The Future of SL Business

[SabrinaCooke]

1 minute ago, Jaylinbridges said:

Which repeats my question - WHO is doing this in LL?   Names please - It must be coming from one of the top executives who are publically listed on LL's own business page.  What has changed here?  Do we have new decision makers now in LL?

That's the thing: we don't know. LL didn't offer any definitive answers to the creator I know. 

[SabrinaCooke]

3 minutes ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

Was this an auto triggered action, as opposed to a punitive one? The rarity of it makes me think there is more to the story.

The creator and I have no idea. They asked LL support for an explanation and got a pro forma "we can't disclose" etc. similar to Jaimy's. They did get the account reinstated after a couple of days, but it definitely left a bad taste in their mouth, not to mention gave them a serious anxiety attack.

Edited June 18 by SabrinaCooke
I can't grammar today, apparently.

[Luna Bliss]

It's upsetting what happened to DRD, and I'd like to see something put in place for those businesses that need to access their MP store via multiple owners/managers.  But, I just don't think many businesses will need this feature (most businesses are small) and I can't tell you the number of times residents go into business together and fall out with each other and then go on a rampage, deleting each others stuff/borking the land builds, etc...whatever they can do to exact revenge. Likely it's more cost effective for LL and actually of benefit to many more residents the way it's currently set up.

[BJoyful]

1 minute ago, SabrinaCooke said:

Yes, it was suspended, but the reviews got deleted. 

That's the other question I have: why is this coming up now, if so many people have been sharing accounts for all those years? And if LL was okay with it for that long, why are they being punitive now? 

I don't think that is completely accurate as there are product reviews on DRD Marketplace from 2023.  How is this action punitive?  It may feel punitive to the person who is locked out of their account, but it is good business practice to freeze everything first, then sort out the issue before they need to start chasing funds all over the planet.  The MP and account were restored within a day, as I understand it. 

What is needed in this topic is some solutions, not just accusations and complaints.  Obviously LL knows something needs to change and that many people support that opinion.  

Perhaps you could voluntarily check all the links in the Knowledge Base and take a deep dive into the Wiki and make note of any other questionable issues or contradictions to the T0S and point them out in the Comments at the bottom of each page of the Knowledge Base.  I'm sure everyone would appreciate all proactive intentions which may help make sure the future is even more secure for business in SL in the future.

[SabrinaCooke]

1 minute ago, BJoyful said:

What is needed in this topic is some solutions, not just accusations and complaints.  Obviously LL knows something needs to change and that many people support that opinion.  

Where did I accuse them of anything? My original post was to illustrate that DRD isn't the only one this has happened to. 

It was punitive in the sense that there was no explanation for why the account was suspended, so my personal assumption (not the creator's) is this was punishment for account sharing. 

The creator and their team already sent their complaints/feedback/suggestions to LL, but thanks for the suggestion.

As for DRD's MP reviews, Jaimy stated elsewhere on this forum that their reviews from before 2023 were deleted, if I recall correctly.

[Arielle Popstar]

1 hour ago, Jaylinbridges said:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Managing_business_projects_in_Second_Life

This page was last edited on 14 June 2024, at 17:04.

It is not an old out of date WIKI, since it was modified 4 days ago.

But forming a second account as a business account and managing everything with group permissions does not work for many creators.  LL clearly ignored their recent WIKI, and assumed DRD was a personal account and password sharing was not allowed.  And offered no suggestions other than the right to appeal after having your business and SL account removed without warning.  

The real question is - where does the buck stop with these unworkable rules.  It seem to me it stops at the very TOP of the LL organization.  Governance appears powerless to change anything on their own.

To be fair, the last update to the Wiki was done by @Gwyneth Llewelyn to point out to the Lab that the page should be to the Linden Lab Official namespace. See the Discussion tab:

 

Quote

 

Please move this to the Linden Lab Official namespace

As it stands, this article, having been written by employees of Linden Lab over the years (with some minor corrections here and there), is taken as being an official recommendation — and has been dutifully followed by many, many business projects in SL.

