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.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think there would have been a big rush without deadlines being set, but the deadlines have added more urgency to the process for merchants, whereas really merchants should be saying “Take a step back, give LL room to fix the problems, there’s no rush to migrate“. The sensible thing to do would be to remove the deadlines to allow that breathing space.
Some of the issues are on their way to being identified by users, Gavin Hird has highlighted an issue whereby ASCII characters seem to be causing items to be stuck as being delivered, rather than actually delivered. Gavin removed the characters in his listing and it seemed to fix the issue.
Other issues go a bit deeper, Linden Lab are working on them. I do have sympathy with Linden Lab here, people should be reporting issues to the Jira. to be fair many are reporting issues to the Jira and it’s good to see users talking with each other to resolve issues but Linden Lab would be doing themselves a favour by removing the deadlines and bringing them back, when Direct Delivery is working smoothly. Bugs are not unsual, especially when it comes to a project going live and having to deal with a much larger number of variables, but there are things you can do to help yourself, deadlines aren’t one of them.
Good you’re raising this front and centre. I pointed to much the same in reporting the recent issue, but it’s not so direct & somewhat buried in my piece.
Frankly, I was a little surprised at the deadlines. During pre-roll-out discussions, the impression was that it would be several months before MBs were retired rather than just the two we’ve been given, even without the teething problems.
Lack of ANS would seem to be the biggest issue. Many merchants rely on this and pleaded with LL not to roll-out DD without ANS being enabled for it – but it’s been rolled out with no firm deadline as to when ANS will be enabled. As such, the deadlines need to be fluid.
Well ANS is another good reason why there should be no deadlines yet, they are in too much of a hurry.
I didn’t even know there was a deadline.
I’d just sort of ignored the whole thing with a ‘meh, I’ll migrate when I get around to it” mentality. My shop being of the small and barely selling anything variety.
Will be interesting to see how much stuff goes ‘poof’ when the deadline passes.
Let me add one more major reason why the deadline is a bad one:
Annual income tax in the USA. Due April 16th.
– About half of all Americans are so confuddled about things that they can’t figure out their taxes until the last minute. Those folks will -NOT- be migrating pixels from little boxes to little folders at this time… 😀
I was taking the same view but I got around to migrating last night, the process isn’t that bad at all, the trick is to open your magic box and copy it to inventory, then you have two choices, you can either unpack the items into folders using the same method and drag the folders to the outbox or just put all the items from the magic box folder, into the outbox.
Most of your items should happily auto associate.