Event Notifications -- do they work?

[Bloodsong Termagant]

heyas!

i haven't used the event listings since... before viewer 2.  so i'm not sure if/how they work any more.  anyway!

 

i was browsing through the event listings, and i clicked some and used the 'notify me' option on them.  to get a notification when an event was going to start.  but i never received any event notifications.  (i was online when an event was scheduled, and i was looking/waiting for the notification.) 

 

i was using firestorm at the time, and with the 'classic' interface turned on, but i wanted to check before i went anywhere filing jiras... does it work in the official LL viewer, HOW/where does it notify you? does it need a chicklet or something i may have turned off?  anybody using firestorm with/without the classic skin, does it work for you?  i have the feeling events have been broken for years (which is why i never look at them), but that can't be right... can it?

thanks, guys!

 

[Coffee Pancake]

Events is an abandoned system, the vast majority of users don't even know where to find them.

[Hunny Bunny]

What are events?

[Jaylinbridges]

Sigh...

SL Events still work fine and are not broken if you use Firestorm and the classic Phoenix interface.  Just because the SL Viewer and some TPV viewers use the V2 interface does not mean it is broken for FS users. Here is an up to date listing for Live Music from Firestorm Events. And Searching and keywords also work fine.

If you mean does the "Remind me" button work, I don't know, never had to use it.  If it was broken I would think there would be a bug report already filed.

You can also find SL Events on a web page, https://secondlife.com/my/community/events/index.php?lang=en-US 

But it has a lousy search method (if any) so just never use the web search.  You will be paging for hours searching.

Use what actually still works.  Don't expect LL to ever go back to the V1 SL Event page.  The peeps who designed that working system have all left LL and been replaced by a new generation that thinks they know everything.

 

Edited June 20, 2023 by Jaylinbridges

[Qie Niangao]

Not to speak for her, but that may not be what @Coffee Pancake means by an "abandoned system". The several Events interfaces work just fine on all viewers I've tried. What's broken is that there are rarely any events fit to display. Try a search for "gay"… where's all mah gays at? Try "pride"… a few more results but still they're more than half escorts and AFK joints with some LGBT SEO mixed in. And we (well, I) know there are lots more events happening that would include "gay" or "pride" in their descriptions, if they were listed in the system.

Except in a few categories, it seems event hosts just aren't bothering with that system anymore. I don't know why not. Maybe it's an invitation for griefers so they stick to group notices? (Probably that's paranoid; "Griefers" is always top-of-mind for scripters.) Obviously the system is SEO'd to the max, but still it wouldn't seem to completely crowd out legit listings, would it? Whatever the reason, it can't be good for retention that there just aren't any quality events in the system to match a newbie's first few queries.

Anyway, out of desperation I did a search for high sleaze-quotient events in Firestorm and chose the "Remind me" button and I got this:

so I guess it works? I don't know whether those notification work across login sessions. Probably they should, I guess? Also I'm not sure where other viewers would put a "Remind me" button but I'm pretty sure this is the first and only time I'll be using it, at least until Events worth attending go back to using the system.

[Coffee Pancake]

11 hours ago, Jaylinbridges said:

Sigh...

SL Events still work fine and are not broken if you use Firestorm and the classic Phoenix interface.

 

If it is not in the official viewer it is an abandoned system

 

It only exists in FS because as part of the V2 migration, LL said "were going to turn all this off".

Firestorm did a mad dash to get this in their new sidebar free V2, responding with "we dare you".

LL responded with .. "fine whatever" and left the entire event vintage system to rot.

(does this sound petty? that's exactly how things were back then)

 

We never got a new event system. We never got more work on the event system. Events are meaningless on the official platform.

[Monty Linden]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

We never got a new event system. We never got more work on the event system. Events are meaningless on the official platform.

I accidentally did maintenance on part of the events system recently.  Be on the lookout for behavioral changes...

[Coffee Pancake]

27 minutes ago, Monty Linden said:

I accidentally did maintenance on part of the events system recently.  Be on the lookout for behavioral changes...

Can we have some way to see events in the viewer, perhaps with some UI and a search & reminders .. a menu entry that opens a browser to the website is really bad and borderline useless.

This could be awesome. 

