Tag: SL News

Lab seek suggestions on improving Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey

secondlifeLinden Lab has launched a new feedback form, inviting platform users to offer up constructive suggestions on how the Second Life experience might be improved.

The blog post announcing the new form reads in full:

What’s the one thing Linden Lab could do that would have the biggest impact on further improving your Second Life experience?

Many Second Life users have thoughts on this – from different approaches for the way things are done today, to brand new features that could dramatically improve their experiences, to seemingly small things that could have a big impact. Today, we’re launching an easier way to share your ideas with us, a new “Feedback & Suggestions” page on SecondLife.com. You can also find this page by going to Help and finding New Feature Suggestions in the drop down.

Just sign-in with your Second Life account, select the topic or category that’s most appropriate, and describe your suggestion in the text box. Once you submit, you’ll see a confirmation page and receive an automated email as well. We won’t be able to reply individually to each suggestion, but every idea will be routed to the appropriate Lindens and each one will be reviewed and considered.

We’ll of course continue to be on the lookout for ideas as they continue to surface in social media, direct conversations, or via JIRA, but this new page should make it easier than ever for any Second Life Resident to share suggestions directly with us.

The new form is easily accessible via your Second Life web dashboard, or through the support portal page, where it appears as the "Suggestions" link in the lower right corner of the page
The new form is easily accessible via your Second Life web dashboard

Covering a range of topic categories, including the likes of avatars, communications, content creation, groups, inventory, commerce, land, mesh, navigation, performance, scripting, teleports, tools, user interface, viewer, and the all-important “other/unknown”, the new form is simple to complete, and can be accessed directly from your Second Life dashboard and the support portal.

As the form notes, it is not intended for support requests, bug reports, and other inquiries; these should continue to be directed through the Second Life Support Portal and the JIRA.

Also, please do remember that suggestions are being sought – not statements. So, for example, a demand for reducing tier isn’t going to gain much traction. But if you actually have a considered plan for how tier might be lowered in such a way as to not damage the Lab’s ability to generate the revenue it needs to continue operating (and have some good figures to support your case) – now is the time to drop them into the form and let them take a look.

The suggestions form can also be access from the SL support portal via the link in the lower right corner of the portal web page
The suggestions form can also be accessed from the SL support portal via the link in the lower right corner of the portal web page

Obviously, not every suggestion will be acted upon; but this is still nevertheless a good move by the Lab.

Up until now, the most direct route of putting an idea to the Lab has been via a “feature request” submission through the SL JIRA. However, the JIRA has been something a lot of users have preferred to steer clear of, seeing it as confusing and / or intimidating when trying to complete a report. Therefore, the offering of a simple, clean form for people to use is to be welcomed, and kudos given to the Lab for offering it.

Concierge support closed for Thanksgiving

Posted on by Inara Pey

secondlifeThe Lab has issues a reminder via the Grid Status Reports page that there will be no concierge telephone and chat support available from midnight SLT on Wednesday, November 26th through until 08:00 SLT on Friday, November 28th.

This is to allow support staff in the USA to enjoy Thanksgiving with their family and friends.

The status update reads in full:

Concierge phone and chat support will be offline this coming Thursday, 27 November, so that team members can spend the Thanksgiving holiday with their friends and family. Both services will close at midnight Wednesday evening and will re-open at 8am Pacific on Friday morning.

To the support staff and all at Linden Lab, I’d like to pass on my best wishes for a happy Thanksgiving, and the same also goes out to all those I’ve come to know in SL who are  celebrating Thanksgiving as well.

Viewer-managed Marketplace: beta testing and a look at the project viewer

Posted on by Inara Pey

In October 2014, I reported on the viewer-managed Marketplace (VMM) project, which the lab has been developing for several months.

The aim of the project is to enable merchants to manage the creation and management of Marketplace product listing through the viewer, bypassing the need to use the Merchant Outbox (and have copies of items stored on the Marketplace inventory servers) or using Magic Boxes.

VMM does this by adding a new Marketplace Listing panel to to viewer, of which more below.

On Friday, November 21st, the Lab announced that wider beta testing of VMM is now ready to start on Aditi (the Beta grid). and is inviting merchants to download a new VMM project viewer they can use to test creating and managing product listing through the viewer.

Alongside of the announcement, the Lab also made available:

If you are a merchant and wish to test the VMM functionality, you’ll need to download and install the project viewer, and use one of the following three test regions on Aditi: ACME D; ACME E and ACME F. Using the viewer anywhere else can generate error messages when first logging-in (designed to indicate VMM is not available, and which will not interfere with using the viewer for other activities).

If you’ve never logged-into Aditi, please refer to the instructions on how to do so on the beta grid wiki page.

You may also wish to be logged-in to the Aditi Marketplace place.

When testing VMM, remember that it is not intended to enable all Marketplace-related activities through the viewer. Rather, it is intended to allow merchants to create new Marketplace listings with inventory, associate inventory with an existing Marketplace listing, remove items from a listing and unlist goods entirely. All other Marketplace activities will still have to be carried out within the Marketplace itself.

Also note that at present there is a bug within the Aditi Marketplace that will cause purchases to fail. The Lab is working to address this, and it shouldn’t interfere with testing VMM to create and modify product listings.

The following notes are intended to get you started with the project viewer and beta testing, please refer to the Lab’s VMM FAQ for other pertinent information.

The Marketplace Listings Panel

An active Marketplace Listings panel showing the four tabs used to manage inventory
An active Marketplace Listings panel showing the four tabs used to manage inventory

The heart of the viewer-managed Marketplace is the new new Marketplace Listing panel within the viewer. This will eventually replace the Merchant Outbox,  although both are provided in the project viewer.

