Events/Announcements Reworked

Here is my proposal for a reworking of the events/announcement “system”. I’ll state my ideas, and then the reasons why they are needed.

1) Hourly Announcements

These should be re-instituted. They should come at 5 minutes before the hour. They will be automated with a simple reminder message: “Please check events coming up in the next hour”. That sort of thing, so a LL employee doesn’t have to a) remember to give the announcement, I’m sure they have better things to do, b) Come up with something clever and cute to say each time. These announcements can be toggled off/on by the individual, so those who don’t wish to get them, won’t. The default should be to have them on.

2) In-game Events Listings

Buy/Sell events should be brought back. As mature events can be checked to NOT appear for those who are not interested in seeing them, so too should these listings. Individuals can toggle them on/off as they please. The default should have the box un-checked ie those events visible to begin with.

3) Reasons why these features are needed

For some reason one of the driving forces in the economy of SL has been shunted aside. That would be that whole buying and selling thing. I’ve heard, seen and read a LOT in recent and past interviews, articles and advertisements from the LL CEO on down to us regular folks, how wonderful SL is, and especially that there is the possibility to make some RL bucks from this “game”. Yet one of the most widely accessible features to reach citizens has banned buy/sell from its roster. I’m still trying to figure out why.

It has been established that when there were hourly reminders there was good attendance for events, especially those geared to help new folks. It has been established that advertising your wares be it vehicles, scripts, clothing, accessories, houses, land, skins, animations or what have you is 200% more effective when done in-game as opposed to on the forums; even more so when listed on the in-game events..

For those who been here awhile, and are already established, most of this makes no real difference. For those coming in new, it makes all the difference in the world. I have done a little bit of research on this, and I have found that in the past, as a new person it was tremendously helpful to have event reminders. You were able to go to the SL basics and Building basics classes and so forth. If you had something new to offer the community you had a direct and effective way to reach those who were interested.

Its hard to remember just how overwhelming SL can be when you first step foot inside, and from those folks who have been holding noobie events, have found a marked drop in attendance to zero folks showing up. This new system is hurting the new folks most of all.

People are skating around the rules as they are posted, and trying every trick in the book to get people to show up. There was no need to throw a wet t-shirt contest in hopes people would show up and then go shopping at your mall. The notify system is a great idea, and should be continue to be a feature, but as I mentioned in my post in the Events section, one must actually remember to check the events first.

I can’t tell you how many times as a new person when I logged in specifically to work on an idea I had, that I was grateful to get those reminders so I could stop what I was doing and take in a much needed class or whatever. SL is such that it is very easy to get caught up in a project and forget what time it is, and thus as things are now, miss out on things.

I’ve been here just about 6 months, and I forget to check events. I can only imagine how it is for someone brand new. Some folks have even stopped holding events specifically for new people, as the attendance has been nil. I’m not sure this is what was had in mind when the changes were made, but this is what we’ve got.

I hope that my proposal might serve to not only alleviate these problems, but also provide a climate in which most people will be happy with:
If you want to see everything on the events you can, and be notified about them too.
If you don’t want to be notified and/or be bothered with buy/sell events you can have it that way too.

It seems like a win-win situation to me.
1) Noobies will know where to go, and more SL basics type classes will sprout up again
2) Shoppers will know where to go to get what they want.
3) Sellers will have direct customers for their wares.
4) Those who don’t want to know about events or be able to pick and choose what they see or get notified on will be in hog heaven.

I completely agree with this.

Being a Newbie myself, I would find it very beneficial to be reminded that there are things going on in the world. Even though I didn't have a problem finding the Event listings, I do forget that things are happening.

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can
change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
-Margaret Mead

1) Hourly Announcements, would be good to have, the system for announcing the events should be automated and should contain the description of the event itself and title, etc. I thought this was originaly going to be inclueded with the event announcement changes, but eh, so yes.

The other stuff, I'm not too sure about and don't really have an opinion on either way.

As someone who has been doing Mentor class events with zero (or almost zero) participation from new residents, I fully agree. (Actually I liked the witty comments from the Lindens on duty but I admit that this should be fully automated nowadays, with around-the-clock events and sometimes 10 or more events at the same hour...)

