[A Positive Brainstorming / Suggestion Box Thread - Ideas for Improving Second Life Sociability, Usability and Retention]

- Way, waaay too many to list, but more creator-friendly features and stuff we've been asking about for years. Fortunately some of this is marked "tracked" on the feedback website, but still. Shiny PBR and mirrors might be more appealing to the "average" user, but it's important that QoL features are implemented for creators, because that's who's making SL's content. I, personally, don't care how shiny PBR looks when it's currently a pain in the ass to work with.

- I've already made a feedback thread about it (and others have as well) but; better content filtering and categories. The fact that enabling "Adult" content will show you everything from vanilla sexual content to scat & ***** is absurd. Long term SL users who have become desensitized to this stuff probably don't think much of it, but this is part of why SL gets a bad rep, & why SL creators like myself sometimes feel a little awkward to tell non-SL players what we do.  There should be an "Extreme" category or something so, if this stuff HAS to stay up then it should be tucked away where only people who go looking for it will find it.

- Related to the above point: place search is also currently atrocious. Keyword spam for places is a big problem and typing in a single keyword relating to a community usually returns misleading, spammy, or offputting results. For example; searching "furry" used to (probably still does, haven't checked) show a ton of AFK sex sims & then ***** poseball sims first, which were higher traffic than genuine furry hangout/shopping sims. Searching for a particular brand of mesh body or head, such as "eBody" or "Lelutka" returns tons of stores who have put those keywords in their description, making it hard to find the ACTUAL mainstores for these brands. "Roleplay" is filled to the brim with non-roleplay sims - and so forth. It's hard to find new places relevant to what you're actually looking for, especially if you're a new player and you don't know how to navigate or spot the "legit" sims from the spammy garbage.

- There's a lot of weird little things about SL that it doesn't teach you, but are incredibly useful to know and use. Things such as mesh attaching to "Right Hand" by default & how to change it, and why it's better to NOT have everything stacked on Right Hand. Even a lot of creators don't seem to know about this (or just can't be bothered to pick a different attachment point). Another example is the build menu; I've sold things such as textures that require knowledge of the build menu, and a lot of users don't really understand the build menu or what individual options mean. 

I think all of these things would make SL a lot "friendlier" to new & old users alike, and thus, more people would stick around. To those of us who have been on SL for a long time, it's easier to forget that it's got a steep learning curve. 

 

[DRD Facing Unfair TOS Enforcement]

I seriously question the priorities of LL and the Marketplace.

The Marketplace has been steadily decreasing in quality, with more and more stores that sell ripped/stolen mesh (that the average user CANNOT flag, because according to the flag options only the copyright holder can. Nothing ever seems to be done about these stores, and new ones keep popping up all the time. There are also stores that, as far as I can tell, sell completely fake items. There is one "store" in particular that sells AOs advertised only with out-of-SL 3D renders, 2D drawn art, or AI generated images, that are usually priced at several thousand lindens, it's very obviously a scam. There are also AOs being sold with stolen animations, that people have PROVEN in the reviews & known about for years - that are still up. Or, how about the rise of stores that sell only AI-generated slop and flood tag(s) with their "unique full perm textures"? Or having your search suddenly bombed with ***** content and whatever else because for some reason that's apparently TOS compliant?

My point is; there's a lot of MP stores that are clearly outright scams or at the very least "bad faith", which the average user can't flag because we don't have the option to. So these stores stay up, and it makes the Marketplace experience increasingly unpleasant. 

Why go after legitimate stores for such a non-issue as sharing an account when there are countless TOS-breaking or shady stores that seem to be immune?

At the very least there should be an option for "business accounts." Even in-world vendor systems such as MD labs allow multiple avatars to be credited/work on the same store/brand and as far as I know that's TOS-compliant... or else these vendors systems would be getting in trouble for it, right?

 

[Genuine question: Why No Modify?]

I'm genuinely curious; why are so many, if not the majority of clothing & hair stores in Second Life now selling predominantly copy/no modify/no transfer items? This definitely wasn't as widespread

But despite seeing so many stores do this, I have yet to hear creators explain why they do it. I create things myself, I always get thanked for making things copy/modify and I believe my sales do better because of it. I genuinely can't understand what the point of making stuff no modify is other than to inconvenience the customer.

Here's some "speculated" reasons I often hear, guessed by non-creators:

"So they can't just buy the black/white pack and tint it"

This doesn't make logical sense for two reasons. One; black/white items tinted a vibrant color look bad. They are not comparable to properly textured, colored items, and I don't know any person who actually does this. Two, this reason especially doesn't work for hair, because most no modify hairs these days include tint HUDs. So that clearly can't be the sole reason...

"To protect against copybots"

Not only is this untrue (no modify items are NOT protected) it also does not explain why so many stores abruptly switched from selling copy/mod to copy only.

"The customer might break it if they can modify it."

Alpha Blending items break on their own, this especially applies to hair. Allowing us to modify the item may actually allow us to fix issues, should they arise. Also, I don't think that it's fair to inconvenience all customers just because some might break it... if it's copy anyway, they can just redeliver a new copy.

"To sell more fatpacks"

Some stores do sell modify only in fatpacks, but not all. Most stores don't even offer that option.

Obviously I have bias here - I like my items (both ones I sell AND buy) to be modify. Modify permissions allow us to tint, fix alpha issues, wear more items (by linking them together), clean up unnecessary scripts to improve performance, rename items for easier finding in the inventory, and make way more creative avatars. I see only upsides. But after being immensely frustrated by so many of my go-to hair stores abruptly changing to copy only permissions, I really would like to understand the reason why. Surely there must be a reason, right...? Or is everyone going no modify just because all the other brands are?

(Sorry if this is in the wrong category, I didn't see a "general SL creator discussion" section!)

 

[Is there any way to report something other than the inworld report feature?]

Title. Basically, I need to report a TOS violation, but the in-world report feature requires that I catch the user in-world, and only has 1 text box to explain the issue. This is not really suitable for this particular situation because;

• The user in question has multiple accounts and it's hard to find them all active inworld.
• The reason I am reporting is NOT an isolated incident but an ongoing issue.
• The issue is something I need to provide multiple screenshots and explain in-depth; so a quick text summary will not cut it.

Is there any alternative form of reporting that I can use, such as making a ticket online or similar?

[Unable to upload rigged mesh]

I tried deleting some of the unused bones (like all the faces bones) but it still didn't let me upload. I'm not sure if just deleting them is enough though.

[Unable to upload rigged mesh]

I'm trying to rig a basic shirt mesh to a dummy rig for a specific mesh body. The body is fitted mesh/bento, I am NOT using Avatar.

I followed the simple tutorial here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz8f3VlVbNc

It's not the body I am trying to rig to, and it's a little outdated since it shows an old version of Blender in the video (I'm using 2.8) but all of the functions are basically the same. I managed to follow it and got the mesh to appear to be rigged (ie: the mesh moved when I moved the bones in Blender.) But when I tried to upload it to test, the "Include skin weights" box is un-selectable.

I have not been able to find any other tutorials for Blender 2.8 or fitmesh/bento rigging tutorials that don't use Avastar, so, I really don't know what's gone wrong.

Can someone tell me what I might be missing, or links to more updated tutorials for rigging? Thanks in advance.