Penny Patton

"Eventually"?

The bursting hype bubble, dwindling userbase, abysmal reputation are all direct results of LL's approach and attitude over the years.

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The Digital Pasture - SL from a cow's point of view. When the cow is also a designer.

Phoebe Avro

Hihi,

What I men't was like one day the staff will come to work at LL and see there is 3 people in sl and everyone else left to go do something else!

Penny Patton

I predict that will be within days of viable competition appearing unless Rodvik is really able to keep up the momentum in turning things around at LL.

Latif Khalifa

What momentum? During the time with Rodvik at the helm some crucial things like communications and engagement with the community only got worse. Closing down Jira is just the latest example of this trend.

Tengu Yamabushi

Spend some time reading here...

Glassdoor: Linden Lab

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Penny Patton

Communication has always been a weak point for LL, at least by the time I joined in 2005. It's debatable that it's gotten worse under Rodvik (he's not the one to close down the official forums and tho he doesn't communicate as often through the blogs/announcements he has been much, much, MUCH more active in engaging directly with the community via forums and other avenues than I've ever seen from a Linden).

On the other hand, we've seen a lot of improvements under Rodvik, too. LL is finally starting to work on features SL has needed since the beginning, and they've been delivering on new features and fixes at a much greater pace than LL has ever managed before.

Of course they're still just as likely to completely screw up the execution of those new features (mesh arrived broken, new profiles arrived incomplete, invisiprims phased out with only one single end user use for them addressed) and fixes, so there's still room for improvement, but there IS improvement.

Pretty remarkable improvement, given SL's history.

Kadah Coba

Honestly, I'm surprised it took this long for this to happen, I was expecting them to pull this a while ago.

Pretty much this. ^

I find a problem, I collect what I can about it, go look for an existing report and either add details to existing one or file a new one documenting the problem. If we take how dupes were handled prior to today, under this new system, everyone other than the first one to file it is just going to only see a closed comment of just "dupe of thing you cannot see".
Why bother reporting anything if its only going to be a dupe?
Why even bother going to the bug reporting system if its than a gloried crash reporter now?

The direction the current LL is taking LL is seeming more and more like something I will not like. For the first time since I joined, I'm making serious reconsiderations to my long term dedication to both use and actively support SL. There are a few experience features in my query I still wish to complete and try to push up to LL, after that I'm going to ponder if I have the will to continue or if its time to move on to something else.

Victor1st

The JIRA was full of ego inflated know it alls who trampled on other folks bug reports thinking that they knew best. I gave up on the Jira years ago and refused to use it. The inherent problem which plagues Jiras as well is that only the "well known" folks who put a bug report in and then spread the bug to their group and friends got it looked at cause of all the comments, which flamed the ego maniacs who trolled the Jiras in the first place.

I am really surprised the JIRA didn't close down sooner. I am even more surprised someone just didnt say "wipe the lot and start from scratch".

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Kadah Coba

Someone is going to have to do a lot of work on the LSL wiki templates. Those directly link to searching the Jira for issues that mention the pages topic. This would be completely useless now and any known issues and workarounds with an LSL features are to be unknown for this point on. Happy blind struggling.

Tengu Yamabushi

Well, actually, they did that... at least twice - 'Feature Voting Tool' then 'pJIRA' and then 'JIRA' (with periodic flushings down the memory hole both during and in-between).

This time, it's basically:

Kadah Coba

If LL's reason for closing it is only "video games don't have jiras" then they have forgotten the point where other games do not have the entirety of their content within the game made by the players themselves. If that is the case, we are truly in trouble.


Sometimes I wish I could:

Eboni Khan

I don't disagree, but all these VW companies think they are too good for sex, and/or user created content with an easy way to make money.

I don't think anyone will make a world as open as SL any time in the near future. All the SL killers have failed, epic failed.

Nika Talaj

Searching JIRA for known issues and workarounds was a big help to my SL. As others have said, it's a necessity for active scripters.

On thinking it over, I think that something like what Darius suggests is worth doing, because that will help residents. In fact, I would support anyone who wanted to put up a more traditional bug repository, with searchable fields etc.. I don't think we should have to, but again, it would help residents.

Here's Nalates' current take. Clearly trying to find a positive reaction to make to this. Blessings for that. I have to say that if I were a person able to attend user group meetings with the Lindens, I would simply stop attending at this point, until/unless some mitigation of this policy were announced.

Cincia Singh

Ahhh another change by LL and the usual cries of "the sky is falling" are heard far and wide. Of course if they keep it up eventually they'll be right just like a broken analog clock is right twice a day. And next out of the starting blocks are the ideas for a "resident run replacement" for the change. Yea ... like that won't blow up in someone's face and be totally useless in short order? Sadly the Jira changes come about for the same reason other communication routes to LL have been shut down; the screaming and crying and bullying and flaming made it useless for the intended purpose.

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*My concern can be measured in micro give-a-shits, and I'm working on nanotechnology!*

Penny Patton

Wait, where have they given that as a reason? Also, they provided reasons other than that on the blog post linked at the start of this thread, so it wouldn't be "the only" reason.