However, it's not quite clear if this 'recommendation' is actually policy or merely serious and honest advice given in good faith, by LL employees, some of which might not even be part of the company any longer.

To make its status more obvious, please move the article into the Linden Lab Official namespace.

Thank you!

— Gwyneth Llewelyn (talk) 17:13, 14 June 2024 (PDT)

 

 

[Love Zhaoying]

I have an idea.  By discussing the differences that may explain why some types of Second Life business may not have the same critical need for sharing logins, it may highlight some changes that could help.

What gave me this idea is "SL Real Estate".  Real Estate is controlled by either individuals, or Second Life Groups.  The Groups can determine ownership, roles, payments, etc.  I assume that a Real Estate company in Second Life could have one group for the "Land Rentals Sales" ("Real Estate Agents"), one group for "Customer Support", etc.

What appears to be missing in the type of Second Life businesses being discussed, is "Group" control/ownership/etc. of "Marketplace Stores".

I propose that if the "Group" concepts used for other things in Second Life were extended to the Marketplace, it could alleviate the main pain points referred to often in this thread.  That would require multiple users in a Group to be able to contribute / maintain Items in a Marketplace store, maintain listings, etc.

Someone is likely to say, "but by using Groups, don't you multiple the risk factor of fraud and theft" (by the number of users with the same Group rights)?  I thought about, and my initial answer is:  not really, no more than any individual user can be "hacked", or any land group can be "robbed"/"griefed" by individual users.

For the "Customer Service" aspect, that certainly seems fixable by using Groups in the first place.  One example caveat being, if individual Group users need to manipulate "original objects" sold on the Marketplace, then they would need to be able to have access to those inventory items somehow.  You would think that having the "original" items owned by a Group, stored in some common-accessible place, would be the answer for that.

For the "Employee payments" aspect, I would think that is also doable with "Groups": a. Money goes to the group automatically.  b. Assign users to certain Group roles who need to pay employees. c. Employees get paid.

In my understanding, anything you do with Groups, that can be assigned to Roles, can be given multiple users ("backup users").  So, if one person is sick / out of the country / cannot login, a designated "backup user" in the same Group could take over at any time.

(Sorry if this came up before, but I've been told that I'm not interested in this topic - so if that's true, I may have missed it.)

Please let me know of any thoughts, specifically WHY you think this is a "good" or "bad" idea.  "Groups" are used successfully today in Second Life as a main mechanism for sharing different responsibilities already.

 

[Jaylinbridges]

11 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

To be fair, the last update to the Wiki was done by ******* to point out to the Lab that the page should be to the Linden Lab Official namespace. See the Discussion tab:

Thanks for the clarification.  So essentially everything in that Wiki is still no longer in effect, despite it once being the case.  I wonder who wrote the original business options, and if they are still employed by the Lab?  If the WIKI is just someones opinion, why is it listed under the Second Life banner?  

I think I will write an SL WIKI claiming all women over the age of 22 are illegal in SL.  Unless they are really men behind the avatar of course.

Edited June 18 by Jaylinbridges

[Arielle Popstar]

3 minutes ago, Jaylinbridges said:

Thanks for the clarification.  So essentially everything in that Wiki is still no longer in effect, despite it once being the case.  I wonder who wrote the original business options, and if they are still employed by the Lab?  If the WIKI is just someones opinion, why is it listed under the Second Life banner?  

I'd suggest that for a more in depth answer/deep dive it would be worthwhile to read the https://feedback.secondlife.com/feature-requests/p/allow-business-accounts-to-share-access-responsibly and search the page for Gwyneth to see a detailed post on it.

[stlshayne]

Re: sudden activity from new cities/countries likely being a flag: DRD did say the only people who they account share with are their sister who they share a building with, and a third person whom they have been sharing with for eight years - if we're taking their statements as fact. 

