Void Singer

much appreciated on the update FJ

You know full well that SL has never worked well with wireless... wireless doesn't handle the sustained and erratic stream of data from SL... if it's shutting off, then you have a problem with crap hardware... no one else has this problem, because they're all bright enough to realize that heavy irregular streaming + wireless is a recipe for problems. @Ann Parcel size WAS over emphasized in the past, it's not a claim, it was a testable fact. no one is suggesting we return to that... it is however relevant to a great many places (and your extra prims example is broken since you can group any parcel on the same region together). it's not a simple on/off issue, you might try some color vision on it. @Ciaran: I pity the poor soul who would try to implement category switching for keywords, twice as much if they they had to try to place category words .... the only way to do that properly is under user control... and even that would be likely to be a mess between shopping and every other type of activity wanting it's own special category.

Ciaran Laval wrote: The reason there was a problem in the first place was keyword stemming. which was giving the top paid classifieds upto three times as much word coverage. Keyword stemming hasn't gone awat. We're back to me asking you why a 512m parcel that is dedicated to steampunk should be less relevant than a full sim that has only a few steampunk items? On my RP Sim we have an events stage in the sky, we have no room on the ground for it, the sky area isn't as large as the parcel it's on. The only parcelling I have really done is for the tavern and market area and that's because I insist we have them on different parcels, I could merge them. The market would suddenly be on a full sim parcel, why should it get an advantage for that? When I'm searching for something I want to find the content I'm looking for, I don't want to spend time trawling around a hair store that has a small line in mens clothing when there's a much better mens clothing store with more content on a smaller parcel. Parcel content is what people are after, not parcel size. for the exact reasons you stated... both have limited space, but a region has more literal content and more room which equate to more potential people interaction.. that's hugely important for all sorts of non-store and social locations. the space available to a region to describe it's content has to be focused to it's main content, but can cover a wider range, so the owner has to cherry pick it's majority content... that's always going to be over the focused content of a 512 plot... and if it isn't the region owner is throwing away business, because people will come in, not see what they were after and not come back. when they could have been generating leads for content that they do have a majority of. content quality is a completely different case, and I don't think there is anything realistic that search can do about that right now. Also, not all content is measured in prims, social and RP venues find themselves in the position of providing space and content, but largely, space. more space = more interactions, more people = more popularity and driving traffic to them. I'm not suggesting that the size is more important than other stats, merely that it IS important for a wide range of venues, and should account for something. Throwing out metrics is never a good idea... if they become broken, reduce their weight or refactor how they are calculated, but you never throw out a useful metric... you just rebalance it.

you won't hear any objections from me, I'm an unapologetic advocate of efficiency AND consumer rights

twitter is mostly universal in it's demographic... most joins now are to have contact points for information from specific points, with a side of sending information as well. your social circles determine who you see using it the most, and often the general level of personal sharing... modified by each persons limits. a lot of people do however seem to forget that even if someone isn't following you, public tweets are still public, and easily mined.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/18/secret-service-twitter-fox-news_n_863786.html since you mentioned officials using twitter.... I thought it was funny as hell and agree.. Fox news drones on about the most ridiculous crap at times, and tends to beat dead horses back to life too, although the piece they were waiting for to monitor was important (and the secret service deserved to get slammed over it) @Kidd: I hate to see stupidity like that... I've actually seen facebook and similar used to great effect to engage students and keep them more interested in what they're studying

Ciaran Laval wrote: So they can be at the top for several different search terms, this is a well known tactic. When you're specialising, you need less search terms. LL cut the number of characters in classifieds precisely because of this issue. and it worked... so why then abandon parcel size as a stat? this actually gives smaller parcels a edge since they can cover their content more thoroughly while the larger parcels cannot, which balances nicely against a parcel size modifier Vendors have long been borked in terms of being useful in search, keyword stuffing in prims is more of an issue on larger parcels where they can hide hundreds of the damn things, and we have seen this happen too. The parcel size on its own shouldn't be a weighting factor, a larger parcel of content a should beat a smaller parcel of content a by virtue of having more content, but that's not what always happens. keywords/m^2 is an easy calculation to cut stuffing, and remember that stores are not the only things in SL, parcel size matters a great deal to events, hangouts, RP areas, sandboxes, educational venues, etc etc.

::here's me hoping that was dry humor::

why would a ful region, with what you admit is limited description space list a search term for a category that it holds less than a relevant amount of content for? if it has less than a 512 parcel worth of items, then that means that less than 1% of it's business is devoted to that... there would be no reason to list it, when other things are more common to it that could generate income and need the limited space available... sorry no I don't buy that argument at all and I was very careful to say that it is NOT the only stat that should be looked at... parcel items should also count, although frankly they are hugely limited in that it just encourages keyword stuffing of every single prim you can, and actually hurts most smaller plots since they tend to need to rely on vendors, which reduces their for sale item counts compared to what a bigger plot can afford to waste on box vendors it is not the stat that is at fault, but how it is weighted and applied. when they first applied it, it was given too much weight, and that is something I think we can both agree screws up rankings.

