Polymath Snuggler

Not that I've heard. Traffic calculations are consistently inconsistent. LL wanted to do away with the entire system at one point. If you're having anomalies in your traffic numbers give it a few days. It should settle out.

Have you tried Search? The top of your inventory has a "Search" feature if you remember the name of it.

No the "Pack" / Group listing when you pull it up will look like this ~ In the multiple search results window it looks like a normal listing with a normal listing price ( In this case 395L$ )  The similar pricing is to fill out the entire field quickly. You are correct though that there are "groups" of items that all go together that may be of varying prices. Like this entire shop for example. https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/49727 Is a grouping nightmare. But the goal of this is to condense mutiples of identical listings into one collapsed entry and have them ALL show up in a single search~ ( with a single listing price )

Nothing in my post is a strawman argument~ not even close. My point was~ and still is prepare for unfairness in open markets. It always happens. Anyhow ~ I'm off to go do something productive~ I've got nothing more of value to contribute to this conversation. You all have fun arguing with the obvious trolly purple cookiemonster.

The VMM already handles updates to listings. You can plug any item you wish into a listing folder and set it to Active and it will sell that item. The proposed Group Folder would house Listing Folders which each contain associated items. Anything with tiered heirarchy winds up being rather difficult to explain in paragraph form.

I clarified the one sentence in the JIRA pretaining to Group Demos. I wanted the group to be an ironclad catagory for variants of the same product or same product line ( equal value ) Such as all the commons from a Gatcha Console. In that sense the overly detailed specifics was completely intentional. "Loose collections of items" are already handled by the "related items" tab at the bottom of the marketplace. The idea is that the [Group] itself shows up as a listing of the individual item copy in it ~ IE the listing shows up in search as 395 L$ in the example I provided. The intended spec in this case is single item vending of color / texture / design variants of a single entity. I managed to eke Gatchas into the form ~ but I'm... hmm ~ will think about it.

