Further Conversation... with M Linden

I like that Idea.

"landbot982 Johnson has offered to purchase the land parcel located at secondlife://Plum/128/128/0 for L$ 1. To accept this offer, click "Accept" otherwise click "Decline" and the transaction will be cancelled."

Not sure how this would work for group owned land... but it's a great "outside the box" kind of approach to the problem. Of course it also assumes that the land seller is able to log into SL in a reasonable amount of time. Then you have to ask "what happens to the money?"

Let's say that Ann Johnson tries to buy my land, for 30,000 L$.
she pays 30,000 which is credited to my account.
Some other automated process, debits money from my account (perhaps the remote deposit box at SLX) and my account now has 0L$.
I log in, and press "decline".

Under one scenario, there's no money to give back, so Ann loses her money. Under the other scenario, my SL balance goes to -30,000 L$.

Then of course the question comes up.. "what if I log off, or crash, before answering the popup?

This idea, while good at it's core, has some hurdles to overcome. Seems like what would work, is some sort of SL "Escrow" service.. for a start, and then some sort of "Pending transactions" interface that you can pull up on demand, and/or pops up at every login while you have a pending escrowed transaction. The money could be deducted from the buyer's account, but held in a special account until the transaction was sanctioned by the seller.

It could provide an interesting sink.. let's say it's a 10L$ fee to use the escrow service perhaps? We could make it optional.. but "checked by default" on land sales. That way, if someone unchecks it.. well they've REALLY screwed up. It'd be nice if we could use this service on other sales inworld as well. Then of course, we have to consider what that could do to land sales, if people had the chance to "back out" of a land purchase.

It's definitely an interesting idea.. but there's clearly some number of things that would still have to be worked out. Doesn't mean it's not worth having.

Yes there were times then that the grid "was under attack" by griefers, which thankfully LL have taken steps to reduce, but in those days when not under attack the grid was stable and fast enough to build comfortably.

The following Autumn (2007) I agree was murder, and I did for some time spend very little time in the community until SL started to sort out all the problems.

But I still maintain, that now, with the higher concurrency figures and an infastructure that is unable to support it properly. the experiences of the newbies once they leave their sheltered orientaion spots, and the difficulties of now doing simple things like basic building once past the 60k concurrency figure is not going to keep those new customers.

Also, have you never become a bot....Just try shopping in SL, you will become a bot for a good 15 minutes when you land at one of the bigger shops, as you stand there and wait for all the displays to rez so you can see what they have available. Could this also be why a lot of entrepreneurs are also moaning these days.

Let me help, M.

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-93

This bug is about to turn 18 months old. It's done teething already.

re: allowing RL children in.

NO. Goodness, we get enough griefing as is from supposed adults. And how do you protect them from nasty IMs soliciting sex? Not all inappropriate material is by sent by picture. I understand families wanting to meet in SL, but that is what the phone is for. Do us all a favor and keep the kids out of the main grid. The boundaries between PG and Mature sims are a little too elastic and the world is too vast to protect all the children. One child being hurt is not worth it to me.

I see SL as somthing that will become "web 3.D" as I call it, this type of restrictions doesn't seem to make much sense, parents are supposed to teach their kids right from wrong and supervise them and such, like someone said before, we don't prevent children in a city cause it has sexshops and adult activities in it, depending on the place parents go with their kids, or if it is safe enough, they simply teach them to not get in trouble, same with the internet

and of course, they lock the door of their houses and such, someone could just as well use somthing like Restrained Life or somthing to help ensure the kids will only do what they're supposed to do, only go where they should, only talk with the right people etc (and install and setup stuff on the computers to restrict the usage of internet as a whole since we are at it)

You might consider bringing back live and clickable links before crowing about the wonderful new SLurl system.

Or does that not include being able to use them from the forums?

Yet another tool that businesses and consumers can utilize to ease their user experience: down the drain

~AB

This is far from an acceptable workaround, but: in the direst of straights, one can use a regular external web browser to get at the Search All results. (Those results do contain active links to People and profiles, at least for people who've done certain transactions in-world that create web links.) So, for example, to search for yourself, you could use this URL:

http://search.secondlife.com/client_search.php?q=Cocoanut%20Koala

Note that the search string itself must be "URL escaped"--so the "space" character is replaced by "%20".

