The recent TPV Policy changes brought with them the news that the functionality of llRequestAgentStatus, popularly used to obtain someone’s actual on-line status would be changed at some point in the near future as a matter related to users’ privacy.

The ability to determine someone’s on-line status has been the subject of debate for some time now, as evidenced by JIRA SVC-4823. The JIRA itself has received a lot of attention since the news on the TPV Policy changes broke, which both highlights the level of concern where potentially legitimate uses of llRequestAgentStatus is concerned, but conversely doesn’t help the Lab clearly understand all cases where this is so.

Yesterday, Oz put on a request on the JIRA, thus:

Everyone…. I don’t know if this will help or not, but I’m going to give it a try and see….

We hear what you’ve all said, we understand the issues, and we’re going to discuss what we can and should do about them.

Nothing is final.

We appreciate that Phoenix is moving appropriately to remove the privacy violation from their next release, and hope that they’ll do that soon, but we understand that these things take time.

In order to help us to have a better understanding, I appeal to the many of you who are posting messages that essentially say “I agree – this will be bad for me too” as opposed to describing a specific use case not already described here (and thank you to the many posts that have done a good job describing use cases): please stop with these “me too” posts – they just make it harder to read the full stream (and yes, I at least am reading all of every comment). We know that for every use case there are many users… we don’t need each of them to post something

This is a fair and reasonable request, and while it is understandable the many want to add their name to one or more instances where the function does have a positive use, it’s also essential the LL get a fair chance to establish the how and where and what in terms of what needs to be done in order to avoid causing undue upset or pain in altering the functionality – if indeed this happens.

If you do have a potential user case that hasn’t been listed in the JIRA (or perhaps hasn’t been fully explained), then now is the time to help Linden Lab help you by providing a clear and concise explanation of how the function is used and how altering it could be detrimental to the SL experience. If you just want to add a “me too” comment, without specifics, I would encourage you to consider Oz’s plea and resist the temptation, so that LL stand more of a chance of sifting through the feedback and properly taking all they need to understand into account.

Again, you can reach the JIRA to add your examples by clicking here.