Further Conversation... with M Linden

What is Linden Labs aiming to do about the extortionists?

Are you just going to ignore them and hope they give up now they have lost most of their abilities to Harass?

I want to know because I refuse to pay 40usd for 16sqm of land and also refuse to sit waiting for the owner to find a new way to harass, We have had to endure fake ad towers and banlines already, thankfully Jack has stopped those being used now.

The oversized glowing adverts seem to have been sorted out by Jacks new proposal, but Adfarming has seen no real changes, mainland Sims still have huge numbers of microparcels with stupid prices attached just, just so a few parasites can make easy money from your users M Linden.

Have you all noticed that no real "answers" have been posted by "management" in this thread? Sorry to sound skeptical, but these threads aren't here to increase communication. They're simple here to allow you all to "feel" as if you've spoken your mind. They've given you a town square where each of you can stand and say whatever you want for as long as you want to cardboard cutouts of Lindens....and you can pretend they really are listening.

That being said, I'll take my 5 minutes in the "cardboard cutout area" to yell my thoughts out at no one.

Showcase: Lose it. It's biased and does nothing but promote Linden alts and friends. Newbies don't shop. Most don't even know how to buy lindens for a LONG time. So please stop touting the Showcase as someplace to "introduce" newbies to Linden Endorsed Businesses.

Welcome areas: specifically, where you are dumped when you leave HI and/or OI ...lose them. dump people randomly in the middle of a sim or something, or have some sort of mechanism that prevents people from staying around them more than a few hours. I know the place where I was "born" is a loud, jangly place with a bunch of emo, foul mouthed, "gothic vampire" looking AV's who are neither nice, nor helpful. The SLURL thing is okay if you know someone in SL and are joining under their advice. I started SL on my own, and knew NO ONE in SL when I started. Being dumped out in Korea or Bear or Ahern as a newbie is a HORRID experience, and I almost didnt stay in SL afterward. Bunch of people standing around being crude and derogatory and "you want to have sex?" ...this was before voice, and I'm sure it's worse now.

I still crash at least 10 times a day. If I use camera angles, I crash. If I minimize SL, I crash. If I take too long to find a file location to open files into SL or save files from SL, I crash. If resize the window, I crash. This is consistant through all the viewers. If I were interested in making SL more "player friendly" I'd make it more accessable to people who didnt have the "top of the line" video cards etc....Not all of us are gamers who purchase our computers for the 3D graphical chatrooms on the web....we have to use what we have.

Premium OR Teir, but not both....do you really need my $5 usd for owning 1024 of land to put my store on? Charging both a Premium fee AND land teir is losing you money, because more and more people are opting to not go premium and rent land...... $26 a month may not seem a lot to those of you at LL drawing 6 figures, but to some in the US, in this Economy, it's a LOT. Maybe if you made your product more affordable, and accessable, more people would be willing to pay to use it.

I am confident this will probably not even be read by the "Lindens" and if it is, and actually replied to, I'll get some glazed over doublespeak pat on the head in bright orange text.

*shrug* Just remember, LL is in the business to make money, not to provide an online environment.

Market forces can deal with those plots now. There's no need for further intervention.

Welcome first Hour
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The main point in my opnion is to simplify the interface as much as possible for the beginners. My sugestion is to have a Basic and Advanced mode.

In basic mode the user will have access to fewer options, but will have a easier adaptation

In Advance mode the user can select the option he want one by one, so he have time to get used to each new feature one at a time.

Advertising Mainland Cleanup
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WOW it is working, I am impressed. Unlike most I believe we have to give time to LL to work and that new actions may be taken by then to solve specific problems. But this is a great advance

But I still think the voluntary reurbanization process I suggest in the other thread would be a nice idea, and would organize mainland. But I guess that in the crossfire between the parts my suggestion get lost. Sigh Maybe LL find my posts after removing the corpses.

Also make search work properly to everyone. this may help with many complains.
I am one of the people that can not scroll down the new search system so I understand some of the complains.

Technical Improvements
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Unlike many people I like that SL advance tecnically. I like windlight and I approve mono.
I know that a change time give problems, some new some old but I am happy the SL is a product in evolution, instead of a freezed one. Because the freeze in development is the first signal that the product will be discontinnued.

Hi M,

Thanks for keeping us updated on things going on at the Lab. Seems like you all have some great goals to improve SL for us, but I do have a concern about how SL is evolving.

