Peggy Paperdoll Posted February 2, 2012 Share Posted February 2, 2012 Yes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charolotte Caxton Posted February 2, 2012 Share Posted February 2, 2012 Really? Why would they pick that date, to be funny? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
161488303349 Posted February 2, 2012 Share Posted February 2, 2012 something like that. lindens can be weird like that. not so much these days but in early days they were crazier than we are (: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charolotte Caxton Posted February 2, 2012 Share Posted February 2, 2012 Who you callin' crazy, crazy! lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
161488303349 Posted February 2, 2012 Share Posted February 2, 2012 i am not crazy. i just like cats. lots of them ;p Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charolotte Caxton Posted February 2, 2012 Share Posted February 2, 2012 Meow Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jennifer Boyle Posted February 2, 2012 Share Posted February 2, 2012 Qie Niangao wrote: Well, they could gradually add Premium perks and diminish the abilities of folks without payment info on file, but the hue and cry from the latter would be deafening. I mean, if one had to have payment info on file in order to rez anything -- even an attachment -- a lot of folks would leave. If the 6/6/6 free-account floodgate had never opened, almost all of those same people would have happily joined anyway, but now they're so steeped in entitlement that they'd sooner pay through the nose to play WoW than fork over a dime to Linden Lab. I would not have joined SL if I had had to pay initially. I had a free account for a year. I just did not know enough about it to know if I would like it or not. I think it is important to let people try it for free, and not limit them so much that they are unable to see the possibilities. I do not think it would be wise to not let them rez anything, because if they couldn't rez anything, they really would not be able to experience SL properly. However, limiting them to having some number, maybe a couple of dozen, objects rezzed simultaneously might work. Also, limiting certain functionalities that are particularly useful for griefing for free avatars under a certain age might help a lot (I'm thinking of particles.). Another possibility that occurs to me is to implement an algorithm that would inactivate new free accounts if they did not maintain a certain level of logon activity, making it harder for grievers to keep an inventory of accounts to use. I'm sure that there are some other good ideas out there. What is needed is to let new people try SL out for free and have a good enough experience to want to stay while making it harder for grievers. Perhaps people could get a month or two free, with some limitations, and then either have more limitations imposed or have to start paying. It would help if there were a cheaper paid account than there now is. Perhaps there could be if it didn't get everything a premium account gets. One real possibility would be to implement inventory limits. If that's done, a timetable for a gradual reduction should be announced well ahead of time, something LL seems to have a hard time with. Having said the above, I have known many wonderful people who were very creative and who contributed much to SL that were on free accounts that were years old. LL should be very careful not to drive such people away. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peggy Paperdoll Posted February 3, 2012 Share Posted February 3, 2012 They had free (or basic) accounts when I joined in 2005. But to join you had to pay a one time fee of $9.95. That seemed reasonable to me so I joined as a basic. A month later I went premium.........mostly for the Linden Land benefit but also because it seemed the thing to do since I enjoyed it so much. Why wouldn't someone who gets pleasure from something be willing to pay for it? I could do everything as a basic that I could do as a Premium except own mainland plus, back then, I got a $L500 a week stipend plus a $L1000 sign up bonus for upgrading....that bought my Linden Land that I still live on. It was quite a good deal until the Linden Land got gamed so heavily by land flippers and was discontinued. I keep hearing this "basics contribute as much as premiums" to SL. I've never bought into that. Sure some do but not very many at all. I used to upload tons of textures at $L10 per item............I never uploaded enough to spend my entire stipend for a month (about $L2000). Basics pay rent to a landowner if they want a place to live or have a shop....buy buy lindens if they don't "earn" enough to pay that rent. Linden Lab doesn't get any return on those lindens purchased until those lindens are "cashed out".........and that's only the fee for handling the sale (what's that now? 3%?). Tell me how a basic contributes as much as a premium. The buy stuff from people and maybe they create and sell stuff.........how much of that goes back to LL? Not very much. It's almost always less than the premium membership fee that premiums pay on a regular basis. I have not problem with basics. But that argument is hogwash. