AjaxLife Blog

Linden Lab has informed me that AjaxLife cannot be run as an openly available service (this is the first time any formal policy regarding it has been determined). It is not currently actually blocked; however, I will be terminating service effective immediately. Note that it is permissible for you to obtain the source and run a private server; however, I will not be maintaining the code, and you may not make your server publicly accessible either.

I have included below the pertinent portion of the communication from Linden Lab, which is the termination of several weeks of (intermittent) discussion:

I’m afraid we can’t reinstate access for AJAX Life as an
open service, even if L$ transactions are disabled. The problem
remains that the others have used the service for harassment and
fraud, and we don’t have engineers available to integrate the IP
address hash you’ve offered to forward on connection with the
governance tools. We also don’t have resources for oauth or another
third-party authentication system at this point – the user count
doesn’t justify it against larger issues.

There’s also the problem of the password being passed through AJAX
Life. This creates a security risk for Linden Lab and for the users,
and extends liability risks to you.

It is perhaps important to stress that this is not an unreasonable statement; merely an unfortunately one. I have no idea how many people used AjaxLife, but it was under 600/day, and concurrency was 50-60 at most.

If you’re wondering why this didn’t happen sooner: AjaxLife’s original architecture caused its IP to change extremely frequently, as a result of a combination of poor stability and frequent server reassignments. As part of the changes made to make AjaxLife stable (which it now is), it was given a fixed IP. As such, the issue of abuse from the IP became somewhat more prominent, resulting in whatever internal discussions lead to this.

It’s a shame, but it’s not surprising, and not really LL’s fault. It was nice for the last three years, at any rate.

As many of you have noticed, AjaxLife has been blocked by Linden Lab again. No word from them thus far regarding getting it unblocked…

Linden Lab has unbanned us again. Hurrah.

Log in!

Linden Lab has banned us. Again.

Anyone at LL feel like whitelisting app1.ajaxlife.net? :<

AjaxLife is currently down, due to being banned by Linden Lab. I will re-enable it when I have figured out why.

First post here in a long while!

AjaxLife, as it stands, is effectively not in active development – the last change to anything other than the splash screen was almost a year ago. I haven’t actually given up on it; I’ve merely lacked the motivation to continue development (this is not helped by libsl/libomv making breaking changes every version). So I’m sorry for the lack of updates.

However, the service is, nominally, still running. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Linden Lab have taken to banning it periodically. I can only assume that this is an automated response to griefers using it, as bringing it up on a new IP usually resolves the issue for an undefined length of time (and it does accurately report itself, so it seems unlikely to be an intentional ban against AjaxLife).

If you receive messages informing you that “Second Life cannot be accessed from this computer”, and that you should contact support@secondlife.com, AjaxLife has been blocked again. Unfortunately, it appears there isn’t much I can do for this; I apologise for the inconvenience.

(Incidentally, I know support@secondlife.com doesn’t work any more. Linden Lab writes the error messages, not me.)

AjaxLife has been down for the last couple of weeks due to Linden Lab’s consistent failure to make the Teen Grid signups work. Please all go vote on JIRA WEB-734, which I would link to, but WordPress doesn’t seem to like me much today.

As for those of you who have donated, you do have some valid cause to be irritated. There has been one vocal complaint, and I imagine that there are more who don’t feel strongly enough to actually publicly comment on the issue, but none-the-less feel somewhat put out. Whilst I would remind you that AjaxLife has been costing $120-130/month for much longer than people have been paying, and that it will return in future (and donations will carry forward), I understand that it is not running now. As such, in return for your support, I will be happy to refund any donations you have made since November 11th (31 days before AjaxLife was closed, which is the length of time between the spending of donations).  If you would like to request such a refund, please email me at katharine@kathar.in with the email address from which you sent your donation, and I will make arrangements for your money to be returned ASAP.

I do hope that this episode has not impacted on any of those who may have intended to use AjaxLife and/or donate towards its upkeep in future. In the meantime, I will point to MovableLife (https://movablelife.net) as a possible alternative – whilst far buggier than AjaxLife, it has the significant advantage of actually being up.

AjaxLife 0.5.1 has been released, featuring not much of anything.

Bug fixes

• Desktop version no longer shows “None” in the group list if you aren’t in any groups.
• iPhone version properly escapes messages.
• iPhone version resets unread local message count to zero when you read the messages.

I have a nice survey for people to take. Please do so. You can find it here.

Responses will actually be taken into account when working on things As many responses as possible would be appreciated; it should only take a few minutes.

Many thanks to those who take it!

I am currently not in a position to develop AjaxLife, mostly due to the brokenness of the internet over here, as well as time constraints.

The bug that was originally delaying the release is now fixed, but other significant work is in progress, and the system is currently unusable (IMs broken, chat buttons floating oddly, inventory window wildly oversized, strange formatting bugs, profiles unviewable, search only shows one name at a time, windows becoming unopenable after closing using the “x”, etc.)

That sounds like a very long list, but most of it comes down to a single bug. The IMs being broken is another bug, and windows being unopenable is already fixed, but I haven’t applied this to all windows yet.

I want and hope that this will be done by Monday. No promises though.