Carole Franizzi

So a Contributor rank refers to contributions of half-baked, one-liner sarcasm?? Well, thanks for your utterly priceless contribution to this thread and the topic it touches on.

Charolotte Caxton wrote: Carole Franizzi wrote: "we"?? Have you formed some sort of committee?? Are you the spokesperson? The Nation Front For The Liberation of Digital Homes And Gardens? I have no pleasure in threads which are just a long series of images. Forums are for discussion, in my opinion and whether you like it or not, I get to express my dislike of the suggestion as much as you have the right to express your support of it. Actually, you said we first as in, " It's been three days and we're already asking for extra forums??? " I said we as in those of us who said we would like a Home and Garden forum. Carole says: Yes, and I repeat - WE (i.e. the forum users) - are really pathetic at times. WE nagged and nagged LL to sort our the forums and make less sub-sub-sub-categories so the whole thing was more useable. And lo and behold - for once they listen to us and DO it! Make a much neater more concise forum....and what do WE do....why, WE count to 10 and start asking for more sub-sub-sub-sub-categories again...... Charolotte Caxton wrote: You do get to express your dislike as much as I get to express mine. Carole says: Oh, that's big of you. That's a change of tune from earlier, though...

"we"?? Have you formed some sort of committee?? Are you the spokesperson? The Nation Front For The Liberation of Digital Homes And Gardens? I have no pleasure in threads which are just a long series of images. Forums are for discussion, in my opinion and whether you like it or not, I get to express my dislike of the suggestion as much as you have the right to express your support of it.

Well, I don't know about you, but I'm seeing them EVERYWHERE. Actually, I take that back. I'm not seeing them everywhere. If I saw them in fairgrounds and fairyland sims I probably wouldn't have noticed them. I'm seeing them in sex sims. Yep. Dressed like lil gurlies, with ankle socks and baby doll dresses and puff sleeves, they sometimes were flatties and sometimes heels, which creates an odd effect - rather like seeing a little girl trying on her mother's high-heeled shoes. The cutsie hair-dos, like bunches and ponytails, add to the infantile effect, the primary "symptom" of which is the height - usually about waist-height to everyone else. The odd lollypop or teddybear can also be seen.... So....what the heck is going on? I've been known to challenge them the odd time, but you go round and round in circles trying to talk sensibly with them. "Me??? A child avie???? You gotta be kidding??? You seen my boobs?? Does a child have boobs?". And they're right. A child doesn't have boobs. And that's the little trick. Hair ribbons and lollypops, ankle socks and gingham print dress, small, skinny, childlike body.....with a couple of boobs - that classic ace to pull out and play when they hassle you about being a child avie in an inappropriate place. *sarcasm on* Yeah...'course you're not a child avie....you got boobs.... *sarcasm off*

Oh gawd....they just tidied up the forums after months of messy confusion. It's been three days and we're already asking for extra forums??? Why not have a prim nail forum? Or a hair forum? Or a pet forum? I mean where do you stop? And anyway, what the heck would such a forum be about? An endless boring series of threads showing off houses and gardens. Let's face it - it'd be a variation on a vanity thread with lots of free publicity thrown in disguised as recommendations... Nah... Let's keep the forums minimalistic. Set up a group like Home and Garden Lovers United, and you can swap photos of your little palaces to your heart's content.

Nike Xaris wrote: I know I put a "fine-line" but I deleted it... It shouldn't really matter how old a person is, its the chemistry and who how the person acts inside and out... besides, you are only as old as you feel. This is EXCELLENT news indeed since I myself am looking for a new SL and RL love (the last four or five couldn't really stand the pace, poor dears). A few lines about myself. I'm happy to inform you that the fine line of which you speak (75-ish, would you say?) is still a whole FIVE years away, so don't hesitate to contact me for a date in-world! I'm attaching a photo of my avie which is 100% accurate reproduction of the RL me. (Well, okay, the avie looks a few years younger than the real me, but don't let that put you off).

