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.

Yesterday in Second Life we:

• Spent US$1,372,000 at an exchange rate of L$268.7 to US$1
• Exchanged US$274,000 at an average of US$11,400.0 per hour.
• Market buys were US$197,000
• Market sales were US$75,000
• Limit-limit buys were US$1,400
• The busiest time was at 11am when about US$16,000 was exchanged.
• The quietest time was 3am when about US$6,000 was exchanged.

• 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.

• Fixed several UI elements
• Fixed new group not appearing in group window until relog
• Fixed Trash folders in user inventory
• Fixed missing line of information on land sales
• Fixed parcel listings showing [AREA] instead of parcel size
• Fixed bad teleports from landmarks
• Fixed up/down arrows for Repeats Per Face
• Fixed a viewer nested message crash
• Fixed a viewer crash with editing classifieds
• Fixed a viewer crash when pressing Ctrl-F with a minimized Search window
• Fixed secondlife.log spam when group info window opens
• Fixed Publish on Web not saving for parcels
• Fixed missing dialog for Publish in Classifieds
• Fixed updates for Land and L$

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.

Yesterday in Second Life we:

• Spent US$1,284,000 at an exchange rate of L$266.4 to US$1
• Exchanged US$257,000 at an average of US$10,700.0 per hour.
• Market buys were US$173,000
• Market sales were US$84,000
• Limit-limit buys were US$200
• The busiest time was at 11am when about US$26,000 was exchanged.
• The quietest time was 11pm when about US$5,000 was exchanged.

• 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.