VMM based [Group] Listings- Getting 6 birds with 1 (really big and kind of complex ) stone. Ohhhkaaaaaay so: I made a JIRA Feature Request. It's long winded. It's detailed. And it's not that technically difficult to implement ~ (as best I can tell anyhow!). It's just menial and has a lot of steps to it. But it's technologically doable within the confines of the present system.  Below is a text of the JIRA ticket. Marketplace Groups / Variant Listing Handling: I propose making marketplace "Group" listings. ( Note these will be Opt in! No retroactive updatery required! ) The combined / fixed relevance from associated items should be sufficient attraction for merchants who actually care to go fix their listings. It starts inworld on the VMM side of things~ in the MP interface. Add a new type of folder to the folder hierarchy. "Group Folder" Any Folder added to this will automatically tell the system to handle the following listed items within the folder as a [Group] .[Group]ed items may share mesh bases, or from the same gatcha event or whatever the merchant deems their linkage is. Any contained ACTIVE listings will be fed into the [Group] and accessible via the marketplace store interface. The group folder should automatically create a single sub-folder with the word "DEMO" in it~ this should be the group folder name + [ DEMO ]. On the website side of the equation the group listing must be handled in a special manner. Every listing inside a [Group] MUST BE PRICE LOCKED to the group listing. Whatever the [Group] price for the item is, that's the price that gets set to every single active listing in that folder. This is to prevent marketplace gaming of gatcha Rares into groups of gatcha dregs. etc etc. A group of items inherently, by definition is all the same and identical in the merchants eyes. So they MUST all be sold for the same price. This is important for this next part to work. The checkout buttons for groups must have additions  The [Group] Header listing will have a "Buy All" Discount Dropdown/ Rollout Menu where the merchant can select 10%, 20%, 30% etc discount. This will allow the merchant to specify a flat discount rate for if the customer chooses to buy the whole darn thing. This needs to be a posted value on the listing. ( again see reference image ) Just make sure the group buy-all discount percentage requires 2 or more listings in the group to be marked as Active. This [Group] Primary listing requests the merchant to choose an item from the folder to be the main listing. ( Statistically probably the black one ) A [Group] cannot be set to Active without a primary listing. The merchant then fills in all the appropriate fields for that listing and here's another important part: At the bottom of the listing entry. There should be two choices. "Save listing" "Save Group" Save listing edits the singular listing. "Save Group" should automatically copy that entered data into the rest of the listings in the group except for changing the listing title ( that should be the listing folder name anyways ) and the sold item. This leaves individual listings to be manually edited if the merchant sees fit however any price changes to any entries must either be greyed out or trigger a [Group] wide price change. Automatically appended folder that contains the DEMO item should light up the DEMO button if and only if there is an Active DEMO listing in the group designated DEMO folder. Section 2: Appending & Updating old listings. A merchant creates a group folder: It auto appends it's default [ DEMO ] folder but remains empty. If the merchant attempts to drag & drop another listing ( Active or Inactive ) into the folder it will popup a dialog message. "Warning!! You are attempting to append this listing to a Group. This will merge this listing into the group listing and set this listing to [Inactive]. THIS OPERATION CANNOT BE UNDONE!!!!" [ Proceed / Deny ] Likewise if a merchant goes to remove a LISTING folder from a [Group] that has been set to Active, they will be prompted ( again big loud warning message ) that they will lose all associated sales statistics from that listing. The listing will remain "filled out" but it will lose all of it's search sales & relevance statistics. And the group listing will have those statistics removed from the overall listing. If the merchant accepts the listing data and associated search relevance statistics should be appended and merged into the group ranking. The appended listing should be temporarily downgraded to an Inactive listing. Obviously if LL chooses to internally store that data separately anyways that would plainly be a prudent choice. But willy nilly grouping and ungrouping of items I feel would make the system exceedingly gameable ~ especially with merchants "grouping" their best sellers with their new items and or some other wierdness. A listing should now be a categorical [Group]. When the [Group] listing is made active and the page is visited the ALTERNATE variants of the [Group] items should be listed across the top of the page , much like the current "Promoted advertisements" system presently does. Selecting any of them will bring you to the sub-listing page. Note: The checkout should still have the "BUY ALL ITEMS" option there at all times regardless of what sub-listing they are on. How this solves things Each created listing as it presently stands has it's own relevance rating, it's own sales popularity and the only "group" effect that elevates overall relevance priority is average store success. It's exceedingly difficult to track conversion rates, demo sales, and overall product success. It's also exceedingly difficult to categorize and track disparate rankings~ especially when your DEMO is your best seller ( not often but it happens ) The inclusion of this system would create a non-gameable condensed set of listings. The updated listings will gain "traction" and boosted relevance in the search algorithm due to condensed sales statistics which will encourage merchants who actually care to update their marketplace listings. Yes it's a lot of work. But again between the automated updates of entire categories of items as well as better searchability and relevance. If the merchant cares enough. It's worth it to them. They'll do it. This self balances out listings that no one cares about ( their relevance will drop over time and they'll remain disparate entities ) and these grouped listings will take search priority. However, people who attempt to 'game' the system by putting their entire store into one search ranking will also run the incredibly high risk of being reported and having their ENTIRE inventory de-listed in one single fell. (Remember grouping 'cannot' be undone!!) Grouping items illegitimately poses a serious risk to the vendor. I think abuse of it will be very low if the outlined rules I posted above are put in place. The benefit for the community is more impulse purchases of grouped content at discounted prices.( anyone who's seen a 'fatpack' vendor knows full well how important this is to sales ) It removes Marketplace Clutter and improves overall relevance by condensing identical items into a single search return. It removes Marketplace Clutter from DEMO items, but still preserves sales ranking from pre-existing DEMO items that are currently 'carrying' a listing. It improves overall statistics return on viability of products and conversion rates. It makes Selling marketplace ads more profitable for everyone. It makes listing multiple items quicker and easier for merchants. As well as updating those items. For all I know LL this is phase 3 of the whole VMM> Marketplace Beta Search > Grouped Listings marketplace overhaul they've been planning all along. Though on the off chance that wasn't the case. Here's the post to make it happen. Sincerely - Your commerce community. ( And ~ Me! )

