With 16 minutes left, SL goes TU. What now?

[Grey Nacht]

OK, this is my first major SL failure while I was holding a contest at Pala. There were about 15 minutes left, when Second Life decided to go up in smoke. What happens now? I have seen a smaller crash at Hedonism (their sim had crashed) where there was a large hole where the sim should have been. However, this appears to be a larger outage as I can not get into SL at all.

Apologies to all who were at Pala. The contest will resume (I guess) when SL comes back up.

I really do hate Monday!
Grey

[Grey Nacht]

OK, this does point out a need for a new feature in the scoreboard controls. We need the ability to PAUSE a contest, rather than abort or end early. That way, when there is either a SIM or SL-wide crash, the contest host can PAUSE the contest to give contestants time to get back to the location. Otherwise, the contest just resumes when the sim reboots.

Thanks
Grey

[Seven Shikami]

Hm, interesting idea. One possible drawback is that to keep lag low the board only "ticks" every 30 seconds, so you'd end up adding an extra 0-29 seconds to your contest after unpausing. I doubt anyone would really care, though.

Next time I open up the board code I'll look into it. I've got a slew of other upgrades and features on my plate, I'll note.

[Jen Shikami]

Hmm. I can see how this would help if the host is in the region and the fishers are on their way back... but in the event of a region crash, would that actually be likely?

What I mean is... if the region or SL crashes, nobody will actually be there to pause the contest, eh?

I wonder what happens to the scores if the region croaks while a contest is running, for that matter.

Oh and speaking of SL going TU, I always use this site's graph of concurrent logins for rapid detection of SL-wide disasters:
http://etitsup.com/slstats/
The right end of the graph is "now", so big downspikes are an obvious indicator of badness. I find that's a better or at least quicker indicator than the official status blog:
http://status.secondlifegrid.net/

[LittleHelper Eichel]

Ho Ho Ho, merry christmas !
I was there at Pala when the region crashed and it take a lot of time for many fishoholics to be back online and coming to Pala.
So if there were an Pause-Option for running contests and the host is back online early enough that would be a good way to wait for all returning fishers.
I would love to have such an option at a contest board.

Greetings
LittleHelper

[Grey Nacht]

As the host at Pala, when I was finally able to log back in, I dropped back into my "last location", which was oddly enough not where I was when we crashed, but another location on Pala. Easy TP to the dock and I waited. Since this was a network and not a sim or region failure, the clock was still running on the board. Took another few minutes for the fishers who had been in the contest to start reappearing, either through LMs they had set, or from the Pala entry telehub. Either way, it would have been useful to have been able to pause the contest for 5 or ten minutes to give folks the time to get back. Some never did. The prizes were handed out at the end, even if the fishers were not present.

So, its usefulness depends on the host being able to get back in time to pause it.

Seven is going to look into it, which is good enough. As long as SL stays stable (ANOTHER GOOD ONE!), this won't be needed.

[Ookami Katayama]

Normally what I would do is restart it if it was early and wouldn't go into someone else' tourny, otherwise, just let it play out.
Pause sounds like a good idea, until hosts start getting requests to pause all the time.
As long as the option isn't there, hosts can never be accused of pausing for their friends or favorite fishers.

[Seven Shikami]

That is a good point, that hosts could use Pause in an unethical manner. If I do this I'm going to need to make it VISUALLY clear that the contest is paused, so folks know that any fish they catch won't count until it's unpaused. That way no sneaky business is going on.