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The 2023 Valentine Shop & Hop is almost here with 280 participating merchants across 14 shopping regions. All are offering their best to inspire your Valentine fantasies from a romantic evening with your bae, to a party with your friends, and everything in between. You will definitely find something to suit you! Every store will have at least a 20% discount on all items and a free (non-group) gift for shoppers or a gift certificate valued at L$300 or above!
The event formally opens to the public on Friday, February 3rd at 9am PT - but who wants to wait when you can get early access?! If you can’t contain your excitement, join the official Second Life Birthday group inworld to be granted immediate access.
Before you jump inworld, you can get a sneak peek at many of the items that will be available in the official Second Life Shop & Hop Flickr pool. And don’t forget to share photos of your haul after your shopping excursion!
Scroll to the end of this post for a complete list of all 280 participating Shop & Hop Merchants in alphabetical order, and their direct slurls! To visit the 2023 Valentine Shop & Hop - start at any one of the Regions - but be sure to visit them all to see everything that's available. Happy shopping!
ISLE OF VIEW AND MORE VALENTINE’S EVENTS
The Isle of View is our annual tribute to all things romantic via four regions filled with forested walks, cozy nooks for cuddling, and romantic swan boat rides.
Visit one of the Love Pavilion gift kiosks to browse through a variety of gift selections that you can send to your friends and loved ones on Valentine’s Day. This year’s selection includes heart lollipops and balloons, an adorable teddy bear, a chocolate box with rings, cutesy cupcakes, love lanterns, and, of course, romantic roses. To select and send your free gifts, follow the directions on the sign adjacent to the kiosk.
Looking for more romantic destinations to explore this season? Grab a loved one and go on a date at one of the many beautiful places listed in the Romantic Spots category on the Destination Guide.
VALENTINE'S LOVE TRAIN
Our special Bellisseria Valentine's Event returns this year. This time it’s a Love Train with the primary departure point being Muehlenbach Station, but residents can hop on from any station as the trolleys go by! Learn more about it from Patch Linden's forum post.
DUNK & HUG A LINDEN OR MOLE EVENT
Are you feeling “some kind of way” about the Lindens or Moles? Show your love (or friendly aggression) for the makers of Second Life at our annual Dunk & Hug a Linden or Mole Event, held this year on February 14th from 1pm to 3pm PT at the Isle of View. Come early for some fun conversations and plenty of soaked Lindens!
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Hug and dunk some Lindens & Moles,
At the Isle of View!NEW LAST NAMES
Additionally, we have just released new last names for the season!
The following valentine-themed names are only available for a limited time:
Snugglepuff
Allure
Passion
Heartstrings
Aphrodite
Adonis
Waifu
HusbandoThese names for Valentine’s Day are seasonal and may come back around this time next year, for a limited time.
The following is a screenshot of the full list of current last names available:
We will continue to make additional updates to the available last name pool, so if these options aren’t for you, stay tuned for future updates. You can also suggest your favorite name on our suggestion form, the new names were chosen from there!
For more information about the costs and how-tos involved in name changes, read the Changing your username FAQ. Click to change your name now!
A complete list of all 280 participating Shop & Hop Merchants in alphabetical order, and their direct slurls:
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"Let me inundate you with all the beautiful things I collected from the awesome sales over last weekend, because there were goods to be had!" Read more on the blog.
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Hello!
This Wednesday, February 1st, was a rocky one for Second Life, especially for regions on our Release Candidate (RC) channels. As with many large-scale services, we experience service interruptions from time to time, but yesterday's problems were unique and noteworthy enough that they deserve a sincere apology and more thorough explanation.
Summary
- The incident lasted 6 hours
- 7029 regions were reverted to a previous stable version
- The root cause was a bug in object inventory behavior that was introduced by new code. This bug caused some objects' scripts to enter a non-running state.
- We are making changes to our deploy and testing processes to make events like this less likely to happen in the future.
Timeline
Second Life deploys simulator changes in two major phases: first, to Release Candidate (RC) channels which comprise roughly one-third of all production regions, then to the remainder on a main Second Life Server (SLS) channel. Before changes are deployed to RC, they go through several develop-test cycles, including deployments and testing on staging environments.
RC rolls are regularly scheduled for 7AM Pacific (SLT) every Wednesday. While conducting one of these deployments, we received initial reports of issues relating to script behavior at 8:30AM. We immediately started investigating, and by 9AM it was clear that we needed to stop the roll, because the issue was pervasive and clearly related to the new changes. As we do in these situations, we declared an “Incident” and an Incident Commander took charge.
By 9:30 we started a rollback, reverting the affected simulators to their previous version. We also evaluated what additional actions we would need to take, as it was unclear that a rollback alone would start the scripts which had stopped. This quickly proved to be the case, and we came up with a new plan - one that would ensure that scripts would perform as expected going forward, but possibly undo the changes our residents had been making since the time we had introduced the bug. Although this meant more downtime, it prevented further content loss, and proved to be the best way to put the grid back in order. The team came up with a quick, clean, and efficient way to achieve this and get everyone back on track.