I was under the impression that SL was to become the 3D web. How will this ever be possible if the client keeps pushing further ahead than the computer equipment that is available in most homes? Don't get me wrong. I think it is great that SL is improved with new shinies for the latest and greatest computers, but when you compare the number of high end machines versus the number of low-end to mid ranged machines, isn't this choking any potential growth of the platform? Not to mention the explosion of notebook machines which still seem to get largely ignored by your developers.

It seems that while you continue pushing SL forward with complexity, you should also make the client be able to run well on lower end machines. The lower end machines should be able to get a minimum of 15 fps in a busy area with all settings on low. This should be a priority when adding all the new flashy bloat for the high end machines.

Anyway this is just my 2 cents and I am sure many will disagree, but I cannot ignore the fact that many computers simply cannot run SL very well and there is no reason why it shouldn't, especially if you want the platform to continue to grow with new users.

Hi M / LL.

New server code: Latest release moves prims, known fact.

Imagine a wordprocessor that in every sentance you type, automatically creates one spelling error.

Imagine losing a days progress toward delivery, because as fast as you're building, the new server code is borking your work, creating misalignments and seams in the primwork. No agency worth its salt can deliver that to a client; So its got to be fixed, at cost to the agency, and its timeline. This is bad.

Clients/Brands are, this year, increasingly 'nervous' about the capability of Secondlife as a platform, especially considering the new alternatives out there. Ringing up a marketing director with "we've lost a day, here" isnt an option, but there's only so many days creatives can go without sleep to pick up LL's slack and get that delivery in on time. Bad code or not, a deadline is a deadline. But when the goalposts move, then what?

Further, once its delivered, what then? hope that it doesnt bork again, leaving the work shoddy looking and amateurish - Not something brands generally shoot for.

If people come in as new users to take part in an experience their friends have told them about, or that they've heard about elsewhere, and it looks like the first level they tried to make for 'quake' when they were 12, they're not coming back. Give us the tools to create rich, interactive environments, with luscious graphics and killer interaction, and we'll give you an audience that is loyal to the platform, and keeps coming back for more. [edit] - I'm not talking about new features here, either. I think its time people stopped complaining about a 'limited toolset' - Michaelangelo's "David" was carved with a hammer and a chisel, sharp metal and a rock - so lets get past that already - but what we *do* need is tools, however simple, that we can rely on to work.

We are your platforms best PR. We make it look good. Your retention rates are the ROI you get from helping us help you.

I generally don't critisise LL - I actually think you're doing a pretty good job, its an enormous task, to maintain a network as large as you do, on evolving technology, not to mention the issues of economy and governance. But things that affect the tools that are used to spearhead your brand toward new audiences, as well as creating shared experience and relationships for your existing one, should be amongst the most highly prioritised of things to 'fix'.

Things like land zoning, advertising - this takes a lot of time to work out, to reach a fair consensus. Things like server code do not, it works, or it doesnt work. End of line.


Other than that, welcome to 'T' who I saw you mentioned in your post, I herby petition that the next linden be christened "coffee"..

Seconded, why not build it into the installer - short lowres video to watch, instead of a progress bar. Even a few pictures and captions. At least teach the newbies how to fly or walk or type, the basic tools they'll need to get further help once they rez.

Actually I'm one of the Arabian in SL .. What I want to say is that there are many Arabian people in SL and many have Premium accounts. And what's more is that many of this people don't even know the English language and have a hard time when they are trying to communicate with others ! We Arabian people do enjoy the sl and like to express ourselves more by being able to talk in our own language If that happened we could even invest more .. in both our time and L$

I recently presented SL to a company who are interested in getting their own island built. They are educators. The eyecandy was certainly impressing (I had to get a new notebook just for the presentation though) but the reason they did not go immediatly for SL was the lack of interactive tools, like whiteboards, pointing devices, interactive browsers, embedding of flash files, file sharing options, interactive open office applications and much more. (Google "Croquet" to see what I am talking about.) These features are crucial for any serious business application of SL. They are much more important than pretty skies and shadows, although I can't wait for shadows

How can M say with a straight face, "Plus daily user-to-user transactions in Linden Dollars continue their steady climb."?

Look at http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy-graphs.php
Yes, there has been a quarter-by-quarter increase in transaction value - but only from the Q4, 2007 trough, so a small "well done" for the slow recovery, but....

