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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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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To pave the road for the upcoming Subscribe-O-Matic upgrades, we’re moving the service to a shiny new server (and a different datacenter). I’m not expecting any downtime (hence the short notice), but there might be a few short disruptions in form of not being able to send messages or new members not being able to subscribe, since we’ll be locking the database for write access while we migrate everything.
You might also experience some slight slowdowns during the day until the DNS changes propagate over the internet properly. Here’s a quick breakdown of the move:
- March 7th 01:00AM – 02:00AM PST – database move: you won’t be able to send messages during this time and members won’t be able to subscribe/unsubscribe.
- March 7th 03:00 AM PST – service and website DNS change: DNS will be updated to point to the new servers. I don’t anticipate any disruptions, but you might experience a slight slowdown until your objects in-world are actually connecting to the new server. In extreme cases, the DNS changes might take between 24-48 hours to propagate across the internet.
- March 8th – blog and support portal move: no disruptions planned.
I’ll update this post as soon as the move is complete.
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If you ever wanted to offer discounts to your Subscribe-O-Matic members, give out special loyalty gifts or if you’re simply unhappy about freebie hunters that unsubscribe as soon as they check your group for freebies – we have just released the right tool for you.
Subscribe-O-Matic Member Discount Vendor is a simple, easy and free add-on vendor script that allows you to reward your loyal members with discounts or even free gifts while other customers pay the regular price for your product.
You can grab it for free at our in-world location here, or on XStreet here.
Overview
While Subscribe-O-Matic already enables you to send freebies and gifts to your members, this simple vendor gives you more options to fine-tune your loyalty rewards. For example, you can set up a discount (or a free item), which applies only to customers that have been your members for over 3 months.
The vendor is extremely simple to setup and packed into one simple lag-friendly script (with no active sensors or listeners). There is also an example vendor prim included inside the package that you can use as a starting point.
Although it’s not meant to be used as a full feature-rich vendor replacement, it has all the features you would expect from a simple vending script (properly handles refunds for over-payments, sets the Pay buttons with prices, etc).
Usage examples
So how or why would you use it? Here are a few examples:
You have a brand new clothing item that you normally sell for L$200. You would like to give a 50% discount to everyone that’s been a member of your group for 60 days or more, while everyone else can buy the item for the regular price. Or you are selling your discontinued clothing line product for L$20, but would like to offer it for free to all your members. If you worry that people would join to your group just to snatch your free item and unsubscribe, you could set it so you have to be a member for over 3 days before you can get the item for free.
Fine Print: although this is a free add-on, you need an existing paid (or non-profit) Subscribe-O-Matic subscription plan.
I’m excited to get some feedback, so don’t be afraid to post any questions, suggestions or issues in the comments below.
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We were just way too busy to write anything on the blog. Wait – we didn’t even have a blog!
Even though we’ve been quite busy in the last few months, we probably haven’t been updating you on our current website as much as we should. To remedy this, we put up this blog so we can keep you in the loop more easily, let you know what’s going on behind the scenes, what we’re planning and also post a handy tip or two.
Subscribe-O-Matic groups currently have almost 2 million members combined and over 100,000 members join every month, so even though we’re way overdue on some much needed feature additions and upgrades, we’ve been focusing on the backend to make sure we can deal with the growth and keep providing a reliable service.
Since we probably all agree our website urgently needs upgrading, we have a team of 150 engineers working on are working hard on a brand new Subscribeomatic.com website which will be much more user-centric. Users (group members) will be able to manage their subscriptions online without all the teleporting around and hunting for the kiosks. They’ll be able to unsubscribe easily on the website, or subscribe to new groups, check their recent messages or redeliver items they might have missed, amongst other things.
For group owners, the most important and long-awaited feature is definitely the ability to create and manage more than one group. Other exciting features include detailed analytics, the ability to send messages only to certain members (based on a tag or where / when they joined, etc) and 3rd-party integration options.
We’re aiming to launch the upgraded service and the new website by the end of February (provided we have enough coffee and Red Bull). In the meanwhile, we’ll keep you updated with previews and insights on what we’re doing.
Your feedback and ideas are very important, especially at this stage, so don’t be shy and let us know what features are most important to you in the comments below the post.
If you want to be updated on what we’re up to, don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.
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