Blogs
Our community blogs
-
- 1452
entries - 4720
comments - 45489
views
Second Life Pic of the day is "close your eyes and i'll kiss you", from Ashlee Cadell.
To submit your image for Second Life Pic of the Day consideration, add it to the Official Second Life Flickr Group.
Be sure to check us out on social:
Facebook
Twitter
Google+
Tumblr
Pinterest
Plurk- Read more...
- 0 comments
- 1452
-
- 552
entries - 6194
comments - 82022
views
As the end of 2017 draws closer, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on just a few of the major beats that made this another great one for Second Life. From technical improvements to new features, to community happenings, the virtual world’s 14th year was a busy and fun one!
Baby Got Backend Enhancements
We rolled out a number of upgrades to SL’s backend and build systems. This behind-the-scenes effort helps to improve stability and performance, and also is part of the future-proofing and prep work needed for the “Brave New World” project - i.e. moving SL to the cloud.
Tons of Fun Inworld
We launched our first-ever grid-wide game experience: Tyrah & the Curse of the Magical Glytches! Thousands have already enjoyed playing so far, and there’s even more to come.
This year also saw the introduction of a brand new group of starter avatars, and some awesome events inworld, including great shopping events like the one going on now, our annual Linden-vs-Resident snowball fight, the Halloween creepy-crawl, and some massive celebrations for SL14B - our 14th anniversary!
We hope you had as much fun in SL this year as we did. Next year is SL’s 15th birthday and we’re planning an absolute blow-out to celebrate. Stay tuned for more on that soon - we’re talking way more than one month’s worth of parties...
More Primo Premiums
In addition to regularly rolling out fresh gifts exclusively for subscribers, we added new benefits to Premium membership to make it even more, well, premium! We launched Premium Access to full regions, and extended the L$ transaction history for Premium subscribers up to 90 days.
We’re very pleased to share that as a result, we did see some growth in Premium account membership this year. Happy as we are, we think we can do even better, so look forward to new initiatives in 2018 aimed at making the benefits of going Premium even more valuable.
But Wait There’s More!
This year, we introduced a whole of new features and capabilities as well. For example, Animesh (which you can now test on Aditi using our Project Viewer) allows independent objects to use rigged mesh and animations, just like mesh avatars, and Residents have already used this feature in impressively creative ways.
We also rolled out more land features - Estate owners have more control over their land, we improved region capacity, and introduced Place Pages to help make your favourite SL places much more discoverable on the web.
Along those same lines, we brought back an improved version of the Community Gateway Program (and RegAPI), enabling communities to grow their ranks (and SL’s user-base) by registering and onboarding new users.
Last, but not least, we revamped our Support Portal and Community Forums to make it easier for Residents to get help when they need it and connect, discuss, and share with other users on the web.
Onward to 2018!
Not only does SL celebrate our 15th birthday next year, but we’re also working on some exciting new initiatives and enhancements we can’t wait to share with the community. As we announced earlier this year, we’re investing many millions in SL and 2018 is going to be a big one.
See you inworld!
- Read more...
- 0 comments
- 552
-
- 67
entries - 3233
comments - 19246
views
Things were a little bumpy for users that tried to log into Second Life on Monday morning as a result of a scheduled code deploy. I wanted to share with you what happened, and what we're going to do to try and prevent this in future.
That morning, I attempted to deploy a database change to an internal service. Without going into too much detail, the deploy was to modify an existing database table in order to add an extra column. These changes had been reviewed multiple times, had passed the relevant QA tests in our development and staging environments, and had met all criteria for a production deploy. Although this service isn't directly exposed to end-users, it is used as part of the login process and it is designed to fail open, i.e. if the service is unavailable, users should still be able to log in to Second Life without a problem.
During the database change, the table being altered was locked to prevent changes to it while it was being altered. This table turned out to be almost a billion rows in size and the alteration took significantly longer than expected. Furthermore, the service did not fail open as designed, and caused logins to Second Life to fail, along with a handful of other ancillary services. Our investigation was further complicated by other problems seen on the Internet on Monday due to a configuration issue at one of the big ISPs in North America. Many of us work remotely and while we saw problems early on, it wasn't immediately clear to us that it was internal, rather than one caused by a third party service. After some investigation, the lock on the database was removed, and services slowly began to recover. We did have to do some additional work to restore the login service, as the Next Generation login servers (as described by April here) are not yet fully deployed.
I'm still looking to complete this deploy in the near future, but this time we'll be using another method which doesn't require locking the database tables, and won't cause a similar problem. We're also investigating exactly why the service didn't fail open as it was designed to, and how we can prevent it from happening in the future.
Steven Linden
- Read more...
