It’s a good thing I’m not a conspiracy nut.

Over a month ago I created a group for the newly named Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable – a name change, and vision change, de-emphasizing Second Life as the only virtual worlds and expanding our vision and virtual vocabulary.  I kept the group out of search until the day of our big announcement, as I didn’t want people finding the group before the meeting.  Any time you add or update something to search, it shows up pretty much right away.  So the next day, when the group was not showing up in search, and people were writing to me, I contacted Linden Lab.

They told me that the ALL and GROUP categories can take up to THREE DAYS to update.  WTF is up with that?  Three days?  Seriously?  Has LL got some part-timer who comes in twice a week to handle this?  Seriously, with something as complicated as a user-generated content persistent virtual worlds, it takes three freaking days to get a group name populated into your database?  Shame on you for that alone!

So I waited the three days and on the third day the group showed up.  Great – I saw the group, I clicked it, it showed up for me, so I went and wrote to all of my groups letting them know they can now find it in search.

Today I started getting messages from people – although the name is showing up in search, when they click on it they get an error message saying

We’re sorry: This item’s privacy settings prevent us from showing you any further details about it.

I contacted LL and they told me it could take ANOTHER 72 hours before this is “fully” in the database.  I, apparently, was seeing the group in search because I’m a member already.  Now, other people are seeing it in search but when they click the search item, they are being told – in essence – that AJ is an idiot who doesn’t know how to set up privacy settings properly on the group.

First off – why even show it in the SEARCH if it can’t be reached.  Second, why make the end-user look like the one who is to blame.  When is LL going to step up and say “Ya know, we screw things up a lot, and we’re sorry”

Linden Lab, you are on notice – keep things up this way, treating me and others who have been your biggest evangelists in our industry, and you’ll soon find that you won’t have to worry about us any more.  I’m not the only one who is desperately checking out anything out there that might be worth investing time in and waiting patiently for some of the up-and-comers to get just to the point where it works for our needs.

How long before the masses start shouting out of their windows “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!”