WOW! Stealth MODE has come to SL!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, it's another seemingly great idea on paper that in reality is further damaging to the already fragile social structure that is barely holding SL together.

I mean, SL is not like WoW, where starting a new character puts you at level 1 with no weapons and no skills; you can just get a free alt and log on with that, and give them everything (except a few no-transfer items) your main character has, complete with your skills in scripting, building, texturing, whatever.

Yet more 'adding shiny stuff' for the sake of it, whilst completely ignoring the lag and the critical strain on the underlying technology. I thought the idea of these sort of things was to actually predict load and try to stay one step ahead of the demands on the system, rather than thinking about a possible solution 2-3 months after it becomes a serious problem. It's not like it's going to go away, is it.

Lewis

I like it because it gives us more options. If anyone doesn't like it, they can just make it behave it always used to behave. It's all up to us.

I just hope it works.

One little cute feature of the stealth mode is that if you are shown off-line and someone sends you an IM they would immediately know that you are in-world. So ignore at your own peril.

But then I ignore alot of IM's even when I am online and can be mapped. (And somethings even standing in front of them.)

I was thinking exactly the same thing. I guess any hopes of Friends list actually working again are dashed forever.

And to add to the greater discussion, here's what I would prefer:
- Global per-account privacy options for mapping, Search People, Friends list, etc.
- Per-friend options that override your global settings. (I look offline and can'r be mapped by default, but THIS person sees me online, THAT person can map me, etc.)

This would give everyone a simple way to enable global privacy settings, but give folks who want to customize their settings the option to do that on an as-needed basis.

be interesting when people start running into the people they are hiding from. Im with Lewis on this one.

I'm not against having the option to turn mapping on/off, however I am against implementing new features in a way that breaks previous behavior - why should the whole grid mess with some settings just to get back to what they had before? The existing friends list should be transfered with mapping on (also newly created friends should have it on by default) - this way things stay as they were before while allowing people who want it to use the additional functionality.

Jesse: This forum is called feedback. I'm providing feedback, kthxbye

did some testing, and there are a few problems:

* If I uncheck SHOW ONLINE STATUS IN SEARCH in preferences, then I don’t show up in find AT ALL. Nada, zilch, nothing. Shouldn't you still show up in FIND, but just say “Offline” regardless of whether you are? One of the reasons for this feature was to help content creators have the privacy to create, but don’t make us disappear from find altogether or that’ll raise 10 kinds of hell!

* If I remove the ability to see me online from a friend, when they IM, it goes straight through. I get enough “Are you onlines?” already just from people too lazy to check search - this will be even worse, hehehe. Any chance of getting IMs to be treated as offline in that scenario, perhaps only if we have IM to email enabled? I suspect the same behavior is true for inventory passes.

I’ve reported these as bugs - if everyone else could too, that’d be great.

Good start, but it seems this feature still needs some fine tuning to be useful. Thanks for starting to address it - this has been a long time coming for those of us who've been around since 2003 and have thousands of cards and friends we don't wish to offend!

Regards,

-Flip

Thanx all for yer comments... OMGWTHLULZBBX isn't it about time for this joy?!? YES IT IS! Words can't contain my excitement, and of course I remember when Flip -- and many of you infact -- brought this up both on the forums and @ a Community Roundtable meeting.

I'll clip-'n'-save this thread and get your feedback to the right Lindens in the know.

The 'invisible in search' behavior was a bug. It should be corrected on the next preview deploy.

I still can't wait for all the drama to come.

"OMG, you went invisible to me but my friend Billy Bob can still see you! YOU'RE IGNORING ME, YOU DON'T WANNA B MY FREND NEMORE!!111"

I really think it should be all-or-nothing.

ok, i'm confused. does it mean that:
1. we will be invisible to people
or
2.visible but not mapable.

i would prefer #2.

Sorry it was not corrected and you can still detect if someone is online by sending an email. If you do not get a message saying they are offline and the message will be stored then they are online.