As someone who forgets all about what events are going on, I also agree. I often log in and check events systematically - BUT I just do it once. Several events are only announced a few minutes before time, and I completely miss those, since I'm not always looking at "new events" (what about a "new event" IM, reminding you to check events again? hmmm...). Ideally, if we could have the UI separate from the viewing area, we would have a small box somewhere just showing the "upcoming events" for the next hour or so, which would enable us to click on them to get a teleport. But that's for SL 1.8 and not for now...

I also agree that events should be able to announce products/services, ie. be a channel for advertising. Actually, I worry a little that people have to "force" events to be contests in order to get a few L$ for their work. I host several completely free events where I don't get a single L$ (not even for dwell or ratings, it's so rare that people rate event hosters nowadays...) because I feel that announcing it as a contest is not "proper". Say, I'll attend a class in scripting, and at the last 15 minutes of the hour, the teacher says: "oh, hey, sorry guys, I just forgot, we'll have a quick trivia so that I can be payed for my hard work... so, first question is, what are the parameters of llSay()?"

No wonder 95% of the events are silly contests. Now I don't have anything against it, but most of them (say, 80%) are just doing "contests" to get some Linden support. Nothing wrong with that, but what about paying all event hosters (say, the usual L$ 250) if they have at least 5 people on their event? And definitely include "marketing campaigns" on that - after all, they're contributing for the community to do something interesting as well (spending money very is good for the global economy, and not only for your pockets ). Contests are just a special kind of event which gets an additional L$500 for prizes if there are winners.

Brace, again, I fully agree!

I agree with Brace's original post.
those things did help out new players a lot, more than most people think.

I agree too. Mostly I am pretty good about checking, but I do find events that I think after the event, damn, I wish I'd seen that. A reminder with just an automatically generated list of titles of events about to start would be grand.

I'm less sure about the 'payments to all event organisers' comment that Gwyneth suggested. I have no problem with it in general. It is unlikely to motivate me to run more events (I run 1-3 a week at the moment and don't usually get paid at all, not even dwell). Encouraging more people to run more good events I am all for. But maybe some tiering is required - organising a Christmas Ball with proceeds going to VERTU say may be harder work than organising a SL Instructor class (or similar: mentoring, TLC, USL etc.) but perhaps needs a little less hard cash support? If (and I see no reason why they shouldn't be) a product launch/sale event is permitted once more I would suggest no financial support - the increased sales through advertising should do the trick?

On second thoughts (yes, I usually change opinions) it may be that paying for event hosting is not such a good idea after all. Eloise raises a good point: how will you be able to measure the "worth" of one event and "pay" accordingly? To give you an example, for one event I hosted, I took almost a week (remember, SL is unfortunately only my hobby and not my full-time job ) to research some stuff and write a rather long text to give out during the event, even envolving one of the Lindens for comments and approval. It took pains to do - but was certainly interesting, at least for me - and the net result was 2 people attending the event. On the other hand, I know people that suddenly say, "hey, I just remembered, let's do a Wet T-Shirt Contest at my club!", fill the form half an hour before the event, and have 15-20 people attending, and get L$ 250 for hosting it. Hmm. So what is more "worth" in this case? Hard to tell! The contest did take no time for planning or thinking it out, but the truth is, it attracted people, they had fun, rated themselves to death, improved dwell, and left the contest very happy and telling everybody how much fun they had and the people they met there. So this was, in a way, "a successful event" in terms of any type of SL measurement that we care to apply, and well worth the L$ 250 payed for it. On the other hand, it took zero time to plan & arrange.

In my line of business, that's called "filling a clever market opportunity", but it also means that people are "encouraged" to do always the same type of events and there is no real "encouragement" to try to do something different. Our world's society & economy are very tough on unsuccessful people ... meaning that if nobody cares about your ideas, you're quickly forgotten.

This is also a major reason why one of the best "marketing channels" we currently have - the Event list - should try and promote all sorts of events, and not only "contests". I still agree that "sales" should be announced (you could always filter them out if you weren't interested in being "spammed".

As to some sort of "newbie announcements", read this thread. It looks like that a "message board" will be back on the Welcome Area. That's good news!

I agree with Brace's post. While not a big event goer myself, I tended to rely on the pop ups to at least get a vague idea what was availible. And too, it's gotten much more difficult to find out what shops are operating, what new things are being released. The best answer is a revised notification and event system.