Now, mind you, I can't make this available in-world. Why? Because scripts are not allowed access to search.secondlife.com. And why might that be? I have a hunch, but it doesn't speak well for LL's network engineering. See http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-3122.

My few observations.

The Mainland is the most important area of Second Life to me, Sometimes it can be a mess of builds jumbled together, but it allows users who wish to build without constraint chances that simply would never be allowed on private estates.

Welcome first Hour
---------------------
I have only been a part of the Second Life community for a short time and can say, as previously identified, the introduction area first hour in SL was not good.
I was lucky enough to be able to skip most of it and get a personalised introduction from my wife, as she has been a user for some time.

This sort of hands on approach if possible would be far more user friendly than any automated proccess, LL already have mentors and although I have never been fortunate enough to see one, If you have enough mentors they could welcome new users and get them up and running as part of the introduction to SL.
What do they do now?

We run a Sandbox for people to come along and build in, with information boards.
If online we also help with any problems members have, this can be quite often as people often struggle with completely different issues that we couldn't hope to deal with on the information boards.

My point is that both the current automated forms of introduction and a few helpers combined would produce a much better first hour experience, which could be tailored to meet an individuals needs.


Advertising Mainland Cleanup
----------------------------------

On a different note I would like to show my support for your new proposals on advertising and look forward to seeing the changes it forces.
It will also be nice to see Lindens acting as estate managers making decisions on case by case issues where problems occur between neighbors.

What actions will be taken against users who hold many small plots, with the intent of forcing high prices for them though?
This is a practice we try to warn our visitors of, as most mainland Sims seem to have many of these plots, while they exist in such high numbers, it makes it hard for users to find a nice standard shaped plot to settle in, without falling foul of the parasites.

Technical Improvements
----------------------------

From the technical side of things, I have been very happy with the stability of Second Life and am sure this will only improve further, with your new Technical appointments.

Abuse Reports
-----------------

Please look at allowing all users more personal communication, I am lucky enough to be able to use the live chat support page, and was very impressed with the fast and friendly response I received, is there a chance this option could be opened up to all users, as the Abuse Report system would benifit greatly from this sort of option.

My example is I had a building placed on a small plot of my land, which I was unable to return, so I contacted the owner who didn't reply for a week, so i filled out an Abuse Report, also nothing happened, so I filled out another one then some one said you can use live chat and told me where to look, as soon as I did the situation was resolved within minutes. I got feedback and knew something was going to be done about my problem.
This is the way I feel all Abuse Reports should be handled for all users.

Customer Service
---------------------

Having someone to ask questions is extremely helpfull and would also give a positive image of a Linden Labs focused on customer service.
This is something that currently seems to let Linden Labs down, for most users there is no way to speak to Lindens unless via office hours, which many long term users are not even aware exists.
Live Chat is available to people paying tier on larger amounts of land, but most users don't qualify for this.

I agree, *Absolutely* no. Please do not, under any circumstances, ever allow entry for under 18s on the Main Grid. First: the obvious child safety aspect. Second: I know there are a few young people (a minority IMO) who could possibly be mature enough to behave sensibly in adult company, but there is no way on Earth I'd want to be forced to put up with the antics of the rest.

--
Aes

Mark, thank you for this post and for taking the time to reply to some comments. It does a lot to reassure us that the Lab care about what residents think. My SL experience has been a lot more stable of late, so a big THANK YOU to all at the Lab for that.

A few points:

* Is the project called First Hour Experience (FHE) or New User Experience (NUE)? I've heard some Lindens calling it the latter. As was pointed out at a recent Mentor meeting, NUE means naked in French!!!! Ha! This does sound like a very important project though, and the VTeam are doing great work on this.

