[Improving our Lines of Communication with the Community]

It's sad to watch Linden repeatedly reshuffle the same deck of dwindling cards. 

[Improving our Lines of Communication with the Community]

First, with respect to the JIRA and the move to remove the voting feature - it's a good idea and a very bad idea. 

Good in the sense that there should never have been voting for bug reports; a bug should either be validated and fixed or it should be closed for appropriate reasons such as unable to reproduce or not a bug, etc.  Sad to say, Linden was using the voting feature to avoid fixing bugs that have been on the books for years.

Very bad in the sense that there should be voting for new feature requests which if incorporated, will potentially impact every user and Linden should be using the voting to gauge customer desire for or against the change. In fact, the voting should be expanded to vote yes or vote no.  And that leads to my comment on your shuffle the deck communications changes.

You should have used the JIRA to offer up these feature changes before they were implemented to get the customer's input and ironically, these communication changes reinforce the notion that you're not really interested in hearing from the customers except in a highly constrained and selective manner such as these user groups that we can't join unless we know the special handshake?  Where are the direct join links for each of these groups?

As for Facebook, that's a major disconnect because it's a first life social network and go figure, many of your customers bought into your name and promise of a second life that is separate and distinct from their first life.  Not to mention, how do we know who's a Linden on your facebook page?  Are we suppose to know your real names now? 

[Viewer 2.3 Beta Available Today With Display Names and More]

For those asking to restore local lights, make sure you're voting and following https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-157 - Linden did add it back in one of the Project Viewers (Mesh) but it's not in the dev viewer.

[Viewer 2.3 Beta Available Today With Display Names and More]

Unless the new viewers are widely adopted, the display names is a moot point.

[Viewer 2.3 Beta Available Today With Display Names and More]

The greatest problem I see with using the display names is the fact that the display name user has no idea which name other AVs are seeing them as.  Even if everybody used the viewer that shows the display names, they have the option to not display them (righthly so) and it will cause nothing but confusion as people will either see them as their original name, display name, or both.  What's the point if I don't know which name that people are seeing me as?

Also, there's a bug (hopefully) where the web dashboard only shows the display name under the friendlist with no option to see the real name.  That's not good - see:  https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-3200