to provide an in-world meeting place for those stricken by the illness and those seeking a sense of community and support.
Event schedule
At the time of Fran’s passing, it was noted that an in-world memorial event for her was being planned – and this has now growth into a celebration of Fran’s life and times, which will take place throughout Saturday, May 11th, 2019.
Commencing at 11:00 SLT and running through until 21:00 SLT at the Savoy Ballroom in Creations Park, the event will feature the voices and talents of some of Second Life’s best-known performers, many of whom knew Fran directly, by both performing at her 90th birthday celebrations two years ago, and in performing in support of Creations for Parkinson’s events.
As with all events at Creations Park, the celebration will present people with the opportunity to show their support for the work of the MJF Foundation by offering donations to Team Fox, the official fund-raising arm of the Foundation.
Those who cannot attend the event, but who would like to commemorate Fran’s life and the work of Team Fox / the MJF Foundation can do so by donating through any of the kiosks at Creations Park or by visiting the following web page:
In addition, and planned to be available by June 1st, 2019, a memorial honouring Fran and this celebration will be established at the Savoy Swing Era Museum, and will be available online at SavoyBallroom.org/fran.
On Thursday, May 2nd, 2019, Linden Lab deployed the latest updates to the SL Marketplace, chief among which is the introduction of the store manager.
A store manager is another user a merchant with a Marketplace store can designate to manage some operations of their MP store. This is a capability that merchants have long requested, both through the forums and the Web User Group meetings, and the response to the deployment has already been positive.
Key points with store managers:
Merchants can nominate up to five store managers.
By default store managers can:
Edit store details.
Edit product details.
List an unlisted item.
View store and product details.
In addition, merchants can optionally allow store managers to:
However,these additional permissions can only be added once for a store manager: if they are to be changed at all, the store manager must be removed, and then re-added with the changed permissions.
If a store manager does not have any of the additional permissions, those fields appear as inactive in the edit and bulk edit pages. Similarly, the associated controls do not appear for store managers that do not have permission to unlist items, add/remove revenue distributions, or add/remove listing enhancements.
Store managers can access the store using their own log-in credentials – not the merchant’s.
All store manager action (creation, settings permissions, removal) are set through the merchant’s My Marketplace > Merchant home options.
Store Managers are added via the My Marketplace > Marketplace Home page (1), then clicking Edit Store Information (2) and scrolling to the bottom of the Store Information Page to click Add Manager (3). Add the name of the Store manager and setting the additional permissions for term via the pop-up (4), then clicking the ADD button when all is set (5). Remember that if permissions are to be changed, the Manager must be removed and re-added with the required permissions
In addition, and to provide merchants with oversight of the actions taken on their store:
All actions taken by (a) store manager(s) are logged and can be reviewed by the merchant (My Marketplace > Merchant Home > View audit logs in the left menu.
E-mail alerts can also be set to be sent whenever a store manager performs an action on the merchant’s store.
Additionally, no store manager will be able to:
Archive products.
Add/remove other managers.
Again, full details on managing Store Managers can be found in the Knowledge Base article, and any specific issues with the system should be reported via the Jira.
Following the launch of the new Linden Homes, those sailing around / flying over the new continent quickly ran into an issue: banlines being thrown up around parcels.
On Tuesday, April 16th, 2019, the Lab responded to this problem by disabling the use of parcel banning across the estate. At that time, and to prevent the use of overly aggressive home security systems, the Lab indicated they would be providing a dedicated security option for the new Linden Homes for those who feel security options are warranted.
This new system was officially issued on Friday, April 26th, 2019, via a forum announcement by Patch Linden. In short, the system:
Can be obtained via the House / Houseboat Content Creation Pack available through the Linden Homes selector (mail box or life buoy) outside of each type of home.
Is automatically set to give a formal 15-second warning before ejecting someone from a parcel.
This time cannot be shortened, but longer times can be set, if desired.
It is intended to give loiterers enough time to remove themselves from a parcel.
Ejection has been selected, rather than TP home, in order to allow passers-by who may have been distracted to resume their journey.
Can be used in a Linden home or any skybox placed over it. However:
The system will only operate to a maximum of 400m above/ below its current location.
The system will not work between 100m and 2,000m above sea level (2,000m being the minimum height at which skyboxes must be placed).
Includes options for Group access and for individual white listing of visitors.
The system is contained within its own box in the House / Houseboat Content Creation Pack, which contains the security unit, an instructions note card and sample configuration note card for setting your white list, if required.
Designed to be wall mounted, the system is a simple (5 land impact) panel with five buttons:
The enable / disable button and the Help button (displays brief notes in local chat) either side of the status light at the top of the panel (red = off; green=active).
Here: sets the altitude of the panel – this must be done on placing or moving the panel.
Upper Limit: sets maximum operating height above the system’s current position in which it will be effective (cannot exceed 400m).
Lower Limit: sets the maximum distance below the system’s current position in which it will be effective (cannot exceed 400m), when used in a skybox.
The Upper Limit and Lower Limit buttons display similar dialogue boxes, allowing the range of each to be increased / decreased in 50,m 100m, and 300m increments.
