Well, what a ride it has been. This is my 365th day with Second Life Insider. A whole year of writing about Second Life and things related to it. Digging up news tidbits and trying to generally provide you all with useful content and news. In the last year, I've produced 1,120 posts - a total of 367,657 words. We've all been working hard to bring you great stuff, and it's great to see how you've all responded. Journalists, corporates and media agencies read Second Life Insider daily. Linden Lab certainly does.

Second Life Insider is bigger now than it has ever been. The last couple of months have been absolutely massive, and your support has been fantastic. And we've got equally massive changes on the way, too. For the last month, we've been working behind the scenes on a new, expanded site: Massively. Everything you love about Second Life Insider, and a massive dose of news from other virtual worlds, and MMOs, more writers (everywhere I turn, I trip over another great writer that we've swiped from somewhere), more ... everything.

While it's a bit sad to put down the Second Life Insider name, it's even more fun and interesting to be branching out, and covering more good stuff. There's more than 200 virtual worlds and MMOs on our list, and more on the way, including everything Second Life as usual. So this isn't goodbye - it's welcome to SLI's new home. Welcome to Massively.

• 27,981 new signups bringing us to 10,614,271 signups total.
• A peak concurrency of 51,914 at 2:25PM, and a minimum concurrency of 26,808 at 1:15AM. Median concurrency for the day was 39,933.
• The Grid Stability Index for the day was 1.58 (lower is better).
• Yes, huge changes are afoot at Second Life Insider. Full details in one hour.
• A short notice rolling restart of the grid.
• A new viewer release candidate (RC2).
• Havok 4 and the beta grid are back up again.

Linden Lab has released a new Second Life viewer release candidate, specifically, 1.18.4(RC2). This fixes a number of issues with since the last release. There's a list of those changes below the fold.

The viewer is available from the optional downloads page as usual, and we suspect that this one might just be a little more plausible as a release candidate than the last one.

If Linden Lab couldn't find any evidence of wrongdoing at Wonderland, perhaps they need to hire some journalists to investigate incidents like this. It seems that most everyone else found something broadly offensive in the place, and well, the journalists apparently found the worst sort of offense in next to no time.

Linden Lab has apparently shut Wonderland down now - we don't know if they found evidence of wrongdoing themselves, or if it is a reflexive reaction to the mainstream media putting the story in front of about 150 million people so far.

• 32,528 new signups bringing us to 10,585,610 signups total.
• A peak concurrency of 50,872 at 3:30PM, and a minimum concurrency of 27,105 at 1:05AM. Median concurrency for the day was 39,968.
• The Grid Stability Index for the day was 1.84 (lower is better).
• Famed teen resident Katharine Berry turns her back on Second Life.
• Akela rounds up some of the best Halloween Haunts in Second Life, while Moo brings you an excellent list of Halloween freebies and cheapies!
• It turns out that screen legend, and deft comedian Stephen Fry has a Second Life too.
• A Second Life grid backbone service failed causing some users to have login problems.
• Group IMs have been identified as having some ongoing issues.
• Hamlet Au wants to know what you think about the quality of Linden-to-resident communication.
• The 18th episode of SLI's very own podcast, On The Inside, is available now with Ansel Gasparini, the author of Second Life: A Guide to Your Virtual World.
• Accounts and Inventory on the beta-grid is being wiped and reloaded from the main grid, there are several upgrades, and improvements to Havok.
• Grady Booch rocks - but then again, he always has.
• DJ Nexeus Fatale gives back to the community.
• slscout.com launches a new social networking site for Second Life.
• Moo provides a quick primer on encoding video for Machinima.

Hamlet Au is running a poll over on New World Notes. He's asking Second Life users to rate the quality of Linden-to-resident communications in recent months about updates, downtime, policy and so forth.

Think they're doing well, or doing poorly? Go and register your vote. We'll all be watching the results.

Katharine Berry, while not leaving Second Life completely, is winding down pretty much all her Second Life commitments, forum moderator status, shucking her island, and closing off her other Second Life website services except for AjaxLife.

AjaxLife is how we came to know Berry, with her superlative efforts to produce an open-source, web-based, thin-client for Second Life.

