Dear Linden Lab

I don't think this needs much explanation. It's a "community" letter to Linden Lab, detailing some concerns many of use have as users of the SL platform. Thank you to Cristiano for spearheading this attempt at communication with The Lab and for Viv's original plea. Read about it here. I encourage like minded folks to sign the letter. It's not a rant, just a plea for long-standing and important issues to be addressed for the betterment our SL experience.

In the past eighteen months, Second Life has expanded, growing from a small
community of early adopters to a platform supporting millions of users. Linden
Lab has created a world that inspires a deep level of passion in its users and
provides unprecedented opportunities to share creatively, socially, and
financially.

With explosive levels of growth often come unexpected problems. In keeping
with your company's policy and rich history of resident involvement, we the
undersigned would like to take this opportunity to address some concerns that we
feel have gone unanswered for too long.

There are some consistent, ongoing problems that are getting worse under
heavy load, not better, and are not simply irritants but problems that are
causing financial loss in some cases, which is unacceptable. Here is a brief
list of the main concerns:

* Inventory loss - this is a devastating problem that is worsening. We have
no ability to protect our own inventories through backups, and are trusting you
to protect that data. This is the highest priority. Sensible inventory limits
(on non-verified accounts only), combined with better management tools and ways
to protect our inventory ourselves would help to mitigate the problem as well.
Regardless, this cannot continue - we will not accept financial loss as a
feature of Second Life. It is your responsibility as service provider to ensure
our data is not lost, and you are failing us.

* Problems with Find and Friends List - we continue to see search outages
on a far too regular basis. It is bad enough trying to get anywhere without
being able to use search, but many users are also paying money for classified
ads. Our friends lists just do not work reliably any longer, after years without
an issue with them. If America Online/MSN/Yahoo can provide presence information
for hundreds of millions of users, surely there is a way to make our friends
lists work again.

* Grid stability and performance - teleports fail quite regularly,
especially under heavy load. Attachments end up in places they did not start out
in, and sim performance varies wildly. None of this makes for a very pleasant
experience for users. Long promised improvement to physics and scripting would
help dramatically to reduce these problems, but there are a lot of other
scalability issues as well. It often feels like the grid is coming apart at the
seams. The promised use of limiting logins of non-verified accounts during peak
load has been severely lacking. This would be an effective interim solution to
load issues, but Linden Lab seems unwilling to use it.

* Build tool problems - the importance of build tools that actually work as
promised cannot be overstated enough - we rely on them to create content. Prim
drift, disappearing prims, imprecise placement, problems with linking and other
issues with the tools need to be addressed. Too much time is being spent trying
to work around the problems.

* Transaction problems - inventory deliveries are failing with an alarming
(and annoying) frequency, leaving merchants with the burden of replacing missing
content and having to try to confim the transaction in the first place. We trust
that our L$ balances are accurate, but given recent problems, that is a cause
for concern as well, and one we place our full trust in you to ensure its
accuracy.

We remain fully supportive of Second Life and are more than willing to
continue doing our part to help, but our confidence is steadily being eroded due
to a general lack of communication and the apparent failure to successfully
address the many issues detailed above. What we are asking for is that these
problems are addressed immediately, ahead of new features, and that we are able
to see tangible improvements. We accept that this will not happen overnight but
it also cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely either.

Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned