After the flood of comments that greeted our announcement of the upcoming Display Names feature, we’re happy to announce that we are now releasing a Project Viewer to help us further test performance and let Residents get a sense for how Display Names would work should they go into production.

Once you download the Project Viewer, you’ll be able to freely change your Display Name via the Profile Pane of the right-hand sidebar. Once in production, Residents will be able change their Display Names no more than once per week, in order to cut down on the risk of impersonation. In the Project Viewer, however, there are no limits to how often your Display Name can change.

The Project Viewer will also let you see how names generally can be configured through your Preferences pane, where you can elect to see usernames as well as Display Names, or have your Second Life friends’ names show as a different color from other Residents. The release is hardwired to connect to a test grid, so that any changes you make there will have no impact on your main grid account.

As mentioned, reducing the risk of impersonation is one of our chief concerns as we roll out Display Names. Our original announcement had over a thousand comments, with myself and the team reading all of your feedback. Many of those comments touched on the danger of impersonation. We’re currently discussing the great ideas and constructive feedback you gave and we want to stress that we certainly recognise and share the concerns over impersonation. We’ll be talking more with you about those issues soon and if there are changes needed we will talk about what we are thinking.

We’d like as many of you as possible to try out the feature as it stands today and let us know how it feels. We’ll continue to gather feedback throughout, both in the comments thread below, and on a specific pjira VWR-21053.

Late last week, we discovered a denial-of-service attack that was being served through the widely distributed Emerald third-party viewer. This is in direct violation of our third-party viewer policy (part 2, section d, paragraph iii).

We have removed Emerald from the list of third-party viewers, and are now in touch with the Emerald team to discuss what can happen next. We did this to do our best to protect the safety and security of Second Life users. We will not tolerate a viewer that includes malicious code, nor will we tolerate development teams with a history of violating users’ trust or disrupting their lives.

We take privacy, safety, and security very seriously, and we will act to the best of our abilities to protect it. We have not yet disabled logins via the Emerald viewer, but will do so if we feel the software and the team behind it is not able to meet the standards we’ve set. While Emerald is currently the focus of our attention because of what happened recently, all third-party viewers are held to the same standard, and must comply with the third-party viewer policy.

The third-party viewer directory is designed to be largely self-policing, but we take our responsibility to act very seriously when problems come to our attention. Our goal is that you should feel comfortable using many different viewers in accessing Second Life. While there are always risks involved in using a third-party viewer, we are doing what we can to minimize those, and we encourage and deeply appreciate third-party development. Our new Snowstorm project is an example -- allowing third-party developers to deliver more directly and rapidly to the Second Life viewer.

If you have been using the Emerald viewer, for now we would encourage you to consider either one of the Linden Lab viewers, or an alternative third-party viewer.

Français

As Philip announced at SLCC, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue Teen Second Life as a standalone product and to lower the minimum age of Second Life Residents on the Main Grid to 16.  Teen Second Life will be closing on December 31, 2010, and we plan to begin accepting 16-year-old Residents to the Main Grid on or before that date.

In the five years since it opened, the Teen Grid has been a space of incredible creativity for teens and also home to a number of innovative educational projects. However, supporting and developing for two separate grids has been a challenge for us, and has slowed progress on improvements that benefit all Residents. To help us focus our resources and development on the Main Grid, we have made the difficult decision to close Teen Second Life.

Second Life has a lot to offer teens, and they clearly have a lot to offer Second Life. We are proud that Teen Second Life has had a genuine and  positive impact on teens’ lives -- as a space for creative self-expression, as a tool helping innovative teachers make a difference, as a place for fun with friends, and more. We are also grateful for the contributions that Teen Second Life Residents and educators have made, and for the support they have provided to the greater Second Life community. Many Teen Grid Residents have gone on to become productive members of the Main Grid on reaching the age of 18.

The question of why all teens can’t enjoy the community and creativity that is present on the Main Grid has come up often in the last five years. Many teens want access to the rich experiences -- the variety of content, the broader marketplace, and the chance to interact with parents and older friends -- that the Main Grid affords. Parents and educators, as well, have often lamented the fact that they are unable to experience Second Life with their kids, or to hold classes serving a broader range of ages.

Lowering the minimum age of Second Life Residents to 16 is a first step toward this goal. As we progress with our plans to close Teen Second Life, we will be transferring 16 and 17 year old Teen Grid accounts, land, and content to the Main Grid. We are evaluating if there are ways to allow 13 -15 year olds to have safe access to limited locations on the Main Grid with appropriate controls at some point in the future. However, there is no guarantee that we will be able to do that, or when, as we weigh it against other company priorities at this point.

I will be talking to teens, parents, and educators about the needs of younger users and how we can work toward being able to serve them in  future. I’ll be setting up inworld meetings in the coming weeks to learn more about those needs, and potential short- and long-term solutions to meet them. I look forward to speaking with everyone, and listening to your feedback, thoughts, and suggestions.

For more details, see this wiki page, and stay tuned for further updates.