Reed Linden

I like both of those ideas!

If you're spending less than about $20 at a time, you won't see any change at all. Residents like you are the heart and soul of Second Life, and we specifically calibrated the fee change to ensure that residents like you would not be affected.

3 months is a tight timeline! We'll do our best!

This is a very valid question, and one we struggled with, too. The most transparent way to say it is that we didn't feel like we had a choice. The revenue associated with this fee increase is tied directly to all of our plans for the future, and our ability to keep Second Life vibrant and engaging, including right now. If we had had the ability to hold off on this increase any longer, we would have. We appreciate how important Second Life is to our residents, especially now, and we feel the critical need to reinvest in that experience and bring in NEW residents as soon as possible.

This will not happen. Keep that shoe on.

Okay! Good morning! I'm back at the keys, and I'm going to try to get through everything. Starting here. As mentioned above, Oz has explained that our maintenance costs have actually gone UP in AWS, not down. Running our own datacenter was fairly efficient (because we owned the hardware, rather than renting it) so long as the machines were up to date and didn't need to be replaced. However, that does mean that every so often, there's a massive expenditure required to replace all the machines. In the AWS model, that expense is defrayed over time, rather than all at once (plus a surcharge of course for the privilege). The end result from a purely financial perspective is that moving to AWS is more expensive for us month-to-month, but does not require occasional massive one-time cost spikes like running the datacenter did. From an engineering and infrastructure perspective, running Second Life in AWS opens up huge opportunities (and creates additional challenges) that we're only just now beginning to explore. We're very excited for the future.

On 2017-11-02 the buy fee was raised from $0.60 to $0.99. On 2018-07-03 it was changed from $0.99 to $1.49.

Hi, Nethya! The server improvements are ongoing. There is no specific date for any given change, but you should be seeing incremental improvement across all of our properties more or less continuously. As we shifted our "hardware" to the cloud, we saw marked upticks in region performance, historically low teleport failure rates, and faster, easier grid rolls. We're confident that we can provide even greater improvement there, and do so to a wider range of products, and these fee changes allow us to continue to tinker with and optimize our infrastructure within the new environment. With regards to the Marketplace specifically, "more issues than normal" is a hard metric to argue with. There have been some hiccups as we are working on all that leveraging of infrastructure that I mentioned above, and I'm sure there will be some more of those in the future (this goes for all of our products) - the marketplace is one of the areas we're specifically focusing on to provide a better, more reliable, more accessible, and more functional experience. We're very excited about the possibilities that new infrastructure, more updated operating systems, etc. will provide us on the Marketplace! Regarding the new user experience, this is still in the design stage! We'll be attempting to move the needle in as many areas as we can, and running experiments and trying new things in world, in the viewer, on the web - across the board. There's nothing off the table! If you have any suggestions you'd like to make, I encourage you to submit a feature request!

Hi, Paul! I'd love to share with you the great land cost and tier reduction we released rather recently! One of the avenues that we are absolutely exploring going forward is how to best leverage our new cloud based infrastructure to make Second Life more accessible than ever and continually looking for more ways to adapt our revenue model to accommodate more of these types of changes.

(yes 😉)

Hi, Bitterthorn! I can't give an exact dollar value breakdown, but what I can say is that we are committed to reinvesting all of that revenue back into Second Life. The revenue generated from this modest fee increase will unlock and facilitate nearly all of our redoubled efforts to make Second Life an amazing experience for all of you going forward.

Hi! I'm Reed Linden. I am the product manager for our payments team! Ask me anything about this. I'm here to help. :)

This took a fair amount of digging to find. What we've got are a combination of prefixes and suffixes. The prefixes are what has been listed by the user. List of prefixes: PG M Mature AO Adult Only The suffixes are what is being returned by the search application and are contextual to the prefixes. List of suffixes: NOT Doesn't contain anything naughty. AO Contains naughty keywords that are allowed if the resident is identified. BET Contains betting keywords. When we do searches, those two things are put together as metatags. For example: PG_NOT Does not appear to contain anything naughty for PG. PG_AO Classified as PG, but maybe contains some naughty for PG stuff. PG_BET Classified as PG, but maybe has some betting/gambling content. These are being treated the same as PG_NOT, but the distinction may become more relevant in the future depending on laws (or less, for the same reason, as the direction seems to be going!). I hope that clears some things up for you!