The Marketplace Listing panel allows a merchant to carry out a number of Marketplace tasks from within the viewer, such as:  create a new product listing, modify a listing, change the items associated with a listing, etc.

It does this by enabling merchants to directly associate products in their inventory with product item listings on the Marketplace, eliminating the need to either upload copies of products to the Marketplace inventory servers via the Merchant Outbox or, in the case of limited stock items that are No Copy for the merchant, having them stored in-world in a Magic Box. When a customer purchases an item listed via VMM, it is delivered to them directly from the Lab’s asset servers.

This does mean that care must be taken when handing product items in inventory in order to avoid occidentally deleting items associated with Marketplace listings. To help with this, the folder associated with the Marketplace Listing panel remain hidden from view (as far as is possible) when working directly in the inventory .

Google Form

The first time you open the Marketplace Listing panel, it may display the following message:

This feature is currently in beta. Please add you name to this Google form if you would like to participate

If this happens, it is likely because you logged-in to a non-VMM region and then teleported to the test regions. To correct, simply log-in directly to one of the three ACME test regions (ACME D; ACME E and ACME F). The Marketplace Listing panel should open correctly; if you haven’t already created an Aditi Marketplace store, it will display a message requesting you do so, with a link to the Marketplace.

Continue reading “Viewer-managed Marketplace: beta testing and a look at the project viewer” →

Lab blogs about the Nov 17th-21st region restarts

Posted on by Inara Pey

secondlifeUpdate: At the time this article went to press, it appeared the daily restarts were still in progress (hence the reference to the restarts being Nov 17th-21st). Subsequent to this article appearing, the Lab updated the Grid Status report to indicate the work has actually bee completed, therefore the Lab’s blog post did in fact mark the end of the work.

The week of November 17th – 21st 2014 has been marked with daily periods of region restarts. Notice that these would be going on was first posted via a Grid Status update on Friday, November 14th.

As I noted in the first of my SL project updates for the week, Simon Linden indicated that restarts and the attendant maintenance was hardware-related, requiring servers to be taken down and physically opened-up, although precise details on what was being done was still scant.

In a blog post published on Thursday, November 20th, the Lab provided a detailed explanation on the reasons for the restarts, which reads in full:

Keeping the systems running the Second Life infrastructure operating smoothly is no mean feat. Our monitoring infrastructure keeps an eye on our machines every second, and a team of people work around the clock to ensure that Second Life runs smoothly. We do our best to replace failing systems pro actively and invisibly to Residents. Unfortunately, sometimes unexpected problems arise.

In late July, a hardware failure took down four of our latest-generation of simulator hosts. Initially, this was attributed to be a random failure, and the machine was sent off to our vendor for repair. In early October, a second failure took down another four machines. Two weeks later, another failure on another four hosts.

Each host lives inside a chassis along with three other hosts. These four hosts all share a common backplane that provides the hosts with power, networking and storage. The failures were traced to an overheating and subsequent failure of a component on these backplanes.

After exhaustive investigation with our vendor, the root cause of the failures turned out to be a hardware defect in a backplane component. We arranged an on-site visit by our vendor to locate, identify, and replace the affected backplanes. Members of our operations team have been working this week with our vendor in our data centre to inspect every potentially affected system and replace the defective component to prevent any more failures.

The region restarts that some of you have experienced this week were an unfortunate side-effect of this critical maintenance work. We have done our best to keep these restarts to a minimum as we understand just how disruptive a region restart can be. The affected machines have been repaired, and returned to service and we are confident that no more failures of this type will occur in the future. Thank you all for your patience and understanding as we have proceeded through the extended maintenance window this week.

Once again, it’s good to see that Landon Linden and his team are keeping the channels of communication open, and working to keep users appraised of what’s happening whenever and wherever is necessary / they can.

More server maintenance, Weds November 19th

Posted on by Inara Pey

In addition to the server maintenance taking place throughout this week, the Lab has  announced an additional period of maintenance which will be taking place on Wednesday, November 19th. The Grid Status post announcing the work reads in full:

Scheduled Server Maintenance

[Posted 12:10 PM PDT, 18 November 2014] We will be performing additional scheduled maintenance on 19 November at approximately 1:00 AM PST. During this time, some residents may experience login issues and residents in-world may be logged off or experience degraded performance. Additionally, during this time Group Chat may fail. Please refrain from rezzing no-copy objects and making L$ transactions during this maintenance. Please check back here for updates.

 

Don’t forget: scheduled maintenance means daily restarts Nov 17th-21st, 2014

Posted on by Inara Pey

Don’t forget that the coming week (commencing Monday, November 17th, 2014) will see all regions on the main SL grid undergoing daily restarts – which may occur more than once for each region.

The restarts are a part of grid-wide maintenance which requires all of the sim host servers to be inspected, with work commencing at 07:00 SLT every morning from Monday through Friday.

The Grid Status announcement on the work reads in full:

Scheduled Maintenance

[Posted 10:00 AM PST, 14 November 2014] Beginning Monday, November 17, we will be undertaking a full week of scheduled maintenance.  This maintenance will take place at approximately 7:00 AM each day next week. Each region will be subject to one or more restarts, as its host takes its turn for inspection.  A five-minute warning will be broadcast for each restarting region. Additional warnings will be broadcast to regions where multiple restarts are necessary. Please be cautious about going AFK for extended periods in the middle of build sessions or handling no-copy objects, as you may miss the shutdown warnings. Please keep an eye on this blog for further updates.