I'd say that urgent intervention is required. You can actually "hear" the death-rattle in here. I did a quick count of the posts on the first page of the category this thread is in - it's around 200-ish total - spread over a pageful of topics. Is it just my nostalgic imagination or didn't most half-interesting threads easily tally up a couple of hundred posts each?? I doubt that simply tidying up the mess of catogories, sub-categories and sub-sub-categories will be sufficient to resuscitate the poor, dying creature, but it'd be a start.

Sylvia Tamalyn wrote: From what I've observed, this seems to happen when the Ruthed person is using the latest V2, and the observer is not using the latest Phoenix. This may happen with other TPVs, but I haven't tested them. It appears that until the latest Phoenix update, the avatar physics in V2 was the problem, and Phoenix couldn't handle it properly. One solution, as Carole noted, was the for V2 user to drop back to an earlier version of their viewer. Since the latest Phoenix update (which includes avatar physics), I haven't seen the issue come back, even with I'm with someone using the latest V2. There you go, Ian - that might be your problem too. Thanks, Sylvia.

All i know is that I saw myself fine but others saw me dwarfed (photographic proof was provided several times) - I was using the latest version of V2, whilst I could see no pattern in the viewers used by the others. Changed to old viewer version and nobody ever saw mini-me again. If you're using Phoenix or some other viewer, what I said would be irrelevant but if you've been using V2's latest version you might want to have a bash with the old version.

I'm afraid my advice is in the opposite to what everyone else has said - I got afflicted with SL-dwarfism too and only by DOWN-grading did I solve the problem. I'd been using the official SL viewer which, when it upgraded to the very latest version, started causing me problems. I used an old version and - voilà - problem solved!

Could it be that the bra and pants are part of your skin? You said you're newish - I believe some of the new skins incorporate underwear and can't be removed - unless you replace the whole skin, of course. You could grab a demo skin to try and see if this is the problem. If that's not the explanation, try this - when things get "stuck" , I sometimes find it works to replace the stuck item with another of the same sort. For example, wear another pants layer. Though I'm not sure if that works anymore with the new added layers system. Sorry I can't be of more help.

Void Singer wrote: Carole Franizzi wrote: On the grid status page there was no mention of inventories appearing empty - none of the multiple times i checked it. But don't let that stop you fawning over LL's WONDERFUL customer service and comminications skills.... Grid Status Said: [postED 7:13AM PDT May 11, 2011] We are currently experiencing issues with some of our central services, which may cause issues with L$ purchases, inventory, teleporting, login failures, and region availability. Please refrain from L$ transactions or rezzing no-copy items until this issue is resolved. Our network team is working on this issue, and expects to have it resolved soon. Please watch this blog for further information. so I take it your complaint isn't that it wasn't mentioned, but that your specific problem was not explicitly shown, or perhaps that the warning did not come fast enough? rather than a lack of "a simple, short communication from your company informing us that you're aware of the service being malfunctioning and reassuring us that it's being looked",... do I have that correct? and since you didn't see your specific issue, I'm sure you reported it via a ticket or live help... right? so that they could post it? ::is not known for fawning over anything (least of all LL's resident communications), but is occasionally a known for being a faun:: All I saw for the duration the issue affected my accounts was simply the notification of a server restart. Full stop. I'm aware you think I have reading difficulties, but I can assure you that if they'd been such information when I personally (and a whole load of other people) started having "issues" (totally or partially empty inventories) I wouldn't have wasted time scurrying in here, don't you think? Why scurry in here and not to make a report? Well, since LL has the fame of not being super-fast in dealing with issues and our fellow residents are often endlessly and infinitely wise and well-informed about the ins and outs of SL, for me, in my growing unease over whether or not I'd lost a couple of thousand quids worth of goodies, my priority was to solve the problem at the earliest. What eventually solved the problem for me was the advice launched by a fellow resident who, in a group chat, reassured the panicking SLers (growing by the minute, I hasten to add) and suggested the remedy. Last thought on the subject - why is it not possible for LL to launch grid-wide emergency communications in such cases - including one warning people not to make purchaes or rez non-copy items?

