SL borkedness continues…

The weekend was a bad one for anyone needing to do searches or teleport. There was continual complaining on the mentor channel about people crashing off the orientation and help islands, sims disappearing, problems with search. Initially I assumed it was the normal weekend surge causing the problems, but it seemed that as fast as one problem was posted as resolved on the Linden blog, another thing died. Even this morning, which is normally less laggy and far better for building, I don’t have a Linden balance, can’t search and haven’t attempted to teleport.

I am finding that if I leave my avatar on screen, AFK doesn’t seem to kick in at all. If I minimise the screen I get kicked immediately for inactivity, after literally one second. I keep forgetting that’s going to happen, I am so used to swiftly minimising SL in order to check email or to convert a picture.

The build tools are behaving oddly too, particularly the positioning tools. I am finding that things lined up by number still look off, particularly smaller things, and when I adjust the positioning by eye, the position changes, but the numbers in the edit menu do not. The colour bars which indicate position are in any case not showing up in the middle of the object.

Teleportation is hit and miss – often I will crash on teleporting. Rezzing is taking a long time, and so I am tending to stay on our home sim if possible, where lag and rezzing are not a problem.

I realise that a list of things going wrong isn’t the most scintillating thing to read, but often when I have been irritated by something which keeps happening to me and doesn’t seem to be happening to my friends in SL, it has helped to discover that I am not the only one. I’m not the only one, am I?

Edited to add:  People are being very impatient and rude to creators, it seems, believing that the grid problems are actually a scam to part them from their money.  People who sell a lot of things in SL have their IMs capped, and the remainder are sent to email.  When search and profiles aren’t working (as at the moment) this means that the creator has no way of getting back to people whose IMs have gone to email.  Nor can they replace lost items, even if willing.  So if you have contacted someone over the weekend about the non appearance of an object you have bought (or its apparent disappearance) be a bit patient!  DO NOT send abusive IMs to the creators accusing them of ripping you off… most are honest and attentive to their customers, it’s just impossible to do anything about the problems at present.

One of my friends tells me he has had over 100 IMs to email over the weekend due to the grid problems, and he has no way of contacting those people until the search comes back online.