• 31,133 new signups bringing us to 10,551,423 signups total.
• A peak concurrency of 53,256 at 2:50PM, and a minimum concurrency of 27,078 at 1:30AM. Median concurrency for the day was 40,114.
• The Grid Stability Index for the day was 1.37 (lower is better).
• The Wonderland scandal in the mainstream media has been exposed to an estimated 50 or 60 million people.
• Linden Lab data feeds are still giving troubles.
• The Public JIRA has been giving troubles through the day.
• Four big-name designer brand islands are down right now 'for personal reasons'.
• An Evening of Beauty at Tete-a-pied.

For most of the last week, Linden Lab's public data/statistical feeds have been showing signs of being a bit ill. Starting on Wednesday evening, concurrency information started to fall ten or fifteen minutes behind actual data - an unusual occurrence. It's only in the last 24 hours that the system has started to catch up again.

At the same time, the figure for active users ceased updating entirely, with the most recent update to that figure being Wednesday night (24 October), at midnight SLT (US Pacific). Perhaps these subsystems are considered relatively minor, but Linden Lab have said themselves that they consider the accurate and ongoing publication of this data critical to their program of transparency.

The public JIRA has been spitting unusual (and some incomprehensible) Java error messages at people since this-morning. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Rob Lanphier, Linden Lab's open source liaison says that Linden Lab have been working on the problem, but do not know what the cause is.

It seems to be happening less, at present, but there's been no further word that the issue has been isolated and repaired.

Linden Lab has responded to our request for comment about the Wonderland scandal with a statement. The statement was issued just minutes ago by Lewis PR, Linden Lab's external public relations handler. Lewis PR provides public relations support for a wide variety of companies and organizations.

"At present, we have no firm evidence of wrongdoing from our own investigations into Wonderland nor from our Abuse Report channel."

Linden Lab therefore has not acted on reports about the site from Second Life users and from Second Life's child avatar community (we are told that reports have been being filed since July) because they have not been able to find any wrongdoing.

Linden Lab's full statement follows, after the jump.

News of the Wonderland scandal is spreading through the UK press. Channel 5 News led with the piece - it's all over Sky News. Some of the UK's largest tabloids are picking it up - outlets with millions of readers. UK business magazine, The Business, has just taken up the story.

"users feel the virtual community is unsafe and uncensored; they're also deterred by the huge amount of sexually orientated activity which takes place in the world."

The Business magazine slams Linden Lab for their "unshakeable libertarian positions", and says "This will be a huge set back for Linden Labs [sic]".

Expect to be reading and hearing a lot more about this in the news in the coming days.

Of course, this activity directly contravenes Linden Lab policy - so, why didn't they act days or weeks ago, when this activity was reported to them?

We have been promised an official comment or statement from Linden Lab "shortly". That was nine hours ago.

[Update: 10PM SLT (US Pacific) - Linden Lab has just issued a formal response]

• 26,734 new signups bringing us to 10,519,814 signups total.
• A peak concurrency of 53,269 at 3:15PM, and a minimum concurrency of 25,644 at 3:05AM. Median concurrency for the day was 39,775.
• The Grid Stability Index for the day was 1.41 (lower is better).
• A short burst of problems with the login servers in the early morning.
• CNN has announced that they will be coming in to Second Life, gathering news submissions from residents.
• Linden Lab says oops, we may have double-billed land-use fees to some residents.
• Linden Lab releases the September quality-of-service metrics.

Linden Lab says that they believe some users have been billed twice for tier (land use fees). They are encouraging anyone affected by the double-billing (it appears you will have to go and check - or maybe check with your card company) to file a ticket through the Support Portal.

If the stories we hear have any grain of truth to them, then double-billing land-use fees to some users is an ongoing problem with Linden Lab's billing system - as well as users who are unable to process payments to Linden Lab at all.

At 2:50AM SLT (US Pacific) Second Life login servers apparently failed. It was brief, and thankfully just after minimum concurrency. At the time the problem commenced 28,788 users were online.

Linden Lab responded with unusual rapidity, and the problem was resolved by 3:10AM, a scant 20 minutes.

[Update: 3:35AM - Linden Lab posted a notice about the problem after the fact, and apologizing for the problems]