To RODVIK - Request meeting with Merchants on CommerceTeam concerns

[Czari Zenovka]

I am so very sorry to hear this, Faye.  Losing a huge chunk of one's inventory that cannot be retrieved even with LL helping is disheartening (I lost my entire folder of Victorian dresses that I had collected over the years and, after a flurry of customer support tickets back and forth, LL said they could not "see" the outfits and thus were lost forever) BUT - losing all the supplies that constitute your business would be horrendous.   Add to that the now all to common "Sorry about that" so-called support is rubbing salt into the wounds.

It may be months, it may be years, but eventually LL will be left with very, very few content creators.

[Czari Zenovka]

---

Couldbe Yue wrote:

---

 

The sad bit of this is that the people LL drive away (and people are driven away - Faye's story is more common than it should be, as we know) were committed to SL and it's success.  They were the ones who spent so much of their time creating items that add depth and interest to this world for others to enjoy and a lot of them would only usually break even or like Faye, would end up paying LL for the "privilege" of making this world of ours a better place.

That kind of committment to a company should be respected as it's very rare anywhere else but in SL, yet LL goes out of it's way to avoid even acknowledging the effort those creators put in, let alone trying to help them stay by fixing the issues that eventually become insurmountable hurdles.

There's not really much more to say.

---

(Emphasis mine)

....and yet Rod's goal appears to attract new and possibly younger "players" to his "game" that don't have the commitment to SL that many older resident/content creators do and who are known to flit from game to game in search of the next cool thing.

 

[Luna Bliss]

Yes Czari..it is satisfied customers that bring in new members...this is how a world grows...a fact that seems to be unheard of by LL.

 

Faye I'm sorry for your loss...I can't even imagine having to deal with that.

 

An entire sim (one that rezzes over an entire 65,000 sq m island) disappeared from my inventory once. Blue Linden searched high and low for it but to no avail and I was very appreciative of his efforts. But yeah Toy, you would think they would create a backup somewhere!

[Czari Zenovka]

---

Toysoldier Thor wrote:

What still boggles my mind and is simply not registering with my comprehension of the how instant and absolute your loss could be and LL had absolutely ZERO CAPABILITY to recover these specific lost assets???

I might ask Sassy as I bet she would know the details as to why but havent seen much of her - so Darrius or someone else in this forum with some stronger understanding of LL's SL architecture - can you explain to me how this scenario Faye is describing could be surgical in nature and so utterly absolute to the point that LL had NO ABILITY to restore/recover?

 

---

I don't know how it's possible, Toy, but apparently it can happen.  I posted above about losing my clothing folder of Victorian dresses.  I'm trying to recreate the scenario from the support tickets - I *think* I could see my dresses on Aditi because I submitted the name of each lost item.  After all the typical responses from support on how to recover lost inventory (which I had already done), someone named Izzy Linden took over.  I received this response:

Case: 01105502

Avatar: Czari Zenovka 

Type: Inventory (un-rezzed) Issues

Status: Waiting for Customer Acceptance

  Hello Czari,

 

Thank you for submitting your support request. I have run a fix on your inventory that will require you to please log in using one of our SL viewers, then clear cache and relog. Then leave your avatar in a mainland region like Welsh or Pooley for at least 20 minutes.

 

Have a wonderful day,

 

Izzy Linden

I was very hopeful after this support response as I had never had support go to this step with any previous missing inventory.  However, when that step did not work I received:

Case: 01105502

Avatar: Czari Zenovka 

Type: Inventory (un-rezzed) Issues

Status: Waiting for Customer Acceptance

  Hello Czari,

 

I understand your concern and frustration over your recent inventory loss. We have attempted every available recovery method to restore your missing items.

 

At this point, any items that have not been returned to you are unrecoverable and permanently lost. There is nothing more that we can do to assist in this matter.

 

Linden Lab typically does not offer restitution or compensation to residents for reported inventory loss. However, I am granting a courtesy one time grant of 2000 L$ to assist in recovery of your lost items. I would suggest contacting vendors and seeing if they would be willing to replace lost items first. I apologize for the inconvenience. Rest assured that we will continue to identify and resolve the causes of inventory loss in Second Life.

