Today Jessica Lyon posted on the Firestorm blog about Saturday’s 3 hour Q & A meeting. See: Q&A – Don’t be surprised… be informed.
In the comments the key question was asked. When will Phoenix blocking start? Jessica answered:
We haven’t decided yet what we will do with Phoenix. I may not have been clear at the meeting but the 3 version rule will start as of now, existing builds don’t really fall into the rule because we expect SSA will kill them off anyways. However if after SSA is fully deployed for a few weeks, we see there are still thousands on Phoenix, we ‘may’ decide to block it. I would rather avoid that if I could though.
That headline could be just a tiny bit misleading, just saying.
Jessica started out on Saturday saying they were going to block Firestorm and Phoenix. Now, Tuesday, she is saying may be they won’t block Phoenix…
This surprises me. I was under the impressions the decision on what to block and when was LLs call, not Firestorm’s call. It sounded as if Firestorm was merely informing people of what LLs was going to do.
But now it sounds as if Firestorm has been given authority to make the call on their own. I understand why the call needs to be made, and think they should so it and soon. But it places the “social burden” very differently if its the TPV dev making this decision.
LL can block viewers and has, on occasion, in the past. I think the Emerald Viewer was the last one they blocked.
But, this planed blocking of Firestorm and Phoenix is definitely going to be a Firestorm action. Jessica and others from the FS team have mentioned they built the capability into their viewers. I believe it is the splash page of each FS-PH viewer that is delivered from the Firestorm web server. It provides them stats and the ability to block their viewers.
Jessica seems sensitive to pressure. I suspect there is pressure from FS Support and Development to reduce the number of versions out there. But user pressure already seems to have her backing off Saturday’s pronouncement.
The current block of Firestorm 4.4.1 was done through the Firestorm blocking mechanism, not LL’s.