After just one week with Linden Lab the new CEO Ebbe Altberg has been very actively communicating with his user base via a chat with bloggers, twitter but also the official Second Life website forums.

This to much delight of many.

He is answering questions and being straight forward about problems and solutions and dropping hints left right and center about things to come.

Although as a cynical old woman, I have to say that we’re still in the honeymoon period and that previous CEO’s also started with much enthusiasm and public contact with us, this didn’t always last.

Anyway, on the SL forum he was asked about communication between Linden Lab and us in general and the closing of the Jira.

Innula Zenovka asked;

“I understand, though I don’t agree with, the reasons the jira was closed.   However, it really is a major inconvenience when confronted with unexpected behaviour from scripts or the viewer, not to be able look it up in the jira to see if it’s a known issue or not, and what work-rounds might be available.

A while back, a friend contacted me to ask why a teleporter he’d made was working in some sims and not others.   We spend about half an hour trying to make it work, and decided it must be sort of bug.   I spent another hour or so playing with it in various sandboxes, and then writing up a jira about it,  explaining what the problem was and which server channels were affected, only to discover it was a known issue, was to be fixed in the next week’s roll-outs and that I’d just wasted a couple of hours because I couldn’t look it up for myself (which, in the past, would have been the first thing I’d have tried).

Scripters in particular, but all serious content creators, I think, used to use the jira as an important reference tool when investigating problems, and I’m very unhappy we no longer have it.”

To which Ebbe replied;

“Yep, that’s why we will figure out how to open things up again…plan is in the works…”
Pamela Galli wrote;

“In the opinions of many, a good place to start is to make the JIRAs public again so we will know whether an issue is a bug that has arisen, or something on our end. Very often, residents working with Lindens have identified, reproduced, and even come up with workarounds if not solutions to problems. Closing the JIRA felt like a door being slammed, esp to those of us who are heavily invested in SL.”

To which Ebbe replied;

“Funny, both engineering and product heads here also didn’t like that jira was closed and want to open it up again. Proposal for how is in the works! I hope we can figure out how to do that in a way that works/scales soon. ”

Of course this doesn’t say much, it leaves a lot to the imagination, but could it be that the Jira will be reopened?

Either way, it reinforces Ebbe’s other comments on improving communication between us and Linden Lab.

If things keep going the way they are now, we’ll soon be asking if Linden Lab will stop bothering and leave us alone! 😉