Subscribe-O-Matic and new rate throttle on llGiveInventory

Some of you might have stumbled upon JIRA ticket SVC-7631 or have been given a notecard describing how this unannounced Second Life server change might potentially break your mailing list or subscription management product or service or even cause all your vendors to get blocked in a certain region and stop giving out inventory items for a period of time.

I have been closely monitoring this issue for the past few days and testing the current versions of Subscribe-O-Matic against this upcoming throttling change and I would like to write a few words about it.

What is all this about?

Due to security and griefing issues Linden Lab has implemented a new throttle on llGiveInventory which monitors all scripts owned by you in a certain region for excessive llGiveInventory calls. Basically, if scripts owned by you send out more than roughly 5000 inventory items inside a 60 minute window, all llGiveInventory calls could be blocked for 30 to 60 minutes (throttle and blocking is implemented per owner per region) with scripts having no way of detecting this block.

How do I know my scripts are being blocked?

When your scripts reach the throttle limits and are about to get blocked, you receive an instant message from Second Life: “Objects you own in <region name> have sent out excessive inventory and their offers have been temporarily deactivated. The last inventory offer sent was from <object name>”.

I’m using Subscribe-O-Matic, does this affect me?

If you are using the current Subscribe-O-Matic version, there is no reason to worry or panic. Subscribe-O-Matic has been around for almost 6 years now and while it’s definitely not the most flashy new kid on the block anymore, we have traditionally opted for a “safer” approach, favoring long term reliability and stability over speed and feature overload. For that reason, Subscribe-O-Matic’s throttling logic has always been on a more agressive side, making sure we don’t go over any limits or throttles imposed by Linden Lab, negatively impact other products or consume too much of sim’s resources. Simply put, Subscribe-O-Matic is already sending messages and inventory items slow enough so this new inventory throttle should not affect you.

That said, this inventory throttle takes all your scripts in a certain region into account, which means different scripts and products you own in that region can influence each other and all add up to this inventory rate limit. For example, Subscribe-O-Matic calls llGiveInventory when you are sending a message, so do any scripted vendors, magic boxes, notecard givers and other similar products. Since there is no way for scripts to know how often other scripts are sending out inventory, it’s possible to reach this limit in a busy sim even if none of your scripts are sending out inventory excessively.

For this reason, I suggest you monitor your Subscribe-O-Matic a bit more closely in the next few weeks while it’s sending out messages and drop me a line in case you hit the limit on any of your regions while sending messages through Subscribe-O-Matic.

If your Subscribe-O-Matic controller (the object you send messages with) is currently rezzed in your main region where you also have a lot of other scripted products (your main shop for example) or vendors, and you have this option, I suggest you move your Subscribe-O-Matic controller to another region just to be on the safe side. If you do this, don’t forget to include a landmark or SLURL to your main store inside your message or notecard so customers know where to teleport when they receive your message.

I will be closely monitoring this situation for the next few weeks myself to make sure Subscribe-O-Matic doesn’t negatively impact your other product with this new limit. I also have an emergency update ready to roll out in case of any unforseen issues that might arise when this change is rolled out on the main grid.

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Subscribe-O-Matic unavailability details

Let me start with an apology. I am extremely sorry for this recent Subscribe-O-Matic outage and the trouble it has caused. One thing I’m personally always proud of is the reliability of our service. Even though we host thousands of groups and help you send millions of messages each month, we haven’t had any major outages in the last 3 years, apart from a few minutes of maintenance every now and then. Yet in the last 24 hours, Subscribe-O-Matic was unavailable for over 8 hours. So what happened?

Even though we have started switching away from MediaTemple (our old hosting provider) in March, there were still a few fail-over services running on our old server. And more importantly, the DNS records for Subscribe-O-Matic were still hosted there. A few hours ago, MediaTemple became a target of a DDOS attack which resulted in their DNS servers becoming unavailable. This rendered all their services and customer sites unreachable, including Subscribe-O-Matic.

Even though we do have a fail-over server, it still relies on DNS service being operational. I already moved the DNS records to our new provider, but the changes need some time to propagate across the net. At the time of this writing, MediaTemple engineers have managed to restore most of their network availability, so Subscribe-O-Matic should be reachable by most of you. I’m also implementing some changes in how we handle situations like this to make sure a similar outage doesn’t happen as easily.

I received a lot of messages about the outage and even though I’m not able to reply to each and every one, rest assured I’m working hard on getting this situation resolved – I understand how much trouble and frustration this has caused to many of you.

For more information please follow us on Twitter or check MediaTemple’s Twitter feed.

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Non-profit, charity and educational Subscribe-O-Matic groups

We recently got a Holiday e-card from Google, stating they donated US$ 20M to charity organizations around the world. We immediately wanted to match their donation, but our CFO found out that we are a little under US$ 20M short.

Unfortunately we cannot support good people with money donations just yet, but we’ve been doing our best to provide free Subscribe-O-Matic groups to numerous charity and educational organizations around Second Life along with other non-profit and community groups.

Relay for Life Second Life teams have been using Subscribe-O-Matic to coordinate the RFL effort every year  to raise awareness and donations for the American Cancer Society. The Second Life RFL teams raised US$275,000 this year alone. We’ve also been supporting other efforts like Kivafriends.org, the Kiva.org lending community and the Amnesty International group in SL. Organizers of annual charity events and fairs like the Clothing Fair and Hair Fair have also been using Subscribe-O-Matic to plan and promote their events.

There are also hundreds of educational, art and culture communities using the non-profit Subscribe-O-Matic services: Art and Culture Virtual Community, ArtMuse, Institute for Cooperative Education and La Performance – to name just a few.

If you run a non-profit, educational, charity or community group in Second Life and want to use Subscribe-O-Matic to promote or communicate your cause, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’ll be more than happy to review your group and set up an unlimited non-profit Subscribe-O-Matic account for you.

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