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charolotte Caxton Posted February 3, 2012 Share Posted February 3, 2012 Jennifer Boyle wrote: Qie Niangao wrote: Well, they could gradually add Premium perks and diminish the abilities of folks without payment info on file, but the hue and cry from the latter would be deafening. I mean, if one had to have payment info on file in order to rez anything -- even an attachment -- a lot of folks would leave. If the 6/6/6 free-account floodgate had never opened, almost all of those same people would have happily joined anyway, but now they're so steeped in entitlement that they'd sooner pay through the nose to play WoW than fork over a dime to Linden Lab. I would not have joined SL if I had had to pay initially. I had a free account for a year. I just did not know enough about it to know if I would like it or not. I think it is important to let people try it for free, and not limit them so much that they are unable to see the possibilities. I do not think it would be wise to not let them rez anything, because if they couldn't rez anything, they really would not be able to experience SL properly. However, limiting them to having some number, maybe a couple of dozen, objects rezzed simultaneously might work. Also, limiting certain functionalities that are particularly useful for griefing for free avatars under a certain age might help a lot (I'm thinking of particles.). Another possibility that occurs to me is to implement an algorithm that would inactivate new free accounts if they did not maintain a certain level of logon activity, making it harder for grievers to keep an inventory of accounts to use. I'm sure that there are some other good ideas out there. What is needed is to let new people try SL out for free and have a good enough experience to want to stay while making it harder for grievers. Perhaps people could get a month or two free, with some limitations, and then either have more limitations imposed or have to start paying. It would help if there were a cheaper paid account than there now is. Perhaps there could be if it didn't get everything a premium account gets. One real possibility would be to implement inventory limits. If that's done, a timetable for a gradual reduction should be announced well ahead of time, something LL seems to have a hard time with. Having said the above, I have known many wonderful people who were very creative and who contributed much to SL that were on free accounts that were years old. LL should be very careful not to drive such people away. That is very well said and you make some very excellent points regarding free accounts. I agree. It would be a shame if artistic creativity were to be stifled because of monetary barriers, if this were a pay to use system, we would probably be a very dry exclusive club rather quickly. Thank you for taking the time to make me aware of that. I would still hope though, that somehow real action could be taken against real persons when our system is abused, how does the rest of the internet do it? I guess they don't, no one has ever been banned from facebook for being a total jerk, have they? I suppose in the interest of a free internet, we must tolerate the griefers, scammers, criminals and pervs, if only in the name of freedom, but there has to be a way to deal with them, right? I guess I will have to go Google some stuff, I'm sure this has been talked to death many times over. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peggy Paperdoll Posted February 3, 2012 Share Posted February 3, 2012 Linden Lab on June 6, 2006 stopped requiring basic accounts to pay the one time fee of $9.95 to join SL. The also did not require any payment information (actually, they didn't require any personal information except a name and an email.......false name and throw away email was, and still is, the preferred information for griefers and jerks). 6/6/06 was a bad move on LL's part. It was ugly for quite a while since people without payment information on file where often banned on sight from clubs. I even had my land set to prevent NPIOF's to enter for a pretty long time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charolotte Caxton Posted February 3, 2012 Share Posted February 3, 2012 Interesting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eir Sandalwood Posted February 3, 2012 Author Share Posted February 3, 2012 thank you all for your help. i will follow your suggestions and hope everything turns out ok. i'm still surprised that linden lab would allow a stalking tool that basically lets somebody know everytime you log in or out and get that information outside of secondlife on their phone. it seems different than just checking their profile too if they're on. it's knowing personal information about somebody's life, like when they sleep. for me that's private information, and almost as bad as the redzone tool. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peggy Paperdoll Posted February 3, 2012 Share Posted February 3, 2012 I suppose it could be compared to Redzone. Actaully probably pretty much identical in some ways. Redzone collected IP addresses and this collects log in information on SL. However, IP addresses are not considered personal information.....it's public and easily collected. Pretty much the same with the log ins. Knowing when you log in can, possibly, tell the user some information about your habits.....just as IP addresses can tell anyone who finds such information about the broad area of the region you live in (and if you share that region with others......and IP's are not unigue identifiers). Neither are invading your privacy in the sense that users of the tools can identify who you are, where you live, and what color your eyes are......so, legally that's a red herring. That was my stance with the Redzone flap a few months ago.....it's silly to fuss and get your knickers in a wad of something that is public anyway. Somethings are just unpleasant to have to deal with. But deal with them we must. There's no alternative (either in RL or SL). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qie Niangao Posted February 3, 2012 Share Posted February 3, 2012 Charolotte Caxton wrote in part: I would still hope though, that somehow real action could be taken against real persons when our system is abused, how does the rest of the internet do it? I guess they don't, no one has ever been banned from facebook for being a total jerk, have they? I suppose in the interest of a free internet, we must tolerate the griefers, scammers, criminals and pervs, if only in the name of freedom, but there has to be a way to deal with them, right? I guess I will have to go Google some stuff, I'm sure this has been talked to death many times over. You're right, it's been talked over many, many times. I really think it's a moot point now because there are just too many folks who have grown accustomed to free anonymous accounts. Incidentally, I personally don't think the mistake was in allowing free accounts, per se, but rather permitting anonymous accounts; the thing is, billing information is the least invasive (and least costly) way of associating some form of RL identity with an account. I understand the position that free accounts would be a mistake even if confirmed RL identity were required: you lose some folks who won't "pay to play" but gain others--maybe a larger number--by ensuring customers that they'll only encounter other paying customers. That makes sense for some online environments, but I don't see it optimizing the business potential of, specifically, Second Life. These arguments can go on forever, but for SL, the die is cast. Undoing that decision would drive away a huge number of folks like Jennifer; the damage has already been done to SL's reputation; the opportunity cost is already spent on fighting exploits of anonymous griefers instead of improving the platform. They really do have to start over with a different user base, and not repeat all the same mistakes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Feldspar Millgrove Posted February 5, 2012 Share Posted February 5, 2012 chou101 wrote: I would not be surprised if LL turns secondlife into a pay to play thing because of creepy griefers, hackers and stalkers. Is there any reason to believe that there are more than just a few griefers these days? I bet 99% of SL residents never come into contact with a griefer, outside of the "Welcome" areas. (And the Welcome areas are depricated now, in favor of Destinations. And Destinations have a real-life person covering them to solve any griefer problems immediately. Or so the theory goes.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Feldspar Millgrove Posted February 5, 2012 Share Posted February 5, 2012 Peggy Paperdoll wrote: However, IP addresses are not considered personal information.....it's public and easily collected. ....just as IP addresses can tell anyone who finds such information about the broad area of the region you live in (and if you share that region with others......and IP's are not unigue identifiers) IP addresses used to not be "personal information", because only your ISP (phone/cable company) could tie an IP address to your address. (Because they know who and where they provided that IP address for service.) But nowadays, there are third-party databases that can tie an IP address to a physical location to within a block or two, or sometimes exactly to an address. The precision depends on where you live. Some places, it's like the old days (say, 4 years ago) -- can only get to within a radius of about 15 miles, which in my case could be more than 50,000 different people. But sometimes it can nail your exact location. I live in a suburb of a major city, and I have seen people geolocate my exact home street address from only my IP address. You give up your IP address every time you visit a web page (in or out of SL), listen to streaming music or video in SL (or even just step onto a parcel that offers it, unless you have sounds/media disabled in your viewer). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kinda Fallen Posted February 7, 2012 Share Posted February 7, 2012 Naa that won't happen, they enjoy a high subscription rate and if everyone counts as more than one person (ie: ALTS) then the more the better ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kinda Fallen Posted February 7, 2012 Share Posted February 7, 2012 Well i have a story, i was once stalked by an individual, that threatened to tell my RL partner, what i did in SL, that he either knew who he was or could find out easily. I simply copied his IM to me word for word to Linden Labs, and don't ask me how they did this, but not only was he banned, but all 76 of his alts. This happened inside of 24 hours of my AR on this individual. (if you wonder why he had 76 alts, he was the king of a vampire clan, and bought souls, which is no more than an alt account created for just that purpose) So if you collect your proof properly, and if you have friends he has IMed about the situation and they will contribute their own AR with proof, Linden Labs will help, and quickly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anaiya Arnold Posted February 13, 2012 Share Posted February 13, 2012 Peggy Paperdoll wrote: I keep hearing this "basics contribute as much as premiums" to SL. I've never bought into that. Sure some do but not very many at all. I used to upload tons of textures at $L10 per item............I never uploaded enough to spend my entire stipend for a month (about $L2000). Basics pay rent to a landowner if they want a place to live or have a shop....buy buy lindens if they don't "earn" enough to pay that rent. Linden Lab doesn't get any return on those lindens purchased until those lindens are "cashed out".........and that's only the fee for handling the sale (what's that now? 3%?). Tell me how a basic contributes as much as a premium. The buy stuff from people and maybe they create and sell stuff.........how much of that goes back to LL? Not very much. It's almost always less than the premium membership fee that premiums pay on a regular basis. I have not problem with basics. But that argument is hogwash. Every dollar cashed out comes from linden sales, but so does every dollar of tier and premium subscription that is paid for through linden sales. I paid last year's renewel for my premium account entirely from this source. Many sim owners pay for or subsidize tier this way. Clearly a lot more lindens are being sold than is likely to be accounted for by the linden buying of sim owners (who as a group are probably a net seller rather than buyer) and premium