Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas.
~ Calvin Coolidge
We at ZoHa Islands would like to take a moment to let you, our valuable customer, know how thankful we are for your support of our business. Without you, we wouldn’t be doing what we love.
We wish you all a safe and happy holiday.
~ ZoHa Islands Management and Sales team.
When asked “What’s the one thing Linden Lab could do that would have the biggest impact on further improving your Second Life experience?” residents responded with a resounding request to have a way to communicate suggestions for improvements or ideas with Linden Lab — from different approaches for the way things are done today, to brand new features that could dramatically improve their experiences, to seemingly small things that could have a big impact. As a result, Linden Lab has created a page on the Second Life website for residents to use to share suggestions.
The Feedback and Suggestions page (clickable link), allows residents to submit thoughts, ideas, and suggestions for improvement. You can also find this page by going to the Second Life website and clicking on Help and finding New Feature Suggestions in the drop down.
Just sign-in with your Second Life account, select the topic or category that is most appropriate, and describe your suggestion in the text box. Once you submit, you’ll see a confirmation page and receive an automated email as well. Linden Lab has indicated they will not be able to reply to individual suggestions, but that each idea will be routed to the appropriate Lindens and each one will be reviewed and considered.
Linden Lab is always on the lookout for ideas as they continue to surface in social media, direct conversations, or via JIRA, but this new page should make it easier than ever for any Second Life Resident to share suggestions directly with them.
Linden Lab emphasizes this is not a portal for support requests, bug reports, and other inquiries. Residents should continue to use the Support and Downloads page and the JIRA to report problems or get support (hover your cursor over the orange text and you can see the clickable link).
I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers, ZI Social Media Manager
Linden Lab has announced a new and improved Second Life experience, due to some much-needed updates and completion of projects that should make your Second Life experiences faster, smoother, and more reliable. Of course, using the latest version of the official SL viewer will ensure that you will see the benefits of the improvements, but I have no doubt that Firestorm and other TPVs (third party viewers) have already done so, or will catch up very soon. As you know the folks over at Firestorm meet regularly with the SL team at Linden Lab and work hand-in-hand with their technology.
We all knew they were working on something, because Second Life has been hiccuping and burbling more than usual lately. It will all be worth it, however, if we can see significant improvement to performance. Hopefully without having to run out and buy a new computer to keep up with the technological changes!
In an article posted in the Featured News blog on the Second Life website, Linden Lab indicated the following had undergone serious improvement. You will note one thing they worked on, which has been the bane of every group’s existence, is the quirky and unreliable group chat.
(the following is a direct quote from the article on the blog)
1. Speeding Up the Marketplace
If you visit the Marketplace today, you should be seeing a much snappier experience than in the past. We recently deployed infrastructure upgrades for the Marketplace, and the site has since shown some of the best performance we’ve ever seen from it. Even during peak usage periods over the weekend, when in the past performance would degrade, we’re seeing response times that average 70% faster and page load times that are 30% faster than before the changes.
2. Improving Group Chat
Last week, we also deployed new group chat server configurations. Our internal metrics are showing dramatic improvements in group chat performance, and we hope that you’re seeing that in your own experience as well. We are still seeing some cases in which performance for some groups degrades for shorter periods of time than before, and we are continuing to investigate and make changes; the project isn’t finished, but we’ve made a lot of progress.
3. Faster Texture & Mesh Loading
The entire grid is now using a CDN service for textures and meshes. This change means that textures and meshes should load more quickly, particularly for those who login to Second Life from places that are far from our US data centers. Our testing showed dramatic improvements: average download times for textures and meshes have been reduced by more than 50% on average, and the improvement is even more dramatic outside of North America.
4. Quicker Viewer-Server Communications
Another way we’re enhancing Second Life performance is through our HTTP project, which improves the way your Viewer communicates with grid services. With the HTTP Project Viewer out now, the faster content download times you’ll see thanks to the CDN change get even better – we’re talking 80% faster!
As you look for these improvements, please bear in mind this important note from Oz Linden:
“The CDN (and HTTP in those viewers that have them) improvements for texture and mesh data are improvements to how long it takes to download the data. Once they’ve been downloaded, your viewer caches them locally so the next time you need that data it doesn’t need to download them at all. What that means is that these improvements mostly affect how quickly you see new things: places and objects you’ve never seen before. You probably won’t see a big difference in familiar places because your viewer should be using cached data for those.
So… now’s the time to try checking out places you’ve never seen before!
The use of pipelined HTTP for the initial load of your inventory when you log in matters every time, since while we cache some inventory data locally we always make sure it’s correct by loading it all at the beginning of your session.”
So, How’s Second Life Performing for you? Linden Lab wants your feedback! Linden Lab recognizes that performance improvements are not as sexy as a new feature, but these changes will (hopefully) improve your experience in world and lessen your frustration. These changes directly impact all our Second Life experiences and our daily lives in world. If you are noticing these improvements, they would like to know in the Forums, on Twitter, or however you prefer.
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On a side note, thank you all once again for helping make our 7th Anniversary Celebration last week a success! We wouldn’t be here without you, our residents and merchants. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for helping make ZoHa Islands one of the top estates in SL!
