Chat failing to initiate
under review
Tinker Pixels
Both group chat and IM failing to initiate. I mostly experience it in Firestorm Social Island (simhost-0be97bd680c67540a.agni), as do the rest of the team.
Starting an IM with someone else will work most of the time and every once in a while end up with a popup stating "Unable to start a new chat session with Username. The session initialization is timed out".
Group chats will either fail silently or give the following message inline:
"Second Life: You are the only participant in this IM session. Your message is not being broadcast at this ti2me."
Tested on Second Life Release 26.1.1.23806384790, Alchemy Beta 7.1.9.2516 and Firestorm 7.2.3.80036.
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Maestro Linden
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Sparkle Weatherwax
I think 'failure to initiate' is pretty specific but, more information; this went on for a few hours early in the morning. Cleared up for awhile after around 10:AM SLT and recurred late last night so it's intermittent which is troublesome to actually pin down for documentation. Fact is, it did affect several avatars who commented to me about it. These were mostly older avis, helpers, etc who spend a lot of time in SL. So it wasn't just an isolated glitch. Hope this helps.
Maestro Linden
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Maestro Linden
Hi Tinker Pixels in order to investigate this, we'll need more details about specific incidents. For each incident, we need these details:
- Exact timestamp of the incident
- Name of the region you were in for that incident
- Name of the avatar (or group) you were messaging
- The viewer logs from that session.
For the viewer log, please Reproduce the viewer issue, log out, and then zip up your viewer logs folder. This page tells you where to find the logs folder: https://community.secondlife.com/knowledgebase/english/how-to-report-a-bug-r224/
Next, email the zip file to bug-attachments@lindenlab.com and reference the issue name in the email subject line.
Leave a comment on this canny issue once that's done so we can take a look at the logs.
Tinker Pixels
Maestro Linden
Exact time stamp: 8:43:01.
Exact region: Firestorm Social Island
Avatar that got the message: GatewayTester (secondlife:///app/agent/75c98507-b637-45c1-b94e-044813dfb9a8/about)
Avatar that I was messaging: Esmin (secondlife:///app/agent/5bae2768-ebee-44d4-a4c7-71c5c6a2ee98/about)
Viewer logs was sent as instructed.
Maestro Linden
Tinker Pixels: Thanks. I do see the line you're talking about in the viewer log:
2026-04-08T15:42:36Z WARNING # newview/lltoastalertpanel.cpp(197) LLToastAlertPanel::LLToastAlertPanel : Alert: Unable to start a new chat session with Esmin.
The session initialization is timed out
I'm not immediately seeing any activity from your avatar in the sim right around that time. Were you trying to send an IM to Esmin right when you got that notification, or did it seem to appear on its own?
Tinker Pixels
Maestro Linden In this case he had written me first, as I went to respond I got that while typing and the tab force-closed.
Tinker Pixels
Maestro Linden And important detail, This was done on the avatar GatewayTester (secondlife:///app/agent/75c98507-b637-45c1-b94e-044813dfb9a8/about) - not mine.
Maestro Linden
Tinker Pixels: Okay, looking through the viewer codebase and also that of Alchemy, it looks like that particular error message is a timeout error message that triggers if the client requests a chat session and doesn't hear a response from the server time. Starting a chat session against a single avatar (as opposed to a group or conference) would generally only happen if starting a P2P call with them over webRTC Voice. So it's curious that the viewer is complaining about a failed chat session with Esmin if you hadn't been trying to call them.
Tinker Pixels
Maestro Linden Earlier today (the first report) was on Firestorm. At no point in time has voice call been involved in the flow.