Josh Susanto Posted April 1, 2012 Share Posted April 1, 2012 >Can they really expect to roll back to a point in time that then requires that they announce to everyone:- >"We've rolled back 2 weeks, if you migrated, please put your magic box back out, create all your listings again and then re-migrate..." Yes, absolutley, YES. >Reverting to Magic Box is a pain in the ass at best. And that's why I told everyone that it would be, even before DD was deployed. You're welcome. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted April 1, 2012 Share Posted April 1, 2012 >I'm wondering if we all will end up with both in the end.. The main idea is to end up with neither, so that merchants will have to rent more land. But I understand that may not be on everyone's agenda at LL because, being contrary to official goals and objectiveds, LL employees can't risk openly discussing it with each other. Rodvik may even be against it. MAYBE. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted April 1, 2012 Share Posted April 1, 2012 >I've mentioned elsewhere about doing a consistency check. That process will identify which listings are borked. A lot fo good that will do if the person assigned to do the check is the same person who did the borking. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darrius Gothly Posted April 1, 2012 Share Posted April 1, 2012 I use the "View Contents" option on DD Folders pretty routinely. It works well and shows me exactly what's in the folder. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Couldbe Yue Posted April 1, 2012 Share Posted April 1, 2012 consistency? no, a referential integrity check but that's beyond them I suspect - both from a capability point and because of what they'll find. I'm more and more convinced this goes right back to when we migrated from slx and the tables they put in to improve website performance has become the perfect storm which has brought the slx-slm coruption to the fore. It doesn't need to be rolled back past when site optimisation was done - the problem is (assuming I'm right) they'll have to take those tables away and we'll have to go back to that crippled website. btw - I've just had a look at one of my other shops and I have a listing is supposedly listed yet when I click on it, it takes me to the default marketplace page. so it's not actually listed although it says it is. so I suspect it's floating around on someone elses homepage - c'est la vie. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted April 1, 2012 Share Posted April 1, 2012 >so I suspect it's floating around on someone elses homepage - c'est la vie. Hope they keep paying the listing enhancement, though, huh. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ilyra Chardin Posted April 1, 2012 Share Posted April 1, 2012 Josh Susanto wrote: >so I suspect it's floating around on someone elses homepage - c'est la vie. Hope they keep paying the listing enhancement, though, huh. rofl! and I agree with the comment that was made about referential integrity and the lack thereof. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anaiya Arnold Posted April 1, 2012 Share Posted April 1, 2012 Darrius Gothly wrote: No, the current state of affairs is not acceptable in the grander "compared to others" sense. But nor is it a 100% failure either. As with most things, the truth lay somewhere in the middle. I think this is the core of the difference of view. What is happening is not good enough, and that's a fail by realistic measures. I don't think you are applying realistic measures but are employing "special case" measures. So that "as a professional...." is redundant where you said it earlier and could be dropped from the sentence, because it had nothing to do with how you measured performance. What you really by was "compared to LL's previous performance". But Secondlife is a business. Previous performance is not a realistic measure for a business. The proper measure is the "grander "compared to others" " where "others" is all those things competing against Secondlife for peoples' entertainment time and dollars. It's a business, not a high school project where the teacher sometimes gives out "highly commended prizes" to truely terrible work that happens to be "quite good for that particular student". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rival Destiny Posted April 1, 2012 Author Share Posted April 1, 2012 Well Said Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eddy Bouvier Posted April 1, 2012 Share Posted April 1, 2012 Has anyone thought of another impact this change from MP to DD will have: i'm running active scripts in my magic boxes to track my sales for marketing purposes. The new system, besides having to install Viewer2 to be able to use it, makes it impossible to run scripts to track DD sales. Correct me if i'm wrong! Suffice it to say: it's a bad move if you ask me! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sassy Romano Posted April 1, 2012 Share Posted April 1, 2012 Eddy Bouvier wrote: Has anyone thought of another impact this change from MP to DD will have: i'm running active scripts in my magic boxes to track my sales for marketing purposes. The new system, besides having to install Viewer2 to be able to use it, makes it impossible to run scripts to track DD sales. Correct me if i'm wrong! Suffice it to say: it's a bad move if you ask me! Yes, this was advertised in the DD FAQ and I brought it out as a forum thread highlighting it to avoid it being missed. You will be able to do this but you'll have to use the MP ANS to send data first to a URL. The receiving web host will then have to be able to send data back to your inworld object via http-in or other suitable protocol. The only problem here, is that we haven't been given ANS for Direct Delivery yet either. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dartagan Shepherd Posted April 1, 2012 Share Posted April 1, 2012 Darrius Gothly wrote: When the heck did we switch sides?!? ROFL!! No, the current state of affairs is not acceptable in the grander "compared to others" sense. But nor is it a 100% failure either. As with most things, the truth lay somewhere in the middle. I do not understand why the Lab insists on tasking employees with duties that are clearly out of their skill set, although I've also seen glimpses that someone on the Commerce Dev Team is experienced with UI and software development. (For example, the automatic replacement of MB items with DD items when the names match, and the nicely visible and well placed "Are you sure?" prompts that have appeared.) These are finesse things that wouldn't have been considered before, but they are included in this release, so I get the distinct impression that at least someone on the team has some notches on their keyboard. The way the LL staff is utilized is one of the reasons that I keep looking for someone above Brooke but below Rodvik that is responsible for assigning people to tasks. And also is responsible for deciding to accept the team's recommendations or override them and "do it differently". I'm pretty sure you have, and I know I have, worked for bosses that while not really steeped in software development intracacies were at least willing to listen and let the team have their head if they were making sense. I've also worked for bosses that were just as clueless, but for some reason fancied themselves as "Experts" in every stage of the development process and often overrode the dev team with ludicrous demands ... for no reason other than to demonstrate their control of the project. (Using their power to stroke their own ego, irregardless of how much damage it did to the software or the company.) Maybe I'm wrong, but I keep getting whiffs of the latter situation at LL .. I just don't know who it might be or where they are located. But it's those whiffs that keep me from fully roasting the Commerce Dev Team over an open flame pit; I keep thinking they're not doing these things from their own incompetence, they are being instructed to be purposely destructive so that someone else can feel they are "in charge". Heheh, true ... although I think I'm on your side these days. Call me out if I ever seem combative again. Unfortunately I think the team is pretty autonomous and it appears to be the same team (this generation) minus brodesky and pink of course. Collossus was still with them at SLCC and may be the manager rather than Brooke, but who knows. Something made me think Meta Linden jumped on board recently. Agree wholeheartedly that it needs management that has the authority and skill to get the job done. My daughter spent a few years managing her credit union software, she's not a programmer. This is enterprise stuff as you know, banking must be solid. She graduated a year ago for Project Management. She's now managing two teams also both involving software, one enterprise and one mission critical and that successfully. While I'd like to think as a parent that she's that special, half of her classmates could have handled the same given the criteria of a product that must handle stable commerce. Granted you need a good level of familiarity with software and development. That's aside from nearly 30 years of doing business with companies that would be out of business with a product of this level of qualtiy. So aside from lack of talent in that chain, and most definately with whoever is currently managing the team, who knows where the problem lies. Everywhere I'd say from management not fulfilling customer satisfaction, to horrendous reasearch to a shoddy level of QC. In my experience the whole crew is too tainted to salvage even with a new manager (who MUST be 100% performance driven with enough authority deliver a product) to do anything but replace the entire crew. Hate to say that and it's not personal to any of them, but this isn't a product that should be handling funds at all, DD or no. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted April 1, 2012 Share Posted April 1, 2012 >The only problem here, is that we haven't been given ANS for Direct Delivery yet either. Given everything else that LL has already done to thwart you in keeping accurate records of your own business, why would you expect them to continue doing the little that they still do to even allow you to make calculated business decisions? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted April 1, 2012 Share Posted April 1, 2012 >So aside from lack of talent in that chain I'm actually still not doubting their programming talent (especially not Malefactor Linden). What I doubt is their ability to make reasoned decisions about much of anything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sassy Romano Posted April 1, 2012 Share Posted April 1, 2012 Josh Susanto wrote: >The only problem here, is that we haven't been given ANS for Direct Delivery yet either. Given everything else that LL has already done to thwart you in keeping accurate records of your own business, why would you expect them to continue doing the little that they still do to even allow you to make calculated business decisions? Overly sensationalist Josh. ANS with Direct Delivery works, it just hasn't made it from Aditi to Agni yet. If it weren't done at all, then i'd be more concerned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dartagan Shepherd Posted April 2, 2012 Share Posted April 2, 2012 Josh Susanto wrote: >So aside from lack of talent in that chain I'm actually still not doubting their programming talent (especially not Malefactor Linden). What I doubt is their ability to make