Bug Tracker/FAQ

Tip: These are further details on how to use the Bug Tracker.

What's the difference between bugs and new features?

Bug - Something does not work correctly compared to the way it was designed or should be expected to.
New Feature - Something that Second Life doesn't do, but you think it would be a great idea or improvement if it could.

How do I keep up with what's going on?

On the left of each issue is a Watch it link you can click. When the issue is updated, you'll get an email notification. You can also view Your Watches.

Check the Release Notes for what's new in Second Life. Release Notes highlight features and bug fixes, as well as known issues to be aware of. This context may help you understand whether a change was intentional.

Also, make sure your graphics drivers are updated. Many historical bugs have been fixed by newer drivers.

Our Bug Triagers review issues on a regular basis; feel free to join in! Our engineers may require additional information from the issue reporter or other contributors.

What are the behavior guidelines?

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Conduct Guidelines

Privacy

Introduction

These guidelines cover Resident participation on our Second Life community pages, which include the Second Life Blogs, Forums, Answers, Bug Tracker, User Groups, and the Knowledge Base. They are intended to help all Residents have a constructive and enjoyable conversation.

The Second Life Blogs, Forums, Bug Tracker, User Groups, Answers, and the Knowledge Base are places for you, the Residents of Second Life, to discuss ideas, experiences, and questions, and to share what you’ve learned about Second Life with each other and with us. We want to foster an honest and open exchange of ideas on our community pages; to do that, we want to encourage all participants to maintain an atmosphere of courtesy and respect for others at all times. Creating a constructive place for conversation will help us build a strong, better informed community in Second Life, and make both our communication channels and our world a more supportive and engaging place for all.

In addition to adhering to the Second Life Terms of Service, Residents must also refrain from the activities listed below. These Activities are Not Permitted on the Second Life Community Sites:

Vulgarity, Profanity, and Sexually Explicit Content: No name calling, expletives, or any language that is offensive, pornographic, or sexually explicit. Profanity, hate speech, or threats of violence are not permissible.

Harassment: Harassment of any kind will not be tolerated. Harassment can include text or images that contain racist, threatening, abusive or hateful material.

Personal Information: Sharing someone else’s personal information—of any kind—is not allowed. Disclosing another Resident’s real-world identity, contact information, or the text of interpersonal communications (chat, email, IM) is not allowed.

Nudity or Adult Content: Keep the content of your postings “General” as provided in the Maturity Guidelines. Postings that do not comply with the “General” rating may be removed.

Spamming, Solicitation and Advertising: Spamming is not allowed. This includes aggressive self-promotion. No advertising or promotion of specific Second Life merchants, Marketplace listings, products, or services, unless the forum area is specifically for the buying or selling of Second Life products or services, for example, a “for sale” or “wanted” forum. Do not reference other websites offering any product or service.

Note: It is OK to have a signature line with a link to your Second Life profile or information about your Second Life business.

Interpersonal Disputes or Personal Negative Commentary: If you have a personal disagreement, do not post about it on the Second Life community pages. Residents who have personal differences have other channels of communication available to them — private messaging in the forums, IM within Second Life, or chatting within Second Life.

No Flaming: "Flames" are hostile or disruptive posts, or messages intended to incite an angry response. Spirited discussion and constructive disagreement are welcome, but name-calling and airing of grievances are not appropriate in our discussion areas. We will also not tolerate any post that encourages others to violate any policy of Linden Lab

Off Topic Content: Please keep your commentary relevant to the discussion and within the format that the forum, board or question and answer area require. (For example, in the Answers section, please follow the Q&A format of the discussion.) Content that is blatantly off topic is not permitted. You may also not post regarding subjects that do not relate to Second Life except in the General forum discussion board.