We do need these controls.
Technically calling cards should be used for this, but in practice the friends list (why not "buddy list" - that would prevent a lot of drama!) WILL get used for casual contacts... simply because few people know how to exchange calling cards, let alone go to the extra effort of doing so.
Once a casual contact has offered you friendship, no matter how little they know you, it STILL comes off as rude to decline. It STILL causes a tension in the room. IMHO LL are right to accept this is the case and work in better controls for the "friends list".



These features are very good for SL.

I have "I will delete anyone who maps me from my friends list." in my profile.
I would have thought that is a very clear sign telling people not to map me.
They still do it. This causes a fair bit of drama.
The reason is that it is far easier to map someone than it is to go through a person's profile and check if they are ok with being mapped or not. So, as many people believe getting forgiveness is easier than asking permission, they go ahead and map you.

These changes would make it more difficult to cause drama. Instead of being able to cause drama by accidentally mapping someone they were not supposed to, they would have to know at least two bits of info (they can't see you online, others can) in order to cause drama.

So, the total amount of drama will go down, because the drama is harder to cause.

This will be very, very good for SL. It will make a lot of people very happy and lower the occurance of drama.

Thus these changes are good for the SL social fabric.

Invisible mode, and mapping prevention are not "shiny new" (read:useless) features. They are basic requirements for privacy. I am frankly amazed LL have not put them in place before now.
Being able to be 'offline' when you choose, especially to certain people, can save a heck of a lot of hassle, especially if you are a busy person who sometimes NEEDS peace and quiet to focus. I imagine the Lindens, for example, will be using these new tools a whole lot to manage the IMs they get.

Now... about the complaint that LL should be working on the basics... such as lag, sim crashes, etc.
I've got sims that have been crashing several times a *day* and I've had to field a ton of help calls from my residents complaining of lag, crashes, items disappearing... etc.
I know how essential work on the basics is!
Thing is, LL has many coders. They can't *all* work on the basics. There is an optimum number of coders per project and a fixed number of bug-fixing projects they can be working on at any one time. Assigning all the coders to the same things would mean they kept stepping on each others' toes, changing bits which caused other coders to have to re-do their work... etc. In short, it would be a mess.
Therefore some coders should work on new features.
Since some coders need to work on new features.... why not assign them to work on features that are highly requested by residents.... like these ones? Sounds like a damn good idea to me!

But then, it would, because I posted a very similar suggestion a few months ago. It was needlessly complicated though. I'm glad that LL adopted a simpler approach.

Oh and they *are* working on the crash/etc bugs.
Example from Preview Release Notes:


I hope that's fixes as much as possible of the recent plague of crashes.
I also hope they have a fix for the images time bug in the pipeline.

Thing is, I've heard Philip say at Concierge Town Hall event that the images time bug was LL's top priority, so I know it's pointless to badger them about these things because they *are* working on them.

I would criticise the Lindens for their inability to handle the influx of new users...
but I'm a former OpenBSD/*nix sysadmin myself. I *know* if my usercount jumped by 30 percent in a few months (as has happened with their jump from 1m users to more like 1.3+m users...) and kept rising at that rate, then I would struggle to cope with that.
10% growth per month is just amazing, and I understand they are having problems. Obviously I'd like them fixed! But they seem to be aware of the problems and working on them.

The one problem to do with scaling that really worries me about SL is the fact that currently, SL maps a certain fixed size of 'land' to one simulator, and that this simply cannot scale as inevitably some parcels of land will be more popular than others. I worry if LL will be able to give up the concept of simulators simulating a fixed land size - and move towards pooling resources so that empty regions don't use a full simulator, but very popular regions are able to use more resources to avoid becoming super-laggy.

Currently SL does not handle large gatherings of avs in one place very well.
It will need to change the way it simulates the world for it to be able to.
That's the only deep problem I'm worried about LL's response to.
The lag, crashes, etc... they seem to be fixing, or at least trying to fix. Annoyingly slowly, but they're trying and given the money coming into SL I figure it's only a matter of time before their army of coders fixes those problems.




