Increased Rate of IM Caps = Increased Delivery Fails?

[Sassy Romano]

I don't share your paranoia over this perceived risk regarding DD.

As with the above list, IF there is a risk which I actually doubt very much there is, then as with the actions I listed, i'll mitigate that in an appropriate way.

DD will be pretty much a SQL SELECT statement of a UUID from a database table.  It would be pretty hard to crosslink that UUID with just any UUID any more than if you rezzed an object and instead of rezzing a table with a particular UUID you ended up with a chair or a shoe instead and exclaimed "huh?  I rezzed a chair and that's what I got?"

 

[Darrius Gothly]

(this really belongs in the DD thread but ...)

As many of us here are "Techies", we all tend to look at things from a Techie point of view. In that context, you are absolutely right that Direct Delivery will be a technologically sound and simple process .. amounting to nothing more than a database copy operation. However, software systems are not just technological in nature.

One of the biggest factors involving software acceptance and success is its "User Interface" .. or to be more precise, how the user perceives what the software is telling them and how the user tells the software what they want it to do. This factor is more important than any underlying technology too. Even the simplest and most obvious technological solution is useless (and at times even dangerous) if the User Interface is confusing or does not properly communicate with the user.

As an example, in the Marketplace now we have several reports available. One of those is called 'Top Selling Products'. This report contains a list of all your items for sale, the number of units sold and the number of times it has been "viewed". There is valuable information there, but it is presented in a way that is almost useless to us. There is no ability to specify a time frame for that data, it simply shows a grand total of everything since some arbitrary starting time. There is no way to look at that data as anything except raw numbers, so being able to use it to spot trends is impossible.

When it comes to "Times viewed", what does that mean? Does that mean every time the product page has been pulled up? Does it mean every time someone has switched to the Features or Reviews tab? The meaning behind the number shown is unclear .. and thus again almost useless.

From a purely technological perspective, the report is a total success. It provides data from their records and thus meets the technological specifications. But from a user perspective, it's a total flop. It gains us nothing, provides information that must be hand processed to be useful, and presents some data that is meaningless to us.

Direct Delivery, from a purely technological perspective, is a great idea and one that can benefit everyone greatly. But it needs to be properly implemented with a User Interface that makes sense and is not confusing.

When it comes to Magic Boxes, the number of items to pick from is fairly small. But our personal inventories contain 1000's or even 10's of thousands of items, so the User Interface much be even better than now to make sure mistakes are not made by people when they select the items to deliver. Linden Lab must put a "Face" on Direct Delivery that understands how people work, what they want to do, and how they need to do it.

To date, their development efforts have focused on the technological aspects, and almost completely disregarded the User Interface ... and that's not a good thing. Even the fastest race car in the world will lose the race .. if every time you turn the steering wheel to the right, the car veers to the left or shifts into reverse gear.

[Sassy Romano]

In that I agree Darius which is why they are asking for people to sign up to the beta and are asking for feedback.  Again, the present FUD that some have over the NDA is misplaced since merely applying to join does not place anyone in a detrimental position prior to actually reading the NDA and accepting it.  Of course if after reading it they're not happy then no need to participate but if nobody does, then people will happily complain that Direct Delivery doesn't do what merchants want and they still won't be happy.  LL cannot win.

Anyway, yes this belongs in the other thread but it wasn't us that started on about Direct Delivery

[Tari Landar]

All wonderful steps to help alleviate  some of the issues that come with capping, but they still don't fix the underlying issue.

The cap limit is too low, period. Regardless of what we *can do to try and get around it, it's still far too small. 25 may not be much to some and they may never get that many messages while offline, so they'll never cap. But a great many do get that, and more. Not all of those messages are necessarily ones that could be done away with by those steps, either.

I know I personally minimize how many ways I *could potentially cap, already. I have for quite some time. I don't see nearly as many messages as some others on the grid probably do though. It's quite likely that even if those folks took all the same steps as I do, they'd *still cap regularly. I still cap regularly, even with every possible "precaution"(if you want to call them that). I have very few groups that I keep notices turned on for. I have all offlines and such sent to email. I don't send messages to customers regularly so I'm not contributing to their potential cap issue, either.  Cap limits will always be an issue, until they raise them. I've yet to see a good reason *not to raise them. I may not be a techie, but if there were a technological reason for their desire to keep the cap at such a very low amount, one would think they'd have shared it by now. People have been asking for years, it doesn't take this long to at least say "no, we can't, here's why...". Heck even a "no, we're not going to raise the limit" with no other explanation would be nice, lol. But they've not even given so much as that. Then again, I take a look at who we're dealing with, and there's not much you can say but "eh, it's Linden Labs". They've not got the best track record for making wise decisions.

 

I'm not even going to get into the DD discussion, lol. I don't know nearly enough about it to care at this point, and plan to reserve my opinion for when I actually see it being implemented. I consider the two issues two completely separate entities. Capping and failed deliveries that is.