why

JIRA is appropriate for reporting and prioritising bugs.
LL want us to vote on which bugs should get priority. This is because there are so many bugs that the techs can't solve them all within an acceptable timeframe.

General failure of login, TP, IM, rezzing, Inventory are not bugs to be mulled over, voted on and prioritised.
Breakdowns of the basic infrastructure are disasters.They are also not uncommon. LL should be on constant lookout for them, with resources on call for instant response.
LL should have a few bots logging in from a number of locations and performing/checking basic functions on a continuous basis as an early warning system.
If they won't do that, then there should be a simple "red telephone" hotline method for users to report specific types of grid breakdown. A simple web-based form with checkboxes and a text field would do it.


JIRA has no place in the disaster reporting process. It's clunky and user-unfriendly. It's a backoffice tool.

Seconded. Open comments are useful when there's an actual issue that can be debated. When the blog entry reports a problem, the comments that would be posted are painfully predictable and fall right along the lines Bradley laid out.

I barely even read the blog comments anymore because of this. And it's usually the same few people. I think Second Life could run flawlessly and perfectly for 100 days and if there were twenty minutes on day 101 when teleports didn't work reliably, there would be comments about how "LL can't do anything right!" and so on.

And to echo Bradley, many of the complaints that get made are legitimate. It's just that people seize on any open comment thread, no matter what the topic is, to make the same complaints over and over and over. And over.

In a way this is VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION for LL.

They need to not take it personally and actually USE the information. If people are complaining endlessly about logging failures they need to pay more attention to making that not happen any more.

It's far FAR more dangerous for them if they shut their ears to complaints and just keep horking the system and avoiding the tough work to make sl actually stable and reliable (instead of just SAYING it is on shiney new marketing websites).

It's a hard lesson to learn but it must be learned. Complaining customers provide you with a HUGE wealth of statistical nifoprmation about how well you are doing (or not).

Using the blog just allows a lot of people to complain without having to think about what they are actually doing: JIRA forces them to do exactly that, and maybe think about their own hardware. Also, response time is close to non-existent in the blog, since it is usually cluttered up within minutes.

Many log-in or other failures are simply hardware- oder connection-related, but it is so much easier to blame all that in an unspecified way under "FIX THE DAMN GAME". You may remember the DNA failure "bug" of a few weeks ago, which had to be blamed on the part of the ISP providers. Most blog entries are far too general for LL so get ANY information out of them. And about half of them are simply the usual bile by the usual suspects, and the usual reactions.

And let's not forget all those comments that attack LL for terrible bugs in the system that turn out to be just SL users not able to use the client correctly. Examples are the terrible I CAN'T MOVE THE MOUSE WHILE CHATTING, FIX THE DAMN GAME ALREADY and the even more terrible RECENT ITEMS TAB DOESN'T WORK ANY MORE THIS GAME IS SO BORKED bugs. In a forum, you can point this out to people and be done with it. On the blog, one valuable entry (on a totally unrelated topic) is wasted uselessly.

Having managed in the customer service industry for more years than I care to admit, I can assure you there are right ways and wrong ways to complain and be heard.

There are many ways to go about it correctly, including the recent open letter. I can assure you the whiny garbage that goes on in the blogs falls on death ears. That kind of immature response would not be taken seriously.

Ignoring input because of the manner in which it is offered is the mark of the amateur, the prima donna, the insecure, the incompetent, the weak, the unprofessional, the mediocre.
A well managed business will train its customer support staff to dig for the real issues driving even the most intemperate and/or inarticulate customer or prospect.


I've been there. I have a few tee-shirts.
I will politely and firmly explain to a person who is dishing out gratuitous abuse that I want do to help but will not continue the conversation if they swear at me. Thankfully, this is an extremely rare event. Other than that I will try to coach a customer into describing their issue in detail. Most customers need that coaching.



While it is true that there is a "right way" (or rather a 'very good way') of presenting a complaint, this is only the "right way" because of the advisability of working around the incompetence of very many customer service operations.

I understand where you are coming from Sling and I agree and disagree with you. The best analogy I can come up with is when working in a hotel. If a guest had a complaint and would stand at the desk and discuss it with us they would be taken seriously. They didn't have to be polite, but did have to remain civil. The guest who created a scene in the lobby and disrupted the environment for everyone, especially other guests, would be escorted out.

In my opinion, those who hijack the comment sections of blogs repeating the same thing over and over and getting into discussions with each other are robbing others the opportunity to post comments, etc. To me they are the equivalent of the disruptive hotel guest.

Um ... people make the same complaints every single time there is an open comment thread. Do you really think LL is not aware?