 

Thank you,

 

Izzy Linden

So apparently inventory can be "unrecoverable and permanently lost."  I was blown away with the 2000L which didn't come close to the cost of my lost inventory, but providing that went a long way toward good customer relations.  (Wonder if Izzy Linden is still with the company?)

 

 

[Darrius Gothly]

What follows is conjecture .. pure and simple .. but I'll explain how I arrive at it.

The clue that I springboard off is the fact that Faye was emptying the Trash at the time her viewer lagged and then crashed. As I understand the process, each item deleted as the Trash is emptied is indicated as being deleted by sending a message to the Asset Server (through the Sim Server connection). A response is then sent indicating the message was received. However I suspect that at the time she suffered her inventory loss, the communication method used to send those messages was a type called "UDP". That's a type of message packet that wonks call "Fire and Forget". Basically the message is sent but there is no error checking to ensure it arrives intact and correct.

Considering that she was emptying a LOT of items, the back and forth conversation got rather extensive. Many ISP's and some home routers tend to get grumpy when they see a massive amount of UDP type packets flying back and forth. (This is especially true on WiFi connections .. a type of connection that also has a bad reputation for mucking up data packets anyway.) I suspect that as the ping-pong conversation got longer and longer, her viewer began suffering various problems, memory leaks and whatnot .. and eventually consumed so much memory that it just croaked.

Once her viewer dropped offline there were probably still a lot of "delete this UUID" messages still queued up that hadn't reached the Asset Server yet. As the Sim Server tried to clean things up, no doubt a number of them got sent through anyway .. but possibly with corrupted UUID's or other details. Worst of all Worst Case Scenarios is if a munged UUID wound up corresponding to a Folder UUID instead of an Asset UUID. That would result in massive deletion of an entire folder's worth of assets.

The bottom line is .. as her Viewer and the Sim/Asset Servers were doing their back-and-forth .. things got yucky. The hell that could (and apparently did) ensue would be both unrecoverable and potentially disastrous.

Now as I said at the top, this is all based purely on conjecture on my part. I am no Viewer Whiz. I have seen some pretty amazing and destructive behaviors from program systems that use unverified and unstable protocols. The protocol used in the Viewer to communicate Inventory used to be just that .. horrific. (My understanding is that they've switched to a much more reliable HTTP protocol now .. but again that's only based on my loose understanding of things.)

Faye .. I don't know if you use a WiFi connection or not. If you do, or if anyone does, it is best to go wired instead. When you combine WiFi with an unstable Viewer, an unverified protocol .. and Linden Lab code .. you take your life (and Inventory) in your hands. In this case, it appears the Digital Devil saw an unprotected throat .. and ripped it.

[Czari Zenovka]

Darrius, I have no clue what you're saying half the time when you go into techie talk...lol. :matte-motes-tongue:  My situation with the above posted inventory loss may not be the same as Faye's, but...my inventory literally poofed - one day it was there, next day it wasn't.  I was not deleting anything (certainly not any of those prized outfits, many of whom were created by designers no longer in SL) or emptying trash - just logged in one day, proceeded to change clothes and...HEY!!!!!  Where did that dress go....WHOA!!!! Where did the entire folder go?????

So my inventory was just...gone.

[Toysoldier Thor]

I like the theory.  And yes... with LL's past love for the use of UDP some time during the inception of the SL architecture, this could be a very likely theory. 

I know that smarter LL Engineers are now realizing the UDP was a bad protocol to include in the architecture for aspects of the SL design where a reliable and acknowledged conversation was critical all along.  They are actually deep in the works now of switching from UDP to TCP (and yes - the HTTP application protocol above TCP).  But it does still surprise me that the initial system architects at the time believed UDP was the way to go.  I guess they were too short-sighted in their scope of just how big SL could eventually become.  That is too bad.  It would be akin to an architect back in the 80's saying "who would ever need more than 640K of RAM on a PC?".

Unfortunately, none of this helpe people like Faye.

But Darrius.... you didnt continue to provide a theory on the follow on questions as to why LL had nothing at their disposal to recover.

Why does LL not have any forms of effective backup of the Asset Server?  Even if they had an offline Asset DB that is about 1 day and 1 week old from current where LL Staff could go to and recover assets from the DB and restore them back into the production Asset Server?  Old / Outdated assets for a users inventory is better than no inventory at all.

