Notes on the SecondLife Townhall Transcript of May 3rd, 2007.

I missed the Townhall, but fortunately they posted the transcript. There are some interesting excerpts here:

...[12:39] Jeska Linden shouts: Kymber Schnook: The blog indicates that LL will provide an exporter for Maya for the creation of sculpted prims. The range of pricing for different versions of Maya runs from $2,000 to $7,000 USD. Will you make available a more affordable means of export at the time of introduction of the sculpted prim?
[12:40] Cory Linden shouts: I agree that only being able to export from Maya is suboptimal. We expect other exporters to be written and someone could take the open source client and build an editor there as well...

Suboptimal? Yes. But why wasn't this started with the open source client first? Why start with Autodesk? We'll never know for sure.

Next - and emphasis mine:

...[12:47] Jeska Linden shouts: Sascha Vandyke: If there’s a database issue and deployment problem, why don’t you put a time limit on free accounts?
[12:48] Cory Linden shouts: We actually had time limits long, long, long, LONG ago. The problem is that people take a while to learn to use SL, plus great events or builds often bring folks back in weeks/months/years down the road.
[12:49] Cory Linden shouts: It would be bad for all of our businesses to lose that ability for casual users to come back in. Plus, as we have discussed, free accounts are less of the load than you might expect.

So stop with the 'free accounts cause babies to be born naked' argument.

[12:52] Jeska Linden shouts: Katrina Bekkers: since the Open Letter indeed HAD a follow-up from LL, is this *the* way to contact them from now on? since the undercutting of other venues to contact them (and no, a comments-disabled blog and an unresponsive support/tracker don’t count), you’re endorsing resorting to 2000+ residents signed petitions to make issues heard now?
[12:52] Cory Linden shouts: What Torley said…
[12:53] Cory Linden shouts: In this case, since scaling and stability are the primary internal focus right now this was an excelletn opportunity for a conversation.
[12:53] Cory Linden shouts: As the commuynity team has been bloggin about, there are various methods for contacting us and talking to Lindens, including office hours, etc.

Well, 'what Torley said' apparently wasn't good enough because it came to an open letter, as much as I disagree with the basis. So there was no answer here, and worse - not even an admittance that the systems being pointed to aren't being used for some strange reasons. Having fumbled through them (without obvious links from the SecondLife website), I'd rather just write lots of emails and send them to Santa Claus. Maybe an elf will read them. Is that fair for me to say? Perhaps not, but it is fair for me to express how I feel. I doubt I feel alone there as it took a lot of people to sign a letter. The ease of use of the Open Letter might be a sign...

But of course, later, we see this in the transcript:

[12:56] Jeska Linden shouts: BlckCobra Shikami: Are our bug reports and crash dumps taken serious and analysed or do you just wait 2 month and send an eMail (like today) asking wether the bug still matter? Does it make sense for us to send bug reports and crash dumps or do we betetr save our time on that?
[12:56] Cory Linden shouts: Please start focusing that energy on the public jira. That is the best vector for demonstrating repeatable bugs and getting the data to the people working on the problems.

'Please start focusing that energy'? If Jira (what a friendly name!) could focus it, it should have already. If there is anything that Linden Lab should be getting out of this is that Jira may be opaque when they're asking people to use it to focus.

Props to Nel Shan for injecting some common sense regarding inventory:

[12:55] Jeska Linden shouts: Nel Shan: One of the major issues that comes up with inventory loss is the fact that there is no way to verify the loss. This leads to the impression that the Lindens believe that anyone complaining about inventory loss is trying to scam Linden Labs. As well as trying to reduce inventory loss, will there be a way of verifying it introduced?
[12:55] Torley Linden shouts: Re: bug status, you can read the Issue Tracker instructions - https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Issue_tracker
[12:55] Torley Linden shouts: See the procedure and the bottom section about “WorkingOnIt Linden”
[12:55] Cory Linden shouts: That’s a very good idea and I will pass it along to the people focused on the issues.

And last, but by no means least of my favorite quotes:

[12:28] Jeska Linden shouts: Chaos Mohr: What is being done to address land database issues which result in things such as parcels being paid for and not transferring, parcels being sold to multiple people etc? This seems to be a major technical issue which keeps cropping up and hasn’t been fixed yet.
[12:28] Cory Linden shouts: These are likely symtpoms of the broader stresses on the central db and transactions..
[12:29] Cory Linden shouts: as I mentioned int he blog post, we are attacking these problems in two ways, to first identity weak spots in the current system and to build a better transaction system as well.

Could these broader symptoms be linked to other bugs which are being attributed to human error? If I think so, I know at least 10 people who think so as well. But this is a step, because it's now on public record that there may be issues related to the central database and transactions - but the way it is set up, it is the community's word against Linden Lab's apparent strong belief otherwise. This is a minor victory for those of us rallying on this point - and which was neglected in the 'Open Letter'.

All in all, I did not miss much in the way of the Town Hall except lag and... lag. If the forums were used again, they probably wouldn't need a town hall... if the avenues of communication didn't keep pointing to something which sounds like a seasoning used in Indian food, they probably wouldn't need a town hall... but there was a town hall... brought about by the lack of communication... and the main answer was, "Use the stuff that didn't work for you in the past".

OK...