March of the Mob - in April

Friday, April 11, 2008 Friday, April 11, 2008

As most readers will recall, I try to run a particle effects shop. Normally it does very well, but the last few weeks have been bad. While the Grid has been nominally "up" for most of the time, various database flakiness has wreaked havoc on business owners.

Sure, no one can buy when the grid is down. But it's much worse than that. People don't buy even on good days. What's happening?

This seems to be the sequence of events: Residents receive a warning, either via the Official Linden Blog, in-world bulletins, or even from friends that they should not attempt transactions (like purchases) due to various technical issues. In some cases shop owners even put up signs asking visitors not to buy during grid storms.

And people get it! They stop buying. The problem is that they don't know when to start buying. So for some days after a grid storm sales are way down. Perhaps this is because people read the news infrequently and see yesterday's warning and follow it today!

Linden Lab's warnings are a good thing. But it crushes sales for days thereafter. What's the answer? I am not sure, but it would sure help if the grid's functions were a lot more reliable. And then suddenly this afternoon I unexpectedly received this notecard from friend Celina Lathrop (pictured above):

My Fellow Secondlife residents, lend me your ear.....
Most of us i know here have a house, land, a business, a shop or a social gathering spot. Since the outage of last saturday, we have seen a drastic drop in sales, visitors etc. This is the time to take action and show our discontent. After all dont we pay the tiers? Dont we pay for lost inventory? Dont we pay for Linden Dollars? Dont we pay for land on which we conduct our business? Well its about time we started to get together and protest, as we would in RL when our livelyhood is in jeopardy. Are you tired of "Unable to connect to Secondlife. Despite our best efforts, something unexpected has gone wrong.", "Failed to rez object", "Asset server did not respond in time, object has been returned to the sim" etc etc. Lets unite citizens of SL and show our discontent to the Lindens. Join our group and IM Celina Lathrop or Mannix Mensing for info. Our first action will be a peaceful march in the Linden Village on wednesday April 16th at 5 PM SLT. Send this notecard to as many people as you want, details on the group are below..... As they say in my country, L'union fait la force, unity makes strength.

Here are the details:

First March of the "mob" April 16th 2008 with the motto: "either stop charging us, or fix it!" at the Linden Village and Office, Kirkby (178, 207, 44).

What group to join: Screwed by Lindenlabs Inc

Some basic group rules: no spam, no other business, no nothing except discussion about the topic at hand. Please keep this is in mind, the group is open enrollment, but we will not tolerate misuse

PS: Dont blame the Havoc 4 team please, these guys did an excellent job, and the problems we are facing cant even be remotely connected to them /me thumbs up


Someone's taking action on this long-term issue! Organized by Mannix Mensing based on Celina's idea, the march intends on raising the priority of this issue with the authorities.

The reliability issues, while inconvenient to most avatars, are really hurting business owners. And I'm not the only one noticing this.

While everyone complains about these problems, a quick look at JIRA's "Popular SVC Issues" shows that none of the top ten have anything much to do with this:

  1. Stopping texture theft and stop spreading of stolen items
  2. New Permission Request "Resize only"
  3. Region crossings are occasionally slow
  4. Friends list inworld intermittently doesn't show online friends/Not Updating
  5. Notices failing for larger groups
  6. Prims set for sale - prices are incorrectly set when multiple prims taken to inventory and rezzed
  7. Eliminate all parcels under 128m from all land search functions
  8. New Feature Request - llTeleportAgent
  9. Viewer is logged out during failed teleport
  10. numerous reports of objects, notecards, scripts, gestures "missing from database"

Well, maybe that last one is kinda related.

See you on the 16th!

0 comments:

Related Posts with Thumbnails