Acheron Gloom wrote: Yes, because Oskar totally said to stop being sniveling big girlies. Wait, he didn't. It must be great being a clerk or a technician at LL. In what other company would you get a fan club?? ADDED - Actually, he said much worse. I found his attitude appalling.

Void Singer wrote: Carole Franizzi wrote: [...] I'll repeat what I said earlier - a simple, short communication from your company informing us that you're aware of the service being malfunctioning and reassuring us that it's being looked at would be a reasonable-to-expect PR gesture.[...] ya mean like the one on grid status linked multiple times above? what? just saying.... @Oskar: I appreciate the nod, but Cerise actually called it before I got to it... I just reiterated for the person who hadn't read the previous two posts identifying it. On the grid status page there was no mention of inventories appearing empty - none of the multiple times i checked it. But don't let that stop you fawning over LL's WONDERFUL customer service and comminications skills....

Oskar Linden wrote: Void Singer is right. This issue was unrelated to this mornings update to the simulator code. The centrals services that do all the region coordinating and communicating to things like the asset servers started failing. I appreciate everyone's passion for Second Life and I know how much this place means to you. When it comes to reporting issues like this raw emotion doesn't help us. I don't need to know how much L$ your inventory is worth. Telling me how upset you are won't help us diagnose the issues. What really helps is a calm description of the steps you have done to reproduce an issue with specific information about where the bugs are occurring. This means going to Help -> About Second Life and including server and viewer versions in your report. __Oskar You may not be interested in how much each of our inventories are worth but the simple fact remains that for many of us, it has less to do with "raw emotions" and "passion" and more to do with the simple fact some (most) of us have, over the years, spent a great deal of money in SL and I think we're all very well aware that we would have no come-back if our inventories did ever go "poof". Even when it's one single item (which has happened several times to me), it's rather irritating (rather like buying a newspaper in rl and have the wind blow it out of your hand and into a puddle) - the concern I personally have when I log and nothing rezzes and my inventory appears totally or mostly empty is that the dreaded day has come and I've lost the hundreds of US dollars worth of material I've bought here. In my case, that's akin to turning on my $2,000 TV and discovering it simply won't work. Aren't I justified in being a tad anxious? In the three years I've been here, although I've heard of inventories going missing, this is the first time it's occurred to me. I'll repeat what I said earlier - a simple, short communication from your company informing us that you're aware of the service being malfunctioning and reassuring us that it's being looked at would be a reasonable-to-expect PR gesture. If you require extra information from your clients to solve the problem more quickly - then that's even more reason to dash in here and request the specific information you need. I'm not a VR technician - I've no idea what useful information I can supply you unless you tell me. I'm sure we'd all be only to happy to collaborate in finding a solution to the problem. Being told to stop being sniveling big girlies is not the way, however, to create warm and fuzzy customer relations.

Add my name to the list - just logged with an alt and it seems that her inventory has been decimated - no shape, skin, eyes, etc, etc, etc....who do I speak to to get all my money back?? I'm going to check with Carole whose inventory is even bigger, the loss of which would be even more shocking. It would be nice to get some feedback immediately from someone at LL as it's pretty clear this is an extensive and pretty dramatic issue as at the moment it's pretty reasonable for all those affected (could be all of us, as far as I know) to want reassurance that the problem is just temporary. PS Just spotted a group chat FULL to bursting with reports of missing objects and ruthed avies.

valerie Inshan wrote: Carole Franizzi wrote: DirtyLucine69 wrote: Stfu and get out : I'm finding it so hard to believe you have difficulty making friends. I mean - you're so charming... Carole, I think she does deserve her name: Dirty indeed, yuk! Yep. Potty-mouthed...

