"We're having trouble connecting."

[FauxCorgi]

I keep getting this error trying to log in... This wouldn't be a big enough issue for me to make a forum post, though, I did not genuinely need to log in to release my land and cancel my premium account. I'm in a financial bind and can't afford to pay for this service right now (or even play SL right now) and need to cancel it until things are good again. I can't seem to do this from the dashboard and have to log into the game, but...then this error shows up.

My internet is working properly and I disabled firewalls. Still no change, still can't cancel my payments. Is this a known issue that I will just need to ride out for a few hours/days or is there something I can do about it? I can't afford to do my usual monthly game payments this month, so I'm sort of frantic about it, I guess x_x

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Aside from the connecting problem which someone else with more insight hopefully may pick up... besides the suggestion to try and login to some other region, if you haven't done that yet ... you can manage your premium membership on your dashboard on https://secondlife.com/my/account/membership.php?lang=en-US - "Manage Membership" and checking the basic option at the bottom of the page. 

Be aware, though: if you are on any "prepay" option - the quarterly or the annual plan - you won't be refunded your already paid amount, but you will remain premium for that remaining prepaid time. 

Also: if you have deeded any tier to any group, you must withdraw that donation from the group, aka set your donation to 0 and save, then manually tier down on the Landfees page, https://secondlife.com/my/account/landfees.php?lang=en-US .
The manual tier down is also required if you have paid for more tier for yourself, otherwise you will still be charged.

[Rolig Loon]

Actually, you do need to be able to log in to abandon or sell your land on the Mainland, before you'll be allowed to downgrade from a Premium account. If you only own land in private estates, you won't need to give it up for that reason, but you will still need to get rid of it in order to avoid paying land fees.  If you haven't already tried, I suggest contacting Live Chat.  You can still do that as  Premium member, and you don't need to be in world. It's possible that your problem is related to the difficulty that Linden Lab has had with servers since Tuesday. If so, Live Chat should help you sort it out. If not, then the problem is on your end. All I can suggest are the normal solutions (reboot your router and modem, get off of wifi, check with your ISP ... ), which typically clear things up for most people.

[FauxCorgi]

Update: I've tried resetting the router (hard to get away with, I live in a building shared with many others and the router isn't supposed to be tampered with, oopsie...) but it didn't do anything. I guess I'll have to try live chat. ;n; Thank you for your responses, I hope I can get this sorted out so I don't have to worry about paying money I don't have for something I can't use right now

Edited September 8, 2017 by FauxCorgi

[FauxCorgi]

Day 2. So far I have...

• Disabled my firewall
• Uninstalled all of my virus protection (for nothing, mind you)
• Uninstalled and reinstalled the entire game
• Installed Firestorm and tried using that
• Tried to log into god knows how many different known working regions
• Reset our entire internet setup as instructed
• Used live chat who did nothing but tell me to reset everything for the umpteenth time (which didn't work anyway)
• Tried using a public DNS
• Tried using an alternative IP address
• Made an alt account to see if it's account-related (it wasn't)
• Restarted the entire computer between most of these things
• Most likely gained about a dozen new gray hairs.

And  here I am, still unable to cancel my premium account because evidently it is too much to ask me my security question and release my land remotely so I can stop paying for something I CANNOT use. I'm beyond frustrated and I'm out of ideas. My head hurts. I'm tired of not being able to do something that should have been accessible via the dashboard from the start. I can't avoid another charge unless I release my land, which cannot be done without accessing the game (something I CANNOT do, as I've explained already) or want to deal with changing my payment method to be invalid so I can rack up a huge bill on the account and get myself banned.

Edited September 9, 2017 by FauxCorgi

[Rolig Loon]

So, have you called the billing office?

US/Canada: 800-294-1067

[LittleMe Jewell]

Live Chat:  Ask if a Linden can go to your land and return your items and abandon it -- be sure to explain that you've been trying to log in to do it yourself but that you cannot and explain that you really, really need the premium fee to not happen.  That would get you to a point where you can then downgrade via the dashboard.