I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers, Social Media Manager
If you weren’t able to attend, you really missed out on a fabulous celebration! ZoHa Islands’ own DeeLish Wishbringer planned and executed and fabulous day of amazing live singers, a tribute band, and a DJ for eight straight hours. The stage and landscaping were amazing and really made for a fun atmosphere and lots of partying and music!
It was a great line up of music from several different genres of music. First we kicked off the event at Noon with Gweeb, a live musician who sang a variety of songs for our enjoyment. Our second entertainer was a no-show, and so Gweeb graciously stayed for a second hour. His gentle humor and wonderful songs made for a fun time.
At 3pm, Quartz took over the stage and entertained us with his rockin’ tunes. He is fun to listen to, and had some great music.
After Quartz, we were entertained by Wytchwhisper, who was a replacement for another artist who had to cancel at the last minute. We appreciate Wytch stepping in to fill in for us. Her unique music and silly humor was very entertaining.
At 4pm, the stage was set for Lightning Strikes, a tribute band who played head-banging tunes by Black Label Society. They rocked the stage until 5:30 and provided a wonderful show.
DJ Buzrd Draconia took over the mic and brought us some classic rock tunes to round out the evening. Those who didn’t stick around for DJ Buz missed out on a lot of awesome, rockin’ tunes. He spun his music until 8pm and finished up a fabulous day of rockin’ entertainment.
Thank you to Dee for pulling together this amazing day. Thank you one and all who attended the event.
I pulled together some video I took throughout the day. I tried to include an entire song from each entertainer. I don’t do machinima; this is strictly a capture from the Xplit Gamecaster, so it’s not as smooth as machinima is, but it gets the job done. It was long enough that I had to split it into two videos.
I hope you enjoy, and I look forward to seeing everyone next fall as we celebrate our 8th anniversary!
I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers, ZoHa Islands Social Media Manager
[Ed note: I fixed the link. It now contains the correct SLURL.)
I received an email that the premium gifts from Linden Lab were available, and in the same email was information about the Haunted Halloween Tour in SL. Naturally, I had to go check it out.
Created by Linden Lab, this has to be one of the scariest, creepiest, grossest haunted/horror site that I’ve seen so far. I decided it deserved a v-blog. But even if you watch the video you MUST go and experience it for yourself. Warning: This is NOT for the faint of heart nor the faint of stomach!
Go to the Portal Park and enter the Halloween portal. But be prepared. This will be something you won’t soon forget!
Enjoy!!
I remain respectfully yours,
Suzanne Piers, ZoHa Islands Social Media Manager
Recently there was a change in Second 2.3 of the Terms of Service (TOS) that had many content creators and artists in SL quite alarmed, sending some running for the hills. I also manage a club in Second Life (because apparently I don’t have enough to do! hehe) and he lost his Estate Manager for his sim (he runs an artistic community sim besides the club) because she is an artist that is leaving SL. She did not want to take the chance that anything she created in Second Life would be appropriated by Linden Lab.
Recently, Linden Lab posted the following blog post in response to the general concern (read: freak out) by many in Second Life:
“When we updated our Terms of Service in August 2013, the revised language of Section 2.3, the “Service Content License,” caused concern among certain Second Life creators. The revision to this section was worded in such a way that these creators expressed concern that we intended to appropriate their original creations and sell or license such creations without their permission. As our historical practice demonstrates and as we have since tried to clarify, this was absolutely not our intent. Creators are the lifeblood of Second Life. It is you who have populated Second Life with a petabyte worth of unique content and experiences, and it is important for our collective and continued success that you remain confident in continuing to create in our world. To be clear: Linden Lab respects the proprietary rights of Second Life’s content creators and prides itself in its success in providing platforms on which users can create original content and profit from their creations.
“As part of an update to our Terms of Service today, we have made a modification to further clarify Section 2.3. The updated section still provides Linden Lab with the rights that we need in order to operate and promote Second Life, so you will see that we have retained much of the language as the previous version. However, the updated section now also includes limits that better match our intended meaning, and we hope will assuage some of the concerns we heard about the previous version.
“First, the modified version limits our rights with respect to user-created content in Second Life by restricting our use ‘inworld or otherwise on the Service.’ Additionally, it limits our right to ‘sell, re-sell or sublicense (through multiple levels)’ your Second Life creations by requiring some affirmative action on your part in order for us to do so. This language mirrors the corresponding User Content License currently in Section 2.4, which has been part of the Terms of Service for years.
“We know that the legal language of documents such as the Terms of Service can seem daunting, and we expect that some creators may continue to have concerns about particular elements of the updated agreement. Today’s revision to this section of the Terms of Service more closely expresses our intent – that we do not intend to appropriate or sell your content outside of our Service – and our hope is that the limitations clarified in the updated language of this section will support creators’ confidence in our platform.
“As with any document like this, it’s important to read the whole Terms of Service before agreeing to it. Section 2.3 isn’t the only thing that’s changed – we’ve also added the updated policy for skill gaming, which we blogged about here – but we wanted to blog about this update to be clear about what’s different in this section, what it means, and why we made the change.”
Content creators and artists: If you continue to be concerned about not being allowed to bring your creations out of SL, please consider having that section of the TOS reviewed by a RL attorney before deciding to bolt out of SL. We residents of SL really enjoy and need your beautiful content contributions to this amazing world.
I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers
ZoHa Islands Social Media Manager