Since Christmas older residents have had a strange sense of da ja vu. Crashes every 5 minutes, the "black body" as your avatars textures refuse to load - a return, in fact to the "bad old days". Now for us old timers this is just a minor irritation, in fact many of us suspected that it over enthusiastic staff parties at first, combined with the usual in rush of new residents.
I think most of us expected things to settle down and get back to usual once the holidays were over, but, in fact the strangeness continued. In fact in the last few weeks things have started getting really strange.
The first clue was a friend who burst onto my im panel in a flurry of swear words - some of which even I didn't know (you have to admit, Second Life is educational). After she calmed down I managed to ask what was wrong, it seems she had just settled down to some quality time with her significant other, their first quality time in a while, everything was going well when she crashed - annoying but it happens and can be laughed off, but on relogging she gets the "region has begun log out process your account wont be available for 5 minutes", annoying but as this seems to be a default glitch she clicked ok and tried again - success! Except she had been logged in, naked (well more or less naked, if you know what I mean - she had been on a spending spree in Insolence), to an info hub FULL of people... quickly she got her friend to teleport her home, ahh oh well, a funny story, except 5 minutes later the scene was repeated only she got logged in to a different region. In the space of 45 minutes she had crashed, and been logged into to anywhere except where she wanted to be SEVEN times, it somewhat killed the romantic mood. I laughed, I admit, and put it down to just one (or two) peoples misfortune, but I started paying more attention to the chatter in the bars, seems my friend wasn't alone, the crashes were happening to everyone, more and more of the time - my own personal record was twelve crashes in an hour. Still switch to another viewer and things improved.
Unfortunately that wasn't the end of the surprises LL had in store, used to these old style glitches and ready for something new? Linden Labs is proud to present the newest glitch...phantom land! A friend owns an island, a lovely island - and was most disturbed to log in and find herself sinking, at a quite genteel rate, into the ground. After a quick look around she logged out thinking it must be one of those, "clear cache, log back in" glitches...but no, after a relog she was still up to her neck in her beach. A quick phone call to LL and many apologies later it is explained that the servers in AZ are having issues. (Really, servers, which need to be kept cool, being housed in a desert and they are having problems - fancy that). Linden Labs, did manage to relocate the phantom island so the actual island was there and the phantom was just off the coast.
And now I come to the final and most distressing glitch, not a new glitch by any means but refined to a level rarely seen before. Missing inventory.
Usually a few items go astray and you clear cache, log back in and bingo - there it is, but not in this new more fiendish version. Suddenly the hair you are wearing isn't in your inventory, it doesn't exist, it is still there, everyone can still see it, but you can't take it off or replace it, or detach it because it isn't in your inventory (only funny if the neon pink pigtail demo is being worn by someone else when it happens).
A friend of mine has the interesting problem of three quarters of his inventory vanished - but only on his home computer, on his works computer everything is still there, a complete reinstall of SL didn't help and the official response to LL help line was "That's odd, don't really know what to recommend", honest, if nothing else.
Another friend had all the outfits for a photographic shoot vanish - for a week, in a flat spin she asked me to take charge of the men's outfit, on the day of the shoot, I had given out 2 of the outfits when I crashed. On my return I was missing almost four thousand of my inventory items including the last suit - relogging, clearing cache - nothing worked, the suit was GONE. A frantic call to the designer and a replacement was found. Twenty four hours later, the suit (and the other four thousand items)were back. A curious twist to this is something I discovered, after my brush with missing inventory I decided that really, twenty five thousand items is a bit much (don't look at me like that, shopping is my hobby and I was a lucky chair addict), so I pruned, I spent a morning doing nothing but deleting things. I emptied my trash, I cleared my cache and I logged out, pleased that now I was down to under twenty thousand items. Imagine my dismay when I logged back in later that day to find all my inventory there exactly as it was before my mega clean out. The moral might be, don't organise your inventory, leave to run wild and let it surprise you.
What is the cause of the sudden instability of our beloved SecondLife? I can't answer, obviously LL are aware of the problems and are working on the fixes. Meanwhile, my best advice is only make sure you are wearing something at all times, and preferably something that preserves your modesty and you like enough to wear for a while if the worst happens.
We have had reports of old IMs, some as old as 2 months, reappearing in chat as if they were just resent. We want to assure residents we believe this is a technical problem and not associated with anything intentional or malicious. We are investigating the cause and if you wish to send in a support ticket with your experience we will pass that information on to the investigative team.
