Login Difficulties

On Saturday afternoon, I was invited to a formal party, and showed up at 5 PM. At 5:15 PM, Second Life suddenly seized up and crashed on me, the "view IMs or quit" window prominently displayed. It had been happening to me a little more than usual lately, so I relogged. Trying to get back in, I got a message saying that I couldn't log in, saying there was a problem with the clock. Confused, I tried again. Same result.

I waited a while, and tried again, with no luck. Finally after several tries I checked the SL Blog, and found the following:

Login Difficulties

[5:15PM Pacific] We’re currently experiencing an issue with logins. You may see a message that indicates you cannot log in due to the system clock being set incorrectly. As a temporary workaround, setting your computer clock to Pacific Standard Time should allow you to login.

We’re working on resolving this issue as quickly as possible and will post here with updates.

I decided to try one more time before resetting my clock to California time, and it worked! Well, sort of. I was a cloud, and the voice and sound were gone. Just about everyone else was cloudy too. It was soon clear others were having problems. Many of the others were gone, and the hostess was putting up the Internet address for the music stream so people could hear it outside the SL client, humbly apologizing to everyone for the trouble.

I waited a few minutes for the cloud to fade. It soon did, but I got a bit of a shock. It seems SL had lost most of my fox avatar, leaving me a shape I hadn't seen for a long while. I'd been "ruthed" for the first time in well over a year, the look so familiar to long-time residents.

Others at the party had lost items too, such as jewelry. Someone suggested that I clear cache and relog. I did so, and coming back, was able to become a foxy guy again, much to my relief (and the others around me and in IM).

Leaving the place after the party, I got my sound and voice back. Though as so often these days, things still could take a while to load due to the lag.

The metaverse thrown out of wack because of a clock? Something seems a bit "cuckoo."

Bixyl Shuftan

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Post Christmas Grid blues

Each year, after the Christmas gifts have been unwrapped and all those people who treated themselves or family to new computers/Internet access, Secondlife sees a surge of new signups and more people using it than ever - the problem with that?
Quite simply the grid cannot handle it!
Most of us who spend regular time inworld are aware of the issues and mostly what is behind it - basically once the grid reaches 75k+ online everything goes down the toilet - teleports, transactions, rezzing, building even dressing becomes problematic.

Lets have a look at the last few days:

[RESOLVED] Logins and In-world Issues

Posted by Status Desk on January 6th, 2009 at 10:45 am PST

[Resolved 10:45am PST] - The database has recovered and all issues have been resolved.

[10:30am PST] - We are currently experiencing a problem with the database. There may be difficulties with logging in, rezzing objects, completing transactions, and searching. We are aware of this issue and our ops team are working to resolve it as swiftly as possible. In the mean time, please avoid making important transactions or rezzing no-copy objects.

[RESOLVED] Inworld Issues/Logins Disabled
Posted by Status Desk on January 6th, 2009 at 04:10 pm PST
[RESOLVED] Inworld Issues
Posted by Status Desk on January 7th, 2009 at 02:58 pm PST
[RESOLVED] Inworld Issues
Posted by Status Desk on January 8th, 2009 at 01:34 pm PST
[RESOLVED] Logins Disabled
Posted by Status Desk on January 10th, 2009 at 01:54 pm PST
[RESOLVED] Logins Disabled and Inworld Issues
Posted by Status Desk on January 10th, 2009 at 04:53 pm PST
[RESOVLED] Logins disabled
Posted by Status Desk on January 11th, 2009 at 11:20 am PST
[RESOLVED] Logins disabled
Posted by Status Desk on January 13th, 2009 at 03:39 pm PST

Each of these represents times when Logins have been restricted, a black week for any Secondlife business.
Some have called for allowing only premium accounts to log in at these times and yet others slam this notion as many who would like to go premium cannot do so, therefore making the idea unjust.
Then there is the question of bot activity, if as Linden Lab numbers suggest, 10% of those signed in are bots then surely shutting these out would allow real players more of a chance to log in?
But how do we or Linden Lab know which accounts are bots?
Age old question and one many have tried to answer - but to be honest our answers do not matter Linden Lab will do what Linden Lab chooses as always.
I am not technically minded but even I can see the grid is struggling - Linden Lab says 10% bots - most believe that is a very conservative estimate it is more likely to be around 25 - 30%. Now how about if the bots were registered? Then when the Grid is struggling bots are logged out? Wouldn't that make more sense than locking out paying Residents? Even those who run bots would rather have paying Residents inworld than their bots surely?
Hopefully with all the grid issues Linden Lab will finally make a move on the traffic scam that causes most to use bots - once the reason for them is gone it will make the need for bots redundant. But for now Linden Lab have chosen to chase their tails and deal with issues as they arise rather than dealing with the root cause (as always).

