#SL JIRA Change Reactions

The big news sweeping the Second Life™ community is the change in the JIRA. It is not a popular change. I’ve been following the threads I can find to see the reaction. I’ve updating my previous post with new links. I’ll repeat them here.

The video is comedy/satire. It well describes how many of us see the Lab’s JIRA change.

Threads

Innula Zenovka: Changes to the jira.. hiding bug reports? – SL Forum

NeoBokrug Elytis: Point gun at foot, pull trigger. [JIRA CHANGES] – Main thread at SLUniverse.

Botgirl Questi : Bugsy Linden Interview: The Real Story Behind the Jira Change – Comedy or… biting satire

Basic Thoughts

An interesting bit of trivia is the JIRA change before on 9/7/2010. This was the upgrade to JIRA 4.1. It is almost exactly two years later.

There are a number of aspects in the reactions to this JIRA change. I’ll consolidate the comments I am seeing into generalizations and comment on them. You are welcome to comment on my comments.

Characterization

A number of people are characterizing the Lindens. In general the characterizations I’ve seen are based on a Linden comment. The basic form is: ‘some statement’ (quote) shows they are ‘some characterization.’

Few people realize the dynamic at play in such comments. An illustration probably explains it best. In awareness training one of the common exercises in multi-day trainings occurs when attendees have been engaged long enough to start to know each other. The facilitator starts the group describing his/her personality, the facilitator’s. No one really knows the facilitator or their personality. The facilitator is often following a script prepared by others. So, there is little of the facilitator in the material and presentation. Often such facilitators are even trained in the style and delivery of the program. Good facilitators are usually decent actors.

But, that doesn’t stop people from giving their opinions. After 10 or 12 people have voiced opinions it starts to become clear what is happening. Facilitators usually allow the process to run until it is obvious to the majority of people what is happening. People are projecting their personality on the facilitator. Some say he is mean and others say he is caring, diametric opposites that just aren’t likely in a single individual.

In any event, characterizing people usually produces poor results. Imagine having to deal with being characterized every day that you go to work by the people you are trying to help. I’m not surprised that the Lab is reducing communication channels nor that the community fails to understand their responsibility and contribution to the problem.

As a community we need to find better ways to handle these problems. Especially since we don’t like the Lab’s solutions.

Conformance

There is always the temptation to conform to what others are doing as that is somehow likely the best way to do whatever. So, it is natural to compare the Lab’s bug reporting system to other reporting systems.

If one is to make such a comparison, does one compare to other games or software companies? Do either accurately reflect the scenario in Second Life? I doubt it. One might be able to do a good comparison using support systems for Unity or Unreal SDK’s. I think that would be the systems most like SL, where users are contributing to the project. But, even that is not a perfect match.

I do not believe the Lab is trying to conform to industry standards. I think all the Lindens know SL is a unique case. I do believe they are trying to solve a problem. We have to speculate on what that is. But, I am pretty sire conformance is not it.

Competition

A number of people have commented that if there were a good competing virtual world, there would be a mass exodus from Second Life. I don’t believe that. Cloud Party is building a pretty good virtual world and adding in many of the features that users want in SL.

We are seeing a number of SL creatives moving to Cloud Party and working in that world. It has been awhile since I visited. I’ll be making a new visit soon. Their market place is in Beta now.

For there to be a mass exodus another virtual world (VW) will need to work as well as SL and have the customer base to buy products that SL has. Until then, they are not a real competitor.

OpenSim has serious physics engine problems. However, a guy from Intel is working on fixing that. If that fix happens and the currency and IP protection issues can be resolved, any number of companies could quickly open competitive worlds.

Duplicates

Everyone is predicting a flood of duplicates. That is a reasonable assumption. I’ll point some of the other side of that concept. I spend some time answering questions in the SL Forum Answers section. One cannot ask a question without being presented with a number of possible answers. Yet people ask the same EXACT question. For instance: Can’t Login or Cannot Login. Try it.