[Monty Linden]

24 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Can we have some way to see events in the viewer, perhaps with some UI and a search & reminders

I'd normally say turn this into an enhancement (*cough* to v1 levels) request but be careful what you wish for.  Someone may remember that this was to be disabled along with xml-rpc a decade ago. 

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 hour ago, Monty Linden said:

Someone may remember that this was to be disabled along with xml-rpc a decade ago. 

Or other ”condemned” features I won't name here to avoid seeing them disappear while I still have them used in my viewer... 😜

Edited June 20, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Jaylinbridges]

14 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Except in a few categories, it seems event hosts just aren't bothering with that system anymore.

This depends on the club policies, the management, and what you require your hostesses to post for Notices.  Some clubs leave it up to the DJ, performer, or hostess to decide.  Then it usually never gets done. 90% of our club staff are not Premium members - they don't need supervised state housing in Belli and they are not original mesh designers who need free uploads.  Without Premium it costs 50 $L to send a single Events notice. That's the reason why the hostess that used to send notices for every event, stopped sending them entirely at our club.  They were free of course until LL started to nickel and dime everyone.

Some of the largest clubs have no policy, and only a couple DJ's bother to use SL Events.  The managers don't care, because the club is usually full with 70 avatars.  They get their club listed in the LL club destinations every week, and attract newbies and all the oldies trying to pick up the newbies.

Some clubs have had the same clientele for the last 15 years.  They show up every night that their church doesn't have a basement Bingo game.  Hard to find anyone younger than 5000 days old there. That's probably why you don't see many Gay club listings - they already know where to go by word of mouth, or something like that

Edited June 20, 2023 by Jaylinbridges

[Rowan Amore]

Personally, I've never once used the Events listing.  

[Jaylinbridges]

14 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Personally, I've never once used the Events listing.  

I use them every time I want to find a club to explore. But then, my partner and I are social animals, and support talent at other clubs. Live Music events are usually in SL Events, and listed for each performer, along with their bio.  Since LL just uses the most popular destinations now, most don't know SL Events exist.  That happens when you hide a feature and make it impossible to use for SL viewer users, while favoring the most popular clubs on the log in page. 

[Qie Niangao]

Maybe they're not hidden enough.

If newbies use Search and try to find Events, regardless of which interface they use, they're going to be disappointed unless they happen to want one of the (few?) event types that are still populated and not completely overrun by the AFK/escort brothels that SEO-spam most keywords.

(It's my uninformed impression that the little fees charged for Event listings were intended to reduce that listing spam, rather than to generate L$ sink revenue on the LindeX. I mean, they're so paltry it's hard to imagine they're worth collecting except as a nuisance fee to deter some no-charge abuse.)

My point is, if Events fail newbies more than they serve anybody else, it's not only the interface that needs deprecation. At the point new arrivals should be discouraged from using Search, it's time to turn out the lights.

[Jaylinbridges]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

If newbies use Search and try to find Events, regardless of which interface they use, they're going to be disappointed unless they happen to want one of the (few?) event types that are still populated and not completely overrun by the AFK/escort brothels that SEO-spam most keywords.

If LL hides Event search, LL is the problem.  Not every newbie wants to search for gay sex bars, which seems to be your complaint.  If you simply UNCHECK Adult in the Search menu, all that crap you claim is over running legit events is gone.    And if you search during US daytime and early evening, the M rated events overwhelm the adult.  You can also search by category.  Entertainment and Live Music still produce good results, and it's too bad more clubs don't list there.  No one is forcing you or Rowan to use SL Events.  So why even comment on something you never use?  The OP wondered if it still works, not that you can't find your clubs there.  Talk about railroading a topic.

 

[Qie Niangao]

4 hours ago, Jaylinbridges said:

If LL hides Event search, LL is the problem.  Not every newbie wants to search for gay sex bars, which seems to be your complaint.  If you simply UNCHECK Adult in the Search menu, all that crap you claim is over running legit events is gone.    And if you search during US daytime and early evening, the M rated events overwhelm the adult.  You can also search by category.  Entertainment and Live Music still produce good results, and it's too bad more clubs don't list there.  No one is forcing you or Rowan to use SL Events.  So why even comment on something you never use?  The OP wondered if it still works, not that you can't find your clubs there.  Talk about railroading a topic.

