An open letter to Philip Linden

Ooh, looks like it was my prod that got the response from Jeff. I'm giving up on Jira voting, it's obviously not taken into consideration when deciding on priorities.

/me votes
Only 300-odd posts/questions answered but I do give advice and help in the Scripting Tips whenever I can. Having no BB-Code can make this a chore at times, copying and pasting code out of the forums just to make it legible. Just installed greasemonkey (good on ya strife) but surely LL could take some time out of their busy schedule to give something back to the community which supports their customers? How long would LL survive if there were no residents helping other residents with textures/building/scripting etc? Similarly sculpted prims would have died of death if there weren't residents creating their own export scripts for the popular 3d apps. We wouldn't have any useful or in-depth LSL documentation without those who take the time to experiment or donate code to the LSL Wiki's. And finally, how many bugs would we still live with were it not for fellow residents taking the time to reproduce and document / Bug report them?
</rant>

Do we know whether the plan is still to upgrade (and customize) vBulletin, or to move to a different forums software base? I'm trying to figure out if there's a legitimate reason not to do the upgrade now anyway (with or without bbcode, if there's some reason to think it specifically is still vulnerable), and follow-up later with the revised customization for the single sign-on authentication. At the risk of supplying more excuses, here are some possible reasons I could understand:

1. Gonna replace vBulletin with something else.
2. New versions of vBulletin (might) have other vulnerabilities. (But every piece of software has as-yet unknown vulnerabilities; does someone imagine that using a really obsolete version grants "security through obscurity"?)
3. Porting the customizations to a new version would have to be significantly re-done after authentication is reworked. (Of course the current login hack would be, but is it really a Big Deal to port that bit now?)
4. The plans for revised authentication are so dicey that we don't really know how we can get them to work with vBulletin, so the answers to 1 & 3 are unknowable now.
4a. The schedule for implementing revised authentication is so dicey that innumerable newer versions of vBulletin may come out in the meantime, calling for another upgrade and port of customizations.

I rather suspect, though, that none of these are the real reason, nor the Tao, but something just too silly and embarrassing (e.g., there's some compiled source in the customizations that got rolled-out without being checked-in, and now there's nobody around who can figure out how it works or exactly what it does), combined with Magical Thinking As Project Management (e.g., everyone might just lose interest in the forums, saving us the effort of ever having to deal with the problem).

/me hands Qie a roll of quarters. I think they are wishing we would all just go away. I thought here was a glimmer of hope when Strife made the call for ResMod Volunteers, and when he asked we reign in the nonsense a bit in the hopes of getting a General Discussion Forum, but I now think that was just wishful thinking I imagine that one day we will wake up and the plug will be pulled, no warnings given.

Welcome aboard the Titanic. I'm your Cruise Director.

And three or four days later they might give us a blog post about it. It'll be what 'the community' wanted.

-Atashi

I think Linden Lab would gain a lot by participating and listening
in these forums.

They're the first place I go to keep in the flow of what's happening
at the user level in SL.

The people here are probably among the smartest, most passionate
and most discriminating among SL inhabitants. What a great resource!

I may be wrong about this but other than a few quiet moderators in
the background; the guys and gals who make the big decisions aren't
taking the opportunity to check the pulse on the ground so to speak;
well the forums are the next best thing. Maybe better. It's like an
RSS feed of user experience. Warts and all.

My only complaint about the BB code being disabled is that it is still
displaying the tags when someone puts a URL in a post.

Bugs me aesthetically. =)

Those URL brackets do nothing.

And other HTML formatting tags.

Actually when you considering how much BB code many signatures
use, that starts adding up to bandwidth, not much but still money.

I support the call for an answer on this issue.

Hope we get one.

Cheers,
- Infrared

even if they were planning to use an alternate bbs, that bbs' db conversion script would obviously be geared toward the most recent version of vb. so they would have to update vb in order to convert to ipb or whatever anyway.

