Profiles

All of a sudden when I read someone's profile it sends out a public message that says :Faith Palmerstone is looking into *********** 's profile . Does anyone know why this happens, and how I can shut it off? I have been a profile reader for years, but I don't want people to know I am reading their profiles, unless I tell them...LOL

Any help would be greatly appreciated !

What viewer are you using, Faith? Is it Emerald? And what colour is the text? Are you sure that everyone else can read this too?

That's a bug in Emerald 950, it broadcast whose profiles you are looking at to a predictable channel. To work around it, turn off the "true online status in profiles" option in the preferences, or see if you can put up with the newer version.

That worked Viktoria...thanks ! I didn't want to have to go back to the newest version...all I did there was cras every 5 minutes...LOL

I really dont understand why people get so freaked out about the fact someone is reading their profile.. I will sit in a places and click profiles.. I read them... Sometimes I pick up some cool places to visit... sometimes I laugh sometimes I get really confused.... I am a profile reader! And I am probably reading your profile right now! So?

I hope you laughed.

Me toooo!! I read profiles.. isn't that the point in having them? I get random IMs from strangers about my profile, and i have sent a few too.. LOL. Found lots of interesting places in SL that way. Its not a crime to read a profile...and if people object to you doing it, maybe remind them that all profiles ARE public... don't put anything you don't want read

Personally i don't care who knows i am humpin their profiles... LOL

For me, reading someone's profile is often the first step in deciding whether I want to talk to the person or not. I want my profile-reading activity to be secret, because if I decide not to talk to the person, I don't want them IMing me with, "Hey, I saw you reading my profile!" Plus, some people might think that if I am reading their profile, it is the equivalent of me staring down their hot bodies and read more into the act than there is.

I'd also prefer not to know when someone is reading my profile. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. As it stands, I only know that someone has read my profile when they IM me to tell me what was interesting in my profile. That makes me feel interesting. If I had some sort of confirmation that about 95% of the people who read my profile decided that I was not interesting enough for conversation, that might depress me.

I'm with Amity on this.

Some things don't need to be broadcast. It's like people on Facebook who feel the need to announce to the world that they just bought a bunny in farmville. Who the *^#$% cares??

While it's nice to have the option to make connections in social networks such as SL or Facebook, the simple act of looking at someone shouldn't mean anything more than a glance you might give a stranger on a subway. Get over it and move on. No need to make an event out of it, for either party.

What i find more annoying is this "Look At" issue. In my experience, Emerald users are notorious for IMing me when they know i am staring at them in an attempt to strike up conversation as if they had been reading my profile or examining me all along. I find the entire initial IM from these people to be so contrived and such a put off. I run Emerald, but do so in stealth, and i leave my Look At focus active so people assume i am not in Emerald and them IM me with "oh hi, how are you" simply because they think i am interested due to my cam lingering on them.

What is really telling is going to big adult social areas and then leaving your cam on an Emerald user and timing how long before they respond - especially if you know they are at the keyboard and currently active chatting etc.

If Emerald is the source of those messages, then it's just another example of stupid things being added to the viewer 'just because they can' and without any thought for the overall picture. They tinker because they can and much of it is just stupid stuff.

This puzzled me because it happened the other day.

I've always used the same Emerald viewer, I've never updated it, and I often look at profiles. But the other day, at a club, it was announced in green, at a club, that I was looking at someone's profile. Since then it hasn't happened again although I haven't changed anything.

I love this! What a great conversation starter toward a new adventure!

I had a lot of fun going to a few clubs and reading profiles and letting it yell out to the world that I was reading profiles.......... and then I ignored all the queries to me about reading the profiles.



Bye the way, it is a HUD that is doing the chat messages, so those only happen if someone in the room is wearing the HUD that tells them about it and has that HUD set to tell the world in open chat rather than just tell the HUD owner or the HUD owner and the person doing the reading -- those are the 3 options with that HUD. The HUD is simply reading the info from whatever channel it is that Emerald broadcasts the profile reading on. It can be prevented by the Emerald using setting preferences as noted above.

That would explain why it's only happened to me once, then!

This is why I refuse to use Emerald. Not so much because it's stupid, but because it shows a total lack of respect for privacy.

Well, it wasn't the source of the public message, really. The chat is supposed to be private to one avatar's bridge attachment, but since the channel number was made from the UUID is was easy for others to snoop in. It is other people's devices snooping in that make those announcements.

The subsequent Emerald version did away with the easily guessed channel problem, but a lot of people stayed on 950 for various reasons, so at least for the short term this is a lingering problem.

Am I right in thinking that the feature is to tell the emerald user that [name] is looking at your profile? If it is, then it's as I said before - it's one of the myriad of stupid little features that are included "just because they can". Emerald does have a (very) few excellent features, but most of them are just tinkering with the viewer code because they can. E.g. someone noticed that the viewer is informed of av movements, so they decided to make use of it by making a built-in radar - because the information is already provided. That's not stupid like many of the other 'features', but they did a bad job of it's implementation.

Not quite. When the Emerald viewer is looking at a profile, that fact is broadcast on a specific channel. There is a HUD that someone else made that will detect it on that channel and broadcast that to either the HUD owner, the HUD owner and the person looking at the profile, or in open chat.

Why would you wear a hud to find out who is looking in your profile? To me that is just one more thing taking up your screen?

/me wanders off thinking on this.

Alright, so what's the purpose of broadcasting the fact the I (using Emerald) am looking at someone's profile? Is it so that the person I'm viewing the profile of can be informed that I'm viewing it (if they are using Emerald)? And, if so, why - what's the purpose?

It's really sending keys to an LSL script that the user wears in a special Emerald attachment. That script uses llRequestAgentData to see if people are online, and passes the information back to Emerald. So, its real purpose is to bypass the "only my friends and groups can see when I am online" setting. It's a regular LL-supported script feature, the viewer integration was just a little sloppy.

So it's intended to circumvent people's chosen privacy? That's amazing. Whoever thought that up needs to be banned from anything to do with SL. It's not just a stupid little 'feature' because they can' - it's a nasty little feature.

Yeah, as Victoria says. It isn't really broadcasting the "profile view" so to speak, that was just an easier way of describing it. Many of Emerald's *features* are not really any different that what a variety of products already do, they just incorporate them into the viewer. You don't have to use them, just like this feature of "really knowing" if someone is online or not -- no different from a variety of avatar detection objects already for sale.

It is a script feature that LL made available to scriptors and is already in use in a variety of detection objects sold all around the grid. Emerald just gives you the ability to turn it on in the viewer rather than buy another object to do it.