Yes it will cause some new drama.
But think of all the problems it will eliminate...
* people mapping you when they don't know they're not allowed to
* people always IMing you when you're busy
are two good examples.

It will cause some problems, yes. But it will solve more problems than it causes. Thus it is a good thing.

Some suggestions :
1) When we change a person's status, please don't make the friends list scroll all the way back to the top. Let us keep our place while making changes. When you first switch to this new system, some will want to change all their existing friends, say, to remove 'can see my online status'. Having to select in blocks, change, then scroll down again to select the next block is annoying. Let us stay where we are on the long list while making changes.
2) Being able to select more friends at once would be nice.
3) You might want to consider having an easy way to change the permissions of *all* of your friends. Say... a "copy to all" button, which gives *all* your friends the same permissions as the *single* friend you currently have selected. That would make changeover much less hassle, even for people with large friend lists.

Some questions :
1) What is the 4th col, right of 'modify objects' used for? Does it suggest more permissions will be added here in future? If so, any plans for which?
2) Open an IM window to people you double click on the friends list is nice. Is there a different shortcut to bring up their profile?
3) Can you friend someone, then set it so they *can't* see you online when everyone else in SL can? If so... does this signal a plan to integrate the friends and mute lists into one list for ease of managing both the granting of additional permissions to friends and the muting of griefers/spammers?

You already can Angel. You can shift click and ctrl click. Select all freinds, some freinds or just one to your hearts desire.

That show which freinds you have modify rights for


Yes you can

Ack, sorry, I read the forum topic before the LL blog post that answered some of my questions.




Actually...

Emphasis mine



Just saw that on the blog. You replied before I had the chance to go back and remove that Q from my post. I still want to know if they plan to add other stuff to the right though



Yay

Hey I was wondering. I saw you here in Beta and thought you had written that while here heehee. Sorry! ANd yep, I forgot it only allowed 10 freinds selected at one time. I had to do it in 3 different groups.

The fix for this is (as I suggested almost a year ago) to swap "add friend" and :exchange cards" in the menu.

AT THE VERY LEAST the default behaviour should be for "mapping" to remain on.

I went online in beta and it took me 5 minutes to reenable mapping for all my friends because you can't select more than 10 people at a time!

I bug-reported both things.
No, they should fix the underlying problem (give card is just plain hard to find) first and THEN if that doesn't work try something else.

But they never seem to do that.

One thing I would like to mention is the Lindens have had "stealth" mode for a long time. Have you ever tried to search for a Linden only not to even find them in search at ALL? I find it very interesting they find this feature useful yet never bothered to pass it on to the residents who would also find it very useful.

As for the "add card instead of friend". I agree with that. I never could understand why add friend is easy to find yet card is buried a few layers deep in the pie menu. Most residents don't even know calling cards exist or if they did notice them in their inventories they have no idea how they got them or that you can exchange them via the PIE menu.

Also it has been said that calling cards will let you see if someone is online. Unfortunately that has not been the case for some time. A calling card makes it easy to send someone a IM yes, or to pull up their profile if you don't remember the exact name. However, it won't tell you if they are online if they are not on your friends list as well. So you still need to do a search to see if they are online. I never could understand that. And finally I agree that it is usually seen as rude if you don't accept a friend, especially if you just met the person from newbie central. Most people I know accept in such a situation then quietly remove them later but keep in touch via calling cards. I am relived that the Lindens made remove a quiet process compared to add. I have been in systems that informed you to remove as well as add and it just increased the drama. And I think we have enough drama in SL.....don't you?

-DB

NP - I did write the post while on the beta grid, but I don't mind being corrected so long as I learn something useful from it In this case I learnt what the 4th icon is for, so thank you




You may want all your friends to be able to map you, but most people don't want all their friends to be able to map them.
If I had to guess, I'd say that more people will use the new system to strip mapping permission from all their friends than will use it to give that permission to all their friends.
The defaults are safe settings intended to be useful for most people. I'm guessing that most people would prefer not to let *all* their friends map them. Maybe they want a few to map them, but not all.
So, it makes sense to have mapping be off by default. This might not suit you but IMHO it is probably closer to what the majority want.