And.... why was her assets not on the Beta Adititi grid which I understand only copies from prod once a week?  Bad timing that her assets were wiped and the backup to Adititi happened on the same day?

And... finally, why could LL not get some of at least the finished assets from MP?  Yes she would have lost all her input materials she bought - but - at least she would have the full perms of the selling assets.

Just some questions as we patiently wait for Rodvik to post on this thread and tell us that he would love the opportunity to meet with us and have a good two-way dialog.

[Arwen Serpente]

Sometimes SL does things that just aren't really "explainable". Today, I uploaded a new outfit, put it on and saved. I then adjusted a belt, moved some prims, resized, took it off, put it back on just to make sure the edits had "stuck". Then I log out. When I log back in an hour later, I'm wearing the prior version of the outfit and the edited belt was back to pre-adjustment build. No idea why SL does these things. Obviously, this is all incredibly minor versus the inventory loss that Faye and Czari experienced (and nothing was lost, just not the way I left it when I logged out).

[Spica Inventor]

 

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/general-sl-discussion/77023-sl-marketplace-cheating-merchants.html#...

 

My first time over there. The L.L. ministry of propaganda agents where pretty easy to identify weren't they? ;-)

[Spica Inventor]

My vote goes to making Toysoldier the new CEO of L.L. Anyone with me on that? ;-D

[Toysoldier Thor]

---

Spica Inventor wrote:

 

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/general-sl-discussion/77023-sl-marketplace-cheating-merchants.html#...

 

My first time over there. The L.L. ministry of propaganda agents where pretty easy to identify weren't they? ;-)

---

Ohh I know.... the little respect I had for the SL Universe evaporated after the thread you pointed out.  As you all can read for yourself on the thread - its infested with immature hords of LL Fanboys.  You cant even have a good healthy conversation there.  But it is now clear why Rodvik hangs his hat there since its likely lined with a large tribe of LL defenders.

But I will say - it does put SLU's reputation into perspective and it does say something that Rodvik participates actively at SLU and never makes any appearances in the actual SL Forum threads that are owned and run and official endorsed by LL.

Pretty sad situation.

[JoJo Aurelia]

---

Toysoldier Thor wrote:

@Faye,

 

With regard to your current strategy in light of the mass destruction of your business with no recovery ability by LL, I am a bit puzzled why you would reduce your price on MP and plan to shut it down.  If you have decided to end any plans to restore an active SL business, why not simply leave all your content on MP at its original price and simply leave it selling on MP indefinitely?  Just let your products continue to sell until market demand & time slowly reduce your sales to zero.  They would be stale content in that you will not be updating the content - so what? 

If a customer finds your product and wants to buy your product - even if its 3 years from now - let them buy it.  Your avatar is still alive and you can still respond to any customer calls and help them if you are able to.  If not, simply tell your customer "due to a major LL failure - I am unable to assist you on this request".  If they dont like it... ohh well... you really dont have a business to maintain anyways.  You might want to place a small comment on each of your items explaining the situation you were put in because LL lost your inworld content so "be warned".

In fact, here is what also doesnt make sense, can you not regain your assets from the MP DD database?  At least you have the full perm copy of the content you are selling on MP.

But I surely would not take a strategy of actively closing your MP - let them all sit there and let them all collect as much revenue as you can from MP until they sell no more.

---

Thank you for your responses.

It's a two fold question. 

I decided to just be generous as a parting gift to the people who really don't have money and want nice clothes. Remember that my items, priced from 199L to 499L were not selling AT ALL on MP after LL made changes to their system, (unless I paid for ads)--I'm no teckie and I don't know what they were doing. I literally dropped off the radar after making regular sales on MP. Poof. I realize the market is glutted but, this was like I wasn't there at all.

After my inventory loss, I just 10L or Free'd everything,  thinking, what the hell, not selling anyways and I then thought I'd remove everything when I had time (MP is really really slow). 

I wasn't going to keep the items up at those prices but remove them eventually.  I really wasn't coming back as a designer.  I really didn't care anymore.  Pamela from LaGallera was the only merchant who contacted me with concern. Tho I didn't post here on the forums, I did notify many in my groups and other designers.  I had a huge free party sale for my customer groups, and told as many people as I could.  I blogged and twittered it.  I got a few kind responses.