DirtyLucine69 wrote: Well Dirty was random Lucine is the name and "69" is from the band the 69 eyes You know, I had a friend with the same problem as you. She came from a Brazil which, as you know, has a very warm climate. When she opened her account with SL, she'd just come back from a holiday on the Greek island of Lesbos. She was a surgeon in real-life and spent most of her working day wearing latex gloves. Plus, her main activity in SL was building - in particular, she liked making in-scale models of Dark Shadow Maps (yeah, she was pretty geeky). Anyhoo, the poor soul was constantly hassled for sex even though she would explain over and over and over that her name, HotLesboLatexBDSMer didn't have anything to do with naughty stuff! DirtyLucine69 wrote: Stfu and get out I'm finding it so hard to believe you have difficulty making friends. I mean - you're so charming...

valerie Inshan wrote: Carole Franizzi wrote: My suggestion would be to re-think your name. Carole, this is certainly one of the best laughs i have had in these forums!!! Well Valerie, I don't mean to be cynical, but if you have a name which contains both "dirty" and "69", I think it's pretty likely that the sort of people who are going to contact you probably won't want to discuss the global economic crisis. :smileyvery-happy:

My suggestion would be to re-think your name.

Suspiria Finucane wrote: In greener pastures with fond memories of the good times Can I get a cutting of that jump-suit, Susperia? It looks just like the sort of thing Carole would wear.

Qwalyphi Korpov wrote: OP could have posted - "Opps... I forgot my annual premium payment was coming due and now my account is suspended. (obtw, same thing happened the previous year... hehe, guess I'm forgetful) Now the Lindens won't unfreeze the account unless I pay the bill. I think they should change that policy. We should have the option to drop back to basic as of the billing date. I know things like tier need to be cleared up, like for the land I purchased. They should have procedures to handle that. I've entered a JIRA asking for that change (JIRA-!@## link) so please vote & or watch it if you agree. As things are now, if you're like me, you probably should stay with the free basic account." But NO! Instead we get - "NO ONE SHOULD EVER GET A PREMIUM ACCOUNT. I have been a member for 5 years. I have spent thousands of dollars in second life. Now the Lindens have taken everything from me simply because I can't afford to pay them $72. Etc." Carole comments: WE get?? I should warn you - I have a terrible chronic ailment which has a horrible Jekyll and Hyde effect on me, making me abandon my usual polite manners, transforming me into an obnoxious little beast - and that occurs whenever I read people self-proclaim themselves official spokesperson of a community in which they have the same rights - no more, no less - as the members they are policing. Would it be rude of me to suggest that the OP, being the one facing the problem, has the right to choose the wording of the post which illustrates the nature of that problem? (To be clearer - what's stopping me or anyone else telling you that WE feel that YOU should have written: "Although I fully understand your profound disappointment and upset, may I suggest that you re-consider the benefits of a premium account which are, in my experience, the following...bla bla"?). I also note you are privy to what goes on in LL meetings. My heartfelt congratulations to you. However, you're not the first, nor will be the last forumite who claims to possess these eerie telepathic powers. As I see Vania corrects you in her subsequent post, forgive me if I'm a little sceptical of the efficiency of your supernatural skills.

