On the Virtual Worlds Podcast this week we mentioned the rolling restart that updated a part of the Linden Scripting Language, the code that makes much of Second Life work. The update removed a feature, or fixed a bug, depending on your perspective. Chaos broke out accross the grid.
Lear Cale was building a ferris wheel whose occupants started spinning in their seats. Homer Horwitz had a series of multi-pose chairs that now had avatars embedded in the arm rests. Nack Barnes had an entire product line that couldn't be released, and a bar that nobody could sit in anymore. Charltina Christensen was planning a giant event across two sims (a wedding) when suddenly every single bit of furniture broke. A massive amount of content was ruined, and businesses were in jeopardy.
I contacted Soft Linden, the technician responsible for resolving the issue, to find out more. They declined to comment, and I was referred to the company JIRA; a central database for bug fix and new feature requests. The bug fix request to put things back the way they were is still there, and tells quite the story. Officially closed now, it garnered 93 votes and over 50 comments from desperate business owners pleading Linden Lab to roll back the clock. Dellybean North wrote: "Please, PLEASE restore this! You've just torpedoed a 20000L product my partner and I released a couple of weeks ago!"
While Soft Linden gave frequent updates on the progress of this fix in the comments, and was hailed by all those I interviewed for their speedy and attentive service on the issue, there was some confusion over why this was done in the first place. We know that the adjustment was to prevent sim crashes, but many felt that the particular method used was unnecessarily abrupt. This could have been done in a way that didn't disrupt content, and some who caught wind of the change ahead of time tried to warn the responsible Linden to no avail.
Instead, they debated whether the technique of placing an avatar in a specific position using this function was a "hack" or a "feature". Both Soft and Qarl Linden (who later joined the debate, although what part he played in the issue remains uncertain) assert that the use of this function in this way was a hack, while others felt that any use of a completely undocumented function could be thought of that way.
Of course, some questioned whether or not the Lindens should really be debating any of this at all. "The problem here is, that Qarl and Soft actually have the nerve to argue if this was a hack or not after there are dozens of content creators complaining that this breaks about 80% of all high quality furniture at the moment," stated Juliet Ceres in her comment.
Ultimately the issue can be blamed on a lack of communication on the impact of planned changes. The consequences were lost profit for many business owners, and an uphill battle to restore consumer confidence. Ilana Debevec lost three days of business while the problem was being worked on, and Rifkin Habsburg's new game that had just launched saw a sudden halt in sales that is only now beginning to recover. Events like these reinforce that nothing is certain when working in a beta environment like Second Life. As Ilana put it in later interview: "You can take every precaution and test you want when devloping a product, but you can't predict when you're gonna get SLcrewed."
Yesterday's rolling restart of Second Life knocked everyone off the grid for awhile. In the ensuing chaos we were still able to pull off our Metanomics event, but all was not well. A major function (that luckily we didn't happen to be using) 