So, there will be a large number of duplicates no matter what one does. The question is whether there will be that many MORE duplicates with this new system. I think it is apparent the Lindens think there will not be that many more. I believe neither the community nor the Lindens know the answer to that question. The Lindens will find out over the next few weeks.

But, the result the Lindens see is not going to be a pure measure. As always we have other factors that are difficult to measure. We know some number of people are going to stop reporting bugs and submitting feature requests. Others may attempt to game the period of testing by rallying groups to do mass reporting of a single bug to overload the system and skew the results. I presume it hasn’t occurred to them the Lab has seen this before and likely anticipates it. So, the effort at best is meaningless and at worst prolongs the testing period.

12 thoughts on “#SL JIRA Change Reactions

  1. Well, when crucial jira’s get to be 5-6 years old, it becomes difficult to take the side of the Lindens. I find it quite crazy that the Lab can’t tell what is an important jira and what is not. I see fixes all the time, but most are pretty minor to me. The bugs that irritate me the most are those that pertain directly to content creators. Beyond critical bugs that bring down the system, bugs related to content should be of the highest priority. From what I’ve seen, only bugs related to clothing ever get much attention. This is probably because they produce the most backlash. All the rest of the content related bugs get pushed aside and I have no problem at all telling customers why something doesn’t work the way it should. That answer rest directly on LL’s shoulders.

    I, as well as many others, have done everything we can to point out crucial content related bugs, but LL ignores all of our pleas. At some point during the 6 years waiting for a bug fix, you can’t help but try every single approach possible to get a bug fixed. Many times now, I’ve seen residents dig into the code and fix the bug for LL, with little response from LL, if any at all. Personally, I’ve given up. So, they can do things however they want. After 6 years of waiting, my patience for LL is gone, as is probably the feeling of many.

    • You could be right. How you feel is how you feel and that should be respected.

      When one thinks they have done everything possible and have dome it for years, then it is often good to look at HOW those things were done.

  2. “I do believe this is the reason that the JIRA change came about. The Lindens were having to read so much garbage and were spending so much time reading through the JIRA, they felt the cost, money-wise, time-wise, and emotionally, was too much and made a change.”

    I have no problem identifying the wackadoodles by the end of the first line and skip to the next comment. I suspect the Lindens can handle that.

    Whatever the reasoning is at LL, dealing with garbage is not a significant factor. If it is the Lindens are far more childish than any of us believed (which would point to the wackadoodles being right all along!)

  3. One simple crucial factor is how you make the other person feel ….. like if I’d like you to change/do something, I’m more like to get it by treating you as an asshole?

    I work hard at trying to keep the banlines down around my airport Poppyport, and I often get banlines removed just by explaining and asking nicely and offering a security orb as an alternative. Am I likely to get a better result by playing hardball and acting aggressively? – I don’t think so!

    The Lindens often do things for me too when I raise a suppot case and explain and ask nicely – like the new rezz zone in Hookton at the marina I’m building.

    Yes, there are things I wish they’d do or not do – like the fix to Restore To Last Position which has been glitched for ages and won’t work near land borders and which seems way overdue to me – but I have no idea of the wider issues which might be involved for all I know.

    So I don’t think behaving aggressively or emotionally towards the Lindens helps at all.

    Sylvie Etoile
    (“I’ll never forget the way you made me feel”)

    • Well written and I believe accurate. Honey works better than vinegar.

      I disagree on the single idea of ‘made me feel’ or ‘make them feel’. People do respond emotionally. We can figure out how to play people that only react. We hear the term ‘push their buttons’. But, that is a choice for both people. Humans can disconnect their buttons. That doesn’t mean we stop feeling. But, when called an asshole I can react emotionally and be insulting right back. Or I can choose to go into chess player mode and start to consider what they are up to. We always have the choice, a count to ten thing.