* I agree with SuezanneC Baskeville's comments regarding the need for multi-lingual naming fields for objects. This seems pretty crucial to me, although not as crucial as translating the viewer itself obviously. Inbuilt machine translation could be handy too, but isn't really essential as there are tools out there in SL that do the same job (e.g. Simbolic translation HUD). Could a HUD like this be included in the Library folder in residents inventory as part of the NUE naked experience? ;D

* "By the end of the year, the viewer will be fully localized for all our major markets." This is great news, but a very ambitious project. I hope you realise that a lot of this translation work is being done by volunteers and not paid staff. Indeed, LL are very priviledged in this respect as I do not know of very many other companies whose customers are so eager to help them run their company for FREE. We do it because we love SL and believe in this world that we, the residents have created. I'm sure you appreciate that already, but I just thought I'd point it out! ;-D

* I've recently been looking into SL from a French-speaking perspective and talked to various Lindens at their office hours etc, and I discovered that while there are several French-speaking Lindens spread throughout the world, there is no such thing as a 'French Team'. They are all on seperate teams, e.g. inworld experience, localization, GTeam etc and the communication between the teams doesn't seem to be so good. One French speaking Linden was unaware of exactly how many other Lindens were also French speakers and did not know much about the localization project at all. Will there ever be plans to create a 'French team' as such to pool linguistic experience? That would seem to me (from my admittedly naive POV) to be a business no-brainer.

* Many Lindens do not turn up to their office hours. Some do not turn up for weeks at a time and don't leave a note etc. This is really really poor from the POV of residents who have taken the time to visit them. If you say you're gonna be somewhere then you should be.

* Mentor applications are still closed after months and look like they will not reopen anytime soon. This means that those of us who are more than willing to work for you for FREE have to find alternative means of helping, working as lone rangers mainly and unable to get group notices about volunteering opportunities from the official groups. I understand the need to weed out the already massive volunteer groups, but in the meantime you are alienating and discouraging the new batch of volunteers who are waiting to help! And SL volunteers are one of the best resources you have at your disposal.

That's all my comments for now I think. Keep up the good work!

Perhaps you could redesign the viewer and make it plug-in capable.. and restore the original graphics/lighting engine and make Windlight and optional plugin, as well as making Voice an optional plugin. Those two were highly controversial when they were being designed and after all this time, many people still think Windlight viewers perform differently than the pre-Windlights. (perhaps they do, i don't personally know). Not only do people get what they want when they want (a win), but the main viewer download would be a little smaller (a win), and the programmers would possibly have less to parse through when bug-fixing, enhancing, adding, etc. (a win).

just a thought...

This very simply is one of the best suggestion I ever had in my SL. Thanks, *really* useful...!!

It would seem that if the attraction of coming into SL was one of the mega-events like Burning Life, I prostealyze to my friends relentlessly, that that event should be in a space with many servers per sim so that no-one walks into the ground, feels trapped in grey honey, or crashes out.
These events should be the crowning glory of SL, everyone just seeing the amazing creative juices of the place, dancing in the air and I bet you the first time 500 avatars get into one field at the same time they will all want to repeat it.

We can live with little instabilities in day to day but these super events should be effortless for Avatars, no borked TP's, no region fulls, and no lags. That's selling to the NOOB. It would be incredible to have a field of avatars, all moving, all happy. I would be awestruck. LL can we do that by the next mega-event. Please M!

Maybe we could have bumped up regions like vertices of energy for events, rentals, rallies, LL world meetings, or whatever.

Coco, you could try using the inworld browser to access Search All as well.

Personally, I bring up the Secondlife website on the inworld browser by choosing Help/Blog in the client. Go to the Community page; the top choice on the left-hand menu, "Search" provides a nice little front-end to the web version of search, with pulldown choices for "People" etc. instead of tabs. "Old Search" is not available. The default choice, "All of Second Life", is the new Search All. Note that the web version of search works off a snapshot of search data, seems to usually be about a week old. So you can't use it to look at how yesterday's sale impacted your Search rankings, for example.

But, when SL is borky, this can be faster than using the Search button!
.

For those of you praising our almightly CEO for "talking", that's exactly just what he's been doing, talking. The problem is, that he is talking only about what HE calls "good posts". Thereby making this scam nothing more then a hot-air party.

If M Lindenl is honest about fixing issues in SL, perhaps he might go back and re-read the posts that ask HARD QUESTIONS instead of just giving fluff answers to fluff posts.

When Mr. M is ready to tackle the big questions, then and only then will I consider this practice honest. Time to practice that "OPEN and TRANSPARENT" communication your staff touted so well last summer.


Thanks,

Bob

I concede that Search can be (and is) gamed - but the new All Search can also be very useful if you're looking for a specific item and wondering if it even exists.

For example, I was looking for a "black shrug" to finish off an outfit last week, and found one via All Search.

