Snickers Snook

Good post Ayesha. I think pointing the finger (middle or otherwise) at Humble is probably right. He's kind of coming across in various things I've read as Dilbert's pointy haired boss.

Darrius, people have photographed the bots, named them and noted the traffic stats. There is almost never any real activity in the club itself but the traffic is consistently that of a busy one. I just visited. The club was empty but traffic was showing at 16K and there were 15 avatars at 630m.

When I visited this particular club on two occasions, there was practically no one there other than the host, dj and maybe two others. Yet, their traffic numbers are consistently those of a packed club. I found about 15 - 20 avatars parked at 600 - 660m and 1000m in low-prim skyboxes. There may be others but I wasn't going to spend my day hunting them down. FWIW, this club is also ripping off the name of another popular club in SL. But that's a DMCA issue between the owners of the clubs (and I'm not involved).

So has Linden Lab completely stopped doing anything about unregistered bots that are used to game traffic? I know of a club in SL that has been AR'd numerous times over the last month for running bots (usually about 20 or so) to hike traffic rates and nothing has been done. I guess it's all about tier. :(

Yes, that was my point exactly. Most message board, JIRA and WIKI systems try hard to keep ALL feedback and comments under a single topic. Starting a new thread or topic is considered a huge breach of etiquette because it requires a lot more work on the part of participants and administrators to sift through things. It's almost as bad as someone posting with a subject like "I need help with my computer". Yet here's Linden Lab doing the exact opposite. Encouraging people to start new bug reports on the exact same bug. It's crazy. I don't see any logic for it at all OTHER than discouraging people to file in the first place. It's really a "stick your head in the sand" Dilbert-esque approach. Further, it doesn't allow others to follow or track the bug. People will completely lose interest in the whole system -- which ultimately may what the Lab wants. :-(

And an update to this. A group notice was sent out from my Tiny Empires kingdom early this morning. I logged in about 3 hours after it was sent. Never saw it. Logged off about 2 hours later. Log back in 3 hours after that. 5 minutes later, the missing group notice pops-up. What is going on???

I really don't know how to deal with this any more. Group notices (especially with attachments) are starting to fail at an alarming rate. I simply don't receive them. In checking the JIRA for the issue (JIRA SVC-1507), I see 409 votes for it with 300+ watching. Yet, Linden Lab has put the issue on "inactive" status which means that no more comments can be added and the issue cannot be edited. Instead, Maestro Linden demands "reproduceble steps" via opening a new issue. WTH? I'm sorry Lindens but bugs are often a combination of things. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be trying to fix them or take additional info on them. Like maybe it only happens on certain sims? Or maybe it's just from certain groups that contain the letters "W" and "H". Who the heck knows? Or maybe it's just the time of day or general lag?? Closing off comments really shows me how little you value your own bug reporting process -- or us the customers. What you really need is a "Here's what happened when the bug occured" type of reporting. For example, I was using XYZ viewer, time was 1:03PM SLT, at location ABC, Group Notice was supposed to come from DEF group sent by Avater Y. Then YOU guys can keep track of the commonalities rather than pushing "reproduceable steps" back on your customers. Which is just flat out a cop-out!

Oh come on.. In the real world and in SL, people often use full studio lighting with spot fills, at least two floods at 45 degrees, reflectors and other goodies designed to improve on natural lighting. PhotoLife Studio (for SL) does this sort of stuff. A very low key facelight (like Ghosty's) accomplishes some of the same things but allows you to use any SL scene as your background.

Sometimes a facelight is needed when doing photo shoots. I use Ghosty's Polite Facelight (by Ghosty Kips) which is far more subtle and controllable than most of the simple freebies available.

This just happened to some friends of mine too. Their SIM was brought down by auto-return of all the objects. It was apparently a 2-person griefing team.

