Should DEMOs be transferable? or at least "giftable"? (and speaking of GIFTS…)

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, Innula Zenovka said:

Would offering both the recipients of (possibly unwanted) free gifts the ability to block offers via the system of future gifts *from the person who sent the gift* and also offering the merchants the possibility to block people who abuse the system from using it in future not offer a safeguard against this?

Both could be done reasonably easily through experience tools, I think, even without a Linden-owned grid-wide experience.

I think that's right, but it's also reconstructing, bit by bit, functionality already present in Marketplace (and I suppose must have been present in its predecessors*). That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean "block" is a system-specific construct, not inheriting the contents of SL internal block lists.

As to Experience tools, though… would that just be for the big KVP persistent store? or is there something else I'm missing.

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*e.g., SL Boutique and the other one whose name I've momentarily repressed, and the other other one that was all about Adult content.

[Rolig Loon]

11 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

As to Experience tools, though… would that just be for the big KVP persistent store? or is there something else I'm missing.

As long as the merchant is a Premium member, he's entitled to create an Experience. The Experience would only be needed to give the merchant access to KVP, where he could maintain a data base of customers (blocked or otherwise). There is a limit to the amount of data you can stuff into KVP, so a merchant with a large customer base might still be better off using an external service if that's an issue, but I suspect that most merchants wouldn't need to worry much about it (or could contrive to delete the oldest or least active KVP keys after a while).   The merchant could handle product delivery from a server anywhere on the grid, using standard LSL functions.

[Innula Zenovka]

30 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

As to Experience tools, though… would that just be for the big KVP persistent store? or is there something else I'm missing.

Yes, before  sending anything out, I'd check everyone trying to use the system to send something, to make there's no KVP key recording they've been blocked, either by whoever they were trying to send the gift to, or locked out of it generally by the merchant with whose gifts they were trying to spam people.   

Recipients could, I suppose, say they didn't want to receive any more unsolicited gifts from anyone, or from this specific person, or, since the main use case is sending demo items to your alts, that in future they wanted only to receive gifts from a specific resident or residents. 

Edited August 26, 2021 by Innula Zenovka

[Wulfie Reanimator]

3 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

Would offering both the recipients of (possibly unwanted) free gifts the ability to block offers via the system of future gifts *from the person who sent the gift* and also offering the merchants the possibility to block people who abuse the system from using it in future not offer a safeguard against this?

Both could be done reasonably easily through experience tools, I think, even without a Linden-owned grid-wide experience.

Maybe. I don't have strong opinions about it, but I didn't see anyone else mention those things yet in this thread.

It seems like it'd be more trouble than it's worth to implement. There's a lot of pitfalls and headaches in the design of a system that kept track of which buyers are blocked by which recipients. Someone like Caspervend might be able to do it in a way that makes the most sense, but I dunno.

[Qie Niangao]

Being (unnecessarily?) repetitive, I'm not aiming to make re-distributable those celebratory "free gifts" that appear at events.

There may be a use-case for gift-distributing some such items as merchant advertising, but that doesn't seem a pressing problem to solve; there's already the ability to attach items to notices sent by store groups, and the merchant can choose to make their advertising gifts copy+transfer to leverage recipients' friend networks to viral effect. And of course package with the item all they can about where and how gift recipients can spend L$s on the merchant's non-gift product. As long as that distribution is recipient-to-recipient there shouldn't be a special problem with "object spam griefing" because SL platform-wide blocks should be as effective against gifts as against plywood cubes.

The problem to be solved is no-transfer¹ demos that are as free as plywood cubes and distributed vendor-to-recipient, so "object spam griefing" is a threat. It's not really good enough to offer recipients of such spam the ability to block that sender separately for each demo-offering merchant; spam recipients couldn't practically respond to griefers hopping merchant to merchant. It would be somewhat better to offer it per vendor system, but only because one is so ubiquitous. Even still, it would be a whole lot better if all vendor systems could comply with SL platform-wide block lists. Presumably an API to that blocking information would need a jira and some development including some means of protecting block list privacy. That  would be up to vendor-suppliers to pursue, or not.

Surely Marketplace already complies with SL platform block lists. (It must, right?) So instead of gifting a demo, send a link to its Marketplace demo. Each such demo should include that same demo link (for virality) as well as the obvious link² back to the event offering.

But do we know if there are "exclusivity" challenges here? Does Marketplace forbid listing demos for products only available in-world at the event? (They won't get any commission, but there are freebie listings anyway, so…) Or do events forbid offering demos outside the event? (Some merchants have such demos in their stores, so…)

Now, let's take it a step further (and this would apply to transferable demos as well) : Imagine making those Marketplace demo links available on event galleries/blogs. Now, instead of at the event, shoppers can get and try out demos at home, or in sandboxes, or at the Commie Club as social entertainment, or anywhere they won't take up precious peak attendance slots until they're ready to buy.

For events and merchants the objective would be to increase the "L$ intensity" of those early peak hours and days, making shoppers become buyers as fast as possible rather than having the event sim full of avatars not actively pushing L$s into vendors. And at least for this shopper, that would be win-win.

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¹Again, I don't think there's ever any reason not to grant transfer permission to demos, other than merchant superstition, but given the witless spread of no-modify permissions for every damned thing on the grid, merchant superstition seems insurmountable. This whole problem of safely gifting demos is to work around that no-transfer superstition.

²As I mentioned in an earlier post, an objectim URI is mighty handy here, not merely a landmark to the event's stupid landing point where new arrivals will probably be stranded. At the very least the URI can provide a map beacon to the item, but some viewers offer much more functionality.