So please try not to lose the useful functionality if you're "fixing" search

It's great that LL has improved a lot of things and they have done generally a good job. There will always be problems popping up when you're trying to smooth things out. There's nothing wrong with flooding in new residents in high enough numbers to make up for the percentage of those who do no return.

Getting Support can be a problem: I have been a basic free member for more than a year now. About a month ago I wired $300 to LL so that I could pay for a yearly premium and purchase L$ to operate with and build up my little business here in SL. My support ticket for this wire transfer has been lingering for almost a month now, the only attention given to it has been promises to take care of it but it still has not been taken care of. Now 30 days has almost gone by and no real acknowledgment of receipt of my wire transfer.

I've submitted tickets, written comments on them, phoned Billing, and still no action on the money I have sent to LL's bank. A professional would sooner handle incoming money from a long time free member who has contributed to the community.

M, tell those billing/support people to get off their butts when people send money. And find out who's stuffing important tickets under the rug!

have your bank /western union /whoever you used, contact Linden labs, LL won't dare ignore them.

I'll reword my original post. It sounds like they're going to mess with the viewer again for no reason. There are currently, and have been, so many exclusive bugs (as in, didn't exist in the 1.19 series) to the previous, and the current RC series clients, that it's laughable, along with the sheer amount of RC viewers needlessly available. The registration process 2 years ago was as easy as signing up for anything else on the internet (Orig. Register October 3rd, 2006), so the so-called simplification of the sign-up process leading to anything is laughable as well. The sign-up process was very easy, anything further is treating the new users like an idiot, and the 1st-hour experience can be important, but for the record number rest of the 70-some-odd-thousand, it really doesn't matter. I dunno what localization is, or how you can be SL more "relevant" (which honestly sounds like a misplaced word repeated over and over again, doesn't make any sense), but it doesn't sound like it's going to be handled well, judging by LL's past performance...And please, just leave the client alone.

It’s sooooo easy to make numbers lie… But let’s face the truth, for once:

> Yesterday, the peak hit 71,232 – that’s an increase of 6% in less
> than a month.

We had been around 70k peak users before summer already… Not much of an improvement since there are less people connecting during summer. They just came back from vacation…

> Year-over-year, peak concurrency has grown more than 38%.

A poor achievement when compared to the growth experienced in 2006 and 2007… I remember the days, back around October 2006 when the peak concurrency was only around 7k…

> An even more impressive figure is the number of Residents who
> logged-in during the prior seven days. For the week ending
> September 19th, we had 505,839 unique log-ins – another Second
> Life record.

Irrelevant because way too short a period to make any sensible statistics… One number I watch everyday is the “Logged in last 60 days” figure on the login screen of the viewer… The all time record was a little over 1.500.000 at the end of 2007… Since the start of 2008 it is stagnating at around 1.200.000 +/- 50.000, proving that the growth in number of active users stopped in 2008.

There are now has much users leaving SL than there are registering in it.

> Plus daily user-to-user transactions in Linden Dollars continue
> their steady climb.

Not sure where the L$ are going then… Perhaps it’s just because more of the active users are opening businesses… but if you ask to each resident running a business, my guess is that they will tell you that their business is stagnating, at best.

Don’t take me wrong: I do appreciate the recent changes in SL’s policy (better communication, user feedback better taken into account, good work towards a better software stability…), but there is still a loooong way to go to achieve the same growth as the one experienced in SL only two years ago…

"Jessicka Graves wrote "And please, just leave the client alone."

What are you talking about? Most of the changes to the client are what the residents are asking for, are you even familiar with JIRA?

This is where it says it doesn't include Mature listings.

Plus, when I click on a place link in the results, and then click on a Teleport link, the teleport fails, with a message that says "The URL you clicked cannot be opened with this web browser."/

I'm not sure exactly what Mature content is excluded, if any actually is; there's plenty of results for the word "porno".

You don't have to be sarcastic (in fact, I have several JIRA's running =P at least one or two that promise a fix to running bugs in SL, later on), I was meaning in the sense of what we saw with Dazzle. Which skinning...yeah...

Here's an idea, how about they have so you can't set plots less than 512M for sale. The Plot has to be 512M or bigger before the "Set Land For Sale" option becomes useable.

I've seen similar proposals, but most go for a much lower cut-out...

I'm more in favor of punishing misuses than banning all uses of somthing....