Dresden Ceriano wrote: Carole, I agree with you on everything you're saying about LL. I am not a LL fanboy by way means. You don't have to be Mensa member to know LL is one of the worst companies when it comes to customer service. But you don't have to memorize the SL wiki to know that when you have a recurring bill for a service, you have to either cancel it ahead of time or pay for it. Otherwise, it will be discontinued. That doesn't mean I don't feel for the OP because of what she's going through, I most certainly do. If this were to happen to me I'd be very angry. Especially, because after being a paying member for so long, I'd expect LL would be interested in working something out instead of saying... tough tits, your on your own. It's unfortunate, but this doesn't seem to be the case. LL knows full well that most of their customers are heavily invested in Second Life, both financially and emotionally. In which case, my guess is that they feel they can get away with the crap customer service, the ridiculous tier fees, etc., etc. They probably figure most people will put up with it, especially considering that there really is no decent competition... yet. It makes no sense, to me, to treat your customers like they're expendable and your not. Eventually people get fed up, take their money and leave. And it serves LL right. The only problem is that it also adds to the deterioration of our community, which is sad. But what else can you do? ...Dres Second Life residents can be their own worst enemy at times. They let their emotions haze their clarity of vision and they forget completely that they're not survivors of a nuclear war, space-shipwrecked on a private planet belonging to some magnanimous demi-god who allows them refuge but whose benevolence is uncertain in nature and duration - hence everyone falling over themselves to stroke egos and appear suitably humble and grateful. It's a business contract like the thousands of others one signs during a lifetime and in this particular case, the product is created almost entirely by its clients. I'm not belittling the technical knowledge and the stroke of genius which was the catalyst for this platform, but my sensation is that the creator of SL himself must have much greater awareness than many of the residents themselves that the collaboration which makes and keeps SL what it is is completely symbiotic . There would be no SL without the first Mr Linden's amazing vision and ability - but neither would it exist without the input from the thousands of users. I often wonder how much cringing and bemused smiling goes on when LL employees read the posts which raise them to superhero status. Most of SL is pretty amazing. Bits of it don't work too well. Two of the bits which don't work too well are the communications and customer service - these are problems which exist from the very first moment of a new user entering SL - as much as they've tried, a lot of basic information just doesn't get across quickly enough to enable a new user to engage and "commit". I'd be really curious to know how many give up after an unsuccessful and perplexing half hour waddling round an info hub. I know, from personal experience, if it hadn't been for other residents taking me under their wing, I wouldn't be here now at all. Vital information just isn't relayed quickly and clearly enough and although everyone feels the OP should have known about the ins and outs of passing from a premium to a basic account, I think a safety net system which automatically sends messages warning the user what the consequences will be if he doesn't take certain steps would be the most obvious, logical solution to not losing an old client. And that's what it boils down to - a steady trickle of old, invested clients being forced to rethink their commitment in the platform or, as often happens, actually forced out of it completely. It's sheer madness. That's why I feel, rather than gloat over another user's misfortune, we'd all be wiser to use such instances as an opportunity to remind LL in a united voice that loyal regular customers are their greatest resource.

