Monthly Updates (Proposal)

Instead of taking the grid down on a (mostly) weekly basis for updates, which then (a) need to be fixed almost as soon as they're released (grid down again) and (b) take 3 or 4 days to "settle down", why not have monthly updates, at which time the published grid down time is a full 24 hours?
There'd be less frustrated expectation, less frequent disruption, and LL would have more time to rollout the updates on the live servers.
There could even be a mailing list for "update volunteers" to subscribe to. When LL thought the grid was ready, they could send a message to the volunteers, who could log in and see if it actually was! Thus saving the rest of us poor shmucks having to repeatedly check the system status on a Wednesday!

Proposal: http://secondlife.com/vote/get_feature.php?get_id=1843

LL has already stated that they're not going to do weekly updates any more. They said that they'd be at least two weeks apart, and indeed there wasn't an update last week.

While I don't feel mandatory weekly updates are essential... neither do I believe limiting updates to once a month is beneficial. For example, 1.12 already has a number of bugs and essentials showing up (one of which is the great need to be able to send the new notice option to a specific Role... such as when a notice is to be sent only to group officers rather than an entire group). I'd hate to have to wait until the middle of September to see such an essential item added to SL.

For minor, unessential updates, yeah, I can see the wisdom of packing them together and waiting for the next major (or monthly) release. But if an update is more important... I can handle being down for a few hours on Wednesday morning. Of course, some updates are totally client side and require a simple download of the new client software. Most folks can handle that any day of the week if it provides a significant improvement in operation.

I take your point Wayfinder.
Perhaps this is more of an issue for us Europeans. The scheduled updates happen in the afternoon/evening here. For me, if all goes well, then I can log in from 8:00pm onwards.
Recently though, the scheduled updates have been followed almost immediately by more downtime. Given that I'm at work on Wednesday mornings, this means that SL is only accessible 6 days a week when this happens.

They have also been able to do important updates and bugfixes with a rolling update. They could even do a client update that's got a new feature then a rolling update to actually use it.

Having the whole grid down for a mass update for every change... even fairly major changes... shouldn't be necessary.

Yeah, I can understand that. Unfortunately, v1.12 was a major update (and imho, a great one. ) and will likely have some downtime for the next couple of weeks as they get it ironed out and debugged.

I'll have to say though, this version seems less buggy overall than the last three. It has a few that can be annoying, but I think they're on top of those and getting them fixed quickly. Hopefully after a couple of weeks, everything will settle down.

I can understand hating to be offline one day a week. They're trying to limit updates to every 2 weeks I think (except in the case of serious bugs); probably a good compromise.