Beta Release Notes Second Life 1.13.3 Beta

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Umm, is it just me or do these changes not seem to make much sense? Not in the sense that they are poorly worded, but that they seem a bit whacky?

What benefit do we gain by not being able to search only for online residents?

Why would one want "Anyone" to see your online status when you have selected to have it visible only to your friends?

Maybe I'm not getting something but this doesn't seem like an improvement to me at all.

I am likewise confused.
"Can no longer search for only "online" residents"? WTF? I frequently do that to reduce typing. I'm looking for "Amber Kling," I know she's online, so I search for "Amb" and look at only onine results.
What do I find?
Amber Kling
Amber Who
Ambint Rockwall
Ambient Light

Gee, there she is.
The way this is worded is that now I'll have to type the whole name of whoever I'm looking for, and half the time I don't know their last names!

Having read the link Milo provided, this seems like a significant decrease in the usefulness of the search function.

The line "*** Anyone can see your Online status if 'Make my online status visible only to my Friends' is enabled" in the release notes still seems backwards; it contradicts the section in the blog that says:


I think the word "enabled" in the release notes should read "disabled".

You are correct, the release notes are incorrect.

I used the "online only" feature of the people search quite a lot. One use in particular, finding Lindens online, came in handy many a time.

Ah well, I guess this gives the libsl folks something new to do, adding a function to a proxy that will send the data needed to extract the entire population list, read each one's profiles to get the online status , and doing client side filtering to remove the ones that aren't online.

There's better ways to scan for online status in-world.

It's not about finding out if someone is online, it's about finding that person's profile to teleport them or send them IMs.

There are business that use a shared name to indicate that an avatar is an employee of a group. If you know the name, you look it up and contact one of the one's that are online. An example would be Anshe Chung Studios, which uses ACS as the first name for some of its employees. Currently I can find all the online Anshe Chung Studios employees in a very direct manner; just put ACS in as a search term with the Online box checked. One the Online checkbox is removed, I will get a list of 73 Anshe Chung employees, which can't be sorted by online status.


I don't get the impression that user opinion matters in this case, but I'll say it again anyway, I don't like this change.

In a year the number of people who never saw the old way will be greater than the number who remember the older better way, so our opinions don't matter at all.