Bug Reporting

Is a feature not working as expected in your Second Life? You may have found a bug!

What's a bug?

An unintended computer problem which happens for more than one person under the same conditions.

Being "Ruthed" was a common visual bug before we fixed it.

What's a bug report?

A description of a bug, shared by you with us. Useful bug reports are:

Easy-to-follow - Ever given driving directions, where you emphasize landmarks to watch for? Bug reports should be like that: they have a sensible order and a friend can follow your steps.
Reproducible - Sadly, some bugs are like Bigfoot — hard to find evidence of. But many bugs happen reliably after following a series of steps. Confirm a bug so we can catch it in the wild.
NOT account-specific, support issues - Individual situations that desire a response, such as a billing problem, are different! Visit our Support Portal for those.

With that in mind:

Go to our Issue Tracker and read the instructions.
Search the Issue Tracker to see if the bug has already been reported. It's comforting to know someone else has the same problem.
If you find no matches, write a bug report. If you're able to provide pictures or video in addition to text, even better.

The goal is to show Linden Lab what you see, so we can see it too, then process and fix the bug.

I'm not a geek and I need help!

Don't worry, everyone was new once. There's lots of discussion on the Issue Tracker where experienced Residents help new bug reporters.

We also hold inworld bug triages where you can add bugs to the agenda beforehand, then discuss with Lindens and Residents.

What if Second Life is having a widespread service issue right now?

Generally, login problems, teleport failures, and such are shown on our Grid Status Reports and since we're already working on it, there's no need to file a bug report.

What if the bug I found is really serious and shouldn't be shared?

We have a Security Issues Mailing List for exploits that compromise real-life identity, destroy content, and other serious issues that need discretion to be fixed ASAP.

I reported a bug but it hasn't been fixed! Why?

We fix many bugs, but it's unrealistic to expect that we'll fix all of them. Let's look at this on a case-by-case basis:

What do we know? We can't act on bugs that we can't reproduce or don't have enough info about. It's like telling the police a crime happened without evidence. (While bugs aren't criminals, they certainly cause us pain!)
Is it enough of a priority? For example, an inventory loss bug that affects many Residents gets a much higher priority than a cosmetic glitch only noticed by a few.
What are the dependencies? Second Life is a complex system and we need to be sure, even if a bug seems simple, that fixing it won't create more bugs in related areas.

For more background, see this.

How do I find out where bugs get fixed?

Search the Issue Tracker, or if you find that tricky, check the Release Notes. Each version contains blow-by-blow highlights of what was changed.

Want to know more?

After you've learned the essentials of bug reporting, give it some time to digest. Then visit the Issue Tracker category, which expands on the key points above.