I knew someone would ask why I lowered the prices.  But I'd just decided to give out some pretty clothes that might otherwise be buried in MP...and it was buried. The cheap prices gave me sales and people got nice shoes. LOL.

I still offer customer service if they contact me.

I do remember a merchant complaining about stores going out of business and having 10L sales, further glutting the market, and did feel a bit guilty about it...but I've given so much away anyways in hunts, amazing beautiful things, that I just felt like WTF did it matter?  It might be wrong, I don't know, and I hope I don't get people hollering at me.  It was all very tramatic for me and I just didn't want to have any more negative press.

I have gone back and upped some prices again (about a month ago).  I can't explain the emotional rollercoaster I went through over this... Ultimately, as I tried to explain in original OP, I just ran out of steam. I was burned out, depressed, and had put 3 years of my RL into something that wasn't really real in the end.

[JoJo Aurelia]

---

Darrius Gothly wrote:

What follows is conjecture .. pure and simple .. but I'll explain how I arrive at it.

The clue that I springboard off is the fact that Faye was emptying the Trash at the time her viewer lagged and then crashed. As I understand the process, each item deleted as the Trash is emptied is indicated as being deleted by sending a message to the Asset Server (through the Sim Server connection). A response is then sent indicating the message was received. However I suspect that at the time she suffered her inventory loss, the communication method used to send those messages was a type called "UDP". That's a type of message packet that wonks call "Fire and Forget". Basically the message is sent but there is no error checking to ensure it arrives intact and correct.

Considering that she was emptying a LOT of items, the back and forth conversation got rather extensive. Many ISP's and some home routers tend to get grumpy when they see a massive amount of UDP type packets flying back and forth. (This is especially true on WiFi connections .. a type of connection that also has a bad reputation for mucking up data packets anyway.) I suspect that as the ping-pong conversation got longer and longer, her viewer began suffering various problems, memory leaks and whatnot .. and eventually consumed so much memory that it just croaked.

Once her viewer dropped offline there were probably still a lot of "delete this UUID" messages still queued up that hadn't reached the Asset Server yet. As the Sim Server tried to clean things up, no doubt a number of them got sent through anyway .. but possibly with corrupted UUID's or other details. Worst of all Worst Case Scenarios is if a munged UUID wound up corresponding to a Folder UUID instead of an Asset UUID. That would result in massive deletion of an entire folder's worth of assets.

The bottom line is .. as her Viewer and the Sim/Asset Servers were doing their back-and-forth .. things got yucky. The hell that could (and apparently did) ensue would be both unrecoverable and potentially disastrous.

Now as I said at the top, this is all based purely on conjecture on my part. I am no Viewer Whiz. I have seen some pretty amazing and destructive behaviors from program systems that use unverified and unstable protocols. The protocol used in the Viewer to communicate Inventory used to be just that .. horrific. (My understanding is that they've switched to a much more reliable HTTP protocol now .. but again that's only based on my loose understanding of things.)

Faye .. I don't know if you use a WiFi connection or not. If you do, or if anyone does, it is best to go wired instead. When you combine WiFi with an unstable Viewer, an unverified protocol .. and Linden Lab code .. you take your life (and Inventory) in your hands. In this case, it appears the Digital Devil saw an unprotected throat .. and ripped it.

---

WOW, the nuts and bolts! No I don't use Wifi, however, I have a router in my house for a lap top that I never designed with.

But, what I'd done was delete items on Firestorm earlier in the day but then later, I had problems with FS sound, so relogged into Linden's Offical Viewer, and remembered "all the trash" and thought I'd empy it while I was thinking about it. Then I got stuck... I couldn't get unstuck.  Then I crashed.

Would that matter using two viewers to finish a job?

 

[Spica Inventor]

"But I will say - it does put SLU's reputation into perspective and it does say something that Rodvik participates actively at SLU and never makes any appearances in the actual SL Forum threads that are owned and run and official endorsed by LL".

hehe. They are afraid to come to their own forum in any sort of official overt capacity. As much as they like to demonize me and a few others who occasionally drop by here, most people consider me to be a pretty nice guy when there is honest conversation going on. ;-)

 

[JoJo Aurelia]

---

Arwen Serpente wrote:

Sometimes SL does things that just aren't really "explainable". Today, I uploaded a new outfit, put it on and saved. I then adjusted a belt, moved some prims, resized, took it off, put it back on just to make sure the edits had "stuck". Then I log out. When I log back in an hour later, I'm wearing the prior version of the outfit and the edited belt was back to pre-adjustment build. No idea why SL does these things. Obviously, this is all incredibly minor versus the inventory loss that Faye and Czari experienced (and nothing was lost, just not the way I left it when I logged out).

