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Product Updater Question


Princess Verwood
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In the past (as a customer) I have received updated products from merchants who use a product updater for their business. While I think it is very useful I've been thinking of something like that for my store. I just have a question about how it works.

The few I did find (product updaters) on the Marketplace seem to be able to keep a database of customers names who have purchased things from you. My question is, say I wanted to give an update to a product but only 10 people out of the 50 customers stored in the product updater (example numbers) purchased the product. Does all 50 get it the updated product regardless of if they've purchased or not? Or will the product updater be able to determine some way how many people purchased that particular item and give it to the 10?

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Most updaters don't work from lists like that. Most are script driven -- a script is placed in your products that checks in with your updater whenever the product is rezzed (or once every  day or two). The updater sends the new product only to those customers who has an older version of that product.

Hope that helps.

 

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I wouldn't have a database of user names if I was scripting a product updater (which I have thought about doing).  The reason is, LSL is very limited as to the number of names you can have in a list before you run out of memory; so maintaining a list in an updater/controller is a problem.  You can create a test script that adds your name or key to a list and shows you "available memory" when you click a prim, and see how many names you can get.  You can get crafty and use multiple scripts that talk to eachother and store parts of the list, but you still have a limit that you'd exceed with a popular item (or a hunt item).  You can overcome this by linking to a web-hosted database, but who wants to pay for that?

Your item itself, with your self-updater script in it, is proof that someone bought the item from you.  If the item is transferrable, you'd want the item to update for the new owner.  You want the item to check for updates every time it rezzes.

 

So, this is how I would design it:

On Rez, the item would send a message to your central controller, including the item's key, the owner's key and name, and the item's version.  It'll know how to reach the controller because the controller's key would be baked into your updater script.

The controller would receive the message and check version against the latest version.  It'll trust that it's receiving a message from your item, because how would someone know the key for your update controller without somehow hacking the code?

If the controller has a newer version, it'll send a message back to the item to disable its functionality, and send the new version of the item to the owner.  The controller could send you an email also, so you could track the event.

I just need to make time to do the script...

 

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I made this - https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/ArtiZan-Postmaster-Online-Delivery-Mail-Server/1365664 - for exactly this purpose.

Give it a list of names, drop in your stuff to send, and set it to run. To ensure delivery it checks when people are online and sends once they are. That way your updates don't get lost to capped messages.

That model does unlimited names - if you look at the related products there are cheaper ones that do smaller numbers. There's a demo as well.

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