ChinRey

BebeBonbon wrote: Filled a ticket, the support said "I do see that you were charged though." But the support doesn't provide me with any sort of tracking I could message the seller, so the seller can at least see I paid. ... Any suggestions? No matter what happened, you can't expect the seller to deliver unless she actually received the payment, so as it is now, it's a case between you and Linden Lab. Reopen the support case and ask where your money went. They may be dragging their feet but just refuse the close the case until you've received an answer. If that answer is "we don't know", file an Abuse Report - Abuser name: Governor Linden, Category: Fraud > L$ or USD $, Summary: Unauthorized withdrawal from my L$ account by an unknown person. If that doesn't work right away, keep filing ARs and keep the support case open until you get a result.

Cane Sutter wrote: So...is search on the MP just a lost cause now? *Bangs head on desk* Hard to say. If I understand correctly, the change means it's easier now for LL to adjust the search algorithm and that may be a good thing. We can't expect LL to come up with a search ranking system to benefit the sellers because that's not possible. No matter how the ranking is, some merchants will gain and some will loose. But we all loose if MP search results become so messy that the customers give up. I think it's clear Linden Lab missed one crucial point: The main problem with MP search wasn't how the relevant hits are sorted, it was all those irrelevant ones that filled up the lists and the new search engine hasn't done anything to correct that. The search listing has to be judged by how well it helps buyers to find the best match for what they're looking for. I just did a quick test, a search for "airship". I think most people familiar with SL aviation will know which airship searchers would regard as the most relevant one there partly because it's a very good work by one of our very best content creators but mainly because it's the one people actually do buy regardless of search ranking - the one there's actually a good chance you'll occasionally see in-world nowadays. It was no. 165 on the list of 921 matches. Or maybe that's just my personal opinion and besides, I have to say some other tests I did seemed a lot more positive. Everybody should try it themselves: do some simple keyword searches - the kind of searches people actually are likely to try, not the fancy, tricky ones with multiple keywords, quotes and boolean functions. Search for things you are a bit familiar with but don't make/sell yourself and see what turns up. That's the reality check and everybody has to make up their own mind about the result.

This is a user-trying-to-help-users forum, nobody from Linden Lab ever replies here, so there are limits to what we can do. However, before you panic, log on to https://secondlife.com/ and check your balance there. The amount you get in the viewer isn't always correct but the one at the website should be. Also, while you're there, check your Linden transaction hsitory (click on "Account", then on" L$ Transaction History"). Every transaction to and from your Linden balance the last 32 days will be listed there so you should be able to find out what happened. If you see anything that doesn't look right there, open a support case as soon as possible.

Killian Jayaram wrote: I point blank refuse to change all my titles and descriptions to a one-liner, Makes sense. After all the title is your first sales pitch and it doesn't help much to get a top spot in the search results if people don't actually want to click on that link. Besides, if you focus only on one keyword it means only people who happen to search that specific keyword will ever see the listing.

Killian Jayaram wrote: As well I am willing to share how much I make a day with marketplace as most stuff I make for free or sell for less than 50L$ and don't care who see's but before with the old search system I was making on a daily basis 700L$ to 1,200L$ a day now with this new system I am lucky to make 100L$ a day now, hardly enough to pay for new creations uploads (Mesh, Textures, sounds, animations etc) and pay for inworld store to keep servers up and running. I do not want to compare miseries here and you do have my sympathy. But I think I should point out that the problem you describe here is what merchants who joined too late to be favored by the old search engine have been struggling with for a few years now. There was never a way for us to market our works efficiently through the Marketplace. We could sell on MP of course, but for the most part only to people who went there specifically for our products. The solution was to market elsewhere. If you managed to get a foothold inside one of the big events crammed full of people in shopping frenzy you got a flying start and a mention in a popular blog or two helped a lot too of course. But the effect was always short lived, you had to do it over and over and over again. And for those of us who missed those two fast tracks, the only solution was to get in-world, talk to people, show them what we made and slowly build a customer base that way - if we were good enough that is.