---

This happened to me. The last time, and most recent, I had redecorated my store, made many changes inside and out. I'd bought new trees and things, do-dads, whatever.  Okay, spent an hour moving things, in and out of inventory, this and that.... Logged out. A few hours later, logged on,, everything was back the way it was prior to my redecorating, and my new items were gone! I had to notify the designer for replacements!

[Dartagan Shepherd]

---

Faye Feldragonne wrote:

I knew someone would ask why I lowered the prices.  But I'd just decided to give out some pretty clothes that might otherwise be buried in MP...and it was buried. The cheap prices gave me sales and people got nice shoes. LOL.

I still offer customer service if they contact me.

I do remember a merchant complaining about stores going out of business and having 10L sales, further glutting the market, and did feel a bit guilty about it...but I've given so much away anyways in hunts, amazing beautiful things, that I just felt like WTF did it matter?  It might be wrong, I don't know, and I hope I don't get people hollering at me.  It was all very tramatic for me and I just didn't want to have any more negative press.

I have gone back and upped some prices again (about a month ago).  I can't explain the emotional rollercoaster I went through over this... Ultimately, as I tried to explain in original OP, I just ran out of steam. I was burned out, depressed, and had put 3 years of my RL into something that wasn't really real in the end.

---

 I think LL pretty much lost their window on fixing product glut and and overall market value. Someone posted that a Linden had said they like the average price range to be around L$150 anyway and it became clearer that they just cared about pricing to make goods cheap enough to draw in new people, but enough that it'd be profitable for them in sinks and advertising with enough of a taste that merchants will still grind..

It just doesn't matter as much these days. The fingers mostly pointed at LL for not controlling it more than an individual for pricing too low, or should have.

 I think you would have found sympathy here, regardless.

There are just so many more important things like bugs that prevent people from being able to do what the product is supposed to handle, billing errors, over billing, incompetence, pricing, a no-show CEO that won't back up customers more than employees, etc.

[Luna Bliss]

Well Toy, regarding the SLUniverse forum I think it's an alpha male thing - you have to go through this procedure to be accepted I've noticed. As a male especially you can't act like you know anything till you've been pissed on a bit, kind of like what my dog used to do in the yard to mark his territory.

 

Many of them are more disappointed in LL than even we are - they've pretty much given up. I more talk to those who used to participate there and gave up on SL totally, leaving long ago for other grids or just quitting virtual worlds altogether.

They were fighting against you, and most were not really fighting FOR SL.

They do show respect to Rodvik when he appears in the forum though, well most do anyway, but many trash him on the forum and in other venues due to their disappointment in the management of SL.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

That's seems to be true over there. That and it's more of a socializing space than it is a special interest group like we have here. If they want merchant feedback, this is the place to go.

I remember Rod posting some "help me with feedback" issue over there I believe about drawing new users. A few days later his response was something like "that's pretty much what we thought, thanks bye". The path of least resistance to get the answer you wanted to hear all along without Rod ever mentioning what the plan of attack actually was going to turn out to be. Just a token LL kind of thing.

@Toy, tried to interject some fact over there. They said it was reasonable but I sounded like a Linden, one of our own came to my rescue on that bit and I narrowly escaped. You just need to carefully pick off the tar and feathers.

[Darrius Gothly]

---

Czari Zenovka wrote:

 

Darrius, I have no clue what you're saying half the time when you go into techie talk...lol. :matte-motes-tongue:  My situation with the above posted inventory loss may not be the same as Faye's, but...my inventory literally poofed - one day it was there, next day it wasn't.  I was not deleting anything (certainly not any of those prized outfits, many of whom were created by designers no longer in SL) or emptying trash - just logged in one day, proceeded to change clothes and...HEY!!!!!  Where did that dress go....WHOA!!!! Where did the entire folder go?????

So my inventory was just...gone.

