So LL have announced a competition to give feedback on the new proposed Marketplace categories, via a survey in order to win the prize of 2,489 Linden dollars you will need to get creative with suggestions for the female skins sub-categories. There will be five winners and the winning prize can pay for a month long front page Marketplace enhancement.
There are rules and regulations to be aware of, as there should be with any reputable contest! I think the thing to appreciate here is that the Marketplace team are responding, this isn’t how I’d like to see them respond to issues and as Inara Pey points out in her blog post on a recent announcement that meetings with merchants aren’t on the horizon, the marketplace team aren’t exactly winning friends and influencing people with their communications strategy.
However the competition is here for those who want to have a say about the proposed categories and a competition adds a bit of fun to the process as well as bringing some engagement to interested parties.
I’ve banged on about Linden Lab’s communications plenty of times here, they aren’t what I’d like them to be but Linden Lab call the shots and it’s their call. One interesting point though from Inara’s blog post is that the marketplace team have said:
JIRA changes: We are working to adjust our communications practices to make sure all Merchants are kept up-to-date on bug fixes.
If they can do that, then that’s a step in the right direction, but I’m a bit tired and grumpy now so I’ll just have to say that the new Jira is rubbish in terms of people being able to be kept in the loop on bug fixes and it’s not only merchants who should be being kept up to date on issues, the Jira changes are awful. I went to the Jira on Saturday because I was experiencing quirkiness, and of course, I can’t see any new issues that may have been similar, so I simply closed the Jira page and backed away slowly, it’s simply not working.
One of the biggest hindrances to people seeing precisely which issues are being addressed almost anywhere in SL is what appears to be the new policy of not referring to JIRA numbers, even when said JIRA are still open for public viewing (WEB, STORM, VWR, etc.).
As all, or at least most, who track issues have some mental or physical list of those JIRA items they are most concerned with, the removal of JIRA numbers from forum posts and release notes, etc., is fair from helpful – leaving aside the issues around trying to fathom what is going on with bug reports since the JIRA update.
I’ve found this particularly frustrating with trying to work out what “updates” in the most recent CT communications on the forum relate to which (if any) open JIRA items – and it has to be said that (crash issues & bottlenecks aside), it’s the same with Viewer release notes.
The only team (at present) making any effort to link information in their communications (release notes, forums posts, etc.), back to JIRA items is the simulator / server team – and by-and-large their written communications are the clearest and most comprehensive that we get from LL nowadays.
Obviously, being able to link updates and forum posts back to outstanding JIRA isn’t going to last forever nor does it really compensate for the inability to do anything other than file an issue and then pray / stick pins in a Linden Bear until something seems to happen (as with the “new” system). But refusing to even bother quoting JIRA items which CAN otherwise be seen by users just smacks of bloody-mindedness on LL’s part in order to be as unhelpful as possible.
As to the competition – no comment. (Well, at least here :).)
Well the CHUI team have a section of the Jira where you can view bug reports by others, I wonder if that’s what the marketplace team want.
Considering that old Jira posts can still be viewed, or are supposedly still viewable, it does feel as if they are going out of their way to be unhelpful, or as if they don’t want people viewing the Jira as people will wonder why such wonderful information isn’t available for new bugs, out of sight out of mind kind of thing.
The whole Jira thing just baffles me.