Weekend Update

Here’s the status as of Sunday:

• As of last night, the migration was about 50% complete.
• There is no order to the migration. It’s not by Year joined, it’s not by when you signed up, it’s non-deterministic. So we can’t tell you when your stuff will be restored.
• Making posts, sending emails, or calling the office will not make your stuff arrive any sooner. In fact, it will probably slow it down.
• No, we don’t know when yours will be done.

Ok, that’s the obligatory migration update.

Here are some answers to some popular questions:

• When your Buddy and Ignore lists are restored, the Ignores will be re-ignored only if they have already registered. That means that if your ignoree joins after your buddy list is restored, you will have to re-ignore them. We know that will disturb some people but it’s how it works when we don’t restore the several million avatars who were there when we closed.
• When you recover a legacy avatar, your avatar template and skin color should already match your legacy avatar. But, your outfits and looksets don’t re-appear until we restore your buddies and gear.
• Even though you don’t see your vehicles, paintguns, and props in ThereIM, we have restored them. You just can’t see them in ThereIM (because you can’t use them). They’re there, really.
• When we migrate stuff, your transaction history will show a transaction for each item migrated. Your old transaction history is gone, so don’t panic if you can’t see it.
• We are aware of an issue with real email addresses showing up in some types of Club Invitations. This is because we no longer support ThereMail (and probably never will). (ThereMail was the feature which let you email “michaelwilson@there.com” (for example), and it would end up in my InBox. We’ll have to come up with a replacement, but meanwhile, we’re going to fix bug so real emails don’t show up.

And now, for some more general items:

• We know there are bugs in ThereIM, but we’re probably not going to focus on them, because we think you’d rather us work on the 3D world.
• There are rumors running around the community about “fixed” versions of ThereIM, patches, etc. We urge you not to listen to them, and not to use them. We can’t take responsibility for what they are, or, of course, any damage they might do. Given that we’ve already seen one (fake) “hack” program, I think we should all be careful what we install on our computers.
• There is a Hair Patch out there which contains assets which are probably property of MTV (from the VMTV days). Please do not install it. We really don’t need the legal hassles which go with it.

I think that’s all for now. I’ll have a 3D world update tomorrow. Bruce found an amazingly elusive bug last week to do with “FPU Precision Resets” which was troubling us a bit (it turned out to be a missing semicolon!). This was the biggest unexplained issue with the 3D world. But more on that later.

P.S. Up to the minute update: we’re now 73.4% done.