[Improving our Lines of Communication with the Community]

Not for me. I wouldn't touch Farcebook with someone else's bargepole even if I had never heard of SL. I know what the scam is with FB, and I refuse to become a victim of it.

I agree with Ansariel. Zuckerberg et al can suck on my /dev/null.

[Improving our Lines of Communication with the Community]

Regarding Office Hours vs. User Groups. Let me put a Resi hat on a  minute and you’ll start to see the difference. I’m an open source  developer and I want to contribute to Snowstorm. Which office hour do I  go? Oz? Q? Merov? All three? Really confusing. Now, you know you just go  to one--led by Oz--the Open Development User Group--and all three are there.

The User Group  program is focused around a product or community based vs. a Linden  personality. Each User Group will be attended by more than one  Linden and sometimes an entire team. That way, your  feedback gets to the right Lindens who can evaluate it and decide what  can be done and how it fits into product road maps. And, see my comments  earlier re: Land User Group. I’m workin’ on it!

Oh, so if I want to go to a User Group that talks about Viewer 2 Development issues, I should go to Viewer 2 Design and Coding, Viewer 2 Evolution, or Open Development User Groups (since Snowstorm is essentially Viewer 2 bleeding-edge development)? I can see how that is more clear.

I get it that you want to re-sort the office hour table by subject rather than Linden, but let's not kid ourselves that it is much beyond a polish job in name only. These are the types of things that residents get tired of coming from LL -- marketing spin.The fact that you are only now considering a "Land" user group because it is being asked for is kinda telling that the change was more cosmetic than fundamental in nature.

I'll wait and see what comes of these new "facilities" and the "User Group" deal. I don't want to say it can't get any worse, because I have been proven oh-so-wrong on that in the past.

[Improving our Lines of Communication with the Community]

Most everyone knew long ago that the JIRA votes didn't mean anything.

[Improving our Lines of Communication with the Community]

Surprisingly enough, even though Jack Linden's office hours were an informal free-for-all, Jack did an adequate job of managing them, despite being unable to resolve the vast majority of the issues presented.

The official LSL scripting wiki is pretty darn good, in my opinion. It is up-to-date and complete as far as a reference work is concerned. It needs some more examples, but most of the existing ones and the code library are fairly new.

[Improving our Lines of Communication with the Community]

Oh, one more question. Since the departure of Jack Linden, there is no venue for communicating mainland support and governance issues. Will there be a "User Group" created for that? Right now, the mainland support response times are simply abysmal. 3-4 MONTHS to get a simple ticket resolved is NOT ACCEPTABLE.

[Improving our Lines of Communication with the Community]

I must say that, for an announcement intended to spearhead new and  improved communications between LL and its customers, it created more  questions than it answers. Not a good start, in my mind. When will LL  hire someone with real customer service and online community management  expertise?

So does this mean you all are dumping this Jive turkey software and going to something a bit more readable, usable, and mainstream? I used to be a very active forum user, but when LL went to this *cough* "software", I quit.

How big of a "focus group" did you get to examine/test your new "community platform" solution?

The Farcebook thing: Am I missing out on anything related to SL by NOT  being a Farcebook/Twithole user? Is there anything you are posting to  other "social media" sites which you have not posted with SL's own  media first or simultaneously? As far as I am concerned, Farcebook is nothing but a privacy  invasion scam platform and I will NEVER use it. I do have a Twithole  account, but rarely bother to check it. Seeing people trying to cram  1000-word messages into 140 characters makes my eyes bleed and brain melt.

You claim that you have done away with "Office Hours", where particular Lindens set aside scheduled times to meet with residents in-world to discuss issues surrounding a particular topic, and have replaced them with "User Groups", where particular Lindens set aside scheduled times to meet with residents in-world to discuss issues surrounding a particular topic. Did I miss something besides the name change?

As for the JIRA voting and watching issue, I have always felt like it was rather dumb to "vote" for bugs. Bugs are bugs. TRIAGE them and then FIX them. If you REALLY need help to triage them, then ask, but most bugs should be no-brainers to triage. Features, however, should have affirmative voting. People who don't like a particular feature proposal don't need to cast a "negative" vote, but instead can suggest changes to an existing proposal, or write a better one and link it. As such, I think voting for features is a good idea and shouldn't be dropped.

Also, regarding the "vocal minority" fallacy, the people that use a particular facility (like the forums or JIRA) are a statistically sound sample population from which information can be drawn to make sound decisions. The constant "well, they are too small a population compared to the overall population" argument is neither accurate or statistically sound. Many people who bother to speak up are not doing so in a vacuum, but are speaking up for themselves and friends/partners/associates who don't have the time, knowledge, or courage to do so themselves. People naturally assemble into representative hierarchies; it is one of the good things about representative democracies. As such, NEVER EVER discount their input like this; it only proves that you do not understand the nature of the very communication you are trying to improve, and will continue to fail miserably in your efforts to improve it.

Lastly, if you are planning to turn all of your public resident feedback facilities into Disney-esque themeparks, expect the quality of feedback and level of participation to drop sharply, as you ban more and more of your customers for speaking their minds. The way to reduce antipathy and heat in feedback is to respond promptly, thoroughly, and expertly to it, not ban/ignore people for it and pretend like it doesn't exist. It will take time, because your customers already have VERY low expectations of you, but it is possible.

[A Farewell From Jack]

I don't normally post here because I can't stand this crap messaging software (even still), but I'll make an exception in this case.

Been a long and wild ride, eh, Jack?

Given a Dragon's capacity for memory, you can be sure I'll never forget every little detail, both in the good times and the bad. We didn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, but you had the courage to at least stand and face the angry Dragon. If nothing else, I am glad to have known you, and I wish you well in your future endeavors.

BTW, before you leave, could you see about poking someone over in the mainland management group about a 3-month old ticket of mine to acquire one of the last abandoned microplots? #00915456

Thanks again, Happy Holidays, and good luck in the new year!

PS-Feel free to drop by Great Pubnico or Archaea anytime for a visit. No ketchup, I promise!

[Back to Basics Technology Improvements]

Reduced sim stalls on teleports? Not in my sim. CONSTANTLY seeing huge lag spikes everytime someone TPs in/out or crosses the sim border in/out. Better check your facts there. I also constantly am having huge physics spikes when there is little to nothing physical going on in the sim.

As for the asset server, I have noticed a LOT more incidents of things not loading quickly or at all at times. I try to open scripts and I get errors, I try to open textures, and it sometimes takes minutes for them to rez in full detail.

As for new group chat backend, about damn time. I am SO SICK of that "Error messaging " popup that steals focus from everything you're doing.

Same for group limits. About time those were raised. There has to be a better way of managing group-related data and processing on the backend where a few dozen records doesn't kill the system.

We'll see if Snowstorm lives up to its hype. I follow the opensource-dev list, and there still seems to be a lot of monolithic thinking about the horribly broken UI paradigm.

The new grid deployment process has been interesting, and seems to not break too much, except grid rollouts tend to tax the backend and increase overall lag. Thus, too frequent ones means that we are back to "lag Wednesdays".

Lastly, Display Names.. meh; such a waste. Mesh, on the other hand... about time.