Qie Niangao

Maybe you don't need to reference known defects multiple times a day, just to do what you're trying to do in SL. I do. So either what I do in SL won't be possible in the future (in which case--believe me--I can find other things to do instead of SL), or there will need to be a replacement for the Jira.

You wouldn't have to use it, so you can stop fretting about it, okay?

Kadah Coba

I know nothing ¬_¬'

Sahkolihaa Contepomi

As a 'Bug Hunter' contributor, this feels like a slap to the face. As others have mentioned and as I also mentioned during Oz's user group, I'm going to lose a lot if not all motivation to even bother reporting bugs if they get closed as a duplicate because I cannot search for others.

The new submission form makes no sense either. Oz has already told us, many times, to keep things to the point - ie, short description of the bug and steps to reproduce including environment details and logs if needed. The new one looks as if they want a story instead.

Sigh. I guess I should start finding something else to do.

Jopsy Pendragon

What the JIRA needed was a 'Hot or Not' contest type thing... it'd put up two issues side by side and you pick which one you want more than the other.

Let people hammer away at that for a while and it'd certainly bubble to the top the most popular issues. Vastly 'not hot' issues could be closed as 'sorry, just not important'.

AshaSekayi Ra

You are right about the sex/adult/18+ issue. I'm always astounded that the companies that had potential always got hung up on that issue and then choked. But, it just stands to reason that some company will find the balance and take virtual worlds to the next level eventually. I'll give you that I don't see any real competition for them out there yet though.

Brenda Archer

I suspect the next SL will not be a U.S. company, as we are still deep in a pendulum swing in the direction of puritanism. It might be distributed amongst its users.

It needs to be able to reach out to the same kind of multinational audience SL has, and it needs to be able to process micropayments for that same audience, or harmonize with a service that can. In many ways, we're still here because the L enables the economy.

It needs to not tie itself too closely to a platform that is suspected of having privacy issues (such as Facebook). Privacy issues and UGC do not mix. Lack of privacy in a UGC setting is even worse than content theft because people will be afraid to test the waters when the other residents are playing uncensored.

Amity Slade

I had always thought the JIRA was a brilliant scheme for Linden Lab to get its own customers to volunteer free labor to improve a product for Linden Lab's own profit. And all they had to do to profit from all this free labor from customers was to provide those customers with the feeling that they were participating in something. Of all the other screwy things it seems that Linden Lab does, the one thing it always seemed great at doing was finding ways to get customers emotionally invested in providing cheap or free labor from which it could in turn profit.

Marine Kelley

Well the problem is that testing software and filing accurate bug-reports is a full-time job, and a rigorous, thankless one at that. Opening the JIRA to the public is asking the random user to do the job of a paid senior tester for free, and expecting valuable input. That of course can't work since only a small proportion of users are IT professionals, so LL gets a very poor signal-to-noise ratio. Non-professionals use the JIRA the way they know best, a web forum.

But although making the JIRA public was a bad solution, that was the less bad solution of all. LL NEEDS a public issue tracker. The management cannot expect the interns to find all the bugs by themselves, it's impossible because SL is too big. And if we can't search for existing bugs anymore (except those who have already been filed as of today), eventually the JIRA will die by attrition, and so will the (remaining) enthusiasm of the users.

This means a whackload of duplicate bugs hence much more triage work, severed relations between related bugs, reduced inter-Resident help (because I don't know about you, but when I search for a bug on the JIRA, not only do I want to make sure I'm not the only one having it, but also I would like to find a workaround someone else would have explained).

In the long term that means more frustration, worse "SL is crap" overall feeling, worse word-of-mouth communication... LL is only hurting themselves here.

I don't believe it is an attempt to "sweep the dust under the rug" though, because the existing bugs are still visible. So I don't believe it is a necessary step before selling LL to another company, or a precaution before the exposure to Steam. I really think this is just a defence against all the bad mouthing over the JIRA from people who don't know better, but this is a very poor move that will come back to bite LL in the ass.

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90% of Sturgeon's law is crap.

Marine Kelley

It was true at first, people used to fix LL's bugs for free from sheer enthusiasm, like Nicholaz Beresford who fixed many many bugs in his time. Open-sourcing the viewer was certainly an attempt at harnessing the coding power of many professionals for very little buck (because LL still has to pay people to interface with open-source devs and to triage their bug fixes, so it is not totally free, it's just much cheaper).

I've always refused to engage myself into anything related to fixing LL's bugs for that reason. But often when LL releases a new feature (like Pathfinding lately), it comes with its own share of bugs that have to be fixed before releasing a new version of a TPV.

So while in the past people used to fix LL's bugs for free because they were enthusiastic, now they do so because they have no choice.

I'm seeing more and more open-source devs getting pissed at LL and slowly disengaging themselves. I know LL doesn't like drama, and does not expect drama from technically minded people because they think we're above that. So when a dev rants and quits, LL turns a deaf ear. They're wrong. Everyone makes drama when they feel unimportant, and that's how LL makes us feel all the time.

Adeon Writer

I've ditched the SL Jira a while back, so I can't fairly say I'm leaving it because of this, but I might have.