Dana Vanmoer

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Eye on the BLOG, new log in page

OOOoooooo a new shiny interface!!!
'We have made a few changes to the Second Life login screen, as you may have noticed, and we hope you’ll find them useful. You will see headlines from two sources, the most recent posts from the Official Second Life Blog and also the most recent Second Life Grid Status Reports. You can also subscribe to either feed, directly from the login screen, using the handy new RSS buttons.'

Reading through the comments after this post is great fun - for anyone needing a laugh I highly recommend it - some points of interest that have been brought up are extremely accurate.
It is good to see the attempt at feedback for those that the polls work for, although to my mind it is very limited, sometimes the answer is not a simple yes or no so i must therefore decline to answer, which of course would not be recorded.
The questions don't seem to be that relevant to customer experience, but it is good to see some Lindens actually taking the time to find some kind of feedback since the reports page still has no comment option.

One of the main problems with any RSS is that it's often way behind what is actually occurring at that given moment and as Katt Linden has said:
'The folks who post to the Status Reports are, themselves, the people working on the problems — the team designates one individual who updates that report. Sometimes they don’t post details because they don’t yet know the cause of problems. Sometimes issues are not widespread, for instance whatever had some experiencing login failure just now, and in cases like that the Status Report might not always be updated. (I don’t know what happened there, I’m simply listing some reasons I can think of why the page may not be up to date in terms of your own experience of the grid.)'
This brings up a couple of points:
1, If multiple people are reporting on a problem there are probably double the amount who actually experience it and don't know how/want to report on it.
2, Even if the people working on problems don't know what is causing them or how long it may take to fix it residents still need to be warned and to know they are not the only ones facing the issue, be it transaction, log-in, database failure etc........
3, It should be updated as soon as an issue becomes a problem and also warning sent out inworld (maybe a link to the grid status inworld so people don't have to open a browser to check).

The surveys may work out to be a good feedback tool eventually once the questions are honed better towards what a Resident is actually looking for (not an easy task and not one I would want) Christa Linden had this to say about them:
'We’ve initiated additional surveys to sample Resident attitudes across a range of subjects. We are experimenting with this as a new channel for communication and expect to hone the questions over time. Currently there are about a dozen questions on rotation. Some issues currently addressed include: brand awareness (”Have you seen the inSL logo used in your community?”), brand comprehension (”Do you know what the Second Life Grid is?”), popularity trends (”What is your favorite Second Life mainland community at the moment?”), and learning tool effectiveness (”Have you viewed Second Life Tutorials? What skills have the Tutorials helped you learn or improve?” ) among others. We hope that the data from these questions will help us understand common perceptions about the experience of being active in Second Life as well as identify the effectiveness of certain tools and programs.
We are looking into ways to share findings with Residents as well as how to extend these surveys in languages other than English. It will take time to get there. But we, as always, greatly appreciate your interest and patience!'

I guess more info is always good however we can get it but I will say that if the grid is offline and status and grid reports don't say otherwise it can be very frustrating as we Residents all know too well, so until this problem is fixed and Lag between the grid going offline and anything showing up on Log in screen or status reports then, to me, it's pretty useless but does give us something pretty to look at as we attempt to log in (P.S loved the suggestion to put a game on the Login screen for us when we can't log in and are waiting for the grid status to be updated LOL)
Dana

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Yes you can MAYBE log in, but why bother?

Unless you were lucky enough to log in amongst your friends you cannot get to them, TP is borked and I won't be trying to buy anything (The system is currently unable to process your request. The request timed out.). IMs work so at least you can talk (if your friends list loads that is) textures don't load, notecards ditto, oh and don't try to get dressed either because its a waste of time, I did eventually manage to get hair, but shoes? not there even after 15 minutes. It took 20 minutes to change pants and prims still havent appeared.
Walking? well if you call sliding across the ground with your hands on hips walking then that is at least possible
Uploading, don't even go there LOL
building seems to be possible and it even managed to delete the prims i rezzed which is a slight improvement from reports we have heard.

To give them their due (ROFL) LL are at least admitting they can't fix it and are keeping people informed:

[07:30AM 04/05/08] It seems the problem is even harder to nail down than we earlier supposed. We need to close logins again to go back to diagnostics. -Lotte

Hopefully we will all be back sometime this week with the new Havok4 working and transactions going through everytime, oh no thats just a dream I had once upon a time...........

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Second life grid wide issues, a black week for residents

After another week of inworld issues the World of Second Life® has finally come to a complete halt with logins being disabled as from 10.22 last night.
Said this time to be a problem with the ISPs who provide bandwidth for Second Life this is just the last in a very long list of problems which many are saying make SL™ such an unstable platform for any business to consider.
This week has been plagued by problems which present themselves by: login failure, teleporting, timeouts on the web page, support lines down, map usage, search functionality, IM/chat, add to that the fact that most of the week transactions have been failing grid wide, businesses will be suffering as residents hold tight to their purse strings.
Through load tests, updates and the installation of Havok 4 Linden Labs have worked hard to try to fix the issues but to no avail, this week has been a black week for most residents and definitely for business owners.
I am sure that many will agree with me that the long awaited Havok4 rollout has been over shadowed by the inworld problems facing most residents.
I know many are asking if the two are related and maybe, just maybe the Havok4 is not all its cracked up to be. Now I am no expert but I have been told that they are not related and Havok4 is actually making a difference. But with no logins and troubles when you do, who is going to believe that (apart from the techies out there)?