      The idea that someone makes us feel something is way counterproductive. It is when we look at why we choose to feel that way, why whatever response popped up first, that we start to learn about our self and can see out inner self. When we understand our self, we have a choice as how to respond. Sports competitors attempt to make opponents angry because it blocks out the higher reasoning processes and puts them into a reactive mode, their buttons can be pushed. That means the controlled reactions will play first and the person can be played, their responses predicted, and be defeated. Great competitive athletes have learned to control their reaction and keep thinking rather than reacting. They often have consciously trained their self to turn stimuli that could produce anger into determination or other productive channels.

      There are all sorts of scenarios that are proof anyone can choose how they feel and thus how they react.

  4. Personally, how i would change the procedure, would be to keep the system essentially as it is but with one major change. I would prevent any comments on the jira from flagging up until they had been “Moderated”, possible putting the person in charge of the Jira entry in charge of this (Or a responsible resident team). This would prevent the many many repeat posts on popular Jiras from flodding them with information, enabling a Resident / the reporter / a moderator to manually flag posts to the Jira that may potentially of use.

    The single reason i don’t file Jira reports (Or comment / bother spending time tracing them in any depth) is because so many of the issues i come accross, particuarly in lsl, are so old, there really seems no point. Lets take the Listeners in child prims as an example (Just make it behave consistantly!), or Permissions that have been granted not transfering over during region crossings as another (Or transfering allot slower than the script anyway). As a content creator i can’t count the hours i’ve wasted trying to fix bugs in my code that have turned out to be LSL bugs. I hate to think how much worse this will be in 2 / 3 / 4 years time (Or many more with some bugs) as residents won’t be able to find out what’s causing their problem and many of the usefull work arounds will be much more dificult to find.

    There is a solid pool of residents that would assist in the management of the JIRA if only they would try and engage us. I Personally would donate some of my time to it provided it actually helped and issues got fixed, however, given i’ve been in SL with various Avatars for 7+ years now, i’ve almost given up with the situation before the JIRA change was announced. There was a time when i’d try and get to meetings, despite the Time diference from GMT but it’s just not possible. Resources like the JIRA / Forum and Blogs like this are a critical line of communication for many people not close to an Amercian time zone and the slow erosion of these (the Linden Blog being a prime example from what it used to be like a few years ago) only serves to Frustrate us further.

    p.s. Excelent blog.

    • Thanks for the PS.

      Your ideas are good. I don’t know if they will address the issues as the Lab sees them… but maybe.

      I do know something has changed in the JIRA. I have to do some testing. But, Lance C was able to see and comment on my BUG-9 item…

      • I just wish, and this i believe is where most of the miss directed frustration comes from which they are trying to avoid, they would try and engage the community. i’m not demanding (lost a large percentage of forum posts seem to) they engage in the forums, the Jira, Write personal responses to every flame, just simply that the people who can and want to help are allowed to.

        You’ll never stop the flaming, there are many reasons that situation has been created over several yers, but the solutions they come up with seem to be mostly using a sledge hammer to crack a nut. This all feels a strangley familiar to when they stopped allowing comments on the blog posts about these sort of issues, or even when they stopped posting about grid problems / bugs…

        • Users see things from their side. As users we only see a part of the Lindens position or any problem, an incomplete picture. It is on that incomplete picture most people base their thinking and opinions and what they think the Lab should do. I think that is silly behavior and most likely to be counterproductive.

  5. Nalates, I agree with a lot of what you’ve said. The sky is always falling on Second Life. But this is the first time I’ve felt like they just don’t want me or my content in SL any more. I’m not saying I’m leaving – I haven’t decided yet – but there’s a strong temptation to say, “Yeah? Well, screw YOU too, and I’ll be damned if I give you any more money.”

    JIRA has issues. Liberal application of the banhammer would make it a much more useful tool for the Lindens. I’m not sure why they’ve resisted doing just that. Posting to JIRA should be a revokable privilege. Content creators, though, need read access, and I can see no good reason to deny it.

    • Bans don’t work well. A recent JIRA rant was from a new ALT, which could have been made using a pseudo-IP-address. People learn and circumvent obstacles.

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