Abuse of Moderation or Moderators: Please honor our moderation process and the decisions that come out of it; they are being made in order to provide you with a productive environment for conversations about Second Life. We prohibit abuse of our moderation process, including the following:
- Posts that discuss or re-post material that has been removed or locked by a moderator
- Posts questioning a moderator’s decision
- Posts that discuss the status of any Resident account (e.g., on hold, suspended, etc.)
- Frivolous or malicious use of the abuse report feature

Report inappropriate content for moderator review

Moderating a discussion site is a daunting task; our forums alone see in excess of 10,000 posts per week. You can help by reporting abuse when you spot it. If you see a post you feel violates the Community Participation Guidelines, or our Terms of Service, then please click the Report Inappropriate Content link that appears in each post, and let us know why you feel the post is inappropriate.

We moderate at our discretion

We evaluate posts on a case-by-case basis and take into account the severity of the conduct and any history of past violations. Although we will make reasonable efforts to take into consideration the context and general sentiment of the blog or forum discussions, the actions taken (or not taken) by Linden Lab and our moderators are at our sole discretion, and we may act without warning or explanation. We provide the discussion areas of our sites as a service to Residents, and we will take the actions we deem appropriate to keep our sites a productive and enjoyable environment for all Residents.

How do I search?

Do you want to find something specific in the Issue Tracker, or or scan to see if your bug's been reported by someone else?

Issue Tracker searching can be frustrating, but it gets easier if you know how to use search parameters.

Official Atlassian Instructions

Atlassian's JIRA documentation on "Searching for Issues"

Quick JIRA Search How To

think some words (at least 2; 3 or 4 can work better) which reasonably can be present in the hypothetical title of the JIRA you're looking for;
write those words in the "Quick Search" form, which is in the upper-right corner of any JIRA page, adding a '+' before each word
getting too many results? on the results page, look on the left side for the "Query" form. "Comments" and "Description" checkboxes are enabled by default. Disable "Comments" checkbox and try again. If you still get too many results, disable "Description" checkbox too.
if you don't get any results, or results don't match what you're looking for, change your keywords and retry

Screencast

What software powers Bug Tracker?

JIRA from Atlassian. For details, see the documentation. If you find a bug with JIRA itself, contact Atlassian.

How do I customize my settings?

View your User Profile - Some details, like your Username and email address, are tied to your main Second Life info. If you want to change those, visit Your Dashboard.
Edit Your Preferences - A few options can be customized. You can also change your language here.

Can I write my bug report in another language?

While we have a growing number of Lindens who are multilingual, to have your issue understood broadly by the Linden Lab's developers, please have a friend help you with an English translation.

What are projects and components?

Projects are used to sort issues into sensible groups. One big project is "VWR" for our Second Life Viewer, the software package you download to use Second Life.
Components are the specific area of a problem within a project.

More projects and components are added over time as needed.

Examples

Second Life Viewer - VWR
- Component = Avatar/Character - "My avatar clothing is all black after installing a video driver update"
- Component = Inventory - "Objects in my inventory don't remain sorted in the correct order after relogging"
Second Life Service - SVC
- Component = Performance and/or Teleport - "Server performance decreases when several avatars teleport into the Region at once"
- Component = Scripts - "My scripted objects are not able to talk to the outside world after Second Life Grid downtime"
Second Life Website - WEB
- Component = wiki.secondlife.com - "Wiki blocks login for Residents with a 'y' in their name"
- Component = jira.secondlife.com. - "The Bug Tracker always forces me to authenticate, even if I save my login information"

What is the "SEC" project?

Issues pertaining to the security of Second Life should be sent to Linden Lab via special mechanism described below. Please help us keep Second Life secure by ensuring that possible security exploits aren't broadly advertised before a fix is available.

So just what constitutes a security issue? If an issue poses any of the following threats to Second Life, its Residents or content, then it is an exploit and should be reported:

exposes real life Resident identity without consent
destroys content
permits unauthorized access to Second Life/Linden Lab resources
compromises a client or server host subjecting it to remote control

When reporting an exploit, please provide as much detail as possible, Including the environment used (e.g. Windows XP Service Pack 2, Nvidia 6800 etc ) and the complete reproduction case. Linden Lab offers a L$10,000 bounty for each previously unknown exploit that can be verified. Please report issues as soon as they are discovered!