Update:[3.30 AM] [RESOLVED] - The doors are open and we are back. It turned out there were multiple issues with our ISPs network which have been worked around for now. The network provider is working to resolve the issue permanently - Matthew
OOPs looks like i was too quick to hope:
[05:20 AM 04/05/08] Unfortunately, connected to the earlier described problems with our ISP, we are getting reports of failing inworld services again. We are working to get it fixed again, and will keep you updated here.
[9:38 PM] We are continuing to work with the service provider, we will keep you posted as the details come in.
[8:34 PM] We have investigated network issues and determined connectivity issues with one of our service providers. Contact has been made and they are working to resolve this.
[7:31 PM] We are experiencing various inworld issues at this time, such as region down, logins failure, transactions, teleporting, timeouts on the webpage etc. We are aware of this problem and are working to resolve this as quickly as possible. Please refrain from any transactions at this time, as possible.

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What a wonderful world we have chosen to live in????

Yesterday saw record numbers logging into SL with a concurrency of over 66,000 online. While Philip Rosedale gets ready to go before The Congressional Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet and talk about "Applications and Avatars in a User-Generated Medium" we, actually using it, struggle with huge stability issues and stale transactions that have troubled the grid for most of the week.

The stability issues have plagued residents to such an extent that after a few hours at peak concurrency the actual users online dropped by more than half as most gave up in sheer frustration.

"Our database has crashed and caused in world services to go down. We expect it will be ten minutes minimum before we are up and running again."

This was the message on the blog followed by yet again "Resolved" which of course did not last long, Logins were problematic as were in world transactions, teleporting, maps, search, attaching objects and of course the support portal (just when you need it most).

Together with the new ToS and branding issues it is becoming obvious that its open for a competitor to step in, in my opinion, if there was another platform out there with similar capabilities most of SecondLife issues would soon clear up as people took a better option.

Yes of course people will still sign up and yes businesses will look at it as an option for their venture into the virtual world, but with all the bad press and Linden Lab doing everything they can to put residents off and now stopping the very people who have promoted them freely, what business will they have to sell in 5 years time? As one resident commented "When somebody steals a texture or build from another resident, LL tells us that it’s got nothing to do with them - but when we use THEIR graphics they suddenly start caring about copyright. Just keep looking after number one, LL - it’s what you do best."

The worst of this new ToS is the manner in which they have yet again failed to deal with the people it affects the most, 'Please check out Brand Center FAQ, if you’ve still got questions, please drop an email to tm-questions@lindenlab.com - note that the trademark team can’t guarantee that they’ll be able to respond personally to all the emails they receive. If your question is urgent, you should contact a trademark attorney.'

Anyone that is not an attorney, and even those that are practiced in trademark law, cannot give a straight answer as the new branding, FAQ and ToS together are confusing and complex even to the point of those legal eagles not being able to agree on what is now allowed and what is not.

I look forward to some clarification from a press release supposedly forthcoming from Linden Research Inc®

sources: SecondLife blog massively

UPDATE: Several In-World Services such as teleporting, map usage, search functionality, IM/chat and image upload failure are being experienced across Second Life. We are working as quickly as possible to resolve these issues. We will update you here as soon as further information is available. Thank you for your continued patience. (unsurprisingly I cannot log in right now getting DNS server errors, NOT mentioned on the list of problems)

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Can't get inworld? you are not alone

This is the error message I get when I try to log in, although from what support has said there could be several different variations that people are getting - the advice I was given - 'please wait 30 minutes then come back to live help if you still cannot log in'
They are aware of the problem and I was told to check the blog - oopppsssyy nothing on the blog about it, which of course I had to point out, 'We are aware of the problem and are considering a blog post about the issue, sorry for the inconvenience'

some good news I did manage to log in after downloading the new windlight release candidate but still Very VERY laggy

Dana

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Why You Can't Get In To SL Right Now!

IF YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO LOG IN TO SECOND LIFE at the moment, this explains why:


"[Updated] Service outage for certain regions

Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 2:16 PM PDT by: Maurice Linden
[Update 4:26PM PST 08/11/07]
Following the additional tests, we have concluded that code initially suspected to be at fault was not the root cause and so we will not be making any visible progress on this issue until Monday. To be clear, this does not mean that work on this issue has ceased (in fact, the opposite is true), it merely means that no patch or other fix is likely until next week. Several options in addition to the already written patch are also being researched in parallel, and it is looking like this issue may be the result of a network configuration problem rather than a “bug”. We will update again on Monday or as more information becomes available. Thank you for your patience."

This information comes from Linden Lab's website, which you can refer to for further updates as they become available.

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