An open letter to any Linden that will hear my plea...

I am not a new user, nor am I a long time vetran. I've been with SL for about 3 months - long enough to have it become virtual crack for me.

I work in Information Technology - I understand completely how server/infrastructure issues can crop up, and when you're in firefighting mode, sometimes its hard to think about the customer directly - you're just trying to get the server up, and get your manager off your butt.

However -

I understand now what its like for my own users when I have a protracted outage in my own environment. Now that I can see it from the other side, I have a few *reasonable* requests that would make outages less painful for us SL-crackheads out there. We already do these in my IT Department - why can't you?

1. Please, please, please update the forums on a regular basis when there's an outage going on. By regular basis - I mean at least hourly - or more Even if you have nothing to report, just a quick note with a recent timestamp gives the psychological impression to your customers that *someone* is aware of the current situation, and is plugged in. A note that is 2 hours old, and it way outside of the change window, is compltely unacceptable to me, and probably everyone else. ***This becomes critical when you are exceeding your original downtime window***

2. Please make uptime during peak hours a top priority. What I mean by this - SL downtimes seem to be scheduled during buisness, or pre-buisness hours - not in the middle of the night. Granted, the user community is worldwide - but has anyone taken a look at where the majority of your customers are located, and try to plan downtime around that?
If I didn't know better, I'd think the person scheduling these change controls is doing it around *their* schedule, rather than your customers.

Just two requests - that's all. I have others - but they probably leave the realm of completely reasonable. These are things Linden Labs can do RIGHT NOW - if you choose to.

Please, I hope you're listening.

Your faithful (and paying) customer...

Travis Lambert

AMEN !!!!!!

*claps*

I agree whole heartidly with request 1, communication on downtime and other problems has ranged from minimalist to non-existant.

This here is a good start. But can we take it out of the forums and puyt it someplace more readily accessible? Perhaps an employee whos job is purely that of community relations. Who can put a quirky spin on it to lighten the mood and make technical details more novice friendly. (IE: The router thingy broke and data is flying out all over the place.)

/3/c9/22763/1.html

On number 2, hmm... Well I like the idea, but there may be more to it... If its doable, most definately schedule downtime durring low usage hours. (Even if I probably would end up one of the people that ends up playing those hours. lol)

Am I missing something here? I thought the original downtime was scheduled for 4-8am. I'd hardly call this someone else's desired schedule - or peak time. I think what they were doing was tryin to pick the quietest time - which would be around these times. It then all obviously ran over a bit.

It was 4 am -8 am There was a problem..It was not scheduled, and thats why it was down till later that night they moved there servers.. World will not end don't worry.

In over a year of SL being around SL has hardly ever gone down in this way.. I can count the ammount of unscheduled Crashes/Updates/Fixes on both hands.

Most Online Games/Worlds have Downtime every night SL does not.. Give them a break

I've had my private island for less than a month. I need both hands an toes to count the times it has been unavailable. To count the hours too.

Not impressed.

/RR

Topsy, its not even the scheduled maintanece. Kitzbuhel went down for at least 3.5 hhours Sunday night and there was NOTHING said about it. I bugged Lindens online about it 3 times. I know the Lindens are short of staff but there must be someway of tying server status into a live update page.

We are working on better ways to communicate system status for while the grid is in scheduled downtime, during unscheduled downtime, or when it is up. The status page is usually kept up to date, and I usually appear in #secondlife on efnet when the system exceeding scheduled downtime to give real-time updates.

We already pick the scheduled downtime window based on a combination of concurrency and expected downtime in order to impact the fewest total residents.

Phoenix was very helpful communicating status of the grid during relocation. I really appreciated the progress-reports, even though you guys were busy beyond belief.

Great job!