Important: New feature ;-)

[Coby Foden]

Dear Residents

While signing in to the Second Life Forums you might have noticed that we have implemented a new feature. From your dashboard you select "Community Forums" or directly from a link https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Forums/ct-p/Forums you get presented with this:

From there you will sign in. And when you have done so you get presented with the Blogs.

Question:
Why I get directed to the Blogs? I wanted to go to the Forums, not Blogs.

Answer:
To enhance our communication with Residents, we decided that it is good that you will be directed to the Blogs first. From time to time there will be important announcements. We do not want that you miss them. We think that this is a great feature that you will learn to love and appreciate.

Question:
Hmm.. I have noticed that after signing in I click the Forums tab and start reading the posts, then after couple of minutes I'm suddenly signed out. Why is that?

Answer:
That is a way how we ensure that you are actively participating in the Forums. We don't like you to be idling there.

Question:
Hmm, I see.. After I have been forcibly signed out I sign back in TO THE FORUMS I notice that again I'm directed to the Blogs! Why is that? Don't you think it's a PITA?

Answer:
You see, there might be new important messages posted in the Blogs while you were signed out. Again, we don't want you to miss any of those. We are confident that you will learn to appreciate this enhanced communication feature.

Question:
I have noticed the following too: After I have signed in again, clicked the Forums tab again, and started to read the posts I will most likely be forcibly signed out again for the second time! Why, for heavens sake?

Answer:
As already mentioned earlier we want to make sure that you are active in the Forums, not idling.

Question:
Are you going to keep this very annoying feature? Lots of residents have complained about it. There is even a BUG report about this https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-8953 which has been totally ignored.

Answer:
We think this is a great feature and we will keep it. What comes to the (unnecessary) BUG report we will soon handle it and mark it as "Status: Closed" and "Resolution: Works as expected". We do think this feature will be loved by the majority of the Residents. You'll get used to it in no time at all.

Best regards, LL  :smileyhappy:

Question: ! ?  :smileysurprised:  :smileymad:  :smileysad:

[LlazarusLlong]

Cody, this reminds me of the Calendar Riots of 1752!

PS What IS that tab called "ANSWERS" on your screen shot? I have never noticed it before. Does it have a purpose?

PPS And presumably that tab called "KNOWLEDGE BASE" is a joke? I bet it has unnecessary explanations on things like unpacking boxes.

[Freya Mokusei]

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Coby Foden wrote:

Question:

Why I get directed to the Blogs? I wanted to go to the Forums, not Blogs.

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Blogs is the central destination for everything at community.secondlife.com. It's not choosing at all - the redirect is broken and so it reverts to the root of the sub-domain as a whole.

I don't experience the logging out issue - I'd suggest you disable third-party or off-site/domain cookies or carefully inspect your cookies for *.secondlife.com to see where this is happening, and (ideally) disable the cookie itself as well as any attempts to recreate it. Can assist you with this via PM if you like - just at present I've not encountered it and can't be precise.

Can't explain the neglect of this issue from LL, though. The first bit is simple, they broke the redirect by accident.

[LlazarusLlong]

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Freya Mokusei wrote:

Can't explain the neglect of this issue from LL, though. The first bit is simple, they broke the redirect by incompetence.

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FIFY!

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

That was probably Grumpy Linden's idea.

[Coby Foden]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was.  :smileywink:

[Coby Foden]

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LlazarusLlong wrote:

 

PS What IS that tab called "ANSWERS" on your screen shot? I have never noticed it before. Does it have a purpose?

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If somebody has a QUESTION to post they surely are not going to the answers! :smileyvery-happy:

Perhaps Linden Lab could make a favour and rename that tab to "Questions & Answers", there's plenty of space for that longer name. Might be that more people would then realize that "Ah, there I can post a question" because the tab says so. I wonder why the "Question" part was omitted from the tab name?

[Qwalyphi Korpov]

Coby -

  I was going to start my reply by pointing out how silly it was to suggest the LL wants us to see important announcements in the blogs.  I thought it was obvious that, like the residents, the LL posts important items here in the General Discussion. Things can change though so I checked my sign posts first.  I was shocked.  I cannot emphasize enough how shocked.  The sticky post at the top of this forum announcing the end of the Local Payments Beta in January of 2012 is gone.  GONE!

  I'll add this tiny thought:  Perhaps, among other reasons, we're all plopped into blogs to provide the common shared experience the LL always aims for.

[Coby Foden]

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Freya Mokusei wrote:

I don't experience the logging out issue - I'd suggest you disable third-party or off-site/domain cookies or carefully inspect your cookies for *.secondlife.com to see where this is happening, and (ideally) disable the cookie itself as well as any attempts to recreate it. Can assist you with this via PM if you like

- just at present I've not encountered it and can't be precise.

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Thanks for the tip Freya. I deleted all cookies referring to "secondlife" (and tons of others too). I didn't disable creation of new cookies, yet. I'll observe how the sign in / and random sign out behaves now.  0.o

[Pamela Galli]

If this post had not made me laugh several times I would not have gone through the pain of writing this reply! grrrrrr

[LlazarusLlong]

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Qwalyphi Korpov wrote:

Things can change though so I checked my sign posts first.  I was shocked.  I cannot emphasize enough how shocked.  The sticky post at the top of this forum announcing the end of the Local Payments Beta in January of 2012 is gone.  GONE!

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That was one of the first casualties (from friendly fire) of the "Clean Up GD" campaign, which has recently gone retrograde as Xanax Linden has apparently lost interest.

[LlazarusLlong]

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Coby Foden wrote:

 I deleted all cookies referring to "secondlife" (and tons of others too).

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You may need to get rid of any cookies referencing lithium as well.

[Freya Mokusei]

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LlazarusLlong wrote:

You may need to get rid of any cookies referencing lithium as well.

