Well, what a ride it has been. This is my 365th day with Second Life Insider. A whole year of writing about Second Life and things related to it. Digging up news tidbits and trying to generally provide you all with useful content and news. In the last year, I've produced 1,120 posts - a total of 367,657 words. We've all been working hard to bring you great stuff, and it's great to see how you've all responded. Journalists, corporates and media agencies read Second Life Insider daily. Linden Lab certainly does.

Second Life Insider is bigger now than it has ever been. The last couple of months have been absolutely massive, and your support has been fantastic. And we've got equally massive changes on the way, too. For the last month, we've been working behind the scenes on a new, expanded site: Massively. Everything you love about Second Life Insider, and a massive dose of news from other virtual worlds, and MMOs, more writers (everywhere I turn, I trip over another great writer that we've swiped from somewhere), more ... everything.

While it's a bit sad to put down the Second Life Insider name, it's even more fun and interesting to be branching out, and covering more good stuff. There's more than 200 virtual worlds and MMOs on our list, and more on the way, including everything Second Life as usual. So this isn't goodbye - it's welcome to SLI's new home. Welcome to Massively.

Linden Lab has released a new Second Life viewer release candidate, specifically, 1.18.4(RC2). This fixes a number of issues with since the last release. There's a list of those changes below the fold.

The viewer is available from the optional downloads page as usual, and we suspect that this one might just be a little more plausible as a release candidate than the last one.

• Fixed several UI elements
• Fixed new group not appearing in group window until relog
• Fixed Trash folders in user inventory
• Fixed missing line of information on land sales
• Fixed parcel listings showing [AREA] instead of parcel size
• Fixed bad teleports from landmarks
• Fixed up/down arrows for Repeats Per Face
• Fixed a viewer nested message crash
• Fixed a viewer crash with editing classifieds
• Fixed a viewer crash when pressing Ctrl-F with a minimized Search window
• Fixed secondlife.log spam when group info window opens
• Fixed Publish on Web not saving for parcels
• Fixed missing dialog for Publish in Classifieds
• Fixed updates for Land and L$

Hamlet Au is running a poll over on New World Notes. He's asking Second Life users to rate the quality of Linden-to-resident communications in recent months about updates, downtime, policy and so forth.

Think they're doing well, or doing poorly? Go and register your vote. We'll all be watching the results.

Katharine Berry, while not leaving Second Life completely, is winding down pretty much all her Second Life commitments, forum moderator status, shucking her island, and closing off her other Second Life website services except for AjaxLife.

AjaxLife is how we came to know Berry, with her superlative efforts to produce an open-source, web-based, thin-client for Second Life.

Berry cites a number of reasons on her blog:

• A significant portion of the grid seems to hate me.
• Many of my friends have already left, making SL rather dull.
• (The main one) Linden Lab continue to neglect the Teen Grid:
  • Signup is still impossible.
  • Upgrading to premium is broken.
  • No website update in two years.
  • No MapAPI.
  • (list of generic complaints that have built up over the last two years go here)
• I actually can't afford the extra 17.5% due to VAT

It's sad to see this adept, teenage dynamo walking out of the mainstream, and we here at SLI hope she does well. Likely, in ten or fifteen years, Berry will be something of a superstar in the tech world.

The public JIRA has been spitting unusual (and some incomprehensible) Java error messages at people since this-morning. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Rob Lanphier, Linden Lab's open source liaison says that Linden Lab have been working on the problem, but do not know what the cause is.

It seems to be happening less, at present, but there's been no further word that the issue has been isolated and repaired.

Linden Lab has responded to our request for comment about the Wonderland scandal with a statement. The statement was issued just minutes ago by Lewis PR, Linden Lab's external public relations handler. Lewis PR provides public relations support for a wide variety of companies and organizations.

"At present, we have no firm evidence of wrongdoing from our own investigations into Wonderland nor from our Abuse Report channel."

Linden Lab therefore has not acted on reports about the site from Second Life users and from Second Life's child avatar community (we are told that reports have been being filed since July) because they have not been able to find any wrongdoing.

Linden Lab's full statement follows, after the jump.

Second Life is a 3D virtual world in which all the content is created and owned by its Residents. It is used by individuals, businesses, non-profits and educational organizations to communicate and collaborate in an immersive and compelling way. All Residents using Second Life MUST assert that they are over 18 years of age and that they will abide by our Terms of Service which prohibit illegal activity and by our Community Standards which prevent broadly offensive behavior. While the vast majority of Residents abide by these agreements and use Second Life in a constructive fashion, as with any communications technology, such as email, the phone or the Web itself, some seek to abuse the system and behave in an offensive manner.

At present, we have no firm evidence of wrongdoing from our own investigations into Wonderland nor from our Abuse Report channel. There's nothing objectionable nor illegal in having a child-like avatar in itself and we must assume innocence until proof of the contrary. That said, Linden Lab is morally opposed to and has zero tolerance for child pornography, simulated or otherwise, within Second Life.

It is a primary concern of ours to keep Second Life a safe and legal environment. Second Life Residents are held to a clearly defined Terms of Service and Community Standards to prevent illegal and/or broadly offensive activities, and it goes without saying that anyone engaged in these activities will be permanently banned from Second Life. Additionally, it is important to clarify that when we discover minors in Second Life, or when their presence is reported to us, we terminate their access. Underage users are automatically directed to Teen Second Life, an area specifically designed for non-adults, and offering them a rich, creative experience collaborating with other teens.

In addition, Linden Lab is in the process of implementing age verification measures to require age verification for entrance to parcels with adult content. More information about this can be found here:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/09/18/identity-verification-and-flagging-parcels-for-restricted-content/.

In the rare instances of suspected child pornography of which we have been informed, Linden Lab immediately works to remove the offending content and involves local authorities where appropriate. At present in the US, we work with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and are open to working with similar authorities in other countries, such as CEOPS.

News of the Wonderland scandal is spreading through the UK press. Channel 5 News led with the piece - it's all over Sky News. Some of the UK's largest tabloids are picking it up - outlets with millions of readers. UK business magazine, The Business, has just taken up the story.

"users feel the virtual community is unsafe and uncensored; they're also deterred by the huge amount of sexually orientated activity which takes place in the world."

The Business magazine slams Linden Lab for their "unshakeable libertarian positions", and says "This will be a huge set back for Linden Labs [sic]".

Expect to be reading and hearing a lot more about this in the news in the coming days.

Of course, this activity directly contravenes Linden Lab policy - so, why didn't they act days or weeks ago, when this activity was reported to them?

We have been promised an official comment or statement from Linden Lab "shortly". That was nine hours ago.

[Update: 10PM SLT (US Pacific) - Linden Lab has just issued a formal response]

Linden Lab says that they believe some users have been billed twice for tier (land use fees). They are encouraging anyone affected by the double-billing (it appears you will have to go and check - or maybe check with your card company) to file a ticket through the Support Portal.

If the stories we hear have any grain of truth to them, then double-billing land-use fees to some users is an ongoing problem with Linden Lab's billing system - as well as users who are unable to process payments to Linden Lab at all.

At 2:50AM SLT (US Pacific) Second Life login servers apparently failed. It was brief, and thankfully just after minimum concurrency. At the time the problem commenced 28,788 users were online.

Linden Lab responded with unusual rapidity, and the problem was resolved by 3:10AM, a scant 20 minutes.

[Update: 3:35AM - Linden Lab posted a notice about the problem after the fact, and apologizing for the problems]