Mute resident changes?

So I took a gamble and tried out the 1.20 client last night. Surprise, surprise, it actually works fine so far and runs smoother than 1.19, which I didn't expect.

The biggest surprise came a few minutes ago when I muted an annoying greeter object (spamming me with close to 30 lines of text whenever I moved, grrrrr). I fiddled around, accidentally double-clicked on the name... and got a quite interesting message: "You have muted that resident. Sending a message now will automatically unmute. Do you want to continue?"

OMG, sending a message now un-mutes? You mean there will be no more muting disasters, like renters muting their landlords without realising it???

"Muting disasters" happen precisely the way you described: people get spammed with landmarks/notecards/etc and they end up muting the sender.

Instead of forcing people to think about why they got muted in the first place and remove the offending landmark/notecard spammer LL fell for the "accidental" muting story and added unmuting. It's not a "good thing".

I guess at least it gave you a warning. What might be useful, and would help out content creators with the occasional complaint they must get from people whose items never arrive because they've somehow muted the creator, is a similar warning when buying an item from someone you have muted. Something that says, "You have muted the owner of this object. Items purchased from this owner will not reach your inventory. You must un-mute the owner if you want to buy this item..." etc.

Might be tricky to enforce, as I don't know the ins and outs of various vendors and the like, but it might help out content creators somewhat. (And it might already happen anyway. I've never muted anyone and then tried to buy something from them. Just a thought, anyway.)

to my understanding it means.. if YOU mute Me..

then if YOU go to send ME an IM... it'll "undo" your mute on me...
If i IM \you\ the mute still stays in place.

How is this not a good thing?

What if you buy an item from me and accidentally muted me at some point.. and then when you buy my object you never get it. In the old system if you IM'd me to ask me about "Hey, why didn't I get your product".. i'd \never\ get your note, since you muted me. But since you accidentally had applied to mute, you think i'm ignoring you..

this new system lets you know that "hey you muted that person you're IMing", by you sending Hana an IM its gonna undo the mute.

To me, it sounds useful.

Similar to the warning you get when you shop in Busy Mode.. it says "Hey, you're about to buy something, but you're in busy mode so you won't get it, wanna leave busy mode?"

...i really am confused on how you think it's not good...

or maybe i really have misunderstood the new mute function.... herm.

How do you "accidentally" mute someone?

Store owners don't end up magically muted, they end up muted because they're spamming everyone and everything that enters their store and people click "Mute" to make it stop. That's not accidental, that's purposeful.

The obvious solution is for store owners to cease creating opportunites in which they end up muted, not to pretend that it's easy "accidentally" mute someone you've never seen and have never spoken to and to just keep on spamming.

hmm I have and still do accidently mute someone in the pie menu. I do believe Hana is reading the situation correctly.

Actually, in my case, the only thing that spams is my vendors. Well, they whisper in local, so I guess that counts as spamming. But I've been muted a couple of times.

I've also accidentally muted someone when trying to mute an idiot who IS spamming, because the chat history scrolls too fast.

I had a friend accidentally mute me once--yes, yes, I know what you're thinking But seriously, we were working together at the time and she kept giving me updated versions of her half of the project. But when I sent things back, it was automatically declined. Fortunately, we also communicate off SL, so it all got sorted.

I'm also fairly certain that a customer who has been IMing me for the past two days about an undelivered item now has muted me accidentally. It had the same pattern of instant declines when I think he's online, and non response to my replies to said IMs. It's terribly frustrating, really, but I had a friend forward a notecard from me so hopefully things will get fixed.

And no, I have no notecard spammers, shop greeters, talking vendors or anything like that. Just the vendors themselves offer items through the Hippo server after the person buys the item. So yes, accidental muting does happen, and I suspect despite the change, still does.

I had a newbie friend mute me once. He kept IMing me about my sudden silence. It was the most frustrating time in SL that I ever experienced. Funny too. I almost fired up Photoshop to make a sign that I could wear. I was almost at the verge of doing it too when he figured it out.

And I think this new change applies to you IMing someone that you accidentally muted.

The only thing this has made me change is the order of steps, and a few simple words.

I can no longer say "You're a jerk and I just muted you." The plan now goes: "You're a jerk and I will now mute you."

I frequently mute people when I'm at concerts (can't stand that damned chat spam!!!), but I may forget to turn it back on when I leave. If I need to contact say, a manager, and I've muted them, this is a wonderful thing to have!

I had a tenant mute me once. I have no idea how that happened and this ... bright person ... didn't know either and kept asking for the same help over and over again (re: a radio). It was so frustrating, and then I figured out that they muted me. Unmuting via IM is a good thing, for these kinds of people. And he had the nerve to take an attitude afterward.... *mutter*

Why mute someone so you can keep yapping at them without hearing anything back? Mute and be done with it.

Actually, most often it's just a matter of someone clicking the wrong button in the profile UI. I've had several customers and tenants accidentally mute me exactly this way. It's incredibly easy to mute someone, and un-muting has always been somewhat unintuitive.

When you mute someone, they become a grey sprite. It would be nice if their profile pic was a grey silhouette too. That way when you open the profile to send an IM, you would see immediatly they were muted. I think that would help store owners a lot.

The unmute on IM I see as more of a way to prevent people from muting someone and then telling them off, sort of like Xerxes was saying.

Then you have never run a store. I get accidentally muted all the time, and so do most owners. We have been lobbying LL for this feature for years, and thank god they finally listened.

Then I'm sure you have plenty of practical examples of how it actually happens .

So far there are two and only a single one of which is actually "accidental":
* inventory spammers - practical solution is to not use them, technical solution would be to mute by object name/UUID instead of muting the owner
* scripted vendors - fix the "Inventory Offer" dialog/UI although the "Discard" button is in between "Keep" and "Mute" so I'm really skeptical that this would happen on a large scale

All the other examples are things that don't come into play when purchasing something (profile, chat history, pie menu, etc...) so you can hardly use those to support the "solution" from a seller's point of view.

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The problem isn't that inventory offers get declined and IMs can't be seen, that's the whole point of being muted.

The actual problem is that some people supposedly "accidently" mute someone they never intended to mute and the sentence above are merely side-effects. You find the reason why people "accidently" mute in the first place and fix it by preventing the mute in the first place.

I honestly don't know, Everytime it happens, the person swears up and down they never muted me, usually apologizing profusely. It's usually new people, so I can only guess they hit Mute on some dialog by accident. but it really, truely happens, and not because they have a problem with me, as you seem to keep implying.

I have done accidental mutings a LOT through the pie menu - simply because "mute" is right next to "inspect"...

The mute button is right next to the IM button in the profile display window. It's not hard to accidentally click the wrong button. And if you do, it doesn't really make it clear what you have done. There is no "Are you sure you want to mute this resident?" dialog. A list of muted residents/objects pops up, which, I'm sure many noobs would be completely confused by, just X the window, and forget about it.

Also, not everyone is as familiar with SL terminology as people who have been using SL for some time. "Mute" isn't really a word that most people would use regularly day-to-day. And then there's the people who are not running the SL viewer in their native language, for whom "Mute" might have about as much meaning as "Kwijybo".

The reality is, that when people are not sure how to do something, many will randomly mash buttons until they find what they are looking for.

This is just one of the many usability problems that needs to be improved in the viewer.