By 12PM the decision was made to take this direction. By 1:15PM the code was complete, by 1:40PM we confirmed that it worked. By 2:25PM all regions were brought back up.
Of course after an event like this there’s cleanup to be done, and we had quite a few Lindens reviewing the fallout and taking care of our Residents. Our amazing support team was working with creators whose operations were affected.
Trouble doesn’t come alone: we had to deal with another outage at the same time - this one on the web side of things. Some of our services were getting overwhelmed. We added a few hamsters to those wheels, and they seem to be turning just fine again.
Technical Details
What happened? To quote part of our internal discussion, “scripts are weird”:
QuoteSometimes we refer to scripts in an object by a globally unique identifier, and sometimes we refer to scripts in an object by an object-local identifier. There was an issue in the version we deployed on 2023-02-01 where object-local script identifiers would always refer to the first script in an object, causing only that script to be marked as running and receive events like touch and linked_message.
Conclusion
What remains after an outage? We write up an internal “postmortem” report: what happened, what lessons we learned, and what future measures we’re going to put in place. We share it widely, so that we can all learn from it. On days like this, we also write a blog post to let you all know what happened as well.
Of all the reasons to write a blog, a postmortem ranks pretty low for me, because it means something went seriously wrong. But of all the reasons I love working here, watching everyone come together during an outage ranks pretty high. I’m grateful to know that while we may make mistakes, we will not sweep them under the rug, nor look for someone to blame - we will come together and make it right.
Thank you for your patience and understanding. This is your world, and we hope to take better care of it.
Grumpity and the Second Life team
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On #NationalEscapeDay - teleport to the Elvion destination by Bo Zana where you can explore a magical paradise!
For a chance to have your image featured as the Second Life pic of the day, submit your work to the Official Second Life Flickr Group, but don't forget to read the rules!
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Happy Wednesday!
We’re writing to remind everyone that we’ll be holding our monthly Web User Group meeting today at 14:00 SLT in our usual meeting place, where we’ll be discussing our status with ongoing projects and our near future plans for our web properties. As always, we’ll leave plenty of time for Q&A from the community. We look forward to seeing you there!
Keep up to date with all of our user group meetings on our wiki and public calendar.
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The Concierge and Land User Group meeting is a monthly, public meeting for discussion and education on Second Life, useful to both Mainland Residents and Estate owners.
Topics include any issues relating to Customer Relations/Support or concerning Land in general (mainland, islands, Linden Homes, estates, auctions, etc.).
Join Wendi, Vix, and members of the Land team, on Wednesday at 12pm PT at Linden Estate Services. All are welcome.
Keep up to date with all of our user group meetings on our wiki and public calendar.
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Hi Everybody!
I would like to introduce a new member of the Linden Support team, Boxy 5000.
Boxy 5000 is a virtual assistant/support bot trainee.
But wait, wasn’t there already a chatbot who answered questions for premium users? Indeed there was! Boxy 3000 was the earlier model of the trainee chatbot.
We are learning from some design flaws and moving forward with a more advanced bot. Boxy 3000 has been re-invented and given an extra 2000!
But wait a second time! Won’t this bring about the machine apocalypse? Not just yet–Boxy 5000 is more advanced and learns as they go but Skynet is still a few upgrades away.
The upgraded bot will be a 24/7 support option for both premium and non-premium residents! (Previously only available for premium customers.)
Boxy will have the ability to answer commonly asked questions, keep you up to date on current issues, help with ticket submission and in some cases handle a support request.
Boxy has uses for all residents, from early adopters to fresh new faces.
For new and more casual residents Boxy is available to help them find the support they need.
For our seasoned veterans Boxy can offer support options for some specific requests. Specifically, Boxy will be able to submit an abuse report on your behalf and in some cases help with the restart of a region!
Boxy will continue to learn as we go. Boxy might not have all the answers currently, but we will continue to review questions posed and help the bot to better answer your support queries.
We realize that a chat bot is not a substitute for a customer support representative, and this bot is not meant to be. It is however meant to help when we are unavailable or may be experiencing higher call volumes.For premium residents Boxy will only be the first point of contact before being passed to a support representative during office hours. Utilize Boxy to help better explain your issue once you are transferred to a support representative. Outside of office hours Boxy can help or create a ticket for when we are back in the office.
The ability to get an answer to your question or to get your issue resolved without having to wait until our Support Lindens are available is Boxy’s primary directive.
Anyone interested in saying hello to Boxy can access it by logging into our support portal. The Boxy 5000 chat widget should appear in the bottom right hand corner of your screen.
Boxy 5000, it’s advanced…
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