I talk with a lot of people ~ most a lot smarter than I and a lot more involved. I also read crash & downtime reports and justifications for actions that LL takes. From that I pick up some interesting bits of insight. For example the concurrency issue: Apparently a substantial part of why group chats didn't work was people constantly opening up their 15000 member groups to see who was online. Mind you ~ a perfectly valid use for a group that size. Especially for a "meet & greet" style group but it was killing the server doing that many database requests for online statuses then ~ funneling that information back to a single user. Then doing it AGAIN when that same person hits a dead end with their "hay u wnt sum fuk?" request. And goes back to the group to try again. Adding all this up to include all the concurrently logged in agents on the grid and suddenly their servers implode. LL can't exactly pay for super-servers. But the coding for that particular function in SL is so deeply embedded in the architecture~ with so many things piggy backed on top of it that they really cannot just "oh hey let's rip out this old incredibly inefficient bit of code and replace it with how we should have done this 10 years ago but didn't know any better back then." To make matters worse LL has outsourced a lot of the tasks that the platform performs, not necessarily efficiency checking it. It really is a spagetti code nightmare. So technically ~ I think investing what remaining capital they have into creating a new platform really is the only smart move. They've clearly stated they'll maintain the two platforms separately and I believe them. They've done an excellent job of making improvements to SL in the year I've been here. Object occlusion & rendering , interest lists, Automated derendering of assets beyond a certain render complexity limit, LSL control for materials, Disabling large groups ( not technically an improvement, but a necessary stop-gap fix )~ Viewer Managed marketplace, which albeit was slightly terrifying to undergo ~ largely went off with only minor hitches.. and now SLM Beta search. There have been a lot of improvements. Exlcuding their hardware difficulties things haven't been all that bad... at least in my brief snapshot view of SL~ Again~ back to my diversification argument. Sometimes operating on a different platform provides insight into a prexisting problem and gives a different potential solution. I don't know if these improvements have been results of independent labor or bleedoff from "doing it the right way" on Sansar ~ and then going back to SL and going "maybe we can do something similar and make things better." I don't really know~ I'm just an information sponge. I don't have any actual internal knowledge.

Once you catch a glimpse of the tottering infrastructure backbone that holds the present virtual world up, you would understand the need for a new environment. I'm not speaking of aging hardware. I'm speaking of overall infrastructure. From the design of an "always on" server that maintains the environment in memory at all times~ to the ballooning no-limits personal inventory databases, to the connectivity issues regarding the number of data requests the servers are currently built to withstand from a concurrent number of users accessing group information~ fiddling with their inventories etc etc. SL literally cannot grow without it's current infrastructure imploding to uselessness. All of that is not even taking consideration render pipeline issues. Especially converting a non PBR based world into a PBR based one. ( they use two different classifcations of texture sheets ) Throw into that pot ~ lack of support for displacement maps and tesselation based rendering, SL's stupidly heavy render overhead. That's not even counting the average poly efficiency for objects in SL being unchecked for 12 years. There's a lot of reasons to start over. So yes. The new platform is actually needed. LindenLabs could be lightyears ahead in their thinking for all you know. But the current infrastructure is clouding that ray of hope and forward thinking from ever reaching our eyes. I have no idea! I really don't! I have high hopes though. Ebbe has been throwing out the proper buzz words in his talks such as "scalability" and "cross platform experiences" etc etc. Small reply to Dart~ 70% is charged by some smaller studios on Steam Workshop for submitted skins & added content to their specific games.

As a creator I can tell you some of my most innovative stuff has come from my learning of a new "cool thing" for some other platform and then going "wait how can I apply this to my SL work" Likewise a lot of my wierd hacky cheaty things I have to do for SL wind up having applications elsewhere. Turmoil has some oddly productive side effects. That being said SL has to present itself as an attractive platform. Presently that comes in the form of an approxmiate 12% tax on sales compared to a 40-70% for other platforms. A slight bit of instability is acceptable considering the low tax rate. I'm concerned about Sansar though. What's my incentive to dev for that platform instead of Unity marketplace~ or Turbosquid or SoE Player Studio, Or Steam Workshop or ~ or ~ or ... you get the idea. HEY LL PEOPLE IF YOU READ THIS THREAD ~ ^ THAT COMMENT IS YOUR TAKE AWAY.