[Lindal Kidd]

You seem to have tried everything that you can do on your end.  It's highly unlikely that LL has anything that would help on their end.  That leaves whoever is in the middle...hello, FauxCorgi's ISP, will you please stand up?

Contact your ISP and tell them that you're having problems connecting to Second Life.  Explain the troubleshooting you've already done and ask them to look into any possible problems on their end of things.

[Nalates Urriah]

You have tried all the right things. But, you haven't told us about any of your connection metrics. This type of problem is almost always a connection problem. Having a good Internet connection that works for email and surfing does not mean you have a good connection the the SL servers or have all the ports open that SL requires.

Use the information here to see where the problem in your connection is: http://blog.nalates.net/2011/10/26/troubleshoot-your-sl-connection/

Since you are using a shared connection, they may have a port blocked that you need. If you are connecting via wire, you may be able to look at the router setup and control screens and open any port you need. An alternative if you are on a laptop is to go to a coffee shop or church and jump on their wifi. On weekdays churches are often a good choice. On worship days they tend to have a huge data load as parishioners open their smartphone Bibles. So, on weekdays 8-5 there is usually huge pipe sitting unused.

[Ashanti Madrigal]

I'm having the same problem right now. did you find a solution?

[Zihm7]

I'm having this problem too, for the last week+. So, I have tried all the tricks; firewall, antivirus, etc. I even tried logging in on Lumyia from my phone. I was able to get through on the mobile data, but not the wifi.

I called my internet provider on two separate occassions, and nothing is being blocked. They even looked into anything that would block SL on their side.

I am waiting to hear back on my SL support ticket (that process takes forever) on whether my IP Address is being blocked.

Needless to say, extremely frustrating. If anyone has learned what the cause it, I would love to hear it... At this point I'm curious if I'll ever be able to get back in to SL.

[Nalates Urriah]

16 hours ago, Zihm7 said:

I'm having this problem too, for the last week+. So, I have tried all the tricks; firewall, antivirus, etc. I even tried logging in on Lumyia from my phone. I was able to get through on the mobile data, but not the wifi.

I called my internet provider on two separate occassions, and nothing is being blocked. They even looked into anything that would block SL on their side.

I am waiting to hear back on my SL support ticket (that process takes forever) on whether my IP Address is being blocked.

Needless to say, extremely frustrating. If anyone has learned what the cause it, I would love to hear it... At this point I'm curious if I'll ever be able to get back in to SL.

Check your IP address. Disconnect your gateway/router overnight. After restarting it check your IP address. You will most likely get a different address. 

As far as I know the Lab rarely blocks a contiguous group of IP addresses. So, an IP change should solve an IP block. If the Lab has blocked you there will be a MAC thing blocking you too. So, an IP change won't help. 

You can run through the steps at http://blog.nalates.net/2011/10/26/troubleshoot-your-sl-connection/  to see if it is you, your ISP, or the Lab.

[Zihm7]

Unfortunately, no success there. And the Second Life support team has stopped responding to my open ticket. Not sure what to do next.

[animats]

9 hours ago, Zihm7 said:

And the Second Life support team has stopped responding to my open ticket. Not sure what to do next.

I'm not getting timely ticket replies for "region down", either. Something must have gone so badly wrong that support is overwhelmed.

[Unda Xue]

I get this message all the time now. Even after I've tried solutions like the above.  Heavier traffic on SL due to covid-19?

[Lindal Kidd]

Hi @Unda Xue!

It's probably not SL...there are no outages shown on the grid status blog.  Most likely it's an issue with your connection, either your own router and your connection to it, or your ISP.  Before you start troubleshooting though, have you tried logging in at several different locations?

[Unda Xue]

Hi, thanks for answering. No, I have not tried logging in at several different locations. Doubt I can do that, my tower weighs a ton (or so it feels, when I lift it up).