With regard to swapping 'add friend' and 'offer card'... I don't think that's a good idea, because :
1) people are *used* to using the friends list. Many don't even know calling cards exist! Changing the system radically on them would cause lots of drama. Remember when LL swapped the positions of "take copy" and "wear"? They ended up reversing that change because people complained about the inconvenience it caused. Many people don't like having their habits disrupted... especially if those habits are based on muscle memory. If LL won't swap "take copy" and "wear" due to complaints about how people are used to the old system, what chance do you think there is of them swapping "add friend" and "offer card"? Very little, I think.
2) The friends list is being upgraded. The calling card system isn't. Eventually the friends list will do everything the calling cards system does, and much more. When it does, what point will remain in using calling cards?



IIRC I've heard Lindens say they do this - simply for peace and quiet while working hard.

I don't know why they have not given this ability to residents.

Maybe you should ask Phoenix Linden about this?

I would suggest IMing or emailing him about it. Or possibly use the Linden Answers forum?



My guess is because the one feature that most people want is the ability to bring up a list of which of their 'buddies' is online. The friends list lets you do that much more easily than calling cards do. So, the 'add friend' button got priority over the 'offer card' button.
That's just a guess though.



It'd sure help if "friends list" was renamed "buddy list" to make it seem less rude to decline offers.
You're right that removal should always be silent. No reason to cause drama by telling people something drama-causing like "____ has removed you from their friends".

Given the very limited usefulness of calling cards... I'm surprised why people still push for them. The single advantage of them I can see is that they make it easy to IM groups of people without having to create a group for those people. Even that isn't such a big advantage - groups are easy to create - have better communication options and with the latest update you'll be able to IM a list of friends at once too.

If there is some great feature of calling cards that I am missing out on, please let me know!

Doesn't work, you can't select more than about 10 friends at a time.

I corrected that in post #42

It might be like that for a reason thoucgh. When you select the 10 freinds, it takes a while to update. It might be treating it as 10 different server calls??? If it does do that then it would be rough being able to select 30+ freinds at one time. Just a thought. I still bug reported it anyways

Then let *them* turn off the mapping features... don't make me turn them on. And if they do, they shouldn't be able to map anyone unless they give them the corresponding right.

That's a good design when introducing a new capability (though they violated that when they introduced P2P teleporting by turning all land 'teleportable' by default), but for existing features the defaults should remain the same as they were before.

I suspect that most people's *existing* friends lists are lists of people who they are willing to let map them, or they'd have removed them. If there are a few they don't want to, then it's easier to take a few out than all but a few back.

So, basically... You think the majority have big lists of friends with a few close ones they want to let know where they are. I think the majority have big lists of friends with a few they think are stalker-ish. So what "you guess" and what "I guess" is irrelevant. Setting that aside, then, the first rule when *changing* a feature is "don't silently break what currently works". Turning mapping off by default is a *silent* change. letting people P2P teleport by default was a *silent* change.


That's a *result* of the incorrect placement that puts the 'risky' option up front. Swapping them isn't a silent change... you go to "add friend" and you see a different menu. It won't make someone mope about for a week and then think that their friends don't care because they don't drop in any more.

Different situation. Those are *unrelated* operations, wherease "give card" and "add friend" are different levels of the same process...

They're not two different systems. The friends list is *based on* the calling card system.

It IS silent. It only notifies you. I had someone (who I'd lent 48k to to start a store) leave SL for good and I never saw her remove me as a friends (along with the rest of her list). I did however see her leave a group, but I was cognitive enough at the time to know what it meant.

I'm not saying it isn't silent now. I'm just saying it should always remain so. I've heard people say it's silent before. Sorry if you thought I was saying it's not silent now.