Privacy Problems

I was anxious to embrace the new privacy functions, however there exists a somewhat nasty situation.

If you hide your on-line status in-world on the Friends List, what good does it do when anyone on that list need only visit the Friends Online web page to see if it's true?

I think this is a serious flaw, needs to be addressed, and has all kinds of potential for hurt and misunderstanding.

Kindly respect privacy in both places or not at all.

Bump for truth. Friends I saw as online on the web page that weren't online in my friends list made me skeptical. Some of them just haven't gotten used to the new privacy system, so I can see this causing a lot of trust issues.

omg i just assumed they would match...

Trust you friend. Don't trust the online indicator or the webpage.
Both in inworld indicator and the webpage or wrong on a regular basis.

Though this is sadly true, they are out of sync even when they're both correct. If I don't want a friend to see that I'm online, they can still see me on the web page, even when things are working correctly.

One does question the reasoning and sense of "enhancing" a feature that still had several known stability issues , where that change will directly impact without ensuring that it is first fully stabilized and confirmed fixed.

A cynical sort of person might think that by muddying the waters here its a good way to diffuse attention from those system problems as you now have the added confusion of thinking it is down to a use of the new settings.

It still has many flaws. If it says offline send them a message anyways. IF you don't get the "User not online - message will be stored and delivered later." then they are online. Or drop a box on them, You should get a message "User not online - Inventory has been saved" if you don't get the message they are online. or even a third more sneaky way is to use a scripted method to by useing llRequestAgentData.

You can also look someone up in "search" and it will show their online status there. This doesn't seem to be very much of a feature.

You can also see it in group listings, I believe.

Well, it's a start.

I wish they had some way of globally toggling "show on map" for all friends, instead of having to do it ever so slowly one by one, withut having to "show offline".

You can shift-select up to 10 at a time I believe. Still not a global, but much faster than one-by-one.

Latest viewer will handle up to 20, I think. You can select as many as you want and it will trim the selection down to the first 20.

That's still to slow for me to use it routinely, and it's also clearly terribly inefficient compared to the single bit "is this person mappable" flag that I'm talking about.

So is anyone addressing this issue?

At all?

I'd be interested to know if this has been plugged as well, just out of interest. llRequestAgentData is used by a number of "online alert" products, and doesn't even require you to be on someone's friend list. It's not something that bothers me a lot personally, but come on, introducing a feature like that but making it trivially easy to bypass is silly.

I don't know if people are imagining more functionality than is provided with the "Show Online" feature of the friends list.

All I've ever seen it as is a way to keep people from being bugged with the annoying little blue "SoAndSo is Online" or "SoAndSo is Offline" messages every time you log on or off.

If someone really wants to see when you log on or off, they will find a way, whether they're on your Friends List or not.

There are bigger fish to fry. Like ferinstance, why a graphical chat program can't even do chat right (without text lag). Or why vehicles are promoted gridwide, but it's a lesson in futility to drive (fly or ride) a vehicle any distance in-game. Or why we can't find the products we're looking for in search. Or why, in a graphical chat program, our graphical representations (AVs) look ridiculous with clothing and attachments appearing wrong or sometimes not at all. Or why...

Or why whenever we try to focus on a single bug/problem with SL, seventeen even more crippling problems come to mind - and seventeen more for each of those.

Oh whell, give it time. The Lindens enjoy this (uh-oh, he called it a) game as much as we do and they want it to be as functional as we do. Then we can all complain about meaningful things, like why there's no CAVEMEN featured on the main SL webpage! It's discriminatory dammit!!!

I do know the lindens know how to use it. I tried to reach one and saw none online. Went to LH and they answered me and right away went back to search...no lindens were on.

That's because they've always been able to hide their online status as to not be disturbed.

This is exactly the point. It can be done, it just isn't.