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Good point! Lithium.com is used heavily here for assets. I'd worry if cookies traced back there, but it's plausible.

Again I can't see whatever is causing this, it doesn't show up on my PC environment at all - so I'm just guessing based on the described symptoms.

Mostly the cookies I see relate to Google, but there's some trickery ones in there for Lithium/SecondLife inter-relational whackadoo.

[Coby Foden]

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LlazarusLlong wrote:

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Coby Foden wrote:

 I deleted all cookies referring to "secondlife" (and tons of others too).

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You may need to get rid of any cookies referencing lithium as well.

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I did that too. No lithium cookies left.

 

PS. Since deleting cookies related to "secondlife" and "lithium" I've been staying signed in already for fifty minutes. Before deleting the cookies the first unwanted sign out happened after few minutes. Crossing fingers. :matte-motes-smile:

[LlazarusLlong]

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Freya Mokusei wrote:

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LlazarusLlong wrote:

You may need to get rid of any cookies referencing lithium as well.

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Good point! Lithium.com is used heavily here for assets. I'd worry if cookies traced back there, but it's plausible.

Again I can't see whatever is causing this, it doesn't show up on my PC environment at all - so I'm just guessing based on the described symptoms.

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For a while recently, my FlagFox addin told me that I was accessing the forums on a server based in Canada, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was a joint Lithium-LL cockup.

[Freya Mokusei]

Flagfox high five!

And yeah - my understanding is that most of community.secondlife.com is not stored on LL servers. The exceptions are a couple of stylesheets and all the wider auth/nav stuff. To be honest, I'm not sure how Flagfox determines the host.

I think in most circumstances, LL try to do this somewhat discreetly (at least, if you don't look at the page source).

Keep those fingers crossed, Cody!

[LlazarusLlong]

I have a feeling that LL is attempting to reduce the number of verification services it has to run across its various web properties, which SHOULD improve efficiency, speed and security.

If it worked.

[Freya Mokusei]

Iiiiii think they did that already, and this current system is the result?

I'm not great at jumping through the required number of hoops to find out what LL's up to day-to-day. It is way easier than it used to be, and sign-ins do (sometimes) preserve themselves between sub-domains - which if I recall, was the main thrust.

 This recent snafu was caused by replacing community.secondlife.com/<something> with support.secondlife.com/<something> (which doesn't exist) - likely a copy-paste error or other silliness.

[Coby Foden]

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Freya Mokusei wrote:

Keep those fingers crossed, Cody!

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..b.

:matte-motes-asleep-2:

[Freya Mokusei]

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Coby Foden wrote:

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Freya Mokusei wrote:

Keep those fingers crossed, Cody!

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..b.

:matte-motes-asleep-2:

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Sorry. I had both my eyes and my fingers crossed, for luck. b looks like d!

[Coby Foden]

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Freya Mokusei wrote:

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Coby Foden wrote:

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Freya Mokusei wrote:

Keep those fingers crossed, Cody!

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..b.

:matte-motes-asleep-2:

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Sorry. I had both my eyes

and

my fingers crossed, for luck. b looks like d!

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Yes, so it does! :smileyvery-happy:

 

PS.

I had my dinner and when I came back at the computer I was still signed in to the Forums. Very promising. :smileyhappy:

[LlazarusLlong]

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Coby Foden wrote:

I had my dinner and when I came back at the computer I was still signed in to the Forums. Very promising. :smileyhappy:

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Did you check what got posted under your name while you were away?

[Coby Foden]

Yes, I did. Nothing was posted. :smileyhappy:

But what I noticed when I started to read the Forum posts few hours later in the evening is that again I get signed out randomly after few minutes from the sign in.

So, the deleting of the cookies was only a very temporary solution. :smileymad:
Something is badly broken with the sign in process.

- - - - - - - - - -
Ok, next step:

I blocked cookies from "secondlife.i.lithium.com" and will observe how things develop now.

Interestingly if I block cookies from:

"secondlife.com"  it prevents log in to the dashboard
"community.secondlife.com"  it prevents signing in to the community area
"support.secondlife.com"  it also prevents signing in to the community area

[ETA]

Well, I noticed within few minutes that blocking cookies from "secondlife.i.lithium.com" does not help.
I still get randomly signed out. Pfftt...  :smileyfrustrated:

[LlazarusLlong]

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Coby Foden wrote:

Interestingly if I block cookies from:

"secondlife.com"  it prevents log in to the dashboard

"community.secondlife.com"  it prevents signing in to the community area

"support.secondlife.com"  it also prevents signing in to the community area

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This suggests that they are still running multiple verification services - presumably with separate identity databases managed by LL and Lithium. The logging out may be a symptom of incomplete resynchronisation.

[it is also apparent that the web profiles runs off another identity database, one that is even more susceptible to corruption than any of the rest]

[Freya Mokusei]

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Coby Foden wrote:

But what I noticed when I started to read the Forum posts few hours later in the evening is that

again

I get signed out randomly after few minutes from the sign in.

So, the deleting of the cookies was only a very temporary solution. :smileymad:

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Perhaps this gives another clue - removing the cookies likely enables you to stay signed in for thelength of the "session" (sessions end when you close browsers, restart computers, or log out of the service). It may not be held in cookie data, but in the session data, which is faaaairly similar.

Clearing cookies won't stop the process from starting again the next time. But it probably means that this "timeout" or session expiry is a deliberate feature of Lithium. Like Llaz says, it could be related to the fact that sign-in here requires SL-ID + Lithium 'hybrid' login, and the expiry feature only checks half of the credentials.

 1 + ? = 0

I worry that a lot of this sounds like guesswork - I'll see if I can secure a different, less-nailed-down system for testing in the next couple of days.