Railroaded? Who tried what the OP actually asked and gave a real, relevant result?

(And "gay sex bars", wtf?)  It's not just "gay" that's underrepresented in Event listings anymore. Using the Firestorm Event search, my old mainstay, "gallery", has nothing at all (except Adult spam, if enabled) until Saturday. The two web-based Event interfaces (community and search) find one tomorrow, a good one that the Firestorm search missed. (Maybe web ones match against more fields in the listing or something, so maybe they sometimes include extraneous results, I don't know.)

Why comment on something I never use? Why do you think? I used to use Events, I'd like to use Events, but it now returns nearly nothing for queries that used to return ample results.

There remain a handful of hold-outs in Discussions, and in Education which is at least a recognizable shadow of it's former self. But if the whole interface is really about DJs, Live Music, and Escorts when those really are not the limits of SL happenings, then there's a problem, a familiar problem affecting retention: "What's to do here?" Something made the Events system less comprehensive in answering that question—and I wonder if LL knows, or has tried to find out, what contributed to that decline.

[Ardy Lay]

My guests asked me to STOP listing the events I host for them.  I guess they got tired of all the interruptions while I was kicking, banning and filing abuse reports.

Considering how excited some people get when I give them L$ I can see how that small fee could stop some people from posting legitimate event listings.  A little L$ means more to some than it does to others.

Edited June 21, 2023 by Ardy Lay
spelling error

[Jaylinbridges]

7 hours ago, Ardy Lay said:

My guests asked me to STOP listing the events I host for them

SL Events listing is not the same as a group notice from a club.   SL Events sends nothing to anyone unless someone searching requests a reminder notice (which does work we are told.)

Guests that don't want your event spam can block it for either group chat or group notices, or both, on a group by group basis.  Of course the SL Viewer does not have the group by group feature, but fortunately only 2% of our VIPs use it, or is it 0.5%, I forget. Oh yes, it is zero percent.  Only zero day old griefers use the SL Viewer, and they get perma banned the first day from our estate.

One reason why hosts and club managers do not post events in SL Events is the cost.  50$L/event and you have 40 unique events/week.  Event posting should be free, as it once was.

The so called reason for charging an event listing fee, to stop Adult sex club spam, did not work.  It had the opposite effect - the sex spammers pay the fees to post every hour because they charge for their sex services.  The legit clubs and events stop posting  because of the extra cost.  This is so typical of SL - has there ever been a Linden who actually ran an active SL club 24/7?  

Another SL Event Linden rule that makes no sense, is to prevent any notice from being listed unless it is submitted at least 2 hours before the event. They even killed the workaround for that last year.  Performers, hosts, and DJ's often cancel at the last moment, its called having a Real Life, and you need to change the notice to reflect who is playing at the event.  You can not do it in SL Events.  Stupid stupid rule.  Clubs have back up staff to fill in, and you cannot list the changes because of a silly time rule from the Lindens.

Edited June 22, 2023 by Jaylinbridges

[Ardy Lay]

53 minutes ago, Jaylinbridges said:

SL Events listing is not the same as a group notice from a club.   SL Events sends nothing to anyone unless someone searching requests a reminder notice (which does work we are told.)

Guests that don't want your event spam can block it for either group chat or group notices ...

You understood nothing.   My event listings were attracting griefers.  I still send group notices.  NOBODY has balls big enough to tell me to stop sending notices to my own groups.  And yes, people told me they rarely look at the Second Life Event Calendar so they wouldn't miss those listings.  The rest of your reply to my post is irrelevant to my post.  We all are aware of your opinions and prejudices.

Edited June 22, 2023 by Ardy Lay

[Jaylinbridges]

1 hour ago, Ardy Lay said:

You understood nothing.   My event listings were attracting griefers.  I still send group notices. 

That was not at all clear in your original post. Not a mind reader here.  Our club does not attract many griefers, and if it did they would come from reading our group notices, since with 3500 in the group we don't/can't screen everyone.

Tell me about my prejudices...  Our club welcomes EVERYONE, regardless of gender identity, sexual preference, body shape, species, or politics (or age, or PIOF status .)  Probably why we seldom see a griefer.  There are exactly 3 avatars that are on the perma estate ban for this year.  And yes we do post in SL Events.

