Workaround For SecondLife Bug: Honesty and a Dash of Community

Yeah, we know - SecondLife is having some growing pains. Yesterday, these issues coalesced into dealing with land sales. I know. Last night I got bitten. Yes, the land to the right was what I purchased - the money left my account, but the land didn't transfer. It was all quite weird. I twitched my flippers and summoned Live Help - and Live Help was there as quick as you could say something really fast. I had a feeling that it might be server load related, but the server didn't show any pending uploads or time dilation. Further, my transaction record on the website was definitely not as up to date as it had been hours before.

When we're talking about about $62 US, well, it can be something to freak about. A relatively short life has lead me to realize that freaking out, while fun, is usually ineffective and quite often counterproductive. The Live Help fellow, who I've bumped into elsewhere and can only speak highly of, was stumped too. I'm betting he was looking at the same things I was as far as time dilation and other symptoms of server lag - and they just weren't there. He advised me to email support if the land had not transferred within an hour. Well, shucks. OK. Fortunately I had attracted a newbie, so I spent an hour teaching him how to find things in his inventory as well as how to make his first Lindens in SecondLife - money trees - and perhaps even to bank it within SecondLife so it worked for him while he was off exploring SecondLife. He went off, leaving me to dictate a detailed email to my SeaMonkey (you know, Mozilla unbroken...).

A Tendril on Support

A few checks on the email showed an automated response verifying that I had gotten my email in queue to the support folks. A number and everything. While reading the email, I wondered about Linden Lab staffing - it says on the weekends and after normal working hours that support may be slower. Oddly, that is when there is peak concurrency on the grid (I would bet, anyway) - and it would make sense to have a larger amount of people working at those times. SecondLife is almost 4 years old; these probably aren't new trends - and this probably isn't a new criticism - but there are practicalities I appreciate. Sleep deprivation of software developers and administrators is ill advised. Being limited by the employable population in the surroundings of Linden Lab probably doesn't help. It is what it is, and with the peak concurrency growth SecondLife is seeing - well, such things are becoming more important.

Live Help is the first tier, and I've always gotten great help from the folks manning the triage center and providing the first line of defense against PEBKAC users and common problems. Be nice to Live Help.

Back To The Matter At Hand

Hours passed - almost 5 - and when I checked back on the land to see if it had transferred, the previous owner showed up. We chatted - the money had been credited to her account, and I was pleasantly surprised about the transfer of Lindens having gone through - and about the transfer of the land being something that she was concerned about when she didn't have to be. Why hadn't I IM'd her? Well, honestly, I wasn't sure that she would tell me the truth or that I would get a response from her - a penguin's experience with humanity hasn't always been that great. Still, by not IMing her I didn't give her a chance to tell me the truth. Bad penguin. No sushi.

On a whim, I asked her to cancel the sale and put the sale of the land up for 1 Linden to me. She did so. Within moments... it worked, the land was transferred, and she could spend her money with no worries. We chatted a bit, and I was somewhat surprised that Chastity Belts were such a commodity in SecondLife. A brief an interesting chat ensued on the sexual fetish business - specifically hers - and so I actually got some research done too. Not too bad.

I emailed support - told them that the support request was not a pressing matter in my situation - and that I had changed it into a bug report, and that the bug report was filed.

Lessons Learned

• You can probably trust someone who sells chastity belts.
• I should have IM'd the person who I was buying from before involving Live Help; had I done so I may not have needed to submit a support request - just a bug report.
• The support system on weekends and off hours should probably be addressed by Linden Labs before someone less understanding puts on a postal uniform.
• Chastity belts are pretty complicated things.
• People like chatting with penguins and doing business with them.