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 incident was marred, however, by the failure of the webservers for the CSI event, preventing many from registering via the CSI registration portal or downloading the OnRez viewer, both provided by the Electric Sheep Company.

Concurrency for Thursday exceeded normal expectations, and was very nearly a record at peak, but was not extraordinarily high. Of course, many new midweek registrants do not log in the same day or on a weekday, with many opting to wait until the following day to connect to Second Life, or until the weekend. Sunday's figures are going to be the ones to watch.

Is the CSI:NY promotion a hit or a miss? Frankly, it's too early to tell - making predictions at this juncture is no better than a throw of the dice. You might actually be right - but the conclusion isn't based on observed fact.

The latest metrics and statistics are out from Meta Linden this month, covering September. The August figures were widely described as disappointing.

Let's see how Second Life fared for September. Highlights after the fold.

Total signups increased by 343,961 (3.71%) compared to a growth of 704,603 (8.24%) in August.

Total premium accounts increased by a mere 454 (0.5%) compared to the previous month's 1,803 (2.03%).

The three most active regions by time spent per user were the Falkland Islands, Antigua/Barbuda and Bahrain. Overall, active users spent an average 46.5 hours in Second Life during the month of September.

The second life map grew by 31.6 square kilometres (3.76%) in September, compared to 59.77sqkms (7.66%) in August. The total now is 871.32sqkms of simulated space, of which 21.18% is Linden mainland, and the remaining 688.34 square kilometres are non-Linden estates.

September saw a major recovery from the sudden slump in Lindex sales in August. While July had shown nearly US$600,000 in sales, August's sales had dropped to US$163,239, but recovered in September to a much healthier $573,501.

Overall age demographics continue much as expected. 73% of the population for September were 25 years and older. The older you are, the more time you spend in Second Life: over-45's spent an average of 64.13 hours in September, 35-44 spent 57.06 hours, 25-34 spent 45.06 hours, and the 18-24's spent less than 30 hours.

Females spent nearly twice as long online in Second Life in September as the boys.

Face it, your aunt Tilley is more likely to be spending more of her time in Second Life than that early-adopting, tech-savvy young fellow.

Linden Lab's Robin Linden has stated up-front that Linden Lab has no plans to raise basic tier or island costs this quarter. That doesn't mean it can't happen, of course, but it does strongly signal their intention to leave those prices unaltered before 1 January. Maybe things could jump if Linden Lab suddenly needed a cash influx before then, but it doesn't seem likely right now.

Linden Lab does indicate that the pricing of ... well, just about everything is 'under review' - but at this stage of things, that's pretty much a given. Almost everything seems to be under almost constant review.

Linden Lab weighed in on Yankee Group's highly dubious figures this-morning, even as the Yankee Group was apparently hurriedly distancing themselves from the 12 minutes per month claim that has been spreading so far recently. As we've discussed in the past, the mainstream media loves numbers. Exceptionally large and exceptionally small ones are a favorite. There's not much better way to catch their attention than with a surprising number, and the "12 minutes per month" claim was just such a number.

"One number seems to be a lightening[sic] rod for a lot of attention," Senior Analyst Christopher Collins. (via Virtual World News)

As reported by New World Notes, on VWN, Collins tries to convince us that the rest of the report holds water, while trying to sweep the "12 minutes claim" under the rug.

The basic point is that Second Life is too chained to desktop computers to be a success, so (we presume) like World of Warcraft, Everquest and Lineage and similar massively-multiplayer 'failures', Second Life will remain relatively obscure and unknown - a non-entity, in media terms.

Collins tries to handwave off the number, most notably failing to perform just about the one face-saving maneuver that I think would succeed: Coming clean. If you screwed up the math, just come out and say so. We've all made mistakes, and sometimes very public ones.

On the other hand, if you really feel that your reasoning was valid then detail it - show your work! - and the rest of us can use that to judge the veracity of the rest of the report.

Zee Linden, Linden Lab's CFO, will be conducting a voice town hall on VAT issues for European residents. The Town Hall is to take place on Monday 8 October at 11AM SLT (US Pacific) at the usual place (the big stage in Pooley).

If you don't have voice available, you will need a voice-enabled friend to handle asking questions and transcribing answers for you.

Zee Linden has attached the VAT FAQ and answers a number of additional questions in his posting. Zee adds, "If you have more questions, I encourage you to download the VAT FAQ, refer to our knowledgebase, send me a message in-world, or come to the discussion Monday (again, please come prepared with voice enabled so you can hear, as I'll be answering chat questions by voice to be most efficient with the time.)"