Just approximating from these graphs...

Q2 Peak Concurrent Users are UP around 33% from 2007 to 2008
Q2 Monthly User Hours are UP around 68% from 2007 to 2008
Q2 User-to-User Transactions value is DOWN 14% from 2007 to 2008

But due to the increase in "Residents" online and their longer online times..
AVERAGE spend per Peak Concurrent User is actually around 40% down
AVERAGE spend per Monthly User Hour is actually around 50% down

Huge increases in "Residents" online for longer but average spending has collapsed - as most SL businesses can tell you. Hmmm... could the increase in av's online be mainly bots who don't spend anything?

Or... look at a few (non-campbot) Group's "Last logged-in" column and see how many Members have not logged-on for months...

You are addressing people who actually "experience" SL and who have a good idea of what's really happening.

If you are too "gung-ho" in selectively quoting statistics, then you will suffer a credibility loss on all your enthusiasms.

So thats the plan just ignore them and hope they go away.

It is perfectly ok for me to become a micro plot dealer to then, I can have around 1350 plots in excess tier instead of the sandbox I have now, which is more productive for SL? and which is more productive for me?

is there a jira entry asking for SL's client development to be focused on medium/lower end machines? I would vote for that

and the thing about the coopration tools and such, much, but not all, can alredy be created by us (though in most cases with certain limitations, and requiring external servers not provided by LL)

somthing I've just realized now, it is interesting how now that the client code is open, allowing a huge ammount of people all around the word often with much more free time than the Ls to modify the client, there are still plenty of changes to the client that lots of people deisre but haven't been implemented yet...I'm not exactly sure what that actually means though...

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7139 might fit.

cool, thanx
btw, if that poll is so big and such, why the entry doesn't have allt hat many votes yet?

Regarding my idea for an offline new resident program (in post 84) - I was thinking more along the lines of Spore's Creature Creator and not like a lump of documentation for the new person to digest.

My thought is that many people dislike looking silly or as if they aren't in the know; the choice of using an offline program to get up to speed before going online would appeal to people who like making their mistakes in private.

It seems that the last complimentary post was back on page 6, that was the last Linden answer, ah well, its somewhere to practice typing I suppose.
That is all it will ever be any use for, LL ignore Jira entries that are too much work, they ignore comments that dont say how great LL is, amd when they do answer they sound like Mrs Palin, she refused to answer the questions in the way the questioner asked her too, that is just what LL do here, they answer with the line from the authorised crib sheet.
All I would like is straight answers to straight questions.

What about opening a forum to actually answer every question posted. not all in one day, but just a promise (upheld) to eventually answer every question as fully as possible, now isnt that a revolutionary idea.

/me starts to chuckle softly......which turns to a giggle, a snort, and a huge guffaw of laughter, exploding into a laughing fit so hard, she begins to suffer from an asthma attack....falling on the floor, still laughing hysterically with tears streaming from her eyes, she uses her inhaler, and begins to compose herself.

Seating herself back in her chair, she realizes Taft wasn't attempting humor, but was actually serious?

Yah, that will be the day. they moved the comments here from the blog so they'd hopefully be buried without a trace. You don't think they actually want to know what the customers are thinking!!! Long as we keep payin those fees, they're happy.

aka Shifte Benedek Born on: 2006-10-25 (account deleted) owner of Impact Weapons.
My account was banned for 14 days for an alleged assault and disturbing of the peace within being logged on for about 15 minutes sitting on a prim afk for about 12 of those minutes. I returned to my pc and started to greet some friends which were around at the time, in the process of greeting them i was logged out by an admin. I promptly responded to this with a support ticket asking for an explanation and i all i got for a solution to the ticket was a quote of the TOS i had supposedly breached and saying it was correctly applied. I gave up because this was not a solution to my problem and just a band aided excuse for an incorrectly applied ban just and accepted it as 14 days is no big deal. After the 14days were up I was excited to be getting access back to my account and being able to deal with my daily Customer Service, etc. except i was still unable to login, the messaged changed from "you cannot access secondlife until (date time)" to we cannot process your request at this time. I sent another ticket regarding not being able to login after the ban was over and get a reply saying my account has been made permanently inaccessible and i will not be refunded any amount of Linden dollar balance (in excess of L$100,000), inventory (over 1 year and half research, scripts building) etc etc. Of course I appealed this and go figure, my appeal was handled by the same person who applied the 14 day ban, then answered my request to have it removed, and also answered my ticket in relation to not being able to login after the 14 days. My appeal was also written off so to speak which did not surprise me as it can hardly be fairly considered if the same person who applied it and reviews it.
Today i log in to find all my groups which are co owned by other persons land has been taken by Linden Labs. ( in excess of 25,000 sqm prime mainland)
In all, an account, a successful and popular business, Groups land, IP property and any record of it, and money "fictional currency" which is exchangeable for real money "which has no real value" (not really an issue as i have told linden lab they can have it all in exchange for access to my account) have been blatantly "deleted" of the face of the virtual world.

