Viewerhelp:Bug Reporting

Important: This article has been translated. The translation was imported on 18 Mar 2010. Any changes will require re-export for incremental translation.

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 that happens for more than one person under the same conditions.

What's not a bug?

How to file a bug report

A bug report is a detailed description of a bug that will enable Linden Lab to find and address the issue.

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, sometimes it's tough to find evidence of certain bugs. But many bugs happen reliably after following a series of steps. Please tell us how you found it.
NOT account-specific, support issues - Individual situations that require a personalized response, such as a billing problem, are different! For those, visit our Support Portal.

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 including (1) steps to follow, (2) what you expected to happen, and (3) what happened instead. If you're able to provide pictures, video, or logs in addition to text, even better.

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

I'm not very experienced and I need help!

Don't worry. 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?

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.
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 blog post on how Linden Lab handles technical feedback from Residents.

How do I find out where bugs get fixed?

Search the Issue Tracker, or if you have trouble, check the Release Notes. Each version contains step-by-step 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:

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