Filing issues

There are two ways to file security reports:

In the SEC project on jira.secondlife.com (PREFERRED). It's VERY IMPORTANT that you file issues in the SEC project, which is the only project set up so that only the reporter and Linden Lab can view the issue.
Via email: security@lindenlab.com

Warning: The SEC project (and security mailing list) is ONLY for reporting security exploits that might compromise a Residents identity or the Second Life Grid. All other requests including account issues and account security via this address will not be addressed.

For other issues:

If you believe your account has been breached please attempt to change your password immediately and also contact support.
If you are experiencing some other problem, please contact support.
See Bug Tracker for information about filing non-security issues.

What do the different resolution statuses mean?

Here's how Linden Lab uses the workflow status and resolution field:

Awaiting Review: Initial state when an issue/ticket is created or when it is reopened closed state. All issues in in this state will be reviewed and triaged.

Been Triaged: This state indicates that the issue is being reviewed by Linden Lab.

Accepted: When an issue has been imported to an internal Linden Lab project, it will be marked as Accepted.

Needs More Info: The issue lacks actionable information. Add the info or it CAN'T be investigated.

Information Provided: The issue has been updated with the necessary information.

Closed

Resolution = Contact Support: The issue does NOT belong in the Bug Tracker, and needs to be handled through the Support Portal or Second Life Answers.
Resolution = Expected Behavior: This is NOT a bug and functions by design See Expected Behavior aka Not a Bug.
Resolution = Duplicate: There's another issue about the same problem.
Resolution = Unactionable: Problem described in the ticket is not in a form that action can be taken (i.e. it's too broad)
Resolution = Not Applicable: The Reporter has decided to close the issue.

Diagram of Workflow

Note:

Diagram does not have all the transition arrows.

Why was my issue resolved with a status of "Expected Behavior"?

Often, the Second Life software is behaving exactly as designed, but it can seem wrong if you're not aware of reasons behind the behavior. "Expected Behavior" is used for such cases — where what you saw happen was not a bug, but you're asking for a new behavior we haven't thought of yet.

If you would like to push for a change in that behavior:

First search to make sure someone else hasn't already requested this feature!
1. If it has already been requested, vote and add your comments to the issue.
Go to the issue's page and click Reopen Issue on the left. Be sure to state WHY in the comments.
Then, click Edit on the left, change the Issue Type to New Feature by moving it.
Go through the steps and click Move to confirm.

What do the different priority levels indicate?

Showstopper - an issue that could (or did) cause disastrous consequences. For example critical loss of data, critical loss of system availability, critical loss of security, critical loss of safety.
Severe - an issue that could (or did) cause very serious consequences. For example a function is severely broken, cannot be used and there is no workaround.
Major - an issue that could (or did) cause significant consequences, but there is a workaround. For example: A function is badly broken but workaround exists.
Minor (default) - an issue that could (or did) cause small or negligible consequences. Easy to recover or workaround. For example: misleading error messages, displaying output in a font or format other than what the resident desired.
Trivial - an issue that can cause no negative consequences. Such defects normally produce no erroneous outputs. For example: simple typos in documentation, bad layout or mis-spelling on screen.

Who is WorkingOnIt Linden?

A group account used to mark status when an issue is being investigated internally by Linden Lab. This is more communicative than the issue being "Unassigned". Various Lindens can access the account.

How can my LSL code bypass the initial login check?

Add ?os_authType=none to the URL.

If you find XML to be easier to parse you can request JIRA to return XML document containing all the data about a specific issue. If for example we wanted to get the information about WEB-2771 we would use the following URL:

http://jira.secondlife.com/si/jira.issueviews:issue-xml/WEB-2771/WEB-2771.xml?os_authType=none