New Members of the Executive Team

Thank you all for your warm welcome of our new execs. Our size and complexity required that we expand the executive team so we can continue to grow and develop new opportunities while addressing some of the challenges that you all feel and see when you are in Second Life. Here are responses to some of your questions:

@8 -- the future of Teen Second Life and whether/when it will merge with the main grid: I feel that a single grid is much better than multiple grids (and Philip does too) but a lot of work would have to happen in order to merge them and make it workable and comfortable for all. The exec team has been considering our options (including merging the grids) and when we are ready to share a roadmap, we'll get the word out. Nothing to report now.

@10: redesign of first landing location and why we don't use those created by Residents: Our plan is to reach out to content creators and engage them to help develop some alternative landing locations that we can test and refine until we come up with a set that work well for different types of new Residents. We have many types of new Residents. Some come to socialize, others to learn to create content and others to build a business, yet our first landing locations are all the same. We need to tailor the experience for different types of new Residents so the experience is relevant and meaningful.

@17 -- the Tao of Linden: as companies evolve, their guiding principles must change with them and that goes for the Tao of Linden, as well. Ginsu Linden is the unofficial keeper of the Tao and led us through a process to "reexpress it." Here is the latest and greatest: http://lindenlab.com/about/tao.

@26 -- I mentioned in my post that we got through the weekend and a new concurrency high "...without a hitch." From an overall concurrency perspective, that's true but I recognize that there is more to platform stability and reliability than just concurrency. We look at whole range of metrics such as TP success rates, transaction failures, FPS rates, sim and viewer crash rates, database query rates, etc. There were definitely hitches at an individual avatar or sim level and I should have noted that in my post. I don't want to sound flip or dismissive because I take reliability and stability very seriously -- hence the addition of Brian Michon to the team, continued investments in stability and reliability and all hands on deck during peaks.

@28 -- spend 30 minutes everyday traveling the grid and talking with residents: I think that's a great idea. I spend 1-3 hours everyday inworld as do most Lindens (we have many meetings inworld as we have offices on three continents...when you're experiencing difficulties, we are too). On weekends and evenings I try to get around and see the sights, but my New Years Resolution was to spend more time talking with Residents, as well. I have some snapshots of people/places/things I think are really cool in Second Life on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mlinden/ if you want to check them out. My favorite hang-out, though, is Help Island

I'll check back in later this evening and try to answer some more questions. Thanks all!

Tanner, what would you like to know?

I want to know why you don't respond to me!

I make a faith effort here, offering my YEARS of Community Experience and I don't even get a WINK or a NUDGE?

I mean, first you gripe at me for raising such stinks when you guys screw things up to high heaven, then when I offer my valued services, you say nothing? I'm beginning to think the only way to get a rise out of you all is to cuss you out!

Now, I wasn't joking, I'd be happy to join your Executive Team as the ONLY member that has COMMUNITY Experience!

There are 62 pages of comments, questions, and concerns here:

/352/de/303465/1.html

The last page contains the summary made by Catherine, many of the questions remain unanswered, yet the thread is closed. There have been over 40,000 views of this topic, which indicates quite a bit of interest. It would be nice if you could assign a staff member the task of reading our concerns, making a full summary and a list of the concerns/questions, have a meeting to discuss the concerns because we know you guys like meetings and we want this to be fun for you , and then list the questions that we have asked, followed by definitive answers. It would also be nice if we could get some answers BEFORE you shut down OnRez, especially nice for those of us that do not have access to XStreet. It would be a bonus if you would reopen the thread and post it there so that we would have a clue as to what is going on and could then decide in what direction we choose to take our businesses. I have a birthday coming up, and that is what I want, no bears, just answers.

Thanks
T

good that youre checking back... because nothing to report is very difficult for business owners. Can you at least hint at whether the whole shebang will become accessable to teens and all adult content will go bye bye or if it will just be mainland or portions of mainland. Will private estates remain autonomous?

Much commerces evolves around very non PG stuff. Lots of time and effort is put into developing this content. No business can operate when there is such an unclear future.

Please just dont say nothing as this is one move that might have the biggest financial impact on a very large portion of your customer base.

I look forward to you answering at least some of our concerns.

I seem to recall a kerfluffle about EU personal data laws; I don't have a citation handy.

But if that was resolved, why is the feature page still marked as beta over a year later and why was the age verification status display removed from the profile display?

A status update would be appropriate.