The new security panel (shown alongside a house control panel) and the distance dialogue boxes. In this example, the panel is set at 23.3m above sea-level and will operate up to 23.3m above and 26.6m below its current location. Click for full size, if required
At the time of the April 16th blog post, it had been indicated that all other security systems would be outlawed from use within Bellisseria. However, as Patch notes in his forum post, this is not currently the case – so long as personal security orbs and the like operate within the guidelines set above:
We feel as a compromise, at the present you may only use other security systems that conform to the same Linden Homes Security System standards (warning time no shorter than 15 seconds, no greater detection range than 400m in height; must only work within the boundaries of your parcel, and eject instead of teleport-to-home). If we incur too many issues with non-conforming security systems, we will update the policy to prohibit the use of all non-Linden provided security systems in the new Linden Homes regions.
Hopefully, the new panels will, alongside the parcel ban list (which still functions), and the house access options for all doors, meet all the security requirement people might feel they need with their Linden Home. From my perspective, they are an excellent compromise from the Lab that allow people maintain the security / privacy they might feel they require whilst still fostering freedom of movement within Bellisseria which may in turn (hopefully) encourage a greater sense of community among residents and help build friendships and community activities.
As we’re all (probably painfully) aware, the last few months have seen Second Life plague by region crossing issues, with users frequently disconnected (with teleports – being the most common form of region crossing – in particular being affected). One of the pains in dealing with these issues has been identifying the root cause – with most thinking being around it being a timing issue with communications between the region receiving and incoming avatar and the user’s viewer.
However, speaking at the Content Creation User Group meeting on Thursday, April 18th, Vir Linden indicated that the problem might be related to the server Linux operating system update the Lab recently rolled out.
That update – was initially deployed to a small cluster of regions on a release candidate channel called Cake, and it has been reported by those using Cake regions for testing in April, that it was those regions that first demonstrated the teleport issues – although at the time, they were thought to be local connection issues, rather than indicative of a deeper potential issue.
Commenting on the situation at the CCUG meeting, Vir said:
We’ve been having some issues on the simulator side where people tend to get disconnected during teleports … it’s been common enough that shows up as a significant blip on our stats … and that issue seems to have come along … basically when we upgraded the version of Linux that we’re using on our simulators. so we’ve had to do some roll-backs there, just to try to get that issue to go away.
[But] that pushes out the time-line for [deploying] all the things that are based on … the later version [of Linux] that we’re trying to update to … Hopefully we can get those out soon, but I can’t tell you anything about the time-line.
This might explain the scheduled maintenance witnessed on April 18th, with large number of regions going off-line and restarted. If this is the reason, whether it does see a reduction in the teleport issues with those regions rolled-back remains to be seen. But if data does indicate the region crossing issues have been reduced, then this can only be good news and potentially worth the disruption of the maintenance and restarts.
In the meantime, the audio of Vir’s comments is provided below.
The new Linden Home houseboats have proven exceptionally popular – so popular that demand has exceed supply
With most of with eyes fixed on Fantasy Faire (you can catch my own shorthand guide if the mood takes you). Daniel Voyager was looking in another direction, and tweeted an interesting find.
It seems the Lab and the Linden Department of Public Works could be busy working to address the demand for more houseboats within the new Linden Homes continent, with Daniel identifying a new 48-region SSP development being put together south of the original SSP development area.
There has been no official word on whether the new regions are being developed in response to the demand for houseboats, but certainly, that demand has been strong enough to warrant this, with repeated disappointment being voiced over the fact the houseboats initially made available were very rapidly snapped up. As such, it seem a reasonable deduction to see this latest SSP development as a move to meet at least some of this demand.
The new SSP regions under development appear geared towards providing more space for the Linden Homes houseboats
The new regions form a series of sandbars with extensive moorings of the same general type seen within the new Linden Homes continent of Bellisseria, strongly suggesting they will provide space for more of the new houseboats (see right). Some of the waterways between the sand bars look to be a little too narrow to fit houseboats and piers – perhaps these are intended for use by float planes and the like, if not to form a natural break to prevent the regions from feeling overcrowded.
There is no available date on when the new regions might be added to Bellisseria – again assuming the intent of their development is to meet demand. Nevertheless, it does bring with it a couple of questions.
The first is: where might the new development sit in relation to Bellisseria’s existing land mass? While I have nothing more to go on than instinct, my own thoughts are the area to the south and east of Bellesseria would seem the most likely. There is plenty of space for further regions to be dropped in there (south of the lower eastern tip of the continent), whilst still leaving room for the “unfinished” line down the east side of the continent’s western “finger” without causing any feeling of crowding. Or perhaps the new regions will eventually be placed to the south of that western finger, although that might put them a little too close to the channel running to Jeogeot (unless they are linked directly to it).
The second question is more intrinsic to Bellesseria as a whole. while houses along the cost are being picked up – they did so after the houseboats had gone. So, simply provisioning more houseboats possibly runs the risk of the continent’s inland areas remaining under-populated unless they are made more inviting.
Is the slow initial take-up of houses simply that the initial selection wasn’t seen as attractive enough, or was it down to something more fundamental? A lack of ability to link them to the continent’s road structure, for example or – as I noted in Making a (Linden) houseboat a home – is it the general lack of additional amenities people might appreciate having, such as a few airstrips scattered around to offer people the attraction of being able to rez and fly their light ‘planes off of the grass. Or perhaps some of the houses along the rivers could have small boat access to the water (although this could create issues of its own).
Time will tell on both of these questions, but in the meantime – and again assuming the move is to address the demand – the potential of more houseboats becoming available in the (hopefully!) not too distant future could well be as welcome as the recent moves by the Lab to deal with issues of banlines across the new region.
Just a reminder (or advanced warning for those who may not have seen it): Second Life will be subject to up to 4 days of network maintenance, commencing on Monday, May 13th. This work may possibly run through until Thursday, May 16th.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 