Changes

There are lots of things changing in SL. To those not following the Wiki, blogrum and various Lindens’ office-hours meetings; changes may appear to be moving slowly. However, I see a pattern of changes reflecting Phillip’s direction to improve communications between residents and the Lab and improve how they develop software for SL. I find the pace of these changes rather impressive.

One change is Torley’s recent update of the Wiki post on the Second Life Quality Assurance Portal and the changes in the QA process and how to participate. Torley is actually really busy updating the Wiki with all the new changes related to Bug Tracking.

Read more

Phillip, at SLCC 2010, talked about how the way Linden Lab develops code would change. Effort was to be made to get changes, fixes, and new features out faster. In that line the server code team is changing how they rollout server upgrades.

There is a Beta Server Team that does Quality Assurance (QA) on the Beta grids. The group is moderated by Oskar Linden. Beta Server Office Hours are on Thursdays at 3 PM PDT in Morris on the preview grid, ADITI.

Oskar and Lil Linden explained the changes in Beta Server Office Hours (09/02). The code is still tested on the Beta Grids, ADITI being the grid most of us know and some of us use. But once it reaches Release Candidate status it gets tested on the main grid, AGNI. Previously they were rolling all the changes into a single RC and rolling it out to the pilot area on AGNI. The Quality Assurance team would try to catch the problems and get back to the development teams.

Read more

Update 2010-09-06: The Display Names Wiki page has been updated and provides load of new information and answers.

Earlier I blogged about Display Names and referred to Gwyneth Llewelyn’s article Identity Crisis! The expected roll out for Display Names is late September 2010. However, Linden Lab just announced a Project Viewer for those wanting to test Display Names.

For me this appears to be a first case test of whether we are dealing with the same ol’ Linden Lab or the new more communicative and sensitive LL. Consider this part of their statement;

After the flood of comments that greeted our announcement of the upcoming Display Names feature, we’re happy to announce that we are now releasing a Project Viewer to help us further test performance and let Residents get a sense for how Display Names would work should they go into production.

Read more

Update 2010-09-01: For those wanting to help test Display Names a project viewer using them has been released. See: Display Names Project Viewer Now Available

Display names are coming to Second Life. Late September is the anticipated roll out date. You will have your login ID and in September a new and changeable a display name, which is common on most online services.

The Linden Lab announcement is here: Display Names: Bringing Greater Self-Expression to Second Life – includes a Torley video.

I think the possible and probable problems will outweigh the benefits. It did not have to be such a problem. There are several ways for handling names in an online environment. But, once again Linden Lab’s management demonstrates a lack of understanding of their product and customers. For a good analysis of the problems see Gwyneth Llewelyn’ article, Identity crisis!

Support Changes

Linden Lab is changing their support services. There is an article here: Important Updates From Support

For those paying for regions this does not seem to be working out so well. It is hard to know the size of problem, but the SL blog has plenty of complaints by region owners that cannot get a region restarted or other problems fixed. According to them the most often suggested solution for a problem from Concierge support is to file a ticket…

Also, if one needs to appeal an Abuse Report and subsequent action, one used to be able to log into the forum follow a link to the appeal process. Now the link to the appeal process is gone. The idea being that the login would automatically transfer a suspended account holder directly to the appeal process. That is currently broken. For now the solution is:

Unfortunately, a secondlife.com authentication bug has temporarily disabled this function.  While our  web team works on that issue, we’ve established a temporary process.  If  you need to file an abuse appeal, please log in to secondlife.comwith an alt account.  Then, file a new ticket from http://secondlife.com/support, selecting “Account Issues” and then “Second Life Web Login Issue.”  Be  certain to include any information you believe is relevant to our re-evaluation of your case. As soon as the new Abuse Appeals process is  reinstated, then we will let you know.

One can read the comments to the post to see how the changes are working… NOT.