Author: Ciaran Laval

I think it’s fair to say that Direct Delivery hasn’t gone smoothly so far, ok I may be underplaying the issues there. Darrius Gothly has a blog post entitled: The Fiasco Called Marketplace which has an in depth look at the issues. I’m not going to take an in depth look at the issues, largely because I’m tired and grumpy, this isn’t an unusual situation!

Linden Lab aren’t hiding the issues, they have a post on the forum detailing Jira entries on issues. Linden Lab have also made changes to the migration schedule, the original schedule was:

• April 2 through 13, 2012: Inworld Q&A sessions on using and migrating to Direct Delivery.
• April 18, 2012: All listings priced L$10 and lower must use Direct Delivery.    
• May 16, 2012: Magic Boxes no longer allowed for any Marketplace listing.

This has now all changed, with the FAQ updated to state that merchants will not need to migrate before June 1st and that a new schedule will be posted closer to this date, this means the Q&A sessions as well as migration are now going to take place further in the future. This is a sensible move, I felt the migration dates were too short in the first place and that was without the problems that have surfaced.

Continue reading “Direct Delivery Migration Dates Pushed Back”

Sometimes it’s easy to be critical of Linden Lab, sometimes they make it absurdly easy. The impression one gets at times is that Linden Lab remains a company where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. There are other times when you think “WTF are they thinking of“. This was my reaction when I saw a couple of posts on different forums regarding an automated reply people have received when submitting support tickets on Marketplace issues:

“Thank you for contacting Linden lab Support. I’m sorry, but as of March 21, 2012, Linden Lab  no longer supports the Magic Box application.”

Now let’s get something straight here, this should never have happened. I’ve already said that I feel the migration deadline was a mistake, but deciding not to support a product that is still in use, hasn’t passed the migration date and will still have support concerns, is no way of about going things, even worse, this was never officially announced. Fortunately someone at Linden Lab seems to have spotted this mistake and it has been confirmed that magic boxes are still being supported.

Continue reading “Linden Lab Still Supporting Magic Boxes”

Teething problems with Direct Delivery shouldn’t have been unexpected, I don’t mean this as a slur on the capabilities of Linden Lab, the more people start using a system, the more issues arise and whereas some of the issues may leave people scratching their heads as to how they ever got into release, this is not that unusual. I installed an upgrade to some software at work last week, it fixed an issue and everything seemed fine until I noticed, and then my team noticed, a horrendous flickering issue when we switched Windows to another app and then back again. They glared at me, I pondered how this should never have made it to release, but it was obviously an issue the beta testers hadn’t witnessed. These things happen. However I can rollback with that app, so not the end of the world.

Where Linden Lab have made a mistake, is with regards to setting deadlines for people to migrate their magic boxes to the Direct Delivery system, this has added more urgency to the migration for merchants than was necessary. The ideal situation for users is to do what I can do with the app I talked about above, rollback, that means sticking with magic boxes for a while longer than was envisaged. However the deadlines mean people don’t want to consider that option, they want to get the migration done.

According to the Markeptlace migration guide, which you can read here, all listings of L$10 and under need to be migrated by April 18th, all other listings need to be migrated by May 16th. This was a mistake, when you consider that during this period we’ll see holidays such as Easter and Passover as well as May Day here in the UK where people dance around the Maypole … well they did when I was a lad, this means people are in a rush to get it sorted.

Continue reading “Direct Delivery Teething Problems”