Edited June 18 by stlshayne

[Jaylinbridges]

35 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I'd suggest that for a more in depth answer/deep dive it would be worthwhile to read the https://feedback.secondlife.com/feature-requests/p/allow-business-accounts-to-share-access-responsibly and search the page for Gwyneth to see a detailed post on it.

I have read and am keeping up with the feedback since it began on feedback.secondlife.com  I also added my 2 cents to the feedback as a business owner myself.  (Not as Jaylin of course, I am just an alt here trying not to get banned.)  I was asking who wrote the original business options in the SL WIKI?  And why are they now being ignored? Well that is in Edit History:

Edit history

Page creator Fritz Linden (talk | contribs)

Date of page creation  09:03, 5 October 2009

Latest editor  Gwyneth Llewelyn (talk | contribs)

Date of latest edit  17:04, 14 June 2024

Total number of edits  23

Total number of distinct authors 9

Recent number of edits (within past 30 days) 1

Recent number of distinct authors 1

Edited June 18 by Jaylinbridges

[belindacarson]

31 minutes ago, Jaylinbridges said:

Thanks for the clarification.  So essentially everything in that Wiki is still no longer in effect, despite it once being the case.  I wonder who wrote the original business options, and if they are still employed by the Lab?  If the WIKI is just someones opinion, why is it listed under the Second Life banner?  

I think I will write an SL WIKI claiming all women over the age of 22 are illegal in SL.  Unless they are really men behind the avatar of course.

Go for it, it'll be a better fairy tale than the one sided rubbish you're trying to sell now!

[Jaylinbridges]

8 minutes ago, belindacarson said:

Go for it, it'll be a better fairy tale than the one sided rubbish you're trying to sell now!

I am not a PBR designer!

[belindacarson]

14 minutes ago, Jaylinbridges said:

I am not a PBR designer!

I never said designs, I refer to the one sided fairy tale about accounts, dragging uninvolved people into it without good reason.

[Arwyn Quandry]

I watched the recording of the Governance meeting this month. Tommy and Kiera kept implying that issues like account sharing have to be flagged, AKA reported, for them to take notice. It's not an automated process which notices you're logging in from separate places but another person snitching, or at least that was what they seemed to be saying.

So if you're a business owner who shares an account, a rival could easily target you by reporting account sharing and potentially get your whole store delisted, at least for a few days. That's shady as hell. 

[Innula Zenovka]

I'm thinking back to when I was in business with a friend and we had some stores inworld and one in the Marketplace.

We were able to handle just about everything by sending each other full-perms copies of all the stuff we were working on, together with a judicious use of sharing the building privileges on each other's accounts, shared group permissions and setting each other as managers on things like the Marketplace account and Caspervend.

The only thing I remember being an issue sometimes was when one of us needed to pay the rent on a parcel which was rented to the other one, but we overcame that easily enough by asking the relevant estate managers to add us both to the list of payers.

Other than Customer Service, for which we'd have used a bot to forward messages when we were both offline had we thought it necessary, I can't offhand think of any circumstances in which we'd have needed to share our passwords.    

There's probably an obvious use-case I'm not thinking of, though.   But why might we have needed to share our accounts?  We were in business together perfectly happily for several years without needing to.

[Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia]

23 minutes ago, Arwyn Quandry said:

I watched the recording of the Governance meeting this month. Tommy and Kiera kept implying that issues like account sharing have to be flagged, AKA reported, for them to take notice. It's not an automated process which notices you're logging in from separate places but another person snitching, or at least that was what they seemed to be saying.

So if you're a business owner who shares an account, a rival could easily target you by reporting account sharing and potentially get your whole store delisted, at least for a few days. That's shady as hell. 

Great way to destroy your competition, too.  Are you a land baron, tired of getting undercut by little upstart land lords in the north Blake sea?  Or maybe you are a clothing designer, and your closest competitor is gearing up for a big sale that will cut into your revenues?  Report your competitors for account sharing!  All businesses in SL share accounts.  Most do, at least.  You can report a dozen of them, and worst case scenario, if you only knock out one, that would still be worth it.  You never know which competitor could end up eating your lunch.  Just ask the Coke CEO who passed up the opportunity to buy Pepsi 100 years ago.

