A lot of questions, and an appeal

Hello. I know you hear this a lot, but please let me sum up the current issues once more, from a business person's point of view:

- Classifieds. I pay around 190 US$ each month for classified ads and usually it's worth the money. I use to advertise each new product separately, and right now all those ads are useless. The only way to get a search hit at all is to search for the name of my shop. It shows 2 classifieds out of 8, although all of them have the shop name in their title. Searching for specific products, like "centaur" (appears in the title as well as the ad text) don't show any results.

- Places. These ads would help to get at least a fraction of my usual weekend sales (usually around 90,000 L$) while the classifieds don't work, since my traffic is quite high. Alas, ads listed in places don't work at all.

- Teleport issues, parcel access bugs. I don't know if those are already resolved, but I received a lot of IMs from upset customers, asking me why they were banned all of a sudden.

- Rez failures / "...attachment pending for this spot". Another source of customer complaints, since many SL users don't read the blog or forums and lack the technical knowledge to recognize a supposed product bug as an asset server issue. The builder / seller is usually the first who receives the complaints, and people are losing the trust in my wares. A lot of customers use my products for professional escort work and get very upset when they have to tell a client to wait 5 minutes, or 10 or 20, until a toy decides to rez.

- Invisible avatars, inventory loading for half an hour, money not showing, teleport impossible. I read on the blog that this issue was resolved, but I still manage to run into this bug. A crash throws me out, I relog, read "downloading clothing" again and know that I won't be able to work for 5 to 30 minutes. Well, I could shrug it off and visit a bar or club instead, if I could access the Places search and were able to teleport.

- Missing water. I know the workaround, but visitors of my sim wonder why whales and fishes are levitating in a large empty canyon. Only a minor issue, just added to complete the list of obvious bugs that any form of QA should have detected.


All this leads to the following questions:

1.) I read that the new classifieds search is a tweaked function, not a damaged one. Is it going to stay this way? If so, are you aware that it's pretty much useless for a business owner right now? Do you consider alternative ways of advertising, like a larger text entry in places ads to list a complete product range (with product photos if possible)? I could save a lot of money that way, but I need at least one effective, working advertising method with a full-text search and the possibility to affect the ranking.
Btw, the functionality of the search engine was already questionable before, since a search for "centaur avatar" should also show the result "New avatar - the centaur" instead of searching for the exact word combination only (every internet search engine works that way). If it has to be tweaked, please tweak it for the better.

2.) Some of the current issues must have been detected in tests of the current version. Sure, no one advertises or tries to run a business on the Beta test grid, but with customers like Toyota or IBM the test grid is surely not the only form of QA. Or is it? Are changes which affect the complete search functions only tested by volunteers on the Beta test grid?

3.) If an update is found to be unstable and contain lots of bugs, why is it being worked on on the life grid? Every resident activity during this time makes it more unlikely to undo irreparable damages with a simple rollback. Why isn't a rollback done right away, and the patch delayed for another 1-2 weeks? Are customer satisfaction and a stable business platform not the top priorities at Linden Lab?
From my (a former database admin's) point of view, a rollback is the only possible solution in such a case. First, make it possible for your customers to work again, then try to fix the issues in a test environment.

4.) I understand that a relaxed working atmosphere is very important for LL. From what I read, developers can pick any task they like from a to-do list. But have you ever considered that it's quite risky to let a single person work on serious database or asset server changes? Perhaps it's time to start assigning whole teams to crucial issues and triple-check the potential consequences. Every admin team of a small-scale company is a whole lot more careful when it comes to fundamental database changes. Please consider how much money is at risk when things go awry.

5.) What is causing the ongoing asset server and database load issues? It can hardly be the number of active users. When I signed up for SL, the statistic showed around 12,000 users online during US evening times. This number has changed to 15,000 now, a growth of 25%. How can that pose such a problem? The only explanation I have is the total number of accounts, with a sheer limitless inventory per account. Have you ever considered the only possible solution in such a case: removal of inactive accounts which did not log in for several months?

6.) During the last 9 months I've not seen any of the (often reported) bugs fixed that annoy me since I settled down in SL (like permission bugs, prim drift or "corrupted" prims). All the gimmicks that were implemented were nice, but imho not vital. I'd happily sacrifice all of the updates to get the former stability and performance back, which has constantly decreased. Isn't it time to have the whole team working on bugfixes and an increased stability for a while, before any new functions are introduced? I can live pretty well with the current features and don't need any new ones. Actually I fear new features now, since every update is a greater catastrophe.

Hi Istara -- first, my apologies for not being more elaborate here. I literally have hundreds of questions to reply to and can't get to all of them personally. Some fellow Lindens like Robin have been helping me here.

Some of your questions were already answered in my recent Linden Answers to other Residents and formalized in Official Linden Blog updates, including the "missing water". See:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/12/01/workaround-if-you-have-a-missing-water-problem/

and more info here:

http://blog.secondlife.com/tag/announcements-news/grid-status/

As for developers:



This comes up a lot, but it's a misconception, and isn't accurate: firmly put, we consider the needs of our community first. Scaling and performance have been ultra-serious to us (I hear about it every day from other Lindens), and we have code reviews so it's not a "single person" working from start to finish. Especially when someone's so tired making emergency changes during times like the last few days.

In addition re: technical details, I've already let our developers know how much our community wants to hear more. There may be a Town Hall on this coming up soon, please keep watching because we do want to address the issues.