---

My "edumacated guess" would be .. you got bit by a totally different situation. Sometimes the Asset Servers do just burp. That may indeed be what happened to Faye's Inventory as well, but owing to her different circumstances and her ability to link the major disappearance to a specific action, I'd more likely wager your situation and hers were entirely different.

[Darrius Gothly]

---

Toysoldier Thor wrote:

(snip) ... Why does LL not have any forms of effective backup of the Asset Server?  Even if they had an offline Asset DB that is about 1 day and 1 week old from current where LL Staff could go to and recover assets from the DB and restore them back into the production Asset Server?  Old / Outdated assets for a users inventory is better than no inventory at all.

And.... why was her assets not on the Beta Adititi grid which I understand only copies from prod once a week?  Bad timing that her assets were wiped and the backup to Adititi happened on the same day?

And... finally, why could LL not get some of at least the finished assets from MP?  Yes she would have lost all her input materials she bought - but - at least she would have the full perms of the selling assets.

Just some questions as we patiently wait for Rodvik to post on this thread and tell us that he would love the opportunity to meet with us and have a good two-way dialog.

---

Well, most of those go back to the same lack of foresight as the UDP decision. "Backups? We don't need no steenkeeng backups!" As for not being on Aditi, that's a good one. Perhaps she "fell across" the transfer date .. meaning she lost her folders from the main then a day or two later when she visited Aditi, they'd done the copy from the Main to the Aditi inventories.

Why didn't LL help her retrieve things from the Marketplace? Ummm .. LOL ... you aren't seriously expecting an answer to that, are you? We can't even get them to help fix the well documented and clearly widely damaging problems. I'd be shocked as shiiiii ... stuff if they went out of their way to help one person.

But I DO understand why you ask. I ask the same things all the time. I know I've done it, I know I've seen most folks here do it too. A whole lot of people that USE SL go out of their way to help others fix problems they are not responsible for or involved with .. and for people they don't even know and won't ever make any money from. It's called COMMUNITY and we practice it because of a strong belief that it's the best way to live and survive.

[Darrius Gothly]

---

Faye Feldragonne wrote:

(snip) ... 

Would that matter using two viewers to finish a job? 

---

It shouldn't as Firestorm and the SL Viewer use the same code for the basic Inventory Management functions. To the best of my knowledge they are identical as far as file systems and communication protocols to accomplish such standard functions as emptying the trash. I believe Firestorm has created a more efficient method of finding and retrieving Assets stored in your local disk cache (copies of things it keeps on your hard drive), but as far as talking to the various SL Servers, I believe they are the exact same code.

[Perrie Juran]

Well, I read through the SLU and have to say what a clusterf*ck.

There are just so many unknowns here but we do know Rod is aware DD didn't launch the way it was expected too.  I don't have the link but when asked about it he had replied that the deploy "was not acceptable."

What was probably even less acceptable to him was when someone told him how many thousands of dollars in man hours it was going to cost to fix it.  He may not at that point in time have realized just how deep the hole went.

But to get to what I came to post about, there has always been ongoing discussions about the true value of Linden Dollars and how well LL's TOS would hold up in court.  Whether the reality is if they have "real" value.

Someone happened to post a link to this in another thread, the TOS regarding In World Banks.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Policy_regarding_inworld_banks

Note the phrase, "Linden Lab is not empowered to regulate the businesses of banking or securities."  The context is investing Linden Dollars.  If Linden Dollars have no real value, they would not need any 'empowerment."

Maybe I am squeezing it with that conclusion, but it is interesting to note the whole issue.

 

ETA, this was supposed to be in reply to the thread in general, not Faye.  Stupid LITHIUM.

 

[Toysoldier Thor]

---

Luna Bliss wrote:

Well Toy, regarding the SLUniverse forum I think it's an alpha male thing - you have to go through this procedure to be accepted I've noticed. As a male especially you can't act like you know anything till you've been pissed on a bit, kind of like what my dog used to do in the yard to mark his territory.

Many of them are more disappointed in LL than even we are - they've pretty much given up. I more talk to those who used to participate there and gave up on SL totally, leaving long ago for other grids or just quitting virtual worlds altogether.

They were fighting against you, and most were not really fighting FOR SL.

They do show respect to Rodvik when he appears in the forum though, well most do anyway, but many trash him on the forum and in other venues due to their disappointment in the management of SL.

