Bug Tracker

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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.

What's not a bug?

NOT account-specific, support issues - Individual situations that desire a response, such as a billing problem, are different For those, visit our Support Portal.

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.

Steps to create a good report

With that in mind:

Go to our Bug Tracker and read the instructions.
Search the Bug 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 including:
1. Steps to follow
  In as much detail as possible, describe a sequence of actions that any user can take to cause the problem to occur. If particular conditions are required, such as being in a specific parcel or having particular permissions set for a group role, describe them carefully. Before submitting your report, test your instructions by having someone else follow them to see if they see the problem. Making these instructions simple is good, but completeness is better than simplicity.
2. Describe what you expected to happen
  such as "the object should change to red" or "my avatar should be wearing the shirt"
3. Describe what happened instead
  If you are able to provide pictures, video, or other illustrations in addition to text, even better.
4. Attach supporting information
  If the problem is a viewer crash or a bad interaction with the server (not getting something you should have, or having an effect on the world that you should not have, for example), include the log files from your viewer as attachments. Be sure that you specify as closely as possible the exact time at which the problem occur so that we can find any relevant information in the logs. See Finding Log Files for how to find them.

The goal is to show developers what you see, so we can see it too, then hunt down 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 Bug 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?

Learn about our Security Issues steps 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 closer:

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

How do I report abuse on the Bug Tracker?

Unproductive discussion is discouraging, rude, and wastes time better spent fixing issues. We don't tolerate behavior like flaming which violates our guidelines — please report abuse so we can help keep the Bug Tracker a welcome environment! Thank you!

In the Second Life Viewer (not on the web), select Help menu > Report Abuse.
Fill in all the fields. Not all abuse categories apply to the Bug Tracker, but you may see an intolerant comment, for example.
In the Details field, link directly to the abusive comment by clicking the link icon that appears when you hover over a comment, or specific issue where the comment is.
Click Report Abuse and our Bug Tracker admins will check it out shortly.

Depending on the severity of the abuse, the violator may get a warning or be permanently banned from the Bug Tracker and even all of Second Life.

Want to know more?

After you've learned the essentials of bug reporting, give it some time to digest. Then:

Read the Bug Tracker FAQ - If your question wasn't answered above, see this. Highlights include:
Visit the Bug Tracker category - All pages related to the Bug Tracker.