Hello! A couple of updates, and all good news. Thank you very much for the JIRA! With your help, we believe we have identified the third issue and have a fix on the way. We could not have done that without you, and we absolutely appreciate it. Thank you again, and please keep them coming. I'll let you all know here when we have the fix in place. Second, the fixes for the caching problem with updates not refreshing and the problem with listings having blank fields in some languages have both been deployed (just now!). I know I had promised earlier in the week, but we ran into a few snags during the QA process that needed to be ironed out. They have been ironed!

Hey, all! Thank you for all the extra reports! We've been tracking this issue and have a fix in the works as we speak. We expect the fix to be live early next week. I know we'd all prefer not to go into the weekend the way things are, but we want to make sure we're being thorough and not just putting a band-aid on this, but a true fix. I appreciate your patience!

In case you missed it, check out the new filters on the marketplace for demo and limited quantity items, as well as the new redelivery options. Finally, if you have any questions, feedback, or just want to hear about what's coming next for our web properties, come on out to the web user group meeting later today!

Good catch, everyone! Check out the blog post here: And stop by the web user group later today if you have any questions, feedback, or just want to hear what's coming next. Cheers!

If your argument is that we should have had better tools in place to determine the scope of the impact our changes would make, then I absolutely agree with you! It's almost like you're reading my mind. The good news is that we're making those tools RIGHT NOW so that the next time we need to do something like this, we can, in fact, take the very reasonable steps you're suggesting beforehand.

Hey, Nik! I'm sorry to hear that you are still having trouble relisting your items. This was very much not our intention when updating our filters. What happened was that we updated our filters to take into account some copyright and trademark protected words and phrases, and the filter was a bit too aggressive in blocking words that were "similar enough" to trip the flag in a way that we were not expecting prior to updating the list. What we're seeing here is the result, and for that I personally apologize. We are working hard to reduce the impact of this sort of thing in the future and we have done a fair bit to reduce the current issues across the board which seems to have alleviated the problem that most people have run into. As stated previously by your fellow residents, you can and should absolutely contact our Support Team for assistance if you're still having problems relisting your items. The best place to do so is: support.secondlife.com where you can see the options available to you on the right hand side, like so: Contact Support, or Submit a Support Ticket are your best bets. They're likely going to ask you for the full text of the items that you're having problems relisting so they can check the copy against the list on our end and get you sorted out. They know what to look for, and can adjust the filters to ensure that no one else runs into the specific issue that you're having in the future as well. Any information you give them will help all of us.

You can absolutely go ahead and unlist the unwanted ones. We may have gotten a little overzealous in our attempt to help.

Hey, Elvina! I'm so sorry to hear that you had so many items unlisted. Obviously, that's not something we want. I suspect that was probably as a result of a change I made, so I've checked into it, and I believe you should be able to relist your items now with the original wording intact. Please give it a try and if it's still not working for you, please contact our support agents for further assistance.

Happy August, Everyone! This is a reminder that we are scheduled to host a Web User Group today at 14:00 SLT. We intend to be there! Hope to see you as well. It's been a couple of months with lots of excitement, so we're looking forward to seeing you all again in our more normal setting. Cheers!

Happy Wednesday, Everyone! On account of the US Holiday week, we are postponing the Web User Group meeting that was scheduled for today to a later date (probably next week, stay tuned) when we can get all the right people around to answer your questions and announce all the things. See you all soon!

Happy Wednesday! Just a reminder that we’ll have our Web User Group today at 14:00 SLT. Agenda for today is to talk about ongoing work, including Store Managers, Premium Prepay, and Auctions. We may also have a new project to announce if all goes well with a special guest appearance!

Thanks for the feedback, Fallacy. We'll give those suggestions a good think.