But it's actually not statistical information. If the same people complain about the same problems, offering no information about their hardware, their networks, what they're doing when the problems occur, etc., that's not statistics, it's just noise. And it keeps people with comments on the actual substance of the post from being able to say anything.

Take for example the "Post Mortem: Sept. 6 caching bug" entry ... no more than eight comments in, someone's griping about problems that have nothing to do with the post, and offering no information, just complaints and sarcasm. What information does that give? What help is it to anyone?

Here's an example. Just today on the official blog is a post entitled "Post Mortem: September 6 web cching issues."

The first four comments are congratulations to LL for finding and fixing a problem and for reporting it. The fifth comment, made 23 minutes after the post, expresses worry.

The eighth comment, 1 hour and 2 minutes after the original post, is: "OMG, the grid is so screwed up still. Sims crashing, TPs not working. Glad you think its all resolved, typical."

The bug, by the way, had nothing to do with sims crashing or tps not working. The poster gives us no information about his own system, or any indication how often the sims are crashing, or what sims they are, or how often TPs are failing.

So what does this add? How does this help?

The funny thing is the same people have tha same problems for 9 months insist "SL is broke, can't login", it's nothing at their end of course even when 26,000 other people are logged in ok.

Or the classic "SL is full of bugs, I'm not downloading any of the newer versions even if there are bugfixes in them...", ie "I would like to go back to running SL version 1.0 if anyone can give me a copy"

While there are certainly better and worse ways to make yourself heard. Any company that turns a blind eye to customer complaints of any kind because of hurt feelings or anything else is a company that does not care much about their buisness.

You can HATE your customers and their pesky "whining" all you want as long as you realize that they are your one and only means for survivial, and to that end, LL needs to suck it up and act like an adult in taking it's WELL deserved lumps (even if a large number of their customers do act like children).

I advocate never turning comments off in teh blog. It gives a very strong "We don't want to hear it" attitude which they really need to not do.

If inter-account bickering is actually a problem then I would support the one comment per account, in addition to never closing comments.

I don't believe its a large number who do act like children. Oh well, sometimes its seems that way. I think its a small number that will continue to whine and piss and moan til the end of time no matter what happens. Most people complain and joke about it. I agree its kind of sad that people joke about how bad things are but it seems to me that most people have a grasp that SL is a product they can take or choose. As with any consumer they can and should when they aren't getting value for their dollar. If they are still so dissatisfied then they should move on.

My problem with the whiners is they seem to believe SL is their god given right.



I wasn't implying they should turn them off. I don't really care either way since I find the comments useless. Sure digital worlds are different, but most companies that comment on the status of their operation do not open up a blog for their customers to comment. At least not that I'm aware of. Clearly though, the precedent has been set with SL and keeping the comments closed on all blogs would set off a firestorm. I wouldn't care, but why deal with the hassle.

I completely agree with allowing the one comment per post. That would be a nice change.

It is true that there is a type of person who is predisposed towards making scenes. Such people do need firm restrained handling. But the operative word is *handling*.

To stay with the hotel example, what we have had in LL is
- It's pretty much the only hotel in town for a given type of stay
- Guests have had legitimate complaints
- The issues continued
- Guests saw ceilings collapsing and floors creaking ominously but found that the walls had been repapered overnight
- Issues apparently fixed would return after a time
- Scenes in the lobby became the norm
- The reception desk was deserted
- Hotel staff could not be located
- The lobby became a bear garden, with graffiti scrawled on the notice boards

Things are changing however. LL have started to come out of the bunker.
Maybe it's early in the day still, but comments on the most recent Blog posting have a distinctly low count of incoming thermonuclear devices. Previous *informative* LL postings have had good reactions too. I hope that LL will continue to take the obvious lessons. Things are looking up! Hysteria may become unfashionable.


There will still be people who will run on autopilot on the old courses, making scenes in the Blog comments. There will still be people who will be drawn into responding to comments. In the absence of a single editable comment post per user, we will just have to put up with it. The Blog is a third-party service.

It's not about any of this, though. Blog posts are about specific topics and the comments should pertain to that topic When you can't get more than eight comments in without starting to encounter the "SL sucks" comments that have nothing to do with the topic, then the comments have no value.

In order for Linden Lab to address problems, they need much more specific information than the kind of venting that comes in a blog comment. There are avenues available to provide that information.

To use Bradley's hotel analogy, if the hotel renovated its ceilings so that they had much stronger support and were not at risk of collapsing anymore, the guests would be ignoring that and coming down to the hotel lobby to complain loudly that the housekeeping service didn't put new soap in their bathrooms.

I don't think LL is at all unaware that (1) there are some persistent issues that still need fixing and (2) there are some people who seem to have problems far more often than the vast majority, yet never provide any information beyond "teleports aren't working right every time, you suck!" And what is LL supposed to do with that?