*moves*

It's actually far worse than Just the BBCODE problem. The change password mechanism seems to be horribly broken and untill it recently became obsoleted the land store did not work with IE7 for an entire YEAR. How anyone at LL could think that that was an acceptable state of affairs is almost unbelievable.

I dont know what it is but the LL reponse seems to indicate that they need to pull resources from somewher else to work on the web site. WTF?

Once again, I TRULLY do not understand LLs engineering mentality. You cannot pull an network engineeer or C++ programmer off from somewhere else to work on web coding. They are DIFFERENT DISCIPLINES. You hire WEB ENGINEERS to maintain and build your website. They work FULL TIME on your web site and NOTHING ELSE.

LLs "excuses" for the constant dismal state of their various web functions holds no water whatsoever. It's sheer laziness and lack of attention/oversite to a part of their company. Unfortunately this behavior is all too common, LL didn't invent it, but is sure sucks for us that they've fallen into this terrible behavior pattern.

Agreed. It's about time we got bbcode turned back on!

BTW, why would we want different names here than in SL? I'm glad that people are here who they are in SL, and that nobody but Lear Cale can come and create a Lear Cale forum account.

And when logging in, I'd rather enter Lear Cale as my ID rather than yet another tidbit of information to remember. The security is provided by the password, not the user ID.

The whole idea behind authentication in computer networking is that each user should have a unique public identifier and a private password. Without the unique public identifier, there's no POINT of authentication, because there's no basis for agreement on which name refers to whom. The password alone provides the security of authentication.

Adding a third "key" to remember when logging in leads to more misremembered logins and does not reduce the level of security offered. You just have to choose an adequate password.

Sorry for the OT post!

Meanwhile, put your links between [img]tags.

That makes your links completely invisible to a lot of people.

If you're using Firefox, you can also try the Linkification add-on or Strife's script here:

/327/b2/188445/1.html

I prefer the latter, as it makes everything appear normal, with no annoying tags hovering about.

Oh really! Thanks for telling me!

Which browsers/systems, if you don't mind my asking? It looks right using MSIE or Firefox/Mozilla, on Windows.

Damn, I wish they'd fix the forum!

I don't know what causes it...it happens routinely on one of the computers I use at work, but not the other. Both PCs, both Firefox. I've seen several other people mention it, though, so I know I'm not alone.

firefox/greasemonkey for one, both winxp and mandrake.

check the post date was this just changed? "until 12/22/07"

Each one can be enabled/disabled individually. And custom ones can be added as well, such as embedding media, YouTube, etc.

As far as the security issue, which was why bbcode disabled, I'm not sure why they have it using the same password. All forum software has to patched to fix security issues, bugs, etc regularly.

There are ways to speed up vBulletin so the pages load faster, the searches aren't so limited, etc. I've even told them how, but...

Interest. The upgrade process is easy, even with reimplementing the modified code to use the SL names being the same as the forum names.

Jelsoft would even help them.

Since 3.5, it's easy to put all customized code as plugins, which makes upgrading so easy.

I know you had not intended the post to be taken this way but when I read it I perceived it to mean "First, it would have to be in their TAO (‘The way of nature') to do it"

At first blush, this message made me stop for a moment and think. I slowly picked through my brain, starting with my most recent issue then pressing backwards through time where I was the one waving the "Be Patient" banner when things went wrong. I no longer feel compeled to defend the LL development priorities and have not for a few months now. We are ALL passionate about SL because we SEE the potential...and so does LL. But we often get frustrated because the direction of progress does not always flow as we would wish. I for one have decided to express my passion for SL by doing something different this time. I have changed my account type back to BASIC and I am also going to release all the sims I have been paying for and last but not least I am going to look into another 3-D virtual world development engine and perhaps if I am lucky find the potential in it I saw so many years ago in SL.

If you find one, would you come back and let the rest of us know?