Mason Kingsford

Yes. I'm having this problem today. For me is seems to have to do with SSL certificate authority check in http requests.

I wasn't talking about the conversion from Ls to USD. Yes, the value is going down. Not happy about that either. Of course you can always 'undercut' the lowest valued offer to sell first. That's the problem that's driving the value down. The sell channel has been flooded. But my original comment about faster payouts is the time it takes for LL to send my USD to PayPal. They claimed that the time would be 'faster', but so far, in my experience, it's the same as before. So they've raised the payout fee up to 1500% more than the $1 fee, but the time is the same.

My payout is taking just as long as it ever has. Except now it takes twice as long to sell Lindens, the value is down and LL is charging higher payout fees on top of a fee when you sell Lindens. Nice.

This is really gross. LL is already making a % on the conversion from Linden currency to real world currency. Now they make another % on payout! This is a huge withdrawal fee/tax and it's ridiculous. Really, another example of LL's poor business model. Absurdly high tiers for years, when hosting prices have dropped, dropped, dropped. The writing is on the wall for LL and they are putting the squeeze on us, the lifeblood of their business. Thankfully I can transition my business to accept Paypal payments directly. I think I'll start working on that very soon.

Congratulations Rod and best of luck to you. May Second Life and Linden Labs prosper under your guidance.

Ding ding ding! The problem is that LL is a corporation driven by profit numbers. Profit is the bottom line. They are used to x revenue and they want to see 'growth' each year. Sometimes companies lay off workers to make the bottom line appear bigger to shareholders. LL should lower prices, but they probably won't. Once a company is used to a certain amount of incoming revenue, dramatically changing the pricing plans is a big gamble and they would lose money in the short term. If they could only see past this and realize a new pricing model is in order for long term growth of Second Life. Not lowering prices in the long term could be a serious problem for LL's long term health as a company. This is just my opinion.

I find it interesting that LL calls Tier 'maintenance' when for the most part, it is rent. I hope someday LL changes how they price SIMs. I realize that the fat SIM pricing is how LL made it's money in the first place, but it's quite excessive in my opinion. My suggestion for LL as to how to price SIMs and continue to grow SL is this: $99 USD setup fee for any full SIM. Basic monthly fee of $50 USD for the sim. Then charge additional fees based upon: Traffic: How many people visit the SIM each month. How much of the SIM is downloaded from LL servers? Addition Server Usage: Scripts. How many scripts are running on the server and how much time/CPU resources do they take? Storage: How much storage in megabytes does the data that makes up the SIM take? (objects, prims, polygons, etc.) Bandwidth: How many visitors? How much data does each visitor download from the server when on the sim? (textures & objects - other Avatars) This way, more people can afford a SIM. More people can avoid 'Land Barons'. More people can avoid having SIMs sold out from under them. More people feel as if the pricing from LL is justified. Busy businesses who own sims with massive amounts of traffic will pay more. People can monitor the above things to determine overall traffic, usage, storage and bandwidth. We all know that 1 SIM does not get it's own physical server. So why charge people like they are getting this when in actuality they are getting a Virtual Private Server or VPS. It's time to offer more value and more open, fair pricing to your customers. $300 a month is a car payment, or a mortgage in some states. It's a crazy amount for the rental of a part of a 'server'. Save and grow the SL world by changing how you price things. It makes sense.

Ann, we do not collect relationship data. We do not collect real life names or addresses. We do not accept credit cards. We collect your Avatar name and userkey (which anyone can get at any time in SL), which allows us to verify accounts in world, which allows our SL designed tools to interact with our users. Very similar to how many other sites operate, including how sites like slexchange operated, and how other subscription services for SL continue to operate. Many many resident run SL sites collect the same basic anonymous data that we require to make our SL connected services 'work' in-world. We require an email address in order to validate you on signup and email you alerts and private messages. Other than that, our users are anonymous to us. We do not ask or, or require SL login info or password info. Now, I know you frequent SLuniverse.com. I see their contact page is similar to ours. I also see that they have their whois domain info blocked. Is that also a severe warning sign? If so, then why do you feel safe using the site? I'm not sure how that risk factor is any different. As for me, I've been using the same avatar since I joined SL in Oct. of 2006. I have met with Linden Labs executives in person in San Francisco, they know full well who I am and where I am. If there comes a time when we collect real world information, such as name, address or even payment info, then corporate info will be in place along with other real world, identifying information.

Ok now you chooose to insult me by calling me unprofessional. *rolls eyes* First, I never claimed here it was better or worse than any other site. I explained why a few URLs were censored in the beginning, but let me explain it once and for all. I run AvMatch. It is a 'closed' social network. People's profiles there are to remain anonymous, not public. Some members of AvMatch who didn't like the fact that profiles were to remain anonymous, were using 2ndhub to redirect AvMatch users to their profiles on... AvMatch and SL profiles. Note that if you are a member on 2ndhub, you can 'post' to your comments feed directly on your profile and include URLs to ANYWHERE, including AvatarsUnited.com and SLprofiles.com. They automatically link. Finally, I called your profile an ad for SLprofiles because this is your main profile description: Sorry, "all" about me won't fit into 500 characters and I have way more than one or even ten favorite in-world locations, so please see my profile at wwwdotdotcom/me.asp?id:35655 for more info. (2ndHub keeps auto-deleting the address of my REAL profile. Look me up on SL Profiles if you are an SL member and want to be friends.) Thanks!

Yes I see that you signed up, created an ad for slprofiles and then left two posts bashing the site within minutes. Anyone wishing to see Siwan's profile, her comments and my replies, you can find it here: http://www.2ndhub.com/browse/2/2295-SiwanSandalwood 2ndhub is in beta and has only been open for 6 months. In that time we have released many new features with many more to come. We listen to our users and make changes accordingly. If people ask for more text space or additional fields, we often roll it out with our following update. You can add as many SLurls into your other fields as you wish. We host thousands of images that people have very easily uploaded with basically one click. There are reasons we blocked some urls, including my very own AvMatch, from being listed in profiles. I've explained this on the reply to Siwan's 'posts' on her 2ndhub profile. The navigation is incredibly simple and intuitive. All of our regular users seem to have figured everything out without complaints and in short order. Groups are 'in-world' update groups, but in our next update they will have their own pages and directory, to compliment the other directories.

I don't want to change the topic here, but I do feel the need to defend the SL related services that I personally created for the SL community. @Siwan 2ndhub and AvMatch are not the same, do not have the exact same userbase, and serve entirely different purposes. Both sites have thousands of mature, friendly and intelligent people using them. Of course there are bad apples, just like in RL and on the internet as a whole. Siwan, I would politely suggest that your 'friend' is mistaken. I might also suggest that you try something for yourself before you bash it publicly.