We’ve improved Kitely today with a new, easy-to-use forums system, and several improvements to OpenSim and our website.
Kitely Forums
Ever since we started our beta, people have been asking us to create user forums to make it easier to connect to other Kitely users. We’re happy to announce that as of today, the Kitely forums are officially open and located here: http://forums.kitely.com
To make it easy to use the forums, we’ve implemented a single sign-on system: any user that is logged in to the Kitely website is automatically logged in to the forums as well. We hope that this will make the forums a convenient place for discussions among the Kitely community. Please visit the forums now and introduce yourself!
You have the option to “subscribe” to individual forums, and if you do so then you’ll get an email notification whenever someone posts something to those forums. We encourage you to subscribe to the forums that interest you and become an active participant.
Our previous support site is now deprecated, so please switch to posting your support questions in the new forums. We’ll keep the old support site up for a few more months, since it contains information that may still be useful, but eventually it will be shut down. If you’ve previously posted information which you think is still relevant to other Kitely users then please repost it in the new forums.
We would like to acknowledge the efforts of two Kitely users: Margaux Lapointe and Dot Macchi, who have been kind enough to setup their own Kitely user forums when we had none. Despite being “under the radar” these forums have been quick to attract passionate users and produce great discussion. Dot’s forum in particular, http://forum.kitelyusers.net/, showed us how much good a forum can do and pushed us to add an official Kitely forum. Thank you Margaux and Dot!
Choose World Wind Settings
In one of our recent updates we changed the default type of wind used in OpenSim from “Random Wind” to “Configurable Wind”. We did so at the request of some of our users, but since then we’ve been told by other users that they prefer to use Random Wind. We’ve therefore added a checkbox that lets you select which type of wind to use in each of your worlds. All existing worlds are now using Random Wind by default, so wind behavior will return to what most people are used to. If you rely on Configurable Wind in your world then please make sure to enable it.
Improvements to OpenSim
We’ve implemented the ability to return objects from the Top Colliders and Top Scripts dialogs. This feature simply hadn’t been implemented in OpenSim yet, so we added it, and submitted it for inclusion in regular OpenSim as well. This should not be confused with the ability to return all the objects that belong to a particular user; that feature has always worked.
The following two OpenSim improvements rely on our proprietary cloud-based infrastructure and will therefore benefit Kitely users only:
Sometimes offline users appeared as online to their friends. This problem should appear much more rarely now, and will repair itself automatically after a while.
Some of our users encountered a problem where they had accidentally created a prim with a size of zero in one or more of its dimensions. Such prims are extremely difficult to delete because viewers don’t allow selecting them. We’ve added a self-fixing mechanism to Kitely: whenever a world is started we find such prims and change their size from 0 to 0.001. That is enough to make it possible to select those prims in the viewer, and edit or delete them.
Removed Support for Internet Explorer Versions 8 and Below
As of today, we no longer support IE version 8 and below. These old IE versions were used by just 0.05% of our visitors, so this change will have a minimal impact. However, supporting those old browsers was a chore so dropping support will let us focus our efforts on more modern browsers.
Other Improvements
We added a section called “My Subscription” to the Settings page. This makes it easier for users to see their subscription status at a glance. That information was previously found in the “Get Credits” dialog, but that placement was counter-intuitive so we moved it to a more prominent location.