Killian Jayaram wrote: As someone that is a self-taught web developer and has over ten years experience, I have found that this new search engine uses the "less is more" system as if your item is listed as "Full Prem Hardback Book Mesh w/ AO" or "Book Mesh" the search will rate the less is more "Book mesh" over the more detailed product information title. Oh yes, the new search algorithm is over-sensitive too keyword dilution and I really hope they'll correct that problem soon. Right now, if you want to rank high on s specific keyword, use that keyword and that keyword only as the title, add a word or two in the description field and upload a picture. Any other content in the listing seems to reduce your ranking. I remember Alta Vista had the same problem towards the end. For a while all you found when you searched there were micro pages with one focused keyword and hardly any actual content. Not sure if they ever got around to fix it, this was just before Google and Fast turned up and killed off all the old search engines. The algorthm also seems to give click-through ratio a bit too much significance. Click-through ratio is of course a potentially very valuable indicator of relevance but unfortunately it is also very easy to manipulate. The seach engine does have some protection against click-through genrating bots but nothing that should cause a dedicated cheater with a little bit of technical know-how any serious problems.

arabellajones wrote: And if the Marketplace code was written in a different language, so what? You hire programmers who know the language. That would have been the sensible thing to do, yes. But not LL's way. They just threw their C++ programmers into the deep end of Ruby. arabellajones wrote: But what I am hearing suggests that I would be a fool to have any great confidence in Project Sansar, because it looks like a rather poor competence in the higher management. Not necessarily. The current LL leadership seems to be of a completely different caliber.

Pamela Galli wrote: Chinrey, what is the 3/4 face mesh LOD bug and the mesh map bug? When LL added mesh to SL, they didn't write rendering code optimizes for mesh, instead they did quick-and-dirty modifications of code for various prim shapes. So, as far as the viewer is concerned, a one face mesh is a ditrorted sphere, a two face mesh a distorted hemisphere and so on. Unfortunately, they forgot to update the map software so on the big map meshes are represented by the prims they are based on rather than anything resembling their actual shape. They also overlooked the fact that cylinders have considerably lower LOD than other prim shapes and three and four face meshes are based om cylinders. Pamela Galli wrote: I am sure if we forum merchants wrote the history of the marketplace and commerce team, it would be mostly new information to those working on it. Yes, probably. That would explain a lot. Of course, with MP there is also the language barrier. For some weird reason the MP software is written in a completely different programming language than everything else at LL. Imagine an English author being told to write his next novel in German even though he doesn't speak a word German. That's the challenge the Lindens who wrote that code to start with had to face. Then imagine an editor who doesn't speak a word German ether, being told to proofread that novel. That's the challenge the current MP programmer(s) has to take on. It's a miracle it works at all really.

Perrie Juran wrote: You have reminded me of this old bit of humor: Thanks Perrie! I've been looking for that for a while. Read it long ago but then couldn't find it again. Perrie Juran wrote: But seriously I sometimes think that it is a marvel that Second Life runs as well as it does. Oh yes. The LL programmers have shown an amazing ability to find brilliant solutions to problems that shouldn't have existed in the first place. But that doesn't change the fact that those problems shouldn't have existed in the first place. I used to read a lot here about how brilliant certain prominent early Linden programmers were. Haven't heard much of that recently and maybe it's jsut as well because they weren't. Even without Ebbe's and (apparently) Oz' recent admissions, it's quite easy to see that the core of the SL code has serious issues. What Linden Lab originally made, was the digital equivalent of some boy's hobby room project, assembled from random bits and pieces and held together with paper clips and rubber bands. There's a long way from that to a professional product and judging by what I've seen of High Fidelity, they are still at the hobbyroom level.

arabellajones wrote: If they don't even have internal documentation for the code that would be dreadful management, It is indeed. A while ago I mentioned the 3/4 face mesh LOD bug and the mesh/map bug to a friend who is fairly familiar with the viewer source code. It didn't take her long to identify the cause of the first of those bugs and when she brought it up with LL, Oz explanation why it was never fixed was that the person who wrote the code for SL mesh had quit shortyl afterwards. When my friend brought up the related map bug, Oz told her flatly that nobody at LL dared go near the map software. This is all according to my friend of course but she's not the kind of person who makes things up or exaggerates so I have no doubt that the story is true. What I know is true though, is that Ebbe Linden in a recent interview said that the SL code is a "stovepipe madness" caused by "too many chefs in the kitchen", and he more than indicated that was the main reason why they had decided to develop Sansar from scratch rather than try to upgrade the old SL software. It is quite extraordinary for a CEO to say something like that about his company's main product. I don't know if it was a thoughtless remark or a deliberate slip but in either case it can only mean that the situation was really, really, really bad when he took over.

