2011-10-21

Grid Status Notifier

If there's one constant source of vague annoyance in Second Life (okay, there isn't one, there's many more than one) it's the inability of other residents to check with the resources provided when there's a problem. While Linden Labs might not always update the grid status as a priority, it generally alerts people to upcoming planned outages (as does do the rather useful calendar feeds they provide -- subscribe to it in your calendar software of choice and you'll never be surprised by a planned rolling restart again). So it's always a little annoying (but not surprising) to see people asking why some sim is missing, or why it's restarting, etc..., when the grid status clearly says what's going on.

Of course, sometimes, problems hit out of the blue, they aren't planned, and, again, that's where the grid status comes in. If you're running a sim, or a store, or an event (dance, hunt, etc...), knowing about these issues as soon as possible can be very handy. While I personally try and keep on top of things by subscribing to the RSS feed of the grid status I'm seldom paying attention to my feed reader when I'm in-world.

That needs an in-world solution. What follows is what I'm now using. I can't and won't claim this as an original idea, the code is based on code by Dermot Core/DigitaL Scribe, but that code didn't work quite how I wanted so I re-wrote it from scratch (as much for fun as anything) and made it work "just so". I'm sharing what I wrote in the same way.

Just rez a prim, drop this in, and you're good to go. When it first loads it'll IM you the current status. Any time the latest status changes (either because it's a new status, or because it's been modified) it'll IM you it. This check is done every 5mins. Also, if anyone touches the prim the script is in, the current status is spoken in local chat.

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