Last night there was an outage at our collocation facility.  Are servers are now back up and we are looking into any residual issues.  We will post back when all is clear.  If you’re having any trouble, please submit a help request at our support portal:  http://support.onrez.com

We’ve been getting reports of failed deliveries and are investigating the root of the problem, whether it is Second Life related or on our systems. Thanks for your patience and our apologies for the inconvenience.

[Update: 11/17/07 10:03pm ET] We think that the IP address changes Linden Lab made yesterday to 2,000 sims might be the root of why some dropboxes are failing in certain sims. It appears to conflicting with certain security procedures we had put in place. There may be additional problems people experienced because SL also had multiple database crashes and network problems which took 540 regions out of commission.

[Update: 11/18/07 8:46am ET] We put a fix in place last night for the IP address problem around 12:45am ET. If you are still having problems with your dropboxes, we want to know so please file a ticket through our support system so we can investigate properly.

There will be no in-world support today in recognition of Veteran’s Day.  If you have a problem with OnRez, please submit a trouble ticket via our Support Portal at http://support.onrez.com.  Thanks!

Jade Lily

Yesterday, we updated the delivery system on Shop to combat Second Life’s recent high rate of xml-rpc communication failures. Since then, deliveries have been drastically more reliable.

We have also released an optional dropbox update. Dropbox 1.1.0 gives us greater flexibility for tuning deliveries from the backend so we can adapt to changes in Second Life faster in the future.

In addition to the improved delivery system, we released an improved transaction history listing. Purchase records now indicate if the purchase was made on the web or from an in-world vendor, and the item name links back to the item’s page. The next addition is to be able to tell you which in-world vendor was used.
Happy shopping!

UPDATE:

The easiest way to update your dropbox is simply to follow these steps (there is no need to reload a blank dropbox, thankfully):

1. get the new dropbox from the website

2. drag it into world, edit it, go to the Contents tab, and pull the two scripts into your inventory

3. open up your old dropbox, go to contents tab, delete the two old dropbox scripts, and then drag the two new scripts into the dropbox (you will see that the scripts have version numbers to prevent confusion)
4. close out of edit mode and touch the dropbox

Recently, we have noticed xml-rpc calls failing more often or taking longer to respond from the Second Life grid. Shop OnRez relies on xml-rpc to notify dropboxes about sales (xml-rpc is a method of initiating communication from outside Second Life to objects inside Second Life). While we don’t rely on xml-rpc for transmitting data, we do use it to initiate contact from our servers to in-world objects.

The result of the xml-rpc slowdowns is an increase in delivery failures. If you purchase items on the web, your money is automatically refunded to you. You can check the status of your purchases at http://shop.onrez.com/transaction/purchases/.

Failed deliveries from purchases made at in-world vendors are currently not automatically refunded. We are working on improving this system, but for now it must be handled manually. Buyers, please contact sellers if your item is not delivered. Sellers, you can verify that a purchase failed by checking your sales transaction history at http://shop.onrez.com/transaction/sales/. A sale marked as void means the item was not delivered. We are currently working on updating the transaction history display so you can see if sales came from the web or from in-world vendors. We apologize for the inconvenience and will be posting more on this issue.

We have also seen issues reported about SL’s transaction history being slow to update, which is causing confusion around vendor purchases. We have no had confirmation from Linden Lab on this issue, but it would be prudent to allow extra time for payments in-world to show up.

As always, if you have any comments or problems, please report them at http://support.onrez.com.

We’ve released an optional update to the OnRez Viewer today. This is the first in a series of updates we anticipate making. The new version addresses a handful of bugs and introduces two new features. We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback on the Viewer and will be taking that into account as we develop the next version.

The two new features are:

• Voice Chat: Now when you start a person-to-person or group voice chat the Talk button will be depressed for you. Previously you had to click “Join Call” then activate the Talk button. Now there’s one less click.
• The integrated Web Browser now has status text on the bottom left of the Browser window. It will report on page load status.

The bug fixes are:

• Fixed Appearance Editor bug so that avatar will fully turn in most cases
• Two letter Region names are now accessible via the location bar, general searches still require at least 3 characters
• Fixed a bug in the Web Browser where the browser window appeared black until the browser window regained focus
• Made several color tweaks to improve legibility and contrast

Update: The update is done. Sellers, look here to learn how to list in multiple categories.

We’re updating Shop’s search engine today to help improve the quality of results returned when browsing or searching on the site. Some of the noticeable changes will be:

• See exclusive items in search results! Now you’ll see the items your special sellers have made exclusive in your search results. They remain available at http://shop.onrez.com/item/exclusive, a page which is being updated for improved navigability.
• Did You Mean? When you enter a search term, Shop will suggest some alternate spellings that would bring more results. This works for names when searching for sellers as well.
• More Like This! When you find an item you like, follow the “See more items like this >>” link to see similar items you might also like.
• New sort option: Sort by item name
• When you search with keywords, all of the words must match for an item to appear. Previously we allowed some items to show up even if they did not have all keywords if a particular keyword was very important. (If you searched for “little black dress”, we might have returned some items that were just black dresses.)

Sellers, improve your search results by following these tips:

• Pick a category for each of your items. You can list in multiple categories, by adding tags, but the category selected will get the best results. We’re publishing the list of tags we use for categorization, so you can easily supplement your main category with additional ones, for when your Capris are also Denim!
• Correctly specify whether your item is men’s or women’s using the checkboxes when editing your items.
• Use images for your listings. Items without images will have a lower position in search results. Items with web images will be preferred on the web, and items with in-world images will be preferred when searching from in-world kiosks.

We will be upgrading Shop OnRez’s search over the next couple hours and will continue to tweak during the day. During the update, new listings will not appear in search results immediately.