Sigh... want to be invisible to IMs for privacy? REMOVE your friends from your list.

Appearing offline is not just showing as offline to people you have traded cards with. If you search for a person using the Find feature they show up as online or offline. Also they show up as online or the last date they were online in any public groups they are officers of. Also you can detect a persons online status from script. So, Robin's solution of removing your friends from your friends list is not only a poor solution, it's not a solution at all. Sorry Robin .

Ideally, when I appear offline ims people send me should go to my email, just like when I'm offline. Busy isn't what I want. I don't want an away message, and I don't want to see the messages at all.

Also ideally, I could set offline to everyone, or offline to non-friends only. That way people I know can still bug me, but random people can not. Sorry to pull out the creator card , but the more of your creations or floating around, the more this becomes an irritation.

Pardon me for my lack of social skills, and no desire to aquire more or better . And why is it people naysay features that they DO NOT HAVE TO USE. I can understand if it were something that may effect you adversely. I can see no circumstance in which this feature would adversely effect someone if they were planning on respecting the wishes of the invisible person anyway.

I can not believe that this is a large difficult feature to implement. Presumably whenever someone is detected as online or offline the user database is queried. Alright so to give the functionality I want, a field would have to be added to the user database status table. This field would be an integer and values would be 0-2. 0 indicates show online, 1 indicates show offline to non-friends, 2 indicates show offline to everyone. The back end code for the group member lists, llRequestAgentData, Calling cards, Instant Messages and the Find Dialog would have to be modified slightly to take into account that new field in the database. The biggest part of that would actually be modifying a field in the database. However I bet some of the fields in the user status table are bitfields and I bet one of those bitfields probably has 2 bits free, so if it's too difficult to add a field, instead use those two free bits to do exactly the same thing.

Friend or not, if they map me and come to where I am without at least IMng me first, then I cut both friend and calling card. I have found that if they can't extend common courtesy to me first, then it definitely doesn't get reciprocated.

Yeah but there's a HUGE gap between calling someone rude and calling them a stalker.

I don't think the primary issue here is with stalkers, really. I agree - if someone turns into a stalker, they're not a friend - and neutralizing that situation is about as simple as deleting the friend card. If they've acheived stalker status, you're probably not concerned about offending them with a delete.

However, a genuine issue exists with friendly aquantances who don't know you well enough to understand your busy/free patterns, yet still someone you don't wish to alienate by declining/cancelling friendship.

I dont either, which is why I took exception to someone calling it "How to Stalk 101". We agree. You are preaching to the choir.

hehe sorry, Chris - I know. I should have worded that a little differently.

I'm surprised no one's mentioned one easy stopgap: use an alt.

Sure, it's a total pain in the ass to be scripting or building with an alt then have to transfer gear back to your main account, but it works.

Kage Seraph is my main account, and I have an alt for close friends only, a building and scripting alt, and a bank vault alt. Seems to work pretty well, esp. with SecondLife.exe -multiple . When using the building alt, the silence is utterly golden. =)

Heh, ya, a lot of people do that Kage. Including me. It's just kind of a pain if you want the issolation for say, building things. You know this, you is a builder. it requires setting permissions a couple of times, syncronyzing inventories, making sure your alts name never appears on anything, trying never to be seen by someone while building, and maintaining enough self control not to break your silence and expose your alt .

You betcha it is a hassle. Someone remind me why SL doesn't have basic IM client functionality? =P

Oops, i committed a cardinal sin . I didn't read your entire post before replying. Feel free to roll your eyes or otherwise express exasperation .

heh. A total pain in the ass is easy?

I was thinking about this earlier and how common this is. With each alt you gave LL $10 as well as a means to jack up the number of accounts. Out of 100,000 accounts how many unique users do you suppose there are?

my bet, 40,000

could be much less if there are more people like me who have 4 . All bets are off as to how many are active as in have been used in the last 3 months.

As I enjoy saying, "AND" not "OR". Avatars may not be able to sleep (in the truest sense of the word), so if they could at least be granted a little peace and turn off the "IM cellphone", that would be blissful.

