Extrude Ragu

I see what you did there 🤭

Stupid suggestion - Try putting triangulate modifier on the model itself and exporting with triangulate turned off. If the triangulate modifier does not place triangles in the way you want, you might just want to go in there with the knife tool and force them into the right direction that way.

Over on their repo on bitbucket

I had noticed a pretty substantial looking commit in SecondLife's viewer repo named 'Rigged Mesh Rendering Overhaul' which had me wondering if they are working on performance things 🤔 Maybe related,

Damn! I've been foiled!

Not everything you don't understand is that which you hate.

There you go, the search results updated. As a sim owner I've declared my sim the most relevant anime sim in SecondLife by simply typing Anime into my parcel name a few times.

The result is highly unlikely to be relevant to many people at all. It's got very little to do with Anime, it's someone's SL home with a memey title being a bit edgy and that's it. It is an empty parcel in terms of visitors. It should not be that hard to use human judgment and realize this is probably not what most people were looking for when they searched for Anime. It does not need to know me specifically, but what it does need to do is offer results the majority of people find relevant. It can do that by comparing peoples search terms vs what they actually clicked on. What the vast majority click on after searching for 'Anime' is a pretty good measurement of relevance, as if someone clicked on that result, they thought it was relevant to them.

It is anything but neutral if I as the parcel owner can decide for you that my place is more relevant than anothers by simply typing your search terms into my parcel name over and over again.

I agree with you That is why it should be the users who inform which results are relevant, not the parcel owners.

It's really not a hard concept. The further down the list the quality results go, the less likely the user is to scroll to them, find them/click them, the more likely the user is to think that a high quality result does not exist.

It really does not take a statistician to realize that users who receive low quality results first are less likely to click through to high quality results than those who receive high quality results first. To discredit this on the basis of a lack of statistics is disingenuous at best. It is a bit like saying we have no data to prove that people are more likely to get wet when it rains, therefor it is not true until proven. Do you really need that data?

Actually the answer to that question I think is pretty simple. Don't rely on a computer to do a humans job - If a user follows through on a result and clicks teleport, chances are that result was relevant to the users query. Use that to help inform the search results.

When you say `you` understand you are not talking to me personally, but the users of SecondLife. I am intentionally positioning myself from their point of view. I am more than capable of scrolling through a few extra results and if I wasn't I wouldn't still be playing SecondLife. If SecondLife as an organisation are relying on users knowing that their search is substandard and scrolling through 10's of results to find some reasonable ones, SecondLife is setting itself up for high user churn. Considering how much SecondLife struggles to keep new users as it is, don't you think that blaming new users, for not knowing how bad SecondLife's search system is, is ultimately going to lead to SecondLife's demise? Am I the only person who can see that maybe blaming the user for poorly designed software, will just end badly for everyone?

The results are neither relevant or good. Do you really think that when people search on 'Anime' they are going to find some edgelords private parcel on the mainland the most relevant result? Or does my sim suddenly become more relevant to the user because I've written 'Anime' into the name another four times? The answer is no The fact of the matter is, I am able to game the search results, and users are receiving low quality results. This results in users thinking that no high quality anime sims in SecondLife exist, and quitting, this is bad for Business. It does not serve the needs of SecondLife or its residents, therefor it can be adequately described as broken. And listen, I get it. I too work as a Software Engineer, I spend about half of every waking second of my life writing and maintaining software, I am more than aware of how indexers work, how boolean queries, synonyms, stemming, fuzzy filters, relevance ranking algorithms, term weighting, facets etc I have dealt with plenty of search solutions in my lifetime. It's just all too easy to forget that software is just a means to an end, and if it does not get you to that end, it's not doing the job it's intended to do. I should not need to know how to game the system, nor should the user expect to find gamed results that are useless to them when they search. It is up to the creators of a product to ensure that when a user uses their product, they are not disappointed by the product. Failure to understand this basic principle will be at your peril, most users do not understand and have no plans to learn how to trick your software into working if it does not work the first time they try. If you have to convince your user after they have used your software to use it again, you have already failed.

You are thinking in terms of engineering and not in terms of the needs of LL and its user base. Measuring the quality of software on whether it does what it is programmed to do is a very poor metric. Most software does what it is programmed to do. But does the program solve the problem it was designed to address? The answer is no.

Wrong, an engineers expected behaviour =/= working behaviour

A search for `Anime` brings back as first result someones private parcel with the name 'Anime F..a 🐔for Non-Anime B...eaches' Some creative censoring going on there. The parcel name starts with 'Anime' and infact contains 'Anime' twice, however I have watched the parcel and it is largely derelict, and I highly doubt it is what people were hoping to find when they searched 'Anime'. The description also contains 'Anime' multiple times. Because I am genuinely curious to see how broken the search is, I have made some edits to my sims name/description. Before Name Kokoro Academy - Anime School RP Description Anime themed roleplay sim! アニメ , 学校 After Name Anime Anime Anime Kokoro Academy - Anime School RP Description Anime themed roleplay sim! アニメ , 学校 Anime anime anime anime (We're proving the search is broken) At time of writing, we are the 9th search result for Anime with the before name/desc. I'm not sure how often the search results update. We'll see where we rank once it does...

Challenging me I see Correct me if I am wrong but I think only the viewer source code is open source, not the web services.

What I suppose bothers me the most about all this is that clearly this is something LL has sunk time into, and it hasn't really in any meaningful way improved SecondLife, it's not a pleasing interface to look at, it functions the same if not worse because it penalizes curious users who just want to explore and don't know what they want to search for. You know, I think what LL is lacking more than anything is leadership - Who is making these decisions and setting the priorities for employees? At the moment it feels like nobody, or perhaps a "yes man" who does not actually have a game plan. The leaders at LL need to be thinking about actual shortcomings of SecondLife that users encounter, rather than 'fixing' things that really aren't all that broken. I feel like this pointless and slightly hard to look at UI change is symptomatic of a bigger issue.

The UI is not even responsive. The spinner at the bottom does not shrink when the page is shrunk, so you can't use it in a smaller window Come on LL, I could have put together something better than this on my laptop in my bedroom, drunk.

The width of the page changes depending on which tab you're on.... You can't just enter an empty search and get some immediate results back.... The places wheel at the bottom of the page spins the wrong way when you click the arrows...

The buttons are different sizes... the fonts... urgh... This one opens upwards... This one opens downwards... AAAAAA 😡

Actually I think that idea is a stroke of genius. I get so many low quality results because people spam keywords on their parcels. Sometimes I search for 'anime' and get those sims that like to keyword every imaginable style of avatar into their sim description and have nothing to do with anime at all. I can't imagine many people searching 'anime' actually click through on those, this would help improve the quality of the search results like 10 fold.

Sims with titles/descriptions in different languages become gobbledy goop It seems to be a content encoding mismatch. You'd think they'd use UTF-8 for this.