Myself and a few others conducted a test on the abuse report system at a later date to find that it fails us all and its served purpose.
I was logged in and logged in another alternate account to the same location, at this time i had not rezzed any prims nor used any scripted items on either account. I told the friends around at the time to Abuse Report the alternate account for assault (although it had not assaulted anyone), within 3 minutes both accounts were logged off and inaccessible with not even an email explaining why, what , when or how. I also submitted a ticket about this using my main account which to this day still remains unanswered.

Fail

Have you contacted support directly? This is a resident forum and we can't do anything for you here...and as you might have read, even though the title mentions a Linden, he quit reading after page two when the comments weren't all bunnies and light.

Try calling LL on the phone....... and quit spamming every forum with it

I would like to know why linden labs are going to sort out the teleport, as i cant teleport anywhere so i am stuck in the last place i was. NEEDS LOOKING AT!!! If anyone else is experiencing the same problems tell linden labs NOW they need to know.

I have just tried teleporting to summerville from secondlife.com and it is not WORKING? WHY i would love to know, so come on linden tell us all as Im sure Im not the only one experiencing this, or am I ???

Try logging in to a different sim.

First, Unterwelt, welcome to the Forums. Problems with teleporting in-world very often stem from network problems; rebooting routers and modems and checking firewall configurations may help. A chat with the ISP may eventually be necessary, if they're restricting bandwidth or have routing or namespace problems with the secondlife.com domain. (There are other possibilities, too, including corrupted cache or even Inventory; see below.)

You mention, though, teleporting "from secondlife.com," and issues using SLURLs or secondliferefixed URLs suggest problems with configuration of the browser or with installation of SecondLife on the machine.

Either way, you may want to post details of the problem to the Technical Issues forum at /111/1.html. There are a lot of experts there who help people with problems like this all the time. Think of it as crowdsourced technical support.

Unhappily that is so true Danielle

Totally off topic but funny as nothing LL wrote before so I just have to post it somewhere. Blogs are closed or turned over to PR stunting so unfortunattely it cannot be there.

Currently in the status page:

[RESOLVED 2:36PM 10-04-08] The Rolling Restart for Friday was completed but is not yet finished. We wi........

It is done but it is not done?

Thanks M Linden for the blog entry and for your replies in this thread.

1) Fully agreed that SL has become far more reliable since June/July, likely due to a disciplined s/w development and testing process. This widely addresses and solves the main concern of LL residents/customers.

2) One point i do not understand ; what do you mean when stating "SL will become more relevant". As for me, the very fact that SL's reliability as a system is on the right way at the right pace makes it relevant "de facto". Or am i wrong?

3) Glad to read about an 18 months strategic plan, however would it not be nice to disclose --- just for information --- the roadmap and milestones of its implemantation (i.e.: tactical plans implementations devired from the strategy)?


_______________________________

Now a bit off-topic (but not that much):


I'm not so sure your figures are correct and/or reflect any reality. In my 2 years or so SL's experience i never stepped upon any region (not to be confused with a sim btw) clubbing more than 40 to 50 concurrent residents. You could also proftably read the knowledge base on that precise point ( https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417 ) stating why 40 to 50 agents onto one same region is the reasonable limit.

Also, since you mention those so-called good old times, i guess you have kept in mind the wonderful ritual "we're banging on things" that happened every Wednesday for updates, a "banging" that shut down the entire grid for a planned duration of 4 to 5 hours... most of the time expanding to 8 or 10 hours and up to 18 hours at times. As well you should deeply regret the delicious week-ends of 2007 and beg. 2008 when, as a whole, random incidents closed the grid for a couple of hours.