Rosedale resigns....

Appearances can be deceiving. They own the top five most read blogs, among other things. I was a Compuserve member as well. I'm not sure why you'd think it was better than AOL aside from nostalgia. It had a horrific interface.

I don't know what other similarities besides the growth there could be since SL and AOL are such completely different animals, but AOL was host to more perversion and debauchery than SL is, by a loooooooong way. Ever venture into their user created chat rooms? *shudder*

First, AOL was a virus, plain and simple. When I worked in a remote office and unable to connect to my companies lines I was told to use any provider other than AOL. If AOL was found to be on my machine I would personally have to pay to have my entire system rebuilt. My personal experience has shown this to be true.

You think customer service is bad? Someone somewhere was using my AOL account. AOL knocked them off and the problem was supposedly resolved. When the problem reared it's ugly head I was chastised by AOL for playing games with them and giving my account number and login away after they fixed the problem once. Each call to them was answered after approx a 45 minute hold, of course.

Sorry to derail the thread, but I shudder at the thought of any comparisons between SL and AOL.

You just unknowingly made one.

LOL. I can't disagree with you there except that AOL's chat rooms were like a walk through the rose garden compared to Yahoo's. Talk about a nightmare. Are those even still around.

I realize AOL and SL are vastly different animals. I was simply comparing disappointment in technologies, even though they're not the same. The other thing I'd hate to see is similarities in customer service.

AOL was originally a fairly small "community" of people. It then made it to 1 million members. This was around the same time they relaxed their pricing structure, opening the floodgates to a lot of newer members unaware of the existing culture. This led to some serious growing pains for AOL, as its system could not handle the growth. There were many unplanned outages and a great number of bugs and glitches in the AOL client. Many people grew increasingly frustrated with the AOL experience during this time.

It also led to an increase of people coming in attempting to "grief" AOL members, crash AOL's servers and scam artists attempting to make a quick buck in the "new frontier." Also, a number of commercial ventures came into AOL, a move resented by many AOLers as it went against their views of AOL as a non-commercial "community" based place.

Now replace "AOL" with "SL" and read it again.



At that time I was on the other side of the country, learning RAINMAN and all that.

Mari

Thank you. Now I understand the comparisons and proof that everything old is new again.

Fixed!

I think there are a lot of differences, too, of course -- SL is not entirely the same as AOL, and the paths have been *somewhat* different at this time down the road. Certainly SL has been far less aggressive in its advertising (where's my "five free hours of SL" disk?), and has by and large done a better job of listening to its users than AOL did then (skery, but true!). Still, some of those comparisons to what happened to AOL then an what's happened to SL over the last year or so are purty close, huh?

Mari

Keep an eye on the support stats page (secondlife.com/community/support_stats.php). I know that we had problems with phone response time as recently as 6 months ago, but with the changes we made recently phone response time is down to less than a minute.

Phone Response

Jan 2008: 36 seconds

Dec 2007: 48 seconds

smacked down by Robin hehe.

I should frame this post

Oh, man..that is so totally gonna cost you some FIC points.

Heck,

I figure it GAINS me FIC points.

Really is not an important statistic.

Having worked 16 years managing call centers, I can tell you that those statistics are excellent. Keep up the great work.

Now your on her "Bad" list. Your hair and shoes will be permanently attached to your arse.

Oh please, response time is a customer support fudge.

/me jumps up and down "hire me! hire me!"

lol j/k

Well, Ciaran, there are lots of other stats on that page. Maybe you can find one that you like better.

On that we will have to disagree.

Just finally got around to reading the article.

The ONLY thing that bugs the crap out of me is where it states (more or less) that "New users find the interface confusing".

WHAT?? Are people this dumb? They can't figure out how to click a menu that's in TEXT or a button with its name on it IN TEXT.

JIMINY CRICKETS!!! If you can't figure out what "Search" means on a button, LEAVE NOW!!! Turn off the computer, go back to working at Walmart and maybe someday achieve some IQ.

*whew* Sorry. I just had to vent about that.

Stats need to be quantified. I've used for example live chat, someone has said hi, be with you shortly and then left me waiting. Now they've responded, but I'm still hanging. I've always found live chat to be excellent though, I just wouldn't take much notice of a response time chat stat.

However I was talking about response times generally, not just for LL, I've seen loads of examples where the response time is a complete fudge, including those who say "We answer the phone within three rings" and answer and put you on hold.

Lies, damned lies and statistics

When the images are working I'll take a look. It's not a matter of liking the stats, it's the stats that are less ambiguous that matter, like the number of tickets opened or the number of calls received.

The interface is confusing argument is standard for any new piece of software. It's a new environment, and unfamiliar to a person. To say SLs is especially confusing, however, seems silly. It really isn't that bad, aside from a few flaws and oddities.

You want confusing interfaces? Use those old Kai products, or open up Blender.

Mari

Add Poser to that list as well. I opened Blender for about 5 minutes and haven't touched it since.

I don't think it is the user interface that is really that bad - it is the environment as Mari mentioned. Too many sign up without a clue as to what SL is and orientation leaves them still more clueless.

I don't think the interface is confusing, maybe a bit primitive in it's look, but I do think the movement and camera controls need serious work. It needs to have direct mouse capability. I would like to move and navigate with my mouse directly. Hold down both mouse buttons move, turn etc. and look up and around with the mouse or spin around as well, without selecting anything that the pointer is hovering over. This would mean changing how we edit and inspect items. That would also help from accidentally selecting things.

It's always annoyed me that I can't grab a spot in the viewer for turning the camera, without selecting the floor or walls, etc. Selecting to edit or inspect, should use a mouse-key combo.

Confusing because ( if thats the case ) its their own fault for not having the proper people to build the UI in the first place . It should be more like blaming the builders of it. 3 1/2 years an they are still blaming us and not putting the blame on themselves. People just get tired of the same bugs, broken scripts, stealing, objects being lost ( whats worse copybot stealing creators objects or LLABS losing your objects from their data base.) Thats why people leave.
gesh for once i wish they tell the truth instead of blaming us.........Then again its business. As you say " Blame the users and not the builders "......... They have to blame us or their stocksholdes don`t stay with them.........A.........B............C(s)...... about business and how to keep your Investers..............

Usagi