Pamela Galli wrote: It gave the distinct impression that SL was selling mostly garbage. That may explain something else I've noticed. My overall sales haven't dropped since the new search, they've actually increased a little. But there's a very noticeable shift away from MP. I sell mostly in-world now and it's obvious that my customers at least shy away from MP.

Sally Audebarn wrote: Sales are plummetting and front pages are still flooded with inferior and unrelated products. How is this update suppose to be considered a positive thing? Hmmmm... maybe it's worth mentioning that the no. 1 listing for "house" (without the quotes) right now is a 10 L$ collection of all the old (2004-2007) freebie houses from Yadni's Junkyard. Objectively this shouldn't make much difference to me or anybody else who joined SL the last few years. The old search algorithm was so heavily biased against us MP was never a useable marketing channel anyway. That is, we could always sell through MP but only to people who went directly for our stores there - marketing had to be done elsewhere. Subjectively... well, the listings and sellers who used to keep us away from noticeable search ranking at least had seniority on their side. I do actually feel more than a little bit offended seeing the riff-raff the current search engine regards as more relevant than my builds.

Not sure if I have much to add to Madelaine's answer but I'll try anyway. The "jellybaby" feature was introduced a while ago on the official viwer and recently on Firestorm as a way to automatically derender the laggiest avatars. High ARC avatars is by far the biggest cause of lag in Second Life and it was getting so bad that Linden Lab eventually was forced to do something about it. It is hard to say what the "safe" ARC level is, it depends both on your computer and on the number of avatars int he vicinity. As Alwin said, most computers are able to handle a single 100,000 - and even 150,000 ARC avatar with no problem but a dance floor full of such avatars can be enough to cause problems even for the strongest game computer. It isn't really that difficult to put together a gorgeous looking avatar with an ARC well below 80,000 .... ummmm.... I mean, it shouldn't be difficult. Unfortunately there has been very little info about it and only a few "eco concious" SL'ers cared about avatar lag until this new feature suddenly dropped onto our heads. The result is that much of the items we wear are very wasteful with render weight and it is hard to find good info about the quality of specific items. Only real solution is to waer them and watch what happens. You may beable to pick up a few tips here: https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Your-Avatar/The-80-000-Challenge/td-p/3031467 and - if you are very tech inded, here: http://pennycow.blogspot.no/2015/02/draw-weight.html

Spica Inventor wrote: (Roles eyes) O.k. that was an expected waste of resources. Not necessarily. Updating a search ranking algorithm is something that takes days at most, not weeks and certainly not months. I suppose most of the time have been spent cleaning out spaghetti from the code and that is always a good thing. With that out of the way, it should be easy for LL to tweak and adjust the search ranking continuously

Nalates Urriah wrote: The Lindens that knew all the details have moved on to other projects. Not only to other projects, they don't work at Linden Lab anymore. At least the person in charge of developing SL mesh doesn't, and his boss doesn't and his boss' boss doesn't. And LL's current CEO has publicly described the SL software as "stovepipe madness". It's very easy for us to complain about LL's lack of documentation and I think we should complain because it is a serious issue and the ultimate reason for many of the problems we have in SL. But it's quite possible the current programmers at LL don't have better documentation themselves than we do and they're the ones who have to try to sort it all out. In a very real sense we're blaming the cleanup crew for the mess. The Lindens today are accountable for it, no doubt about that, but let's remember that the people responsible are long gone. Last I heard they were busy messing up another virtual reaility. Maybe time to remove some old pedestals here...