account holders (who probably are marginal in either direction at group level). Your speculation fails to take any account of the direct fees paid to LL in US dollars that are funded by linden sales. I suspect that the US-dollar revenue this represents for LL is not inconsiderable and that basic accounts buying lindens probably fund a substantial proportion of this revenue source. Only LL knows what basic accounts contribute to their bottom line, and with all the trouble it purportedly causes they still steadfastly refuse to close the door to basic, unverified, free-access accounts. I find that highly suggestive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qie Niangao Posted February 13, 2012 Share Posted February 13, 2012 This is pretty tangential to this week-old thread, but it seems confused, or at least confusing. It may just be wording, but just in case: trade in L$s makes money for Linden Lab in three ways. One is the 3.5% fee it charges the L$ seller, for every transaction. The second is a tiny US$0.30 per-transaction fee charged the buyer. The third is the direct sale of L$s by Supply Linden, but that only occurs when there are no other offers to sell at whatever L$ exchange rate the Lab sets. The value of the L$ has increased very slowly in recent years, so it's likely that Supply does indeed need to inject some L$s into circulation this way, to keep the value from rising too fast, but the Lab hasn't reported "sources and sinks" numbers for a long time, so it's impossible to know how much Supply is selling. It is, however, almost surely a minuscule share of total LindeX volume. TL;DR: LL revenue from L$ trading is significant, but LL gets only a tiny fraction of the US$s spent buying L$s. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anaiya Arnold Posted February 15, 2012 Share Posted February 15, 2012 Actually most lindens come into creation in response to a pay-in. My stipend is a creation of lindens in response to a pay in of subscription fees. But the point that is often overlooked when trying to figure out how LL is extracting its income from everyone's activities is that people who buy lindens for cash are supplying the US dollar balances used by many paying members to pay their tier and fees. My entire year of premium subscription this year was paid for from US dollars that I got from selling lindens. The people who bought those lindens are the indirect source of LL's income derived from my subscription. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
161488303349 Posted February 16, 2012 Share Posted February 16, 2012 seems like your screams have been heard. the jira about online status that been sitting there forever has been upgraded. a linden moved. will have to wait and see how it works out. is still a good sign tho Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Apolonia Anatine Posted April 18, 2012 Share Posted April 18, 2012 You have my sympathies!!. I have been having this for months now by an ex who informed someone of what he was doing and they told me. He is apparently using something called SWA Avatar Online Spy HUD v1.xx. The most worrying thing is he purchased it on the MP and the NC has this lovely snippet of info:- 1 Features ______________________________________ - Automatic upgrades - Monitor online status of anyone - Nobody can hide online status - Even Lindens - Remote deploy of chat spy drones - Monitor online status even while offline - Logs online time, offline time of anyone even when you’re offline - Detects when person you are spying on enters your region Even when you are offline - Main HUD to monitor online/offline status of anyone Colour coded display on main hud Shows distance they are from you 0-4096 meter range - Bug and Chat spy scanner - Memory backup HUD Copy contents of main HUD to backup HUD Give backup HUD to alt or friend and secretly share friends list Not to mention even more worrying... It can monitor the online/offline status of up to 70 avatars It also controls Chat Spy probes which you launch with HUD. There are 2 types of Chat Spy probes. 1. Avatar spy probe. Launch and it hides inside the avatar to spy on It will relay in realtime any chat within range It will follow the avatar hidding inside them 2. Drop a chat spy probe into the ground or floor below you Both chat spy probes change their name to reflect their environment making it harder for anyone to ID them Linden Labs will do nothing as he it not actually breaking any TOS..unless he continues to direcly harass me, which he has stopped but can still follow me around -.- but they are quite happy for people to sell tools that make other peoples lives a misery..awesome! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dresden Ceriano Posted April 18, 2012 Share Posted April 18, 2012 You could be in luck... If I'm not mistaken (and I'm sure someone will point out if I am), LL plans on limiting the function of the script that detects online status so that only the creator or owner of an object can be monitored by it (if they haven't already). Which would make that product basically useless. As for your number 2 concerns, that can only be done on land where the user has object creation/script use/object entry rights... so, if you haven't done so already, turn these things off on your land or set them to group only. Oh and you might want to ban this person from your land as well... just to be safe. ...Dres Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ann Otoole Posted April 18, 2012 Share Posted April 18, 2012 LL takes away one method and gives a more efficient method for use by data scraper bots: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-5488? So now the incidence of stationary bots in regions collecting avi key data for tracking will become even more widespread. But the function is more efficient so less lag which makes it A-OK right? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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