Friends List - No Longer a Feature?

Sooo, it's been weeks now, off and on - friends list doesn't work. Has been broken for a few days straight now. Reading through the forums, and talking to friends - it seem this is effecting nearly everybody!

I was at least expecting update upon update upon update to TRY to fix this (and thus subjecting us to another 3 weeks of lag like all updates do) but no! NOTHING! What the.. ?

Is the friends list like, no longer a supported feature in SL? Did Maxis buy out Linden Labs? Something odd is going on, and it's quite annoying.

Yes, it has been quite evident the past several days that Friends and the interface to the website performance has been subject to overall concurrency (# of ppl inworld). During the day in U.S. time zones when concurrency is relatively low, say below 5,000, the Friends Online at the website pops fairly quickly.

When concurrency increases at night, say to 9,000 or greater, you may have to wait up to a minute or more for the website to deliver your Friends Online data.

One more manifestaion that LL cannot carry the heavy loads of late.

But LL has 250,000 users! Really, the web site says so!

Do you mean to say that SL can't handle less that 5% of it's claimed users being on at one time? Heaven forbid!

Correct. I would say that a vast majority of those accounts are alternate accounts. With a few inactive accounts (made a account but their system was not able to handle SL) sprinkled in.

-DB

I don't think concurrency is the whole story. It seems to happen quite randomly to me and there have been many times when it just doesn't find your friends at all no matter how long you wait.

There are also days when it correctly "finds" your friends (except they are not the friends actually online) and vice versa.

What I notice happening a lot is someone will crash and the map will just show them as somewhere "off the edge of the world" for hours at a time, even though that person has logged back on in the meantime and come over to your house. I even had a notification once of a friend "going offline" at the same time as they arrived right in front of me. We talked for an hour or so but according to the system they never came back online.

I also had a friend that got very angry at me for not talking to them all night even though from my point of view they were not online at all by either the website or the games accounting.

We hope this was resolved post-1.12, but in case it wasn't and you're still seeing anomalies like your whole Friends list being offline, please post here with the time you experienced it and any other observations you have that will help us dig deeper.

Logged in tonight to ZERO friends on line.

IMed one to see, got an "offline" notice.
Tried another one, no offline notice, and oooh! A response!
Then an online notification that that friend was on line.

Then, poof, another online notification.

A few minutes later another. And later, another.

I've also gotten the "your friend is off the edge of the world" map indicator.