Tari Landar wrote: Relevance, I'm still uncertain what effect it has, as it's not even always the same results and never has been(not that I'd expect it to, but for it to change, as frequently as it does, makes absolutely no sense at all, lol). I haven't really had time to look at the search algorithm yet. But... (Edit: Removed detailed description how to manipulate search ranking )

Ray Silent wrote: New observation, For instance, searching for "dress", sorted by "Newest first" would show boots and nails - and there would be no a word of dress under source code of the pages representing goods. That's probably the quick-flll bug. I thought it had been fixed by now but it hasn't. What happens is that if you use the quick-fill or the bulk edit functions, any keywords you have will be copied into the various language fields and not be changed even if you edit the listing manually afterwards.

This thread is more than three years old, Hottchix69, so I seriously doubt the problem you (and others) have today is related. It's probably better to start a brand new thread about this brand new image bug.

Technically there are no problems: you can promote others to owner(s) and when you leave the group, it will continue under its new ownership. You will still be listed as the foudner of the group but that's all. I don't think there is anything in the TOS prohibiting sales of a group but you may want to check that. There is a trust issue here of course since there is no way to link payment and group ownership: You transfer ownership first and the new owner refuses to pay - nothing you can do about it. They pay you first and you refuse to hand over the group: nothing they can do about it. And finally, lots of people will overlook the transfer and keep contacting you about group issues, believing you're still the owner.

Penny Patton wrote: And apologies to the OP I've kept away from this thread since it's really only a duplicate of another active thread. But really, I do not think anybody owes the OP any apologies. She started the thread with an arrogant comment about "old computers" and she just got what she asked for. The morale is, if you don't want rude answers, don't ask rude questions.

With all this talk about the new jellybaby feature, here is a blog post by Penny Patton - more than a year old but still very, very relevant: http://pennycow.blogspot.no/2015/02/draw-weight.html That first picture says more than a thousand words and the message is clear: getting a sensible avatar render weight and avoiding being "jellybabied" is not about how your avatar looks but how well it's put together. I hope people still submit examples to The 80 000 Challenge thread here btw. Penny's got her really fancy avatar down even further since she posted that article on her blog. Can you match her achievement?

I have to correct a slip in Amethyst's answer: anybody can file a support ticket, not jsut premium members. You can do it here: https://support.secondlife.com/create-case/

It's hard to be specific without more information but since it started in heavily populated locations, it's probably render lag which is by far the most common lag issue in SL anyway. The most common causes of render lag are: 1) Render heavy avatars Solutions: stay away from crowded places and/or reduce the maximum avatar complexity in your graphics preferences (a setting slightly over 100,000 should filter out all the excessively heavy avatars whilst leaving most sensibly assembled avatars unaffected) 2) Draw distance As cloudnet already said. 3) LOD Factor aka "Object & Sculpt LOD" or "RenderVolumeLODFactor". This is a cheat originally introduced to compensate for a bug in the sculpt standard and later abused by some mesh makers to artificially reduce land impact. It does the job it is intended to but at a huge rendering cost. Serious sculpt makers have developed better fixes for the bug and serious mesh makers never use that cheat so unless your place is full of flawed items, you can safely reduce it to 1. 4) Textures Always one of the biggest lag factors and even more today with all the furniture and other small items covered with high resolution custom textures (gacha items seem to be particularly problematic here btw). Hard to find a good solution here. You can't do anything about what other people place in your vicinity of course and it's hard to control your own items too, most makers don't give any information about their items' render weights and a single item hardly ever causes issues on its own - it's the sum of everything in the scene that can overwhelm a graphics card.

Jason1 Draconia wrote: Also Check the size of SL Estates/SIMs as well. I am pretty sure about 6 years ago there were about 31000, now it is about 24200? Closer to 32,000 actually. But there's not much new there. The number of sims has been dropping at a fairly steady rate of about 100 a month for five years now. The decline has been speeding up recently (266 fewer sims last 30 days) but it's too early to say if this is a trend or just temporary. In any case, it does not seem to have any direct connection to the recent devaluation of the Linden dollar.

Just some food for thought: I once had a talk with a woman who told me how happy she was with the home she and her boyfriend had made in Second Life. We then started talking about avatar appearance and she told me her avatar looked pretty much the same as she did in real life ... before the fire.