---

Thanks Luna.... but when it come to Child Psychology (like what one needs when dealing with the teenaged regulars on SLU) I am very familiar with what was going on in that thread with the marauding hordes.  And you are right, a couple of the kids that showed up on the thread were the informal leaders among their little SLU gang and want to show the gang that they can kick around an SLU new-comer.

Their childish behavior was very predictable and easy to spot.  I am sure the rest of you know who the gang leaders were too.  You may also have realized that I played them like a fiddle.

I tore them a new hole in business logic.  When they quickly realized that their lame SL business logic was bested by me, they quickly resorted to their next level of defence (because they were made to look stupid by me in front of their gang).  If you take a read, they escalated to a typical Teen Behavior response... they started with a group campaign of foul language, aggresive vocal attacks, and derogatory images.  It was at that point in the thread that I knew I had them on the run - and they didnt even know it.

When you have a "bully teen" in the group at this point, he really badly wants his confronting target to escalate and engage in an equal and escalated level of counter-attack in hopes that his gang will be inspired to come to his defence for a gang beating of which they can all enjoy the victory and he can thump his chest in front of his gang how he lead his group into battle and the gang won.

As such, that is when I took him to a place these bullies didnt want me to take them.... I pointed out their immaturity and then slapped them emotionally in the face by thanking them for helping me accomplish my goal.... by creating a ton of interest in the thread that Rodvik cant help but notice".

This ticked them off royally and they escalated their personal attacks on me.... but as you noticed I stopped posting completely.  These lil teen bullies must have been steaming mad that I abandoned their hi-jacked thread.  Read their last few posts

AND... in the end.... it was fun to manipulate the lil Teen Bullies into generating so much attention on this thread and its TOPIC TITLE that you created Luna and that stayed on the top of the busiest forum thread for almost 2 days.

Yeah - maybe Rodvik wont respond - but he and/or some of the senior LL management likely noticed.

So, I dont have any tar and feathers to pick off.  If I wanted to go to battle with them - I could have easily made them all look like the fools they are, but then I would have given up my primary objective for the thread.  I have bigger fish to fry than to kick a bunch of SLU kids around the forum.  Thats like kicking a kitten - no challenge and no fun.

 

[WADE1 Jya]

*bumps* so....

did rodvik answer yet? :catlol:

i bet he's too busy launching their "hot" new non-SL projects to even spend 1 second looking at this old abandonware :catlol:

[Couldbe Yue]

you are joking, right?

Luna put the thread in the wrong forum - one which is predominantly used by non merchants i.e. shoppers and general sl peeps, rather than putting it in the marketplace specific forum or even the business forum.  Then she makes an assumption that everyone knows whats she's talking about so titles the thread "The SL Marketplace Is Cheating Merchants"  and only posts

"Someone @ the SL forum said Rodvic reads these forums, so thought I would post here.
I don't think they know how bad it really is...do they?"

now with the best will in the world, even I don't know who "they" are and what the bad is they're supposed to know.  There's no context given just an open invitation to drama.  So the SLU regulars post lolcats and generally get silly, as they do when trolls come through (sadly quite regularly) - I don't blame them one bit.  Then you turn up with your bluster and insults (which you are still carrying on here) and complete off topic OTT drama about the linden being real currency and threats of lawsuits and they laugh at you.  Not really surprising, is it?  If I were Rod reading that I'd go to the next thread, simply because I doubt he could work out what the problem was and what you wanted him to do about it.

Dart and Darrius on the other hand, go in later with reasoned arguments and are treated with respect - even if the rest don't agree with them. 

You've allowed the topic to be completely driven off course by focussing on the ToS and Lindens as a currency rather than the main issue here - focussing on the poor customer service and poor quality software with defects that are ultimately disadvantaging merchants and impacting on their bottom line (not LLs, but the merchants)

Since you have your much vaunted experience in child psychology, I suggest you look closer to home as the reaction to your behaviour over there is probably the same reaction any Linden reading this forum had when reading your posts.

The pro tip is of course if you are trying to win an argument or convince people of your cause then you should set out your case and provide context and reasonable arguments and since that thread was aimed at Rod, who by virtue of being the CEO is probably a busy man (obviously too busy to know what is going on) then keeping it short, sharp and to the point would have been better.

Knowing your audience is really a basic thing if you're trying to achieve something.