Dresden Ceriano wrote: You can all talk about what LL should do and how they should treat their customers all you want, and on many things, as far as that goes, I would probably agree with you. But the cold hard truth of what these people, whom you say are missing the point, are trying to point out, is that this is what LL does and that is indeed how they treat their customers. The simple fact of the matter is, a company can and will discontinue service if you owe them money. LL is no exception, nor do they differentiate between premium and basic members when it comes to that. I once had a SL boyfriend who was a basic member and for some reason, that I never fully understood, his credit card company reversed the charge to LL he'd made in order to purchase $L. His account was completely blocked until he could scrape up enough money to pay them back. In that respect, it's really no different than what happened to the OP. Do I think that LL could do better to come to some sort of agreement with the OP? Of course I do. If nothing else, they could make her pay only for what she owed up to that point, then set her back to basic membership. While we can talk about all of LL's shortcomings until we turn blue in the face, the point is the OP didn't cover her ass and now she has to pay... one way or the other. ...Dres No, it's not as simple as that, Dres. What people do, when they troop into a thread like this, is smirk over somebody else's hard luck and feel all warm and fuzzy inside over their own superior knowledge of the medium - and it's nauseating, to say the least. My point is that any one of us, including those who believe they're more in-the-know, more techy, more pc-savvy, more on-line-games-wise, could just as easily come a cropper. What won't happen is that those who were seen posting "Well, it kinda serves you right because you hadn't memorised the entire X number of pages which explain all the technical and legal elements which constitute this game" are hardly likely to come back when it happens to them. They'll probably just have to slink off and fume quietly in a corner over the lousy customer service they got from an entertainment infrastucture they might just have spent a fortune on. All over the world companies give varying degrees of customer service. The old adage "the customer's always right" has long since become obsolete, however, it's unacceptable to twist the situation around and cast the clients in the role of benefactors of the largesse of a company's services, and who should be damn grateful for anything they're offered. Most of us spend money in here - some of us spend a lot of money in here - it's hardly unreasonable to desire decent customer service when, after your money's been taken, the game, for one reason or another - it doesn't work. Communications from the company are often difficult to find - you have to know exactly where to look - and when you do find them, they're not always clear or accurate. You may or may not remember when LL was advertising its Teen Grid as an adult-free area - whilst forgetting to mention on the page dedicated to concerned parents that their kiddies were in direct contact with adults through the merged forums and the private message systems. That was a very simple case of giving false information through convenient omission of facts. When suddenly they began deducting amounts from my credit card without paying out Lindens (which was what I thought I was buying) but crediting my US dollar balance without any clear explanation on how to transform the dollar balance into Lindens (it was a fellow forumite who had to talk me through the process) - I got a very clear example of how poor their communications can be. I think we'd all be wise to stop falling into the trap of seeing LL as Olympus populated by gods, creators of our "world", and remember they're just a company, populated by clerks and technicians - some of whom aren't particularly good at their jobs, apparently. Putting up with poor service without feeling you have the right to complain is another example of that fan-boy mentality which I find both infantile and counter-productive. If we all spoke up when things didn't work properly they'd actually be a bigger chance the company would sort the issues out more quickly. The opposite attitude - let's be grateful for what we've got and it's your own fault when things don't work - just serves to consolidate the weaknesses in LL's customer services. In this particular case - a service which is free (and which is used by many new players every day free-of-charge) being taken away from an old customer who's already invested lots and would have continued to invest, because he didn't keep up payments for the higher-end service, is absolutely ludicrous. And if the day comes when LL has to close SL due to lack of clientele it'll be too late to point out that maybe - just maybe - if their customer service hadn't been so bad and they hadn't lost so many loyal old clients, they (and we) might not be in that situation at all.

SoonerGlass wrote: If I had been around since 2005. yeah. I WAS around since 2005, but I had no reason to use the dashboard. Stupid stupid me. Yeah, I get that. thanks. It's very easy. Yeah. Thanks. I get that. And for anyone who asked, no, of course they haven't resurrected my avie or generally indicated in any way, shape or form that this issue means a thing to them. It doesn't. I can only commend those who have the foresight to save themselves the misery and downgrade. I also really love the way, as I'm looking around in the forums, this topic was moved and then I had to login to find it. Bury hot issues much, LL? oh wait. Right. See? And I promised myself I was going to be less naive. If you actually quantified all the skills and knowledge you need to require to play SL in an average way, and the number of documents in the form of ToS, guidelines, tutorials, forum and blog posts, etc., that you require to read....it would work out probably at not much less energy and time invested than a first year at university. None of us "knows it all" - all of us have gaps in our SL wisdom (and if you don't maybe you ought to be wondering why you have that amount of free time) and none of us can afford to point fingers at others for not having their own diploma-level knowledge of all the technical and legal ins and outs of a frigging video game. Personally, I'm very very sorry to hear of your problems and shocked by the lousy treatment you got from a company which should be trying harder to keep their esteemed clients happy. A special word of mention should also go to those who crawl out of the woodwork to let a fellow SLer know how much more savvy and clued-up they are - you warm the cockles of my hearts, guys. I still think that if full knowledge of a a game such as SL requires you to give up your fulltime job and get a divorce in order to free up the time necessary to swat up, then there's something inherently very wrong with the usability of the system.