Edited June 22, 2023 by Jaylinbridges
Added age and PIOF status that we do NOT restrict.

[Ardy Lay]

1 hour ago, Jaylinbridges said:

Only zero day old griefers use the SL Viewer, and they get perma banned the first day from our estate.

 

6 minutes ago, Jaylinbridges said:

Tell me about my prejudices...

 

[Jaylinbridges]

Ah I see what is confusing you.  We allow all ages starting at age zero. We have no restrictions on new residents, and get quite a few on their 1st or 2nd day in SL.  If they are not an alt, they are usually a mess, and we try to get them on a dance ball or HUD. In some cases I was the first person they talked to in SL, because if they looked lost enough, I would IM them for help.

BUT there are zero day griefers, always alts or groups that get their jollies griefing clubs in SL. Most of the griefers I and others ban are 0 days old, that is what I meant.  Sometime they try to return with a new name.  IF they are offensive to our patrons, we AR them after we ban them.  We had a group attack by 3 of them, all zero days old, last month.  Was the first time this year.  None of their avatars are listed in search anymore.

 

Edited June 22, 2023 by Jaylinbridges

[Qie Niangao]

(Not to rekindle the always simmering viewer wars, but perhaps the "prejudice" raised was more about the Linden viewer than about zero-day newbies. Just a guess. Having forced my alt to use Firestorm extensively this week… ah, nah, discretion is the better part of valor. Just: never touch Linden plants with Firestorm, and have a little cake with those extra digits in the build menu.)

I'm not sure if you guys ( @Ardy Lay and @Jaylinbridges ) are agreed that griefing is a deterrent to using the Event system. I imagine it may depend on the kind of event and the venue's capacity for dealing with griefers.

It seems you are agreed that the listing fees are a problem. It was pretty obvious even to me that they weren't effective in reducing SEO spam, but now that you've got me thinking about it, I can see that they change the economics of Event listing considerably. Of course every happening will notify any associated Groups in advance and then use the Group chat to remind anybody logged-in at the time, and that informs all the regulars who generate the vast majority of the revenue. All that Events can add is discoverability by those not already Group members, and maybe the Group has better/cheaper ways to do that—perhaps "better" in part by selectively attracting the desired crowd.

Or something like that. The thing I'm realizing, gradually, is that it's tricky aligning the interests of potential event hosts with the interests of various sorts of event-seekers. I still think newbies specifically are ill-served by the Event system (unless they happen to crave music which is probably not top of the average newbie's bucket list; music interests don't need to worry about that but "retention interests" do).

It seems the Event system is, at best, a discoverability tool. The trick is matching folks who are motivated to discover new events with events' motivations to be discovered.

A sidelight I'd never considered: Venues that run events 24/7 are discoverable through the Destination Guide in ways that individual events are not. Events at such 24/7 venues may have less need of being individually discoverable.

(Admittedly, I'm the last person who should try to figure this stuff out, which usually means somebody else has already done it better. I'd be very interested in that analysis, especially if some Linden's job includes knowing about it. I don't think that's @Monty Linden but working on Events might have uncovered the system's business owner—one hopes somebody with retention metrics at stake.)

[Monty Linden]

10 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

but working on Events might have uncovered the system's business owner

It did!  The d20 is in motion...

[Lyndka Cochrane]

On 6/20/2023 at 11:15 PM, Jaylinbridges said:

This depends on the club policies, the management, and what you require your hostesses to post for Notices.  Some clubs leave it up to the DJ, performer, or hostess to decide.  Then it usually never gets done. 90% of our club staff are not Premium members - they don't need supervised state housing in Belli and they are not original mesh designers who need free uploads.  Without Premium it costs 50 $L to send a single Events notice. That's the reason why the hostess that used to send notices for every event, stopped sending them entirely at our club.  They were free of course until LL started to nickel and dime everyone.

 

This *points up* - not all our staff are premium and to be honest with all the DJ events being bundled in to the "Live Music" category - it became rather a snowstorm for us. I think one of our DJ's argued for us to keep posting events but even using a "promo" for 3 weeks - we showed that no one was coming to his sets because of events.

It was a shame that charging happened and that the system isn't more granular in it's categories - it used to be a good way of publicising events but these days not so much