Darrius~ I'm not advocating departure from the platform ~ though that may be a side effect of a marketing snaffu. That's something LL will have to decide for themselves~ whether this stunt was profitable in the long run or not and whether to repeat it. Obviously they've came to this conclusion to pull this stunt in the first place off of some sort of prior sucess~ as you yourself pointed out ~ similar stuff has happened before. I'm not advocating departure from the platform ~ rather I'm advocating the ability to quickly depart from the platform~ should the need arise. One is action ~ the other is preparation. That being said~ On a slight conversational tangent~ I've long wondered whether SL & Sansar will be better served by a massive number of professional modelers and design artists rolling through at low output for a little extra fun & money or home brewed "I learned to mesh on SL and now I make my living here". In my short time on SL I've met a lot of people who are "ex industry" ( games and VFX ) people who've now settled into SL in between the here's and there's in their life for either fun or profit. Their stuff is amazing. Personally ~ I'm using it as a gateway money maker while I get my portfolio in order. I've seen a lot of upset merchants in the last 2 weeks ( justifiably upset merchants mind you!!!~ ) and it's gotten me to thinking that maybe some people are critically invested in the platform. Platform diversification solves this on a personal level. ( Income security !! Huzzah! ) Additionally it has the intriguing effect of attracting new talent to the platform that may not have previously taken it seriously via artist communities etc etc. I'm an excellent example as I was brought to SL from a forum for 3d modeling and animation. I didn't take SL seriously at all on my first go a few years back ~ I uninstalled it less than 2 hours after "giving it a go". It wasn't until someone told me I could turn a profit here that I bothered to actually see what was going on. It took a few months of acclimation to SL's backwards way of doing things ~ but I managed it alright and now am pulling income in. So diversifcation is not necessarily evil~ DEPARTURE is. Edit: Fixed a 1 word clarification thingydoo~

If Sansar is successful ~ everyone wins, we all go home knowing we have a place to work for the next decade. If Sansar tanks.... well... those other online environments you listed can't exactly sustain a family~ Pamela ~ you're a skilled builder and interior designer, I'm not posting in your thread to antagonize you or mock you or anything like that ~ But if I were you I'd invest time now into learning Physically based Rendering, Unreal4 Environments, Advanced shaders ( procedural maps, tangent & object space normals, displacement maps) , scene lighting , IBL, and expectations for architechtural rendering. Figure out what your OpenSubdiv plugin does and learn how to design for tesselation based rendering ~Etc etc. Just to clarify ~ since you seem to be taking my well intentioned posts the wrong way ~ I don't know your full skill set~! I'm just saying if you haven't learned all these things yet! Now would probably be a good time to start~ as they will be relevant in Sansar as well! Learning this will make you relevant in the field of environment design. The skillset you have here is needed for creating countless other Virtual Experiences~ including games, movies etc etc. SL is only a small sandbox in a vast beach. On this topic ~ I'm not speaking to you specifically Pamela ~ though this is your thread. I'm speaking to anyone personally invested in SL to a point where were the bottom to fall out they would be in a VERY bad place.

Perhaps the "dangling by a thread" was misinterperted~ The 'thread' in this case isn't how well your SL store is running. Rather the "thread" is your RL survivability should the entirety of Linden Labs crash into insolvency and cease to exist.

I don't know anyone's personal lives here. Nor do I wish to ~ it's none of my business. But impassioned responses are derived from critical investment. I will quote you to you though and I mean this in no way as a personal insult: Pamela Galli wrote: My family depends on my sales, including MP, for their support. Could it be that your investment in the MP is not what mine is, and that might account for the fact that my level of concern is a great deal higher? For me the stakes are very high, and that shows in my posts. Edit: My point in my posts is not to insult you~ or impugne you in any way Pamela~ I'm merely pointing out LL has a bottom line to meet. Expect to be periodically screwed over. By all means~ express your anger and dissatisfaction~ But expect it~ Be prepared for it.