::makes announcemnt:: ~3.28ft = 1m (I am not in any way affiliated with LL and that was a joke)

very odd that it won't let you even drag it... have you tried the optional menu at the bottom with a gear on it? it should contain all the normal options when the folder is selected. ETA: there is also a trash icon down at the bottom right that should remove the folder if the folder is selected.

addressed to a card holder, from an online gambling site you say..... actually that does have my attention now. I suspect the source of the leak would be the company that handles non-us payments to LL. does one have to agree to a separate terms of service when using that company? if so, LL may actually be a victim here too... depending on their contract agreement with that company. or they may be an unwitting accomplice. this could get very interesting, very fast.

I think she means the difference between anonymous and reinvented.... the former, you are only exposing what you want of your RL, and the latter you are exposing what you want of your online life (with generally little connection to your RL)

they have the potential to yes... do they? eh... maybe. being on mainland ctrl+shft+1 is your friend... that the stats console to look at, and you can often see the normal numbers for the region are, and when they go to hell... what you can't do is tell what's causing it without some obvious event... ask your renter to derrezz them for a while, monitor, then re rezz them, monitor and see if there is a noticiceable shift... if not then you are all good... if so, you'll have to decide if the shift is an acceptable amount, and may be able to take a guess at limits to put in place.

@Ciaran: Parcel size IS relevant, because it denotes content amount. example: 3% keyword match for a search term included for a full region that includes multiple search terms vs 100% match for the only search term on a 512 (or heavens forbid, smaller). which is likely to have more content for the search term? you can have 128 x 512 parcels in a single region.... keyword space is limited... if the region lists it it's very likely to have content related to it. I'm not saying it's and end all/be all stat, but it should be in there. @more general another one is traffic, which be so much harder to game with a slight change to how it's calculated... constant avatars should be counted at a logarithmically reducing rate with a minimum, with a slight precalculation bonus for repeat visits. avatars spending between x and y time in the area would be unaffected and get a bonus for unique within a time frame visits, and avatars spending <x time would not be counted at all. the diminishing returns from constant avatars would be quickly outweighed by unique visits of a certain timeframe... it could still be gamed, but it would be infinetly harder... especially if the behavior were tracked on the avatar/account side, rather than the by the location. @Thread the non-obvious wildcard set up is annoying, but nice to be aware of, but exact match searches are an absolute must, bar none. title first, description second.

Starlight offers multiple skin options for V2, or if you are really brave, you can try directly editing the skin files in the viewer directoy if the folder has an icon, it's a system folder and you cannot remove it, if it's just one of the folder created by give inventory, you should still be able to drag it to the trash folder

there is an effort being pushed to return stats to the V2 login screen... namely the three public api's which are concurrency, grid status, and lindex. It would be nice to have some new pictures rotated in for the login, but I think that's minor in comparison.

I live on this feature... it often works even when you can't move normally because the region physics has come to a grinding halt. that said I do share some of the same concerns as others, namely in two places... it doesn't work within regions/parcels with forced telehubs... this may violate principal of least surprise. I don't end up in a lot of newbie areas any more, so I don't know how common this setting is there. I've more than once accidentally triggered this through pie menus, and although it should be harder with the higher precision required by V2 menus, it's still possible, especially when building. some users are also trained to double click certain things, so there may be a violation of principle there. there are also inworld objects that have scripted double click behavior, and in fact, I posted an example of such in the LSL Library on the forums. the current default for basic mode is double click to walk, making it double click to teleport in advanced would definitely violate principle of least surprise there are mitigating factors though. it's an easily accessed setting, so putting it as a default doesn't make it permanent while the standard "could not teleport closer to destination" is not helpful for parcels/regions with forced TP routing, a "this region parcel may have restricted teleports to telehubs" message tacked on, or better, to use the friend teleport code to ignore the restriction would negate that concern if menus or items with click behavior did NOT engage this code, then that concern would largely be negated as well it's a very obviously connected action, so retraining and understanding of what is happening should be quick My current position if 51% against making it a default, subject to suggested changes

real world example: standard letter size piece of art scanned in to your computer... actual dimensions 8.5in x 11in it's aspect ratio is 1 to 1.294118 (11 /8.5) inworld you are going to size the prim face to the same aspect ratio (any value multiplied by those numbers on two individual axis) in your image editor, you resize the image so that it's longest edge is the largest power of two you want to use for the image, let say you want 512 to be the largest pixel dimension... now you have an image that is 512 x (512/1.294118) or 512 x 396, but 396 isn't a power of two, so you increase that to 512 by stretching it in your editor, so that the image is 512 x 512. then you upload the image, and apply it to your prim that has the original aspect ratio which squezes the stretched side back down. you almost always want to stretch in the editor then compress inworld so you don't lose details. in reality, the resize should only be one step. The only time you want to reduce the size in the image editor and effectively stretch it back inworld is if the aspect ratio is very close to but UNDER a whole number, and if the texture is low detail you have a little more wiggle room, something like x.975 to x.950 and you only increase the smaller dimension to the next closest power of 2 above it if the aspect ratio were 1 to 3.2 for example, and your max dimension was 1024, your smaller dimension would be increased