I'm alive!  And I've returned.  And I've even updated my look so I don't look like I was born in the early days of SL!  New hair!  Wow, never thought I'd be able to wear new hair.  So here I am.  And no, I've not done a lot.  I don't know if I will do a lot.  Just taking it easy and seeing how this new SL is working out.

I will, however, talk a little about Ban Link.  I've been out of SL for about a year.  During that time I've poked at Ban Link a time or two, but not a whole lot.  Travis has been handling and managing everything.  I even got to where I was ready to move away from it.  I didn't, however.  And that was more a situational decision than anything.  We were going to phase me out, and then Travis, of all people, disappeared.

So what is the future of Ban Link, you ask?  Is there a future?  Well, indeed there is.  Hopefully not too little, too late.  I've already moved Ban Link onto new hardware, and it's been performing brilliantly.  The database has been tuned up and all responses are just thrilling.  We went from processing 5,000 Ban Link messages in a minute, to over 10,000.  And not only that, our average time per message went from around 1-2 seconds to less than 1/4 of a second.  It's really great news and has really inspired more work.

And yes, there's been more work…

The web side of Ban Link has been getting a much needed overhaul.  For those that have been around a while, you'll remember we moved from Ban Link Web 1.0 to Ban Link Web 2.0 a long while back, and that was a much needed interface improvement.  However, the initial plan for that was to provide much more in the way of improvements than came about.  Finally, Ban Link Web 3.0 is near completion.  And it involves an entirely new framework.  So this time around we won't see a whole lot in the way of interface changes, though there will be some significant updates in how the data is presented, but what we will have is a much more robust system and hopefully along with the server improvements, a system that will operate in a much more usable fashion.

That being said, I'm already going to make some aggressive changes to Ban Link's user base.  This is partially due to the severe backload of registered but inactive groups in the system.  As we know, Second Life changes weekly, daily, hourly, and is one of the reasons we made sure a group that wanted to come online was one with significant traffic and not likely to be here one day and gone the next.  If you're an active user, you have nothing to fear.  If you've requested a group for your place or have an account that is inactive. it will be disappearing.  But anyone is very welcome to register again and get back into our queue.

Another change?  Better tracking of history.  And this is in nearly every respect.  The original website grew from a very small project into what it is today.  And we basically chased a moving target to get to this point.  The new improvements will help us in administration and hopefully you as well in determine what's working and what's not.  Who's doing what, and even better tracking of which groups are more or less trustworthy than others.

It's an exciting time, and a lot of things are happening.  I hope the new changes will be welcome and thanks for your continued support.