Not happy

I've just discovered the hard way the news about the 1.6.8 upgrade that has shut down SL for 6 hours July 6th from 6:00 AM PST to 12:00 Noon PST. Whilst I respect that LL has to have time for upgrades and work etc the post was put up at 9:39PM the day before, some 8 and a bit hours before the down time, which might be great for those in the US but it sucks for the rest of us. I might be a newbie, but I'm now paying my monthly fee and I'm regularly reading these forums I'd expect a bit more notice than this: I'd have been on before the shutdown which started at 9pm my time had I'd know (I'd been on the forums earlier this morning prior to the notice) where as I did my stuff then went to login only to find SL down. How hard could it be to send an email a day or two out to account holders advising of down time? we all respect that it needs to be done but it doesn't cost a lot to be courteous.

I agree, a user wide email would be great! If you can send one out about Land Use changes, you can send one out about planned downtime

I'd gladly settle for downtime being posted in the login message as SL starts, as it used to be, on most occasions.

An email would work too, and is much better than having to check the forums before logging in to see if one will get a 5 min notice that the grid is being taken down.

That's a nice thought, but we all know that it was more important for LL to shill for the novel on the start up page instead of putting an announcement on the front page about the upgrade. Of course, this also happened with the announcement about the new auction changes being sent out at 9:00 pm at night.

I'd be happy for the SL Status page to mention the fact that it's closed - I just tried to log on, got a message pointing to the Status page, which says all is well!
If I hadn't checked the forums, then I would be re-installing SL right now to try and solve the "problem".

Well I think they can put it as the message of the day also. Lets say 2 days before sl goes down.

As posted in the other thread, I saw the LL notice of downtime to update as yesterday's MOTD. Not sure where you guys were.

Personally, I was trying to log-in to Second Life!
Didn't realise I had to check the forums beforehand.
The Status Page AND the log-in have now been updated, but it would have saved a lot of people trouble if they'd done that before they closed the grid.

--------
Communication is All!
Bad communication is fhiowtbaykjxjg

Ditto!

And the only MOTD I saw was plugging Cory Doctorov's (sp?) new novel. I never had to relog, so I guess I missed it.
If it hadn't come up in a conversation I was having inworld, and then having my partner in rl tell me he saw it posted in forums, the folks I was talking to thought it was coming in 2 weeks!

IMO I think it would be best if the notification was the MOTD for a couple days before the upgrade.

Ahh!
The penny just dropped!
The MOTD when I logged off at midnight my time was about some novel.
I'm one of the (significant percentage of) SL residents who live in Europe, so the MOTD must have been updated to reflect the closure while I was asleep!
So the answer to "where you guys were" is that we were in another time zone!
As I've said before, if the log-in and status page had been updated before the upgrade closure began, then we wouldn't be posting here at all!

Couldn't agree more, and for reference I'm in Australia, I actually was in the forums that morning my time a couple of hours before the notice went up, then went to login just after 9pm my time (after a hard day slaving away in RL to make sure I can keep up with the SL fees) without having revisited the forums, again, with a little bit more notice I would have picked it up, but I go back to the central point: why cant it be emailed out a day or two before? surely these things must be planned in advance?

Emails to 34000 people is not doable for many reasons.

Everytime you did a mailout like that 1 in 1000 (or 34 people) would probably complain it was spam. That's enough for an ISP to start shutting you down.

They should take over the login message though, for sure.

Yes I agree as well. A msg in the log-in section or even here a couple days beforehand would be nice. I just HAPPENED to read the forums yesterday morning. If I hadnt done it then, I wouldnt have known either:/

Who's this Corey Doctorov btw?

http://craphound.com or http://www.boingboing.net

ooooohhhh..thanks!

Funny... they managed to send out a user wide email about the Land changes... or maybe it was all just a dream?

Is it really such an inconvenience to try to log in and find out that you can't? When it happened to me I thought "OK, good another upgrade!" (If the planned down time coincided with an event you were running that's another story.)

I'm sorry for the short notice. The message of the day was updated to announce the downtime, but it obviously wasn't up long enough for everyone to see. I'll try to make sure that next time you get more advance notice, both in the forum announcement and in the MOTD. I can also put a notice up on the community home page, if that would be useful.

We could mail about this, but updates are sometimes delayed by last minute testing questions so it's not really practical to mail a couple of days in advance. In addition, we try to limit our broadscale mailings to announcements about significant feature changes, especially changes affecting how much residents will be charged. This limitation is to make sure we don't wear out our welcome or spam people with mail they don't want.

Do you think it would make sense to let people sign-up for a special mailing list that we could use for announcements like this? We could put a sign-up on the website for interested residents, if you think it would help. Let me know!

I'd like to see a general purpose mailing list for downtimes, especially if they are only partial downtimes. Myself and FlipperPA currently trade downtime notices back and forward between each other when things like the userserver go down (so we can pull SLBoutique and SecondServer deliveries offline so we can avoid bad deliveries)

Something from LL giving up-to-the-moment reports on when things go offline or into reduced performance would be extremely handy, and give us time to act instead of react to these problems when they occur.

-Adam

I was wondering if we could have a warning longer than" 5 mins to grid shutdown" maybe 30 mins,15 mins ,10 ,5 ,1.
Its got me twice now with all my work out, on a posing stand, micro tweaking stuff.It sends me into a blind panic grabbing and saving .I know it actually takes longer to shutdown cos I've had to work till kicked off,but it would save me alot of hassel later.Thanks...

Yes!

I was part way through a complex land deal, complex because it involved part payment in monopoly money, part US$ (funny how Land Barons give better deals for real money these days...) and a shut down with 5 minutes warning while negotiating wasn't funny.

Even less funny was hanging around trying to get back in to conclude the deal, then both the seller and myself being unable to get to the land in question to reset the L$ prices before someone else bought part or all of it for the marked L$ price (TP just not working and ROAM failing every other SIM crossing).

Advance warning would have been very useful to say the least...

I think a special mailing list that we can sign up for to keep us more informed in a more convenient amt of time is a great idea! I'm all for it

Sorry Blaze, but on what planet. 34,000 emails is really a drop in the ocean and you've got the same chance of getting a spam complaint with 10 emails as you have with 100 million. At the end of the day as long as the email is clearly labelled and you have an unsubscribe optin, there isn't a problem. As others have commented we all got emails about the Land Changes. I'd even cope with the $9.95 for life mob missing out, but as a monthly paying resident I'd like my emailed notice.