Eku, you ask reasonable questions. We haven't fully sorted out our options and are some distance from having a roadmap for changes to the grid. I appreciate that may sound like "nothing to report" but the fact is there is nothing yet to report. One of the things I am trying to do is get our senior people re-connected with Residents which you will have noted over the past several months in the blogs/forums. While I can't commit to a specific roadmap what I can commit to is dialog with the Resident community on the topic when we do have a roadmap.

Tanner, I will get T Linden back in the Forums to address some of these questions, or open another thread. It was indeed a very active thread.

Thank you for answering M. I look forward to proper, productive dialog.. rather than the usual fait accompli

Soap, I fully agree with you on the importance of stability as does every member of the executive team. It is our number 1 priority literally. The vast majority of our investment in people and equipment is in support of stability. And, we are making some progress although we'd like it to be faster just as you would. In the second half of last year, we cut downtime in half, compared to the first half. FJ's posts outline some of the things we are working on in the stability area. The new user experience is our number 2 priority after stability and our work there is not detracting (time, people, money) from our work on the platform.

Thanks Eku. We're trying!

M,

I hope this message will reach you.. I think others are more involved and more articulate than I am about the "truely important business"... So I'm going to let THEm handle the "serious business".. but I have to ask you something here..

Could you please assign SOMEONE on the web team to spend 1-3 days and update the forum software? I'm not asking for the massive overhaul that you guys have in mind.. but it would be a serious releif to ALL the users.. if we could have bbcode back.

This Forum just isn't usable if we can't embed simple formatting, hyperlinks, slurls...

LSL code examples...

and what-have you.

Many of us have taken to running third-party plugins and hacks to try and make The Official Second Life Forums readable... but those "first hour" users,, who come to the forums in desperate search of the answers they need.. find a crippled and out-of-date forum install... And it's been like this for months and months and months. I mean no disrespect, but is this really the "new user experience" you want to give?

I know you guys have big dreams of an awesome webpage, and an awesome blog, and awesome user forums that integrate better.. And that will be cool.. when it's ready. But it's been ages now.

I know you're saving up for new awesome lamps for the entire office building.. but in the meantime, could we PLEASE just replace the lightbulb in the basement?

I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.

I hear you!

And yet LL has gone down the foolish path of deciding to use a new software and a pay money to an outside company to run the forums rather than doing a fairly simple, even with the complications that I'm sure are inherent in the way logins are setup, upgrade to the forums and make use of the huge pool of residents who volunteered in multiple threads (all older than the 30 day default view) on the SL ResMod section of these forums to volunteer FOR FREE. M, I seriously doubt you do get us especially since the reliable go to person on the topic of the forums "left the company" last week.

If you really get it then do the logical thing and tell the company you hired to run OUR forums, and I do mean ours since the residents have just as big if not a bigger stake than you do now in them, no thanks and put someone on the task of

1) upgrading the forum software to the latest version, even if that means taking it down for several days people will more than understand if you give them enough notice, give them the reason and upgrade to an actually useable version of VBulletin.

2) Have one or preferably a committee of Lindens go over the lists of people who volunteered and look for suitable candidates who they'd then offer the position to, or since those lists are out of date probably so not everyone would still be interested, create a new offering... A SERIOUS OFFERING.... to the residents for resmods. I have some ideas on a smart way to do that but I'd rather not waste my time if your not even going to consider it.

If you do decide to actually consider this please feel free to contact me privately and I'd love to give you some more in-depth ideas on the topic especially some ideas on how to implement suggestion 2.

Welcome Michon and Judy. Looking forward to seeing your ideas and hopefully you'll consult us for ideas.

Thanks for the post, M.

ETA now that I've read the thread: the Teen Grid/Main Grid merger is a nightmare of an idea from a social standpoint. Why, exactly, do you guys wish to merge these? If there is a problem with content on the teen grid, you could hire people to build it out and give classes to teens to help them build their own content, in the same way that you have LDPW beautifying the main grid and in the same way LL purchased new avatars from content creators.

Now I know you're not paying attention - this was something I suggested to you weeks ago in another Blog post.

Agreed. I suggested that that thread would be closed before all of merchants concerns were properly addressed, and lo and behold "this thread is now locked" appears the next morning, after most of Europe and the East Coast post up questions, go to sleep and are never given any kind of worthy reply whatsoever. I posted the same query at least 4 times, and others had asked the same question too, but it appears as though it still wasn't Frequent enough to qualify as a Frequently Asked Question. The very least you could do M is have someone with the intestinal fortitude to stand up and answer every question asked. This is people's real money you're just playing about with here, not just some virtual currency you think you can do with what you choose. Our money pays for your new recruits, and now you're taxing us from our SLX sales, we have a right to be answered satisfactorily.