"According to the recently published Yankee Group Note, Wither Second Life?, the growth rate of Second Life users has slowed since its peak in October 2006, while user engagement (as measured by average time spent per user) has leveled off at just 12 minutes per month." -- Yankee Group's own press release, via Virtual World News.

"I've looked at that sentence several times, and can't make head or tail of it, because it's totally at odds with all meaningful available metrics." - Hamlet Au, New World Notes.

This story's starting to spread all over the mainstream media, so let's actually do the math - because Yankee Group doesn't seem to have done any themselves.

Let's start by looking at the figures for August.

Total user hours for August (obtained here) was 23,455,451. Converted to minutes that is 1,407,327,060 user-minutes. That's quite a lot of minutes, yes. Now, the active users for the same month were 540,151 (from the bottom of this sheet). That's 43.4 hours per active user per month or 2605 minutes per active user per month

Obviously this isn't the math that Yankee Group did.

Wait! Maybe they used unique users! Let's look at that! Unique users for the month was 6,164,951. Let's see, that's 3.8 hours per unique user per month (about 228 minutes). Nope. Not these numbers either.

Total registrations? Surely not. Surely nobody would be daft enough to do that. Oh, but you know that some people would! Let's see ... that's 9,252,781. That's about 2 and a half hours or about 152 minutes per user per month. Okay, so that's not 12 minutes by a long shot.

Well... I suppose there's only one way to figure out what population figure they used, and that's to divide user minutes by 12, right? The answer has to be in the approximate ballpark of the population figure they used.

Here goes...

1,407,327,060 minutes divided by 12 minutes per user is ...

117,277,255! One hundred and seventeen million users plus change.

That's very generous, boys, but a bit off the mark. I'm sure I'd have noticed them.

Looking back through figures for prior months, I can't actually find a set of figures that they could have used to get their statement from. Maybe something from a year ago? Maybe something from another MMO by mistake? Back of a bar coaster? Or maybe they mixed it up with a website.

Either way, I've got to call bullshit on the 12 minutes number. It looks like complete rubbish.

Linden Lab's Rob Linden has encouraged Second Life developers to bring forward issues with the proposed changes to login arrangements. Particularly he has invited a formal, group critique on the proposal "incorporating the salient points ... expanding on some of the earlier points ... and providing a list of questions that you'd most like addressed."

That critique is forming up on the Second Life wiki now. From monitoring the chatter on the development mailing list, I've yet to see anyone who is in favour of the proposed changes - and most tellingly most people seem to see the move as introducing an added level of security risk over and above what is present with the existing scheme.

Sabin Linden informs us that the login process for the viewer is going to change to address anti-fraud and other security issues. Essentially, you're not going to be logging in through the viewer anymore.

Instead, logins will be processed through the Second Life website, and the browser launched from there with a custom, secure token included in a secondlife:/// link. The token is valid for five minutes.

While the solution has been tested internally to function fine with Windows and Mac viewers, the Linux viewer solution still needs work.

If you use multiple accounts (need to log out of one on the website and into another) this could be very cumbersome. Likewise if you use more than one kind of viewer (beta, release candidate, homebrew...). There are also concerns with how this will affect bots and non-traditional viewers (Katharine Berry's AJAXLife, etc), essentially making the login process potentially more involved.

It shouldn't be too difficult to provide working login services for alternative grids, however.

Ultimately the aim appears to be that the viewer never has access to your password, though the initial release should still have a familiar login screen that passes through the web-service to authenticate, and bots will continue to function as they are until at least the second iteration. After that they will need to post and retreive data from the web-service - which is not all that different to what they are currently doing.

While efforts to beef up security from potentially malicious viewers is laudible, really the viewer doesn't need your password. Once you're logged in, a malicious viewer can do anything it likes with your account that you could do, and can actively conceal from you that it is doing it (sending all your money to someone else, and displaying a false balance, for example).

GNUCITIZEN shows how Microsoft's flagship browser, Internet Explorer can be used to - well, more or less trivially steal your Second Life password - or at least enough of your authentication credentials to log into the grid as you, which is close to the same thing.

Do you have to do anything or confirm anything? No. A simple scrap of HTML on a web-page or blog will do it all for you, triggering the Second Life viewer to hand your authentication credentials over to a third party without any work on your part whatsoever.

Ouch. Might want to tell the viewer not to remember your password, huh?

According to Linden Lab, all credit-card billing is down as of 5:13AM SLT (US Pacific). The third-party provider in Europe who is responsible for validating and processing credit card transactions for Linden Lab is unable to do so at present due to technical difficulties.