[Persephone Emerald]

3 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

It's upsetting what happened to DRD, and I'd like to see something put in place for those businesses that need to access their MP store via multiple owners/managers.  But, I just don't think many businesses will need this feature (most businesses are small) and I can't tell you the number of times residents go into business together and fall out with each other and then go on a rampage, deleting each others stuff/borking the land builds, etc...whatever they can do to exact revenge. Likely it's more cost effective for LL and actually of benefit to many more residents the way it's currently set up.

This is a good point. I've seen some fallings out between business partners in SL too, and it can get ugly. Of course, that would be an interpersonal dispute, despite the business aspect, as far as LL would be concerned, so they wouldn't want to be involved in it in anyway that might make them responsible for some aspect of it.

[Love Zhaoying]

LL isn't hiding the fact that people want a solution, it's included in today's "feedback" email (in several requests).

 

[Aethelwine]

18 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

The owner of DRD/ the OP of that other thread did not start this thread.    I did.

I thought the YouTube video I posted explained how this conflict is not just about one creator. It's a problem that affects many creators, charities and other groups. In one place the TOS says we may not share accounts or let others use our accounts. In other places it says we may sometimes let multiple people use the same account. Creators and others have been letting others use shared accounts for years. The biggest businesses in SL would be unable to function as they do (24/7) if they didn't do this. Thus LL has given tacit approval for some people to share accounts, while it punishes others for doing so. This behavior reeks of favoritism and is bad business for LL.

This problem isn't about 1 company. It's about all those who run businesses or operate large organizations in SL. 

Linden Lab needs to clarify the rules about letting multiple uses access accounts and produce a clear, legal route for businesses and others to do so. For instance, maybe in order to hold a multiple user business account, the primary owner should have to have it as a Premium or Premium Plus account.

In addition it is about all the accounts made when linden lab were advising on their wiki business and cooperatives to create shared accounts. I expect there is a lot of accounts and Groups made at that time for dealing with land with a lot of money invested in them now wondering what the rules now are, and how they are expected to run their joint ventures without them.

[BJoyful]

48 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

it's included in today's "feedback" email (in several requests).

I'm not sure how to Subscribe or Follow that but I would like to know.  Could you paste a link or describe how to Follow the Feature Requests?

[Love Zhaoying]

@Persephone Emerald, I think it was a good idea to start this thread.  Raising awareness is a good thing. 

Plus, we are pretty sure to find out that "something will change" in the future regarding the issue.

That's how highly visible issues have been trending lately, everything from Bots (and the new "Scripted Agent" status), Child Avatars (and the new TOS changes), to this topic.

And people complain that LL never does anything, won't listen, etc. But they obviously do things, and do listen.

 

 

[Rolig Loon]

Regardless of what anyone's opinions are about the thread that was the trigger for this discussion, the conversation here has been focused on the underlying question -- How could existing policies or wiki descriptions be changed to recognize the challenges that business owners have when they are not allowed to share accounts?  Forget talking about the triggering incident.  That's between the account owner and LL, and we will never know the full story (nor should we). 

[Arielle Popstar]

2 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Regardless of what anyone's opinions are about the thread that was the trigger for this discussion, the conversation here has been focused on the underlying question -- How could existing policies or wiki descriptions be changed to recognize the challenges that business owners have when they are not allowed to share accounts?  Forget talking about the triggering incident.  That's between the account owner and LL, and we will never know the full story (nor should we). 

I don't think it is up to the community to come up with a solution as the Lindens are in control of both the ToS and the wiki's. From the posts I read on the feedback pages though, there are going to be some giving up their businesses as they don't see a way to do it with the limitations put in place.

[Dyna Mole]

Hi gang --

Once again, it's time to remind you to step back from the keyboard when you feel the urge to get into a personal argument (or respond to one), especially one that is off topic.