You just need to make it work Tonya 
Come on..chop chop, things to do you know!
I believe that what CTL is saying is "We haven't yet figured out how to manipulate a few tables in a database that reflect the behaviour when a limited quantity item is sold and aren't sure where the issues around Merchant Outbox failing to initialise lie but we've got new shiny to work on now so we'll hand it over to TPV's in principle so that the blame for it being fixed is that the TPV haven't got around to it yet."
Actually, this is standard as you well know from the deformer project. That too needs TPV input to develop the UI but nobody wants to tell you what this is.
Tonya Souther wrote:A couple of days ago, CommerceTeam Linden posted:
"We are aware that some Merchants are still having problems with the Merchant Outbox. We are are working with TPVs and our internal development teams to address this issue."
As the lead Mac developer for the Phoenix and Firestorm viewers, all I can say is:
Huh?
To the best of my knowledge and the others on the team I've spoken to, nobody has approached us about this. I think I can speak for the whole team when I say we'd love to help, but we don't know of anything we need to do to fix problems.
CTL just failed to say which TPV's.
What was the name of the Ava from that Viewer we aren't supposed to mention? Maybe that is who CTL is referring to? 
(p.s. thank you for your work on FS. my comment was is in no way intended as a jab at FS. i'm a happy FS user)
First off, thank you Tonya and your entire team for providing such a sterling example of how a development team can and should be run. You've fundamentally taken a much more diverse, less explicitly motivated group of people and forged them into a dynamic, responsive and highly professional unit with high moral and professional standards. When placed in contrast with the corporate entity known as Linden Lab ... with their higher imperatives by way of employment rules and regulations and the explicit motivation of paychecks ... they have succeeded only in demonstrating the power of the lowest common denominator. (And when I refer to the Phoenix/Firestorm team as "less explicitly motivated", I mean you are all volunteers without the explicit motivation of a paycheck to ensure you do anything at all.)
Now .. onward to my central point ...
Tonya Souther wrote:A couple of days ago, CommerceTeam Linden posted:
"We are aware that some Merchants are still having problems with the Merchant Outbox. We are are working with TPVs and our internal development teams to address this issue."
As the lead Mac developer for the Phoenix and Firestorm viewers, all I can say is:
Huh?
To the best of my knowledge and the others on the team I've spoken to, nobody has approached us about this. I think I can speak for the whole team when I say we'd love to help, but we don't know of anything we need to do to fix problems.
I began a blog post about this exact topic .. then trashed it when I started digging into the meat of my point. I realized I didn't have a dog that I could reliably place into the ring. However it struck me as incredibly disingenuous of CTL to have tossed the TPV Community under the wheels of their own dysfunctional bus. Anyone that reads the post with a measure of naivete will come away with the impression that the "usual troubles of managing disparate external groups" is somehow to blame for the continued failures in the Merchant Outbox. Yet this is not only incorrect, it's blatantly misinformative.
Linden Lab has control of the code that runs in the Viewers to establish and utilize the connection to the servers that is the essence of the Merchant Outbox. They set the communication protocol and they establish how data is exchanged at every step in the process. The only points of control the TPV developers have are sideline features such as UI coloration and end-user interaction. Linden Lab also has complete control over the Server-side of the Merchant Outbox conversation. The TPV Community has no say in that end of the process whatsoever.
So how on EARTH can LL's development staff claim they are "working with TPVs" to fix the failures that now exist in Outbox functionality? The TPV Community as a whole has nothing they are allowed to do that would even slightly impact the process!
Quite honestly Tonya, it's muddying statements such as this recent post by CTL that reinforces my intense level of distrust in their whole corporate personality. I can easily accept being lied to by a corporation when there are reasonable imperatives that can cause them to obscure the truth. But being lied to in every shape, at every turn, and most often simply because they obviously don't have a clue what they're doing is clear evidence they have no personal or professional ethics on which to operate. That's a shade of their corporate personality that has grown by leaps and bounds with each new management team and each new project they've undertaken. Instead of getting "better" as a company, they have instead only gotten "better" at lying, deceiving and conjuring up new ways to shift the apparent blame to anyone but themselves.
Is it really any wonder that their customer base continues to shrink?
May be the whole marketplace should just be turned over to the Phoenix Firestorm team, great job on making a viewer more stable then the LL viewer!
What scares me about "The transition from Magic Boxes to Direct Delivery has been extended indefinitely" is that it all so likely means that all other needed work on the marketplace has been extended indefinitely until DD is fixed.
Kampu Oyen wrote:
Darrius Gothly wrote:However it struck me as incredibly disingenuous of CTL to have tossed the TPV Community under the wheels of their own dysfunctional bus.I don't think it's necessarily intended to punish TPV's or their users as such.
It seems to me like just one more incremental deterrent to using the SLM rather than running an in-world shop.
That is, anything that leaves the SLM technically functional but limits its total functionality is something you should expect to continue, and you should expect only to see more such things over the next few months.
I don't ascribe the "winding down" activity you routinely highlight to a general motive or goal, but rather more toward their inability to comprehend what is needed, how to go about implementing it and a total lack of competent resources (meaning people) to accomplish anything worthwhile. If I would attribute this trend to any one source, I would more likely hang it around the neck of LL's divergence into other products and not at all to some malevolent or harmful intent.
Even if they have somehow decided to shoot the Marketplace in the head while shooting themselves in the foot, I just don't see that much control or focus on the part of LL Management to implement such a strategy and keep it completely secret. Far too much leaks out on stuff that is much more damaging to LL than it would be to find out they've hatched some sort of hair-brained scheme to kill off the Marketplace.
You may continue post-dicting events to your heart's content, but if you are accomplishing anything at all in your continued vendetta it is to so dull people to the whole nest of issues such that when something of import really does happen, the majority of people are more likely to turn away in disgust because "it's just more of that LL bashing BS!"
