An Open Letter to LL, Over 1200 Sigs saying no new features until everything is fixed

http://www.projectopenletter.com/

The letter to Linden lab:

In the past eighteen months, Second Life has expanded, growing from a small community of early adopters to a platform supporting millions of users. Linden Lab has created a world that inspires a deep level of passion in its users and provides unprecedented opportunities to share creatively, socially, and financially.

With explosive levels of growth often come unexpected problems. In keeping with your company's policy and rich history of resident involvement, we the undersigned would like to take this opportunity to address some concerns that we feel have gone unanswered for too long.

There are some consistent, ongoing problems that are getting worse under heavy load, not better, and are not simply irritants but problems that are causing financial loss in some cases, which is unacceptable. Here is a brief list of the main concerns:

* Inventory loss - this is a devastating problem that is worsening. We have no ability to protect our own inventories through backups, and are trusting you to protect that data. This is the highest priority. Sensible inventory limits (on non-verified accounts only), combined with better management tools and ways to protect our inventory ourselves would help to mitigate the problem as well. Regardless, this cannot continue - we will not accept financial loss as a feature of Second Life. It is your responsibility as service provider to ensure our data is not lost, and you are failing us.

* Problems with Find and Friends List - we continue to see search outages on a far too regular basis. It is bad enough trying to get anywhere without being able to use search, but many users are also paying money for classified ads. Our friends lists just do not work reliably any longer, after years without an issue with them. If America Online/MSN/Yahoo can provide presence information for hundreds of millions of users, surely there is a way to make our friends lists work again.

* Grid stability and performance - teleports fail quite regularly, especially under heavy load. Attachments end up in places they did not start out in, and sim performance varies wildly. None of this makes for a very pleasant experience for users. Long promised improvement to physics and scripting would help dramatically to reduce these problems, but there are a lot of other scalability issues as well. It often feels like the grid is coming apart at the seams. The promised use of limiting logins of non-verified accounts during peak load has been severely lacking. This would be an effective interim solution to load issues, but Linden Lab seems unwilling to use it.

* Build tool problems - the importance of build tools that actually work as promised cannot be overstated enough - we rely on them to create content. Prim drift, disappearing prims, imprecise placement, problems with linking and other issues with the tools need to be addressed. Too much time is being spent trying to work around the problems.

* Transaction problems - inventory deliveries are failing with an alarming (and annoying) frequency, leaving merchants with the burden of replacing missing content and having to try to confim the transaction in the first place. We trust that our L$ balances are accurate, but given recent problems, that is a cause for concern as well, and one we place our full trust in you to ensure its accuracy.

We remain fully supportive of Second Life and are more than willing to continue doing our part to help, but our confidence is steadily being eroded due to a general lack of communication and the apparent failure to successfully address the many issues detailed above. What we are asking for is that these problems are addressed immediately, ahead of new features, and that we are able to see tangible improvements. We accept that this will not happen overnight but it also cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely either.

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

First, IBTL and ouch!

It's already spreading throughout the news organizations and if this doesn't get their attention....

This is what people will do when a company cuts off communication and stops providing decent customer service.

Where's the question?

i would rather have more new features, as all the old ones work perfectly well for me

heh this was just moved to resident websites I see its appeared again. The magical reappreing thread

and in before the lock


/128/7d/180722/1.html

This can't be swept under the carpet indefinately.

They're trying...the problem is that the BULGE under the carper is getting noticed.

There is no carpet .. Ommmmmm ... *TRIPS over giant bulge* ... OOpps

If there was a carpet it would probably mysteriously have a database error and not rez.


Lets hope this gets some action, glad to see it getting exposure to others in SL.

um....there WAS a carpet but it got swooped up by the ESC sheep bot.

It's a great my letter but my one issue with it (which incidentally is the issue a lot of people have with it) is that it vilifies unverifieds and moves to restrict them to alleviate a problem that nobody can even prove they caused.

yeah sorry but it was set for sale at $0L. meet me at the welcome area and i will sell it back to you for $1000L.

Perhaps the solution then, Gordon, is to restrict those of us who pay for being part of SL. After all, we're the ones who do most of the complaining, own land, own businesses etc. If they restrict us, they don't have to listen to us as much [or as little] as they do now. Also LL's most favored groups, aside from large corporations [i.e. swoop bots, scam artists and griefers] would have even more of a field day.

Then the unverified need to fix that. Get verified....pretty simple. Or if you don't want to get verified the get the chip off your shoulder. No one's excluding free accounts.........just the unknowns. And I'm not suggesting anyone should be known by the residents......only to Linden Labs.

That would require LL to think before screwing their customers, it's easier and cheaper for them to just screwover all their customers at once.

Exactly.

I think we need to stop unverified sign-ups. Worst comes to worst and people still want to play for free, they should do IP bans.

I hope more people will sign it. I do wish there had been a mention in it of broken group tools, but you can also vote for those at jira.secondlife.com.

I can see absolutely no reason for unverified accounts being allowed SL...........actually, in any sign up account service or game at all. Second Life is the first service I've ever seen it allowed in fact. What's the purpose? Numbers? It's a policy that invites abuse..........and I guess we are getting it too.

And to argue that the "Open Letter" is advocating discrimination (or any other such thing) by mentioning unverifieds is showing me that either the arguer is completely ignorant of a few facts of life............or the arguer is a griefer. When I happen on a newbie looking for help or information I usually try to help as much as I can (even if they are unverified). But I also try to mention to them how easy it is to get verified. If they refuse then I just leave them alone. If they want friendship, I decline. If someone is not upfront enough to even identify themselves to the providers of a service they are using then I'll be more than upfront enough to "snub" them.

That's the way I feel about this issue.

Posting problems and searching for solutions is fine people,. but your starting to outright attack and bash LL, this is going to get this thread and your privledge to post on this form locked.
Constructive criticism is always good, but criticism just to complain sucks apples ya'll

You're right............and this is a good thread.

I'll bite my lip.

You're right Jason...and I amone of the offenders. Constructive criticism is good but unbridled whining isn't and I am going to try to be a little more constructive.

Maybe it's just my low blood sugar, but something is off in SL. This letter, as important as it is, is in part an attempt to leverage outside news media to do what inworld broadcasting could do, if we had such a thing.

The lack of a good, scalable way for residents to communicate with each other in-world means our ability to evolve in knowledge, as a community, has come to a halt. Every newbie is as ignorant as I was when I started. I don't think we should take that for granted. Ignorance doesn't scale. The lowest-common-denominator appearance of so much of the mainland, and the incredible rate of churn among newly signed up residents, are direct results of the absence of community knowledge.

For example, if a hurricane heads for my city, a broadcast will tell me it's coming. Another part of that broadcast will educate me in the knowledge my community has developed on how to deal with this risk safely. We don't have anything like that in SL unless we're LL. I think this is becoming a block in the evolution of SL.

The issues of brokenness addressed in the letter, as well as broken group tools and the unintended consequences of the sheepsearch, all point in the general direction that there is a need for SL as a community to develop collective knowledge. What we can't fix, we could learn to cope with until the fix is worked out, but only if we're aware of it.

Unlike many, I still have sympathy for LL. I wish them the best. Their success is necessary for us to have an SL, and I don't want to imagine a future without something like SL in existence.

At least having 0 people on your friends list means that it doesn't take you that long to go through and see which ones are online or not.

You and many other people say that but very few landowners who run businesses or whatever on their land use the tools to block only unverifieds because of the money they bring... and your right LL did want the numbers but they've given you the tools and if everyone used them then unverifieds would stop showing up since they'd only be able to get into linden land.