reasoned decisions about much of anything. Well, what I can agree with is that at the end of the day the product or service does the talking. It either does or it doesn't perform to a certain level. What SL has going for it is an immensely patient and forgiving customer base with few demands on the product and little competition in the direct consumer space. They've lost the battle as a development tool already to superior product choices in the last few years, which is a shame because it had enormous potential there and it's too late to play catch-up. Lost out in a huge way in what was a 3 year boom on virtual goods to the tune of $12 billion or so. The "lab" part of LL needs to go for one. Stop dinking around with this and that, nix the remote workers and focus on high quality for core product. Don't know, Oz seems to be getting a handle on other parts of the work, but it needs some healthy pruning and re-org. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted April 2, 2012 Share Posted April 2, 2012 >Overly sensationalist Josh. Is it over sensationalistic to point out that, where Xstreet used to directly provide us with metrics, LL has actually set the data up so that getting it onto an excel spreadsheet is harder than would seem to be consistent with mere design negligence? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Czari Zenovka Posted April 2, 2012 Share Posted April 2, 2012 Couldbe Yue wrote: btw - I've just had a look at one of my other shops and I have a listing is supposedly listed yet when I click on it, it takes me to the default marketplace page. so it's not actually listed although it says it is. so I suspect it's floating around on someone elses homepage - c'est la vie. The borked listing I have that does exactly that (defaults to the MP home page when clicked) is linked to someone who, when searching for the name in Merchant Name Search brings up a blank MP page, and does not show up in People Search. It's linked to a ghost!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Susanto Posted April 2, 2012 Share Posted April 2, 2012 >does not show up in People Search. And I suppose I'm also expected to consider this to be one more "mere coincidence"? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darrius Gothly Posted April 2, 2012 Share Posted April 2, 2012 Perhaps you are content wailing on LL because they are not up to professional standards, and I will allow that I'm disappointed in their level of professionalism in that respect too. But I am not willing to declare it a failure simply because it didn't come out of the box with zero failures. What I'm seeing is progress toward that goal, but at the present time it is also am unattainable goal. Sure, like you I want them to operate with the same level of attention to detail that I demand of myself and demanded of my teams when I was in that world. But that leap is far too high for them to scale in one shot. And as I've learned over years of being a parent and a manager, setting impossible goals is the surest way to cause total failure. I'd rather set a series of reasonable goals and then introduce the next one as soon as the previous one is completed than demand they "go away" until perfection is attained. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darrius Gothly Posted April 2, 2012 Share Posted April 2, 2012 Eddy Bouvier wrote: [..] i'm running active scripts in my magic boxes to track my sales for marketing purposes. The new system, besides having to install Viewer2 to be able to use it, makes it impossible to run scripts to track DD sales. Correct me if i'm wrong! Eddy, ANS is already in place for Magic Box sales. ANS is the approved method of capturing MP sales for use in outside applications. ANS for Direct Delivery is not yet released but it will be fairly soon. Once that happens, the process you have "outside" that listens to your existing scripts will need to be converted to listen to the new ANS format data. If you wish, you can adapt your data listener to the existing ANS for Magic Boxes now. Then when they release ANS for Direct Delivery (which will send sales data for both Magic Boxes and Direct Delivery sales) then you will be that much closer and won't have to rush to be compatible. If you go to the Magic Box Status page then look near the top of the page for the "ANS" menu option, that page gives you basic info on how to handle the existing ANS transactions. Just keep in mind that for now it only sends Magic Box sales through ANS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darrius Gothly Posted April 2, 2012 Share Posted April 2, 2012 Dartagan Shepherd wrote: Heheh, true ... although I think I'm on your side these days. Call me out if I ever seem combative again. Unfortunately I think the team is pretty autonomous and it appears to be the same team (this generation) minus brodesky and pink of course. Collossus was still with them at SLCC and may be the manager rather than Brooke, but who knows. Something made me think Meta Linden jumped on board recently. Agree wholeheartedly that it needs management that has the authority and skill to get the job done. My daughter spent a few years managing her credit union software, she's not a programmer. This is enterprise stuff as you know, banking must be solid. She graduated a year ago for Project Management. She's now managing two teams also both involving software, one enterprise and one mission critical and that successfully. While I'd like to think as a parent that she's that special, half of her classmates could have handled the same given the criteria of a product that must handle stable commerce. Granted you need a good level of familiarity with software and development. That's aside from nearly 30 years of doing business with companies that would be