Here we go again... and the requisite points were already stated here. Some things are already in the SL framework but not quite as flexible as they could be. For example, there is a BUSY mode, but this cancels out inventory drops too. (Has it occurred that someone may be scripting, and hence, busy, but wants to continue to receive scripts from a collaborator to inspect? )

And for me, it's not that I don't want friends to IM me; I want to be accessible. However, there's context for that, and certain times of days where I'm really all for chatting it up, as opposed to others where I'm multitasking with the SL Forums, and blogging, and I don't want to come off as rude by slowly replying.

And yes, I have done the requisite, "I'm sorry!" thing many times before. Infact, I've done it so many times that the process has become a copy-and-paste macro—in other words, something best suited for MACHINE AUTOMATION.

Some say, "put a message in your profile to inform". That's where I take my cue from Flip, altho his is in his 2nd Life section and mine is in my 1st Life's, and neither automatically pop up when someone IMs us. So they likely get missed.

It's not about rudeness for me; it's about redundancy.

And in any instance, it quickly becomes about configurability, about Preferences. Making informed choices. And in such a diverse community, not everyone will need it, but even if I didn't personally need it, I can see many Resis who are asking for it, and these are reasonable, well-reasoned requests.

Connect this to the related issue of SL being very "heavy" when it comes to dealing with IMs: if you have to log on and off quickly and a lot of people IM you as you come online, you can't automatically "catch and save" their IMs to reply to. Rather, you have to let each one know, "BRB BRB BRB!" Doing this 100s of times is... redundantly redundant.

I said how to stalk, not that they are true "stalkers". If they map you and come to where you are without an invitation, then IMO, then it is stalking by all definitions.

One possible exception being if it's your spouse or a good friend who you've openly consented to playing map-tag with. But yup, generally a good idea to ask first.

Good point, Torley. I guess that brings up the other side of this as well, being seen online by some and not by others, like stealth settings in Yahoo.

I know from DJ'ng I have a TON of people on my list and there are times, I log in invisible to all but one or two people. To me, that would be the best solution.

I generally don't have a problem with people iming me, even when I'm busy working on something, but there are exceptions. I would really like it if we had a way to customize busy mode. As it stands right now, you reject anything immediately and you don't see any chat. I would like to have my own choices, such as busy mode for ims only but still being able to see chat and receive things. Some more options might be setting busy to only those outside the friends list or the opposite. There are a lot of options that would be useful for busy mode and I would love to see that feature.

Im confused. You say they are not "true stalkers" but then you end up saying "it is stalking by ALL definitions". Which is it? To me, you just called your "rude friend" a stalker by every definition of the word according to what you've said.

I feel the same way Torrid does.

Also, I would like to add that I'm really bad when it comes to multi-tasking, especially when it comes to holding two or more conversations at once. Most of the time, I just simply tell my friends "just a sec, brb" and the Majority of the time, they say "kk" or "sure, np".

MJ

I agree 100% with Travis in here, there are times I want to socailize with all my friends and beable to be open to take on new projects, but then there are times like this I'm going thru right now... I'm so back logged on projects that I just need to log in and work with NO interuptions at all...
Instead here I am reading forums because I know as soon as I log in to SL I'm going to be bombed with a ton of IM's ranging from "hi how are you " to "hey have you had a chance to finish that project?"
Useing an alt sounds like a good idea except 1 minor thing.... my alt doent have mod rights!! lol
Setting to busy some what works except that it automaticaly declines inventory transfers, so if hiding your online status can be implemented I would very much approve of it even if you can have it placed in your prefrences in the genral tab where it asks to log in at last location or your home location... be nice to have it to log on as offline also

Would be nice to be able to pick and choose which friends or groups to turn off/on. Not just the whole lot but certain friends or groups.

I'm sorry if I sounded flippant. I know that deleting friends from your calling cards is not a preferred option. I'm looking into what we can do to give you more privacy, short of making avatars completely invisible.

The comment at the end about "short of making avatars invisible" sounds to me like they think people are asking to have avatars not visible to the people around them in-world as opposed to having online status not revealed.

First I said IMO, so this is how I feel on the subject. But second, stalking once doesn't make you a true stalker. With the exception of one or two people in game, if anyone who has my friendship link did it to me, then that link would be gone.