Hey CommerceTeam Linden! How will you "Fix" the Received Items folder?

[Darrius Gothly]

In the JIRA issue pointing out how the latest incarnation of Received Items broke a very important feature of RLV, Brooke posted this comment:

"Thanks to everyone for the feedback. We will be rolling back LeTigre and BlueSteel on Wednesday, and will not re-deploy until this has been fixed."

There are a lot of different ways that spring to mind that could be considered a "fix", but I would rather hear from you and your team which one of those you intend to take? Also it would be nice if we got some sort of a time table, even a SWAG estimate would be nice.

Can we please get a bit more information on what to expect and when to expect it? Thank you.

[Nalates Urriah]

As best I can tell the latest plan for the Received Items Folder is here:  Proposed Use of received Items Folder.

What they will do with llGiveInventoryList() is unknown. We can anticipate and speculate what is going on within the Lab now. First their plans have been disrupted. This throws them back into figuring out what to do. That is not as simple as many may think. Young managers often have to learn ideas have inertia. Plus managment may not understand the work needed to make a change. The result is going to be some time figuring out what has to change, how long it will take, what it will cost, and what the alternatives are. Eventually managment will make a decision and the coders will go to work making the change. Problems will e found, the plan will be revised, and the coders will shift direction a bit.

Only when managment is convinced they have the solution that will work, will they allow any staff to say anything. So, for days or weeks all we may hear is: 'we are working on it.'

The Lindens may learn they need a series of different answers that are essentually the same but sound different to placate the community. Eventually people will see through that. Whatever anyone does or figures out the base corporate behavior will likely be as discribed above. We will have to wait to find out. Past behavior by the Lab and staff makes waiting hard. But, that is life. So, it becomes a matter of how well people can cope with their frustration and impatience.

[Darrius Gothly]

That page you linked is the one they provided before their previous poll. I'm pretty sure it's what they rolled out onto BlueSteel and LeTigre .. and that broke RLV. Now that they've realized their solution was just a few steps too short, they've agreed to pull it back and wrench on it some more.

When I ran the Tech Support department at my previous employer, it was often necessary for me to explain to the customer what steps we would be taking to resolve their issue. There is a way to explain what you are doing without saying "we're as confused as you." You can explain what staff is being assigned to the task, what steps they will be taking at the start, and most importantly what are the goals of the effort over all. What I'm trying to say is, you can explain that you are working on it in ways that give comfort and reassurance to the customer without divulging sensitive plans or internal secrets.

Although, even a "we're working on it" would be helpful (and is in a sense what Brooke said in her comment on the aforementioned JIRA). There are a lot of good ideas and requirements put forth by a number of knowledgeable folks around the Grid .. and it would be nice to know that LL has heard and is considering some of those ideas too.

I'm personally a strong supporter of the "Only use Received Items when the user is offline and for Marketplace Purchases" approach ... probably because it's been my suggestion from very early on. But I also support it because it's an easily implemented solution and near as I can tell resolves all issues without drastically upsetting anyone's long-established habits and expectations. However, there may be gotchas in that idea too, but until it gets out in the open and enters into the discussion with Linden Lab, we just won't know.

They've spent a lot of money so far paying coders to make changes and roll those out first on Aditi and then on the two RC Sims, and then found out that a lot of that expense was wasted because they hadn't taken all the possible conditions into account. If they take the opportunity now and put out there "Well we're considering doing the only-when-offline thing, but we have these concerns..." then they can start getting many people around the grid to start thinking it through, spot potential problems and get them all smoothed out before they pay for more coder-time.

We have seen that once an idea is presented to the SL Community, all that brain power inevitably finds a ton of edge cases and gotchas that just were not visible before. I am hopeful that LL recognizes this too, and starts using us as "Beta Thinkers" and not just as "Beta Testers".

[Darrius Gothly]

*kerbump*

[Ann Otoole]

only one week to deployment lol.