You can well imagine that there is likely a dose of desperation at both ends of the processing chain, both with Linden Lab and their card-processing provider which will likely persist until the issue is resolved.

What were you doing this time last year? If you were a Second Life Resident, or media commentator, you were laughing at Linden Lab's prediction of a million signups by the end of 2006. Twelve months ago, the notion was considered a ridiculous one. Neither myself nor anyone else that I'm aware of took it seriously. Six weeks later on 18 October it happened. And another million on 14 December.

Peak concurrency twelve months ago was a whopping 8,997. A bit less than a third of the minimum concurrency now. People were saying three weeks before then that the grid just couldn't handle 10,000 concurrent users. By the end of the month, exceeding 10,000 was a common occurrence.

Exactly 12 months ago, we had one of our first outages in Second Life's database system - a shocking and frustrating event at the time, now repeated in miniature on a frequent basis.

That same day, an issue with the old tiki-wiki software led to the compromise of authentication information from the Linden Lab webservers, causing all user passwords to be reset two days later on the 8th.

Also on the eighth of September, the following forums were shut down:

• Bulletin Board
• General Topics
• The Sandbox
• Land and Economy
• In-world Political Science

What a wild ride it's been since then.

After a long period of peaking in the high 40 thousands, and looking like growth had stalled or grid capacity had maxed out, today saw concurrency reach record highs. The login concurrency passed 50,000 at 1:25PM SLT (US Pacific) and remained above 50,000 until approximately 2:10PM.

The previous record concurrency was 48,683 which took place at 2PM yesterday. Concurrency peaked at 50,528 at 1:45PM before beginning to fall.

Yesterday in Second Life we:

• Spent US$1,216,000 at an exchange rate of L$266.9 to US$1
• Exchanged US$255,000 at an average of US$10,600.0 per hour.
• Market buys were US$199,000
• Market sales were US$54,000
• Limit-limit buys were US$800
• The busiest time was at 3pm when about US$15,000 was exchanged.
• The quietest time was 11pm when about US$5,000 was exchanged.

It's been some time since we heard anything about the Adult Content Flag and Age/Identity Verification (formerly called Age Verification, now called Identity Verification or just IDV). Robin Linden from Linden Lab gave us a 5AM bump today, reminding us that this is still on the radar. The wording is a little clearer than it was, though there doesn't seem to be any new material in it. Notably absent is when all of this is expected to take effect, and how the information for verification is to be submitted - we've sent questions in about that. [Update: Robin answered our questions - see below]

In case you're wondering what content the Restricted Content Flag (or whatever we're calling it today) is to cover, well, we've asked lots of questions and narrowed it down - and are pretty sure about what it covers.

It's basically this:

Flagged content is basically any content that isn't appropriate for a PG sim/audience.

Yes. That's it. "But wait!" I hear you cry, "Isn't that what Mature sims are for?"

Well, almost. The distinction seems to work like this:

Mature simulators can contain parcels with the restricted content flag, but don't have to. PG simulators can't. Ever. Period.

As an example, all the land I own in Second Life is in Mature sims, but none of it contains anything that wouldn't be appropriate in a PG sim. Hence, no flag for me. Really, most of us don't seem to have piles of non-PG content laying around. No flag needed for us. For those that do - flag it.

We back-and-forthed for weeks with Linden Lab about this, and that's the best understanding we've been able to get so far. If there's non-PG content or activities on the parcel, flag it.

[UPDATE 6:45AM SLT]

Robin has answered our two questions:

How will the data for verification be entered?

The information is submitted through a form on the 'my account' page on the website.

When will it go live?

It will start once we're certain through the test with estate owners that everything is working correctly.

In the month of July, Meta Linden tells us, Linden Lab saw an actual fall in the number of premium accounts for the first time on record. The ballpark figure is approximately 5,800 accounts, many of which are on hold due to an "inability to pay".

This appears to be due to inability for Linden Lab to bill due to lost or incorrect billing information, and incomplete account information that is preventing Linden Lab from contacting those account-holders - presumably broken email addresses and the like.

We're expecting July's metrics to be published later today, where we'll get a better, overall picture of the state of Second Life through the month last month.

Linden Lab's page of raw data files of economic statistics and activity is presently down. We're not certain quite when it went off the air, but at this time it's been down for at least 15 minutes.

All the Linden Lab load-bearing web-servers are returning a single space character, rather than the wealth of economic data normally available in raw form. It's been reported to Linden Lab's web-team who are apparently already working on fixing it. The human readable version is still available.

[UPDATE: 11:30AM SLT - Apparently Linden Lab have now fixed this]