Thanks, that would be very much appreciated by many.

It is quite ridiculous (and shows incompetence?) that LL require outside sources to upgrade their own forums and other such softwares. I myself have vast experiences with forum software as to several other people I know who would be able to upgrade these forums with minimal downtime....but LL likes to waste its money and I doubt M Linden is actually paying attention to any of this. 'I hear you' is not what the residents want to hear when all evidence suggests that, in fact, you don't hear us.

Thank you M for your announcement. And welcome to Michon and Judy.
I'm glad to see that Linden Lab starts to professionlize even more.

Aside that, please do not spin anymore with concurrency users.

You may have a party when hitting 100k, but it is faked.
In 4 days 20 Islands were easily found with stationary avatars for traffic exploitation.
I guess it is very easy to find 20 more in the next days, and 20 more after.

In other words, stop the "pretention" of peak concurrent users.

In my e-mail contact with Jack Linden he told me he's going to spend office hours on that issue and ask the community feed back if it should be seen as a violation.
What's your best guess? Why must this take so bloody long.

Simply announce a reduction of max alternate logins to 3 and we are done.
(because new traffic counting math will not be the trick at all to my opinion).
Give the users concerned 3 months time to reorganize.


Well, that all said,

I don't know about others, but i have seen Linden avies inworld lately even playing with the community

About merging the teen grid: good idea, however... the measures to be taken must be rather drastic for teens not to come into contact with all adult material in the main grid.
Maybe it is an incentive to have less rubbish in sl, and start this sl as a more moderated social platform, and as rl business meeting platform... i mean as a combo Both can live together to my opinion. There are plenty of virtual business networks, but not 3D.

However... SL must be made ready for 1000.000 concurrent users for that all, and fast, simple, reliable and then.... marketing it professionally world wide.

I'm thrilled to see all the changes coming

I also want answers to some of those questions, previous actions of certain moderators and admins on xstreet who are still in employment on xtreet need looking into.
Over 2 years ago myslef was banned for protecting my own IP and making people aware of stolen items. Because of an inworld disliking towards myself from one individual i was banned. This was 2 years ago. I have further emails from yourselves and xstreet regarding
this matter which i will keep private. but the politics of a forum, and mass culling of accounts from xstreet in the last 2 years for nothing more than protecting ones property or because an admin/mod did not like you answering them back is unfair.

if people have an account which is live and active in secondlife then it should also be in xstreet. My onrez account has been active and clean for years the same as my apez and other off world sales accounts. Now when you remove my onrez account i can not move it to xstreet. And there are many many more like us. We do not break any rules of copyrights, we did not sell anything stolen. we continue to contribute to secondlife, yet we are discriminated because of forum politics and personal attitudes towards individuals.

@70 -- Linda, thanks for your post. Bots are a frequent topic in the forums and in the Lab and are worthy of separate thread. It's a complex topic because they are used for a wide variety of purposes.

As for concurrency, we are very focused on that figure -- and talk about it a lot, probably too much -- because it is at periods of peak concurrency when the database and network is stressed (which I know you know). Concurrency is a measure of our ability to accommodate our growing user base -- and our user base is indeed growing with real avatars who have real people behind them.

Having Michon Linden on board is going to be a great help because of his previous platform experience at Intuit. Our goals is to be talking less about concurrency and database stress and more about great new products and features.

If you must allow teens on the main grid (which I think is a bad idea) they should be restricted to new mainland and to islands in which the owner allows them. I belieave that most adults on the main grid don't want teens around. We like the freedom we have now.

Morning madddyyy,
When one of those "mods" openly encourages screwing LL out of commissions and at the same time encourages and participates in flaming such as occurs in this post:

http://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=87286&start=30

it may be completely irrelevant as to whether or not we migrate our OnRez accounts to XStreet. I can't even imagine what new customers, let alone the regulars, think when they read something like that. The entire site may be completely useless to us if this goes on. I of course prefer OnRez, but am trying to deal with what is out there, so it would be nice if LL would stop any further sabotoge. Let's just deal with the facts:

LL owns XStreet and will receive commission on sales, which is fine by me.
OnRez is shutting down, which is bad for many of us. We will deal with it.
Selling your items on XStreet for 0L to screw LL out of commissions does NOT promote competition, nor does it keep the site profitable enough to run.

Welcome to the new Lindens. I sincerely hope that the original spirit of adventure of Second Life can be preserved as you move forward.