I've seen this thread festering down here, but hadn't taken the time to read the entire thing until now. I had the same thoughts when I saw the front page ads. "Wow how much did they have to pay to get that kind of visibility?" I thought long and hard about it and here's my 2 cents on the off chance that a CM stumbles into this thread and actually reads it :: Suffice it to say I wasn't too thrilled to find out that it was free with random selection. Irked substantially but at the same time things like this are part of the business world. Unfairness in "open market" contests happens. It happens a lot. Not just in our little small business online marketplace here but out in the brick and mortar material goods block too. Do you know how many huge businesses today have been utterly screwed over, had to restructure their entire business and find a new customer base or flat out ceased to exist and gone bankrupt because their competitor won a HUGE government contract in an unfair contest where there was an obvious favorite? CEO's commit suicide over this, but it happens, and it happens a LOT. Yet everytime there's a big government contract up for grabs, every single eligble business steps back up to the plate to try and bid on it because there's really no choice in the matter. So. Yes. It's unfair. Yes it irks people. But yes. LL can get away with it. Now~ I may be a bit wide eyed and naive in the SL marketplace. But I want to point something out to all of you. We all get NOTHING if LL goes belly up. I want to preface this with something~ I really do love SL. I thank it for the opportunity it's granted me and the income I've gained here has helped tide me over in a time of financial instability RL. ( yes~ me with my little shop of 15 items here has been my lifeline ) But I want you (fellow merchants! ) to consider this : If your SL shop is 100% of your RL income. I can understand your very apprehensive "I'm dangling by a thread here and LL keeps strumming it to hear a tune" But I ask one question? If you're *that* successful as a merchant, you obviously posess skills to enter other online marketplaces, why haven't you created a backup plan yet? Why haven't you put thought into contingencies? Smart business is exactly that. Diversification. Broad customer base, many product lines, many distributors. I'm not saying pick up and leave SL, but please be sane in planning your life~ do not put ALL your eggs in one basket. And to LL: Please, if you can avoid it. Don't screw us over too hard please. Some of us are trying to make a living here.

::takes the "maybe someday" reply and runs with it held over her head like a trophy::

You may be experiencing the tail end of a bug that's in the process of being squished. Presently the mesh uploader truncates material names with spaces in them. That means that "Material #22" , "Material #23" , "Material #24" etc etc ~ all become "Material", "Material", "Material" Thus becoming indistinguishable from eachother and becoming a single massive "face". This bug is being fixed in the next MAINT viewer update. Expect it to take a few weeks to go live. In the mean time just rename your materials "Mat_22" or "Material_A" or whatever your hearts desire~ without spaces.

If prim count is a concern and you need multi-faced clicakble regions that are capable of displaying a distinct texture. Mesh is your friend. A single mesh object can have up to 8 front facing individual clickalble "faces" Each capable of holding it's own texture. Each mesh for this simple object will be 0.5 prims so you can link two together to form 16 forward facing texturable surfaces for 1 Prim Land Cost. In English~ TLDR; ~ Mesh solves all the problems. Contact me in world if you need a meshydoodle to do this, it's literally 2 minutes of work to make one.

commenting is done by placing a // in front of the line so the text becomes a different color it'll look something like this: // llSay ( 0 , llDumpList2String ( a_list_list_name_here , " , " ) ) ;

A picture or two is worth a few 1000 words in this case~

If you're talking about filling in a prim face like a tic-tac-toe board, no this is not possible, as each face on the prim only can hold one unique texture. I recommend sitting down with your prim and assigning various textures to it to get an idea for what you are dealing with. However you can move a single texture around on a prim face to follow the llDetectedTouchUV () coordinates. So that the image will be adjusted dependant upon where you click.

There is a 3-5 day lag time between the date of reset and when your Beta Inventory updates. Aside from that the beta grid login hasn't been retaining information properly for the better part of the last 2 months. I'm unsure about what is going on there. If you haven't had your inventory update in 7 days time from the date you changed your password feel free to submit a BUG report~

I never thought of the Linden team as such. I was just happy that Grumpity dared post a technical reply. Perhaps the humor of my post was lost~ At any rate!! Onwards!!

::does her best to hide a girlish grin:: Sometimes a little flash of technical speech helps illuminate that a programming team is not in fact a bunch of gnomes sitting in a dark room and performing juggling tricks with the dials of the machines they're supposed to be adjusting. It is a notion that easily seeps into people's heads when they see something as not quite working, since few venture into the dark depths of devland with flashlights. I'll keep poking at MP Beta and providing meaningful feedback once this latest round of digital creepy-crawlies have been hunted down and squooshed. -Regards, Liz

Yay!: I created one other BUG for you~ ( I posted it in the prior pages of this thread but I figured I'd put in a BUG Jira since it seems to have been overlooked ) https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-10830