Grid status ... extended.

Looking at the official Grid Status page, it's easy to be underwhelmed:

Maybe it's just my dislike for dumbing down or my general thirst for information, but I don't find that particularly helpful except possibly to a status page scraper.

Second Life has a static grid (it grows, but the sim tiling is still static), so a more interesting status indication could present some sort of stylized map (or even the real in-world one) showing the status per sim. It could even encode the state of sim congestion by color using the usual spectral color sequence. It would be highly illuminating to see the "activity map" of SL displayed in this way.

And of course, clicking on a particular sim should open up a detailed page for it, showing all the main operational details as a subset of those available in the sim statistics bar.

I should have checked first whether LL is a mentor organization for Google's Summer of Code, but I didn't. If it is, then such an extended status page would be a very easy and useful project for lower-end students this summer.

There is value in knowing the overall status of the grid, up down, linden only etc. Beyond that you don't really need to know how well simX is performing today unless you actually own simX (in which case you can get your own stats).

That said, the page is pretty dire, it could do with a link to the announcements forum at the very least.

Of course one doesn't really *need* to know. One doesn't *need* to know anything at all, and indeed some people positively relish stumbling around in ignorance. I was talking about what it would be *nice* to know.

- If there is an abnormally large crowd gathered in your home town for some reason, wouldn't you like to know? The local media certainly think you would. And you could capitalize on that, making your presence more visible to the arriving visitors.

- If there is a major event occurring in your state or your country, wouldn't you like to know? The national media certainly think you would. And it might prompt you to go and take a look yourself, and thus not miss out on a great spontaneous cultural event.

Information is good. I absolutely reject the idea that only the bare minimum metered out grudgingly is an overall benefit.

One can always filter down excess information, but when it's not there in the first place there is nothing you can do to increase it.

You dont need to know the performance of a sim in the same way you don't need to have access to the web server stats - I ment 'need to know' as in mind your own business.

You seem to have lost the plot, ninja.

Of course people want to know how sims are doing. Of course people want to know how busy they are, how many people are on them, and how well they're coping. People have been interested in server stats since launch, and LL has been perfectly happy to supply lots of info about their state --- the sim stats bar is one of the most comprehensive screens about server state in the industry.

"Mind your own business" is one of the most ludicrous comments I've heard here for a while.

The info is already available, spread across players' stats bars. The suggestion was simply to provide the same information in a summary web page.

If you see good technical reasons why something doesn't make sense, great, we're all ears. But if you just want to be childish and negative with nonsense like "mind your own business", then perhaps the Technical Talk forums are the wrong place for you.

Think about it from the perspective of a sim owner.

Its one thing to have realtime access to stats in world, its quite another to have these same stats published on the web for anybody to scrape and analyse.

If I owned a sim, I would opt for my stats NOT to be published on the web, I think most business & private sim owners would do exactly the same. What happens on my sim is simply non of your concern.

No problem there.

I think that what you're saying is that the case of private sims is different: the private owner should be in sole control of whether the stats of his or her server are visible to anyone else. That seems to be a perfectly sound and reasonable argument I think. The blanket "mind your own business" though certainly wasn't reasonable.

Even in the case of a private sim though, it's not really cut and dried. What about the case of a landlord with a large number of tenants all trying to run their businesses or attractions under conditions of poor sim performance? I dare say the tentants would consider stats visibility to be pretty important. However, one could of course say that if they leased their plots under some sort of "no stats visible" agreement then they'd have to be happy with whatever the landlord wishes. Not particularly nice, but legal under a system where contracts can be arbitrary.

And what about the case where the private owner operates a highly player/visitor-oriented enterprise of some kind, in particular one that involves interactivity and therefore good sim performance? With a large visitor base, and all active players very keen to play on a highly responsive sim, I have no doubt that there would be wide interest in visible sim stats, if for no other reason than to know when not to bother to turn up because the sim is overloaded.

There are many such scenarios where it's not so cut and dried, even in the case of a private sim. In the simple case though of a private island where the private owner just chills out in private with a few private friends, well OK, I dare say there's no good argument at all for saying that he should be open about his stats. Fair enough.

The far greater part of SL though is not about private sims. And that's where good stats visibility would be very welcome and very useful to many people.