I think I may have fixed this problem another way.  I have one of those drives split in two partitions: the standard relatively small one for the Windows OS software and a much larger one for data files. I have a big inventory (many years on SL--it kind of collects) and the texture cache is, by default, located in the small, crowded C partition. I read in another thread it can be moved anywhere, so tonight I had the application (very roughly: Preferences > Network Section > texture cache location in Firestorm) point to a directory in my much larger E data partition. Then I logged in. It was fast! No more 3-5 minutes waits!  I saw none of the strange messages (there are several different errors I get) and had none of the problems with connecting or getting my avatar to load fully that I have been suffering for weeks. My avatar loaded fully and quickly. I didn't need to go to a quiet area (lately those quiet areas have been giving me trouble too).  I hope this is fixed now, but I won't know until I test it a few more times over a period of several days.

I will try to remember to report back after I've seen how this solution works over time. 

 

================================

OK, moving the cache didn't work. It's the next day. I just tried to log in. Crashed/didn't load first time. Second time I got on but only my avatar head is visible. (I commonly have this problem.)  The inability to log in or logging in with a partial unmovable avatar (sometimes it is a grey shadow with its arms spread wide and unmovable have increased significantly since the latest Firestorm release 6.3.9.58205, although it was happening regularly before that release, too. Could the inventory size be a problem? Over 500k objects.

I find that the only way to consistently log into Second Life is to clear my cache (I know there are warnings not to do this, but it's the only way I can log in.)  Then I wait somewhere quiet for inventory to load and I am usually good to go.

I just tried the standard SL viewer. It works better. It logged me on quickly. It was slow to load my avatar but not too slow. My avatar is fully there and I can move normally, unlike my experience with Firestorm. It's a pity, I like the Firestorm viewer better.... although as I switched to the web browser to update this post, I got logged out. When I went back to the SL viewer, I had been disconnected. Ok, I got back on again with the main viewer but my inventory is showing only about half the item count and it is not increasing.  I'm beginning to think I need to look for information about large inventories... what do you think?

 

Edited June 1, 2020 by Unda Xue
Updating information

[Lindal Kidd]

1.  When I said, "have you tried logging in at different locations" I actually meant different regions in Second Life, not lugging your machine around to different RL locations.  Although that, too, might tell you something.  But instead of moving your tower around, use a laptop.  Borrow a friend's, if you don't have one.  You can install a viewer and log in to your account from any computer.

2.  If you're noticing missing inventory, clear your inventory cache.  Here are detailed instructions: https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/fs_missing_inventory

500K items!?  That's definitely one huge inventory.  It can cause login problems if its structure is "flat"...that is, if you have several thousand items in an individual folder.  If this is the problem, and you can't stay logged in long enough to restructure your inventory yourself, you'll need to file a support ticket with LL and ask them for help.  If you're organized into a lot of nested sub-folders, then a flat inventory isn't your problem, although 500K is still on the large side.

[Zihm7]

So, I still have this problem, and have a silly workaround that works every time:

 

When loading the client, as soon as it gets to 'Waiting for region handshake', I re-size the screen (maximize, or grab a corner and drag it to resize). For some reason, this triggers something in the process and I successfully log in every attempt. If I don't re-size it... same issue as before.

 

Good luck!

[Lysana McMillan]

I've run into this one myself. The first time, I got it to clear by purging the browser cache. The second time, I had to clear the main cache. That latter choice has kept me from seeing it for several days now. *crosses fingers*

[Juan Dallas]

Hey, kind of digging this one back up but I've been encountering this issue a lot the last 2 weeks, and the only thing that worked for me was logging in with another account, then back.

I have also noticed it happening after TP failures (which are every 2 teleports these days).

Good luck out there!

[Lucia Nightfire]

We need a zombie giving a thumbs up emote for necroposts.

[Love Zhaoying]

23 minutes ago, Lucia Nightfire said:

We need a zombie giving a thumbs up emote for necroposts.

Creepy Lion approves.

[LittleMe Jewell]