out of business with a product of this level of qualtiy. So aside from lack of talent in that chain, and most definately with whoever is currently managing the team, who knows where the problem lies. Everywhere I'd say from management not fulfilling customer satisfaction, to horrendous reasearch to a shoddy level of QC. In my experience the whole crew is too tainted to salvage even with a new manager (who MUST be 100% performance driven with enough authority deliver a product) to do anything but replace the entire crew. Hate to say that and it's not personal to any of them, but this isn't a product that should be handling funds at all, DD or no. Congrats on the kid btw .. it is always a "Daddy Pride" moment when one day you realize your kids are taking on responsibilities and measuring up to tasks that even we feel would be difficult. ^5's! Your last sentence "...but this isn't a product that should be handling funds at all, DD or no." is something I agree with 100%. Perhaps their rationale is that "it's just play money", but if so then they are completely ignoring the truth of human nature that even in games where the "In-Game Currency" has no translation to real-world, people get downright hysterical if they're shorted even one gold coin. (My wife often regales me with tales of people on the FB games she plays that go ballistic when they don't receive the gold coins they were promised. And those things are worthless even in other FB games from the same makers.) I am amazed at times that SL and LL haven't tanked yet. If anything it has to be the purely rabid refusal to accept failure exhibited by the dedicated users of SL that has kept the platform afloat. As more and more legitimate competition, both in workalike Grids and other platforms of a similar nature come into being, the business model LL depends on will prove to be their undoing as well. I guess we keep shouting that they need to be prepared just because we don't want them to go down in flames ... or at least that's my reason. That "business model" .. near as I can tell .. is to bilk the customer out of as much as possible, give as little as possible, and depend on the rabid devotion of the customers to overlook the flaws. That's the business model that will flop eventually, especially as they keep focusing on bringing in new blood ... blood that doesn't have the devotion required to keep the model functional. Far too many of the new blood won't even blink at walking away with the very first insult they receive. They are just too fluid and there are far too many other "adventures" out there to depend on rabid devotion from them. But that's my opinion .. and partly why I'm glad they keep failing to get the new blood they so desperately seem to want. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anaiya Arnold Posted April 2, 2012 Share Posted April 2, 2012 Darrius Gothly wrote: Perhaps you are content wailing on LL because they are not up to professional standards, and I will allow that I'm disappointed in their level of professionalism in that respect too. But I am not willing to declare it a failure simply because it didn't come out of the box with zero failures. What I'm seeing is progress toward that goal, but at the present time it is also am unattainable goal. Sure, like you I want them to operate with the same level of attention to detail that I demand of myself and demanded of my teams when I was in that world. But that leap is far too high for them to scale in one shot. And as I've learned over years of being a parent and a manager, setting impossible goals is the surest way to cause total failure. I'd rather set a series of reasonable goals and then introduce the next one as soon as the previous one is completed than demand they "go away" until perfection is attained. Characterizing honest and well merited criticism as wailing on LL does not change the fact that unless you employ very special standards, it's a fail. They are business, so a pass mark necessary requires that the standard "professional" is met. A non-pass is a fail. This is not about coming out of the box with everything perfect either, and it's disengenuous and peevish to even try that on. The fact remains this is not up to professional standards, but it's also not someone's hobby, school product, or a pre-production demo and it has gone "live" to customers. That's not a pass Darrius. It's not that there were more than zero problems out of the box, it's that, as you admit, the level of professionalism is just not there, and this is a business we are talking about. It's far from reasonable or fair to pretend that the issue is about me wanting to "wail" on LL or me wanting to call things a failure if they do not" come out of the box with zero failures". This is not about one failure, or two failures, or three failures, or four. Do you consider a lack of professionalism to be the pass standard for a business? And as to setting goals, you're not setting anything that I know of. What you are doing, if anything at all, is a sending a message to LL that their performance is good enough, while a realization that it just is not is likely to be a pre-requisite to real and stable improvement. You're not goal setting, but you might be enabling. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darrius Gothly Posted April 2, 2012 Share Posted April 2, 2012 No, what I am doing is combating the rampant panic and disinformation that has flooded the airwaves and chat boxes since DD hit the sunlight. From the messages I'm seeing, and I daresay you see them too, there are a large number of people that are so petrified of all the bad things about to happen or that have already happened, they are no longer buying, no longer selling and have no interest in even looking closely to see the truth. We have people cross-posting the same message in dang near every thread .. and why? Because they misunderstood something and went off like a house afire. We have people that have already written LL's epitaph because they didn't understand something they read and the level of panic is so high all around them that they stopped listening. What I am trying to do is to get folks to calm down and take the time to really pay attention to what has been provided and ... yes .. recognize where the real problems and dangers are. But I am not taking my torch away from LL's feet either. Perhaps you haven't read my latest blog post, but I will share the last paragraphs just to make this point: From "The Fiasco Called Marketplace": We suffered enough having to redo all of our listings when they prematurely shut down XStreet SL and turned on Marketplace. We’ve done a lot of slave labor related to Direct Delivery too. We are not going to continue doing slave labor to fix this error .. not this time. I have the distinct impression from my talks with other Merchants, both those still in Second Life and those that have abandoned ship for other Grids and VWs, that unless this can be made to go away with a minimum of fuss, a lot of people are going to jump ship again and leave SL for good. Perhaps enough that SL will drop below that critical mass of talented creators and inventors and paying customers to make it profitable for Linden Lab. I’m not threatening either. I’m just being honest about my sense of what the mood is like “out here”. Maybe I’m asking the wrong people and there is a flock of folks that don’t give a flip about how this plays out … but I don’t think so. I guess though, only time will tell. What you aren't seeing is the number of private conversations I've had with other Merchants, with various Lindens and with non-Merchants as well. What I want to accomplish is to turn down the boiler and inspire people to think and listen and look with open unbiased eyes. By calling the Marketplace a "Fail", you immediately place an image of total waste and ruin into the minds of those that derive their final opinion by blazing past at high speed. We're seeing the effects already. Not to mention the view from the other side, the developer side, where we want communication from them yet we virtually guarantee a rabid, unthinking mob will attend any public function they host simply by the way we stir up the crowd and their emotions with our choice of words. You assign to me a label of extremist, placing me in the camp of an Enabler and perhaps even an Apologist. Yet I am not an extremist, I am a Centrist, trying mightily to dispell the misinformation. I spend every day educating those that just need to hear a bit more to understand that their problems are (most often) not "The end of the world" in severity. But most of all I want to bring people a little closer to a rational, and much more successful middle ground that meets all of our needs; ours and Linden's both. At the same time I am very sympathetic to those that ARE impacted, in some cases irreparably so, by the changes and broken bits that are out there now. I listen to them .. really LISTEN to them .. and add their anger, frustration and disappointment to my overall opinion. I'm not sure what words you would choose to describe the perception of others when they hear you using the word "Fail" to describe the Marketplace and Direct Delivery. I chose to call your actions "Wailing" because I see it as an extreme point of view. I've not heard a word of understanding or even a statement of what you would find acceptable as a solution, but I have heard you diss the Lab a lot .. and diss Direct Delivery a lot too. And yet at the same time I see folks all over the Grid using both without problem. If it's purely fail then surely no one would be able to do anything with it at all ... yet that is clearly not the case. I'm preaching patience, moderation and above all some understanding for how things look from the "Other Side". No, I'm not giving them a pass as I fully expect them to fix all the errors that exist today. I can also promise you that I won't stop pushing and motivating and cajoling until they are fixed. We cannot hope to win any battles with LL until such time as we understand their reasons and motivations, and give them a path to success that doesn't involve public shame and ridicule. When you have a customer start off their message to you with "Your stuff SUCKS and you're INCOMPETENT. Your entire product line is a total FAIL" .. are you truly motivated to actually help them? Well that same response is extant in LL's staff too, and until we stop demanding extreme solutions and talking in extreme language, we will accomplish nothing of value .. period. You're welcome to go on debating the point as long as you wish. You're welcome to adopt any definition of me you wish as well. But I am comfortable acting and speaking and working as I have. I am very confident that my efforts have had much more in the way of positive results than have those that shout "Fail" at every turn. 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Sassy Romano Posted April 2, 2012 Share Posted April 2, 2012 Josh Susanto wrote: >Overly sensationalist Josh. Is it over sensationalistic to point out that, where Xstreet used to directly provide us with metrics, LL has actually set the data up so that getting it onto an excel spreadsheet is harder than would seem to be consistent with mere design negligence? In this case yes it is. It's not a surprise that ANS isn't yet available and since that's the case, the only action is NO ACTION. i.e. don't migrate and nothing changes, all the data keeps coming. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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