- 0 comments
- 67
-
- 30
entries - 862
comments - 15241
views
On June 15 we became aware that some classified ads had gone missing. Upon investigation, we discovered that all renewing classified ads had expired themselves. We have identified the cause and are in the process of replacing all of them. There are less than 100 that we believe have already been recreated inworld and we have a plan to address those.
To compensate for this inconvenience, we will be waiving classified ad fees for up to two weeks, depending on when your ad was set to renew. After this period your ad will be billed as usual on its expected renewal date.
We apologize for the brief disruption to classified ads, and will update this post when the ads have been restored.
- Read more...
- 0 comments
- 30
-
- 43
entries - 559
comments - 23238
views
Hey everyone,
It’s recently come to our attention that there has been an increase in the use of third party tools that gives account credentials and control over a Resident’s account to another Resident. This and similar products can change an account password and/or details, such as email address, which could prevent an owner from accessing an account, or even from being able to recover the account.
We want to remind everyone that giving another Resident access to your account or account information, by any means and for any reason, is both dangerous and not permitted by the Terms of Service. An account is intended to be used solely by its creator, and keeping your account details secret and secure helps you keep it that way.
We’d like to provide you with some quick tips on how to keep your account secure:
Choose a secure password with upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, spaces, and symbols, and avoid common dictionary words or phrases. For instance, “password” is not a good password, but “wh4tAr g@t4P55!” is much better (though you shouldn’t use that last one either, now that all of Second Life just read it, too).
Choose a secret security question answer. To keep your information extra secure, choose an answer that you will remember, but that no one else could possibly guess. For example, answering “What is your favorite vacation spot?” with “Potsdam, Pennsylvania” isn’t secure if you have that listed as an interest on your social media accounts. Answering “The Wide Wide World of Sports” might be much more secure!
Keep your password and the answer to your security question secret from everyone, regardless of their relationship to you. Only you should know this information; not your significant other, family member, casual acquaintance, person with an honest look in their eye, or anyone else.
Keep your password unique and special to Second Life. Reusing the same password across different platforms or websites makes your account vulnerable if one of those sites suffer a data breach.
No Linden will ever ask for your password. Likewise, there is never a reason for you to enter your password to unlock an item, receive a discount, or anything else.
Use only the official Second Life Viewer, or a Third Party Viewer from the Third Party Viewer Directory. If the viewer does not allow you to log directly into your account for any reason, the viewer is NOT secure.
You can read more about keeping your information secure on the wiki at Linden Lab Official: Password Protection
If you have any problems accessing your account—especially if you believe that your password or security information may be known to anyone other than you—please contact the support team by opening a support case.
Thanks for keeping your account secure!
-Governance Linden
- Read more...
- 0 comments
- 43
-
- 5
entries - 555
comments - 14049
views
Calling all Landowners! This Project Viewer is definitely one that you’re going to want to try out.
So, you know the story: You have a vampire-themed area in Second Life and each Resident who visits your space has to adjust their personal environment settings to get the full spooky nighttime effect. Or, you’ve invited a bunch of friends to a sunset beach party and some of them have their environment settings at midday--not exactly what you had in mind. You’ve long dreamed about the day when you can control the environment settings for all Residents visiting your space. We’re happy to say that your dream has now come true.
The Environment Settings (Windlight Region Settings) Project Viewer, available today, gives you the opportunity to try the new region environmental controls that include sky, water, and day cycle settings. This feature gives landowners and region managers the ability to customize and define unique environmental region settings that are automatically shared by others in that region (unless those users have chosen personal overrides). Now, your vampire destination will always be dark and scary and everyone at your beach party can enjoy a perfect, beautiful sunset.
One last thing before you get started. For now, everyone in your region must be using this Project Viewer to see the customized environment you’ve set. Otherwise, the lighting will appear as it as it would normally. When we’ve completed this trial, and made any needed changes, we’ll roll this feature into the SL Viewer Beta and eventually, the main SL Viewer.
So, give it a go and let us know what you think!
Helpful Links:
• Download the Environment Settings (Windlight Region Settings) Project Viewer
Windows | Macintosh | Linux
• Environment Settings (Windlight Region Settings) Project Viewer documentation on the SL Wiki
• File Bugs in the SL Viewer (VWR) section of JIRA and link to STORM-1126 issue
• Share Your Experiences on this thread in the Land Forum
• Follow us on Twitter @Secondlife and tweet using the hashtag #SLViewer
- Read more...
- 0 comments
- 5
-
- 0
entries - 0
comments - 2261
views
No blog entries yet
- 0
-
- 0
entries - 0
comments - 1793
views
No blog entries yet
- 0
-
Announcements
-
04/04/2017
You can submit your image for Pic of the Day consideration on our Official Second Life Flickr page.
-
Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Flickr