Try this first: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Invisible_Avatar If nothing there helps, then I would look at your internet connection. WiFi? Slow? Sometimes those issues show up as an avatar problem. You may want to check your avatar out by doing a character test. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Tourmaline_Falken/The_Ultimate_Multi-Bug_Fix

Maybe you dropped it into a HUD you are wearing. Also possible is sticking the sound into a mesh item like a body part.

Conifer Dada wrote: This collapse in land prices doesn't seem to have hit waterfront mainland yet - I haven't found any waterfront that's abandoned and L$ 1 yet. That's soemthing to watch out for. There's lotsof water sim land (technically water front) available for $1L. Every so often a parcel of water front (ocean facing) comes up abandoned. A 4096 came up near me in Alope. I almost bought it just to carve out a 1024 and abandon the rest but it would have cost me the big extra tier for the month. Maybe if LL charged a weekly tier you could get more movement on parcels. Or if they didn't charge tier on land held for 2 days or less? I dunno.

LL could start by making tier steps smaller and giving away the first 1024 to premium. You can't do much of anything on a 512. Plus a lot of those parcels are inky dinks < 512. I have a land seller who has a 300m next to me (waterfront). It's been for sale for every price from $1L / m (which is what she paid for it when it went abandoned) to $20/m. I laughed at that then she put up the huge rotating sign which made it obvious she was trying to blackmail the neighborhood into buying. An AR from me and my neighbor stopped that approach. But it's still for sale. Back down to $1.25L/m.

I was going through the direct delivery update process today and discovered that one of the freebies I made in memorium for the old Second Life Forums had gone unlisted because the Magic Box it was in was deleted. It's probably been that way for at least 6 months or longer. Sigh. Anyway, if you remember the old thread that wouldn't die or the angst over closing the original easy-to-use SL forums, then you might appreciate these. They're full perms, A bunch of people in the Forum Cartel were happy I resurrected them today. https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Snickers-Second-Life-Forums-T-Shirts/515987 Not trying to spam this place -- I couldn't figure out a better place to post it where I'd hit those that remember the old days. :)

This sounds like a network / Internet connection problem. Are you on wireless? Low speed connection? SL can be very bandwidth intensive, especially when you are also playing media and/or the SIM is crowded. Some tips here: http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/fs_speedtest http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/How-to-improve-Viewer-performance/ta-p/1316923

@Rolig, yes but those moves all take you out of mouselook and back into third person following view. Mouselook is intended to be what you see from the avatar's eyes.

AFAIK, there is no "zoom" in mouselook. You can change the FOV (Field of View) by typing CTRL-8, CTRL-9 and CTRL-0 but that's just the "angle" the camera is showing. It looks sort of like a zoom but it's not really. Scrolling the mousewheel back always takes you out of mouselook. This for normal viewers. A TPV could change this I suppose.

Updated now with more info and a few minor corrections.

And I updated it with more information and some minor corrections a few people sent me.

Thanks Nalates! Your blog is a great resource for lots of things! And stuff.

My latest blog post is sort of a mini-guide to wearing mesh clothing and mesh avatars. Nothing real technical, just some (hopefully) practical tips. http://snickitty.blogspot.com/2012/06/mesh-clothing-in-second-life.html

I thought I'd flog my own blog post here since I've had a number of positive comments on it. http://snickitty.blogspot.com/2012/06/mesh-clothing-in-second-life.html It's not going to tell you a blasted thing about creating mesh but it could help some newbies solve their in-world problems with mesh items. :)

Yeah I had to recreate my shape from scratch via the numbers. Reponses like the one you got can tempt creators to use copybot systems to recover their own works.

Some, like the shapes, were older. Some of the outfits that had unknown creator in them were newer. The comment from LL was that nothing should have "unknown" as the creator. What hacks me off is that it makes the whole box go "unknown" creator just because one of my older shapes went unknown. You can see from the JIRA I filed that the process went nowhere even though there's an assignee to the problem: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-7123 Once it has gone unknown, LL says there is no mechanism for them to restore it to you. So tickets are useless. You are simply screwed.