THANKS for the posts of support and suggestions and everything! I can't seem to get the quote thing to work right - and I think quoting oneself is tacky LOL - BUT I just wanted to bring this thread back to my original proposal:

"1) Hourly Announcements

These should be re-instituted. They should come at 5 minutes before the hour. They will be automated with a simple reminder message: “Please check events coming up in the next hour”. That sort of thing, so a LL employee doesn’t have to a) remember to give the announcement, I’m sure they have better things to do, b) Come up with something clever and cute to say each time. These announcements can be toggled off/on by the individual, so those who don’t wish to get them, won’t. The default should be to have them on.

2) In-game Events Listings

Buy/Sell events should be brought back. As mature events can be checked to NOT appear for those who are not interested in seeing them, so too should these listings. Individuals can toggle them on/off as they please. The default should have the box un-checked ie those events visible to begin with. "

There was some discussion and suggestions about event support and so on, which is great and I have some agreeing and differing opinions on some of the posts here - but I did want to bring this thread back to the orginal proposal, since I'm not tackling other aspects of events (yet! hehe).

I am not sure if any Lindens read this stuff here? In case they actually do - I just wanted to keep things crystal clear on what I'm proposing.
Basically I'm of the view that when events were announced, they REALLY helped new and newer people. The mentor thread that Gwyneth posted echoes some of this need for change as well.

Just posting "hear, hear!" or simply "I fully agree and support this!" is probably bad forum etiquette, but I really do feel that way

On the subject of automatic announcements, I would like to have something that briefly describes them, but I guess it's almost impossible, since sometimes there are 10-15 events at the same time. Perhaps we could compromise with "There are 10 events right now: 6 contests, 2 general fun, 1 mentor event, 1 class" or something like that? This would at least catch the attention of people looking for a specific type of events.

Also, Brace, if you feel that the Lindens are not looking into this thread, perhaps you could email your proposal to them? Haney would be appropriate for that, or even Char. You could always send them a link to this thread for them to get the overall impression on people's views on the subject (so that they can decide to "bump up to a higher priority" on it, as Philip uses to say )

With Linden Labs boasting about the economy of Second Life, Brace's suggestions seem logical. Bring back the hourly anouncements and allow buy/sell events along with the ability to filter for those individuals that do not want those services.

You know... if you want hourly announcements, when you log into SL, simply click every event and hit the "notify me" button. Ta-da, hourly notifications.

The hourly event spam was something I began to consciously ignore at first, then it became a big hassle. And THEN I would miss important messages because I would mistake it for a stupid event announcement.

I vote no for this.

LF

Maybe a single option "Harass Me with All Event Announcements", defaulted to FALSE/NO, would satisfy everyone?

Well, I think that, in fact, the whole "suppressing the hourly announcements" has been done completely the inverse way of what it should have been.

The announcements should be turned ON by default. With the option of turning them off in your Preferences panel. Reasons to this:

- The SL old timers may be bothered 5 minutes by it, but they can turn it off. Of course they could still activate individual Notifying as we do now
- The newcomers, who prolly won't think of cheking the Events panel at first, will then have the opportunity to be told about the mentoring/building 101 events etc. Which ARE important for them.

Frankly, I'd way prefer having to move my arse and click once on a "don't give me hourly announcements" button, rather than see countless newbies make mistakes and waste cash etc because they couldn't be taught in time (and yeah, it WILL be easier for us "old ones" to do that, rather than for newcomers to realize on their first day that they should check the events...).

I think an hourly event summary would be a good thing, defaulted on to catch the new arrivals, perhaps with a pointer/link to a Help topic on how to look up events and disable the summary notices. Remember the newbs won't be getting all the online/offline and other messages that accumulate when you've been here a while, so I don't think it'll be much of a burden for them at the outset. But it *must* be possible to turn it off as it would drive many SLers postal...

Slightly off-topic, I just checked this morning, and I saw two events clearly announced as "pure marketing" events. "Come here and buy our new line of XXX". One of them not even tried to "hide" the purpose of the event: increase sales. The other was slightly "nicer" and offered "we also have great places to chill out", so it borderlines on an "amusement event". However, I reviewed the rules for posting events, and there hasn't been a change - it clearly states that "for sale" events are forbidden!

Any comments on this? Have some people been given the right to overrule LL's restrictions on marketing events? Or am I just reading the wording on those events incorrectly?

"Slightly off-topic, I just checked this morning, and I saw two events clearly announced as "pure marketing" events. "Come here and buy our new line of XXX". One of them not even tried to "hide" the purpose of the event: increase sales. The other was slightly "nicer" and offered "we also have great places to chill out", so it borderlines on an "amusement event". However, I reviewed the rules for posting events, and there hasn't been a change - it clearly states that "for sale" events are forbidden!

Any comments on this? Have some people been given the right to overrule LL's restrictions on marketing events? Or am I just reading the wording on those events incorrectly?"

Oh Gosh Gwyn

This is also another reason for a revamp of the events system. In my original document I typed out in Word, I had a few paragraphs about rule-bending events listings. But since my proposal is already incredibly verbose - I decided to concentrate on the two things that were closest to my heart.

With the changes I proposed, you won't see any of those type things going on. People will be free to advertize their wares, places of commerce etc - and those that aren't interested in buying or selling can click once - and never be "bothered" again with seeing those listings.

I didn't go into it, as I figured if these changes were made, the problem would sort itself out. Basically, I'm not a fan of blanket rulings. I prefer having choices. I'm also a big fan of helping noobs, having been lucky enought to have so many folks help me out when I first started: and heck I'm still pretty new my dang self.

"You know... if you want hourly announcements, when you log into SL, simply click every event and hit the "notify me" button. Ta-da, hourly notifications.

The hourly event spam was something I began to consciously ignore at first, then it became a big hassle. And THEN I would miss important messages because I would mistake it for a stupid event announcement."

My proposal fixes those things. Spending all that time clicky-fying all those events doesnt seem very user-friendly, and still doesn't address the new folks who are clueless to things like the big blue events button.

I didn't read the thread but I agree there should be reminders

Now that's the ticket! I actually couldn;t think of an appropriate way of saying that but i've been thinking something along those lines since they stopped doing it. Thankfully iw as a noob when they still did it but when it got down to having to find the events myself and checking abck every hour or so i got a bit tired and kept forgetting.

Amazingly, unless you build alot, the game gets rather boring without events. I used to spend 90% of my sl time in events and the toher 10% making clothing. Now i'm lucky to go on SL say hi to my friends and leave... Not very productive in or out of the game.

Event notices should be automated and the message should simply state something along the lines of "Don't forget to check the events listing for fun things to do and see. There are (insert number here) events happening this hour. Have fun!" Shouldn't be too hard. I think. :: shrugs ::

Well there's my two cents but yah. :: cheers for all the nice people who liked this idea ::

I like the idea of hourly notifications.

But no to allowing shopping malls to fill up the event calendar.

If you have a new product or service, nothing is stopping you from having a product release party.

Just as anothr side-note, the two events I mentioned disappeared from the Events list history. That's good news, meaning someone is "alert" and making sure people are respecting the ToS and the Community Standards.

Of course, I still prefer Brace Coral's proposal and fully support it.

Brace, a suggestion. Perhaps, since your proposal will be a way to promote SL's economy - by allowing for another marketing channel - you should mention it at the upcoming Town Hall Meeting on SL Economy?

Jack: the events listing will be toggled on/off as I stated in my proposal. So if you don't wanna see them - you wont Same dealy as the mature events are now. I think I covered all the bases ::grins::

And as far as I can tell with the new rules as they exist now, we are specifically NOT supposed to throw "come see my new thing for sale" events.

Gwyn: GOOD suggestion! Thank gonness today was one of the days I logged in to read the forums LOL

Plenty of time for me to put together a coherent question for Philip *crosses fingers*

Welp, my question didn't get into the townhall mtg - but I'm bumping this up again in case anyone else wants to chime in.

I'll do as has been suggested, and email this link out to the powers that be.

Funny, the events got changed gosh awful quickly to the way they are now with just a few grumbling postings from less ppl than have viewed this thread. I'm not gonna give up tho, I just have to find the right "ears" I suppose.

TY again yall for posting your responses, support, suggestions and ideas

Hourly announcements Yes, bring them back.. but NOT please for the love of all that is sacred, free advertising!

The events list is for EVENTS, not for people to advertise their wares!

If you want to hold an event in your store, then hold an event. People who attend will look round and buy things. But NEVER, EVER turn the events list into yet another channel for advertising your wares at newbies.

A better idea might be for the Lindens to sell Ad space on the find box... put a section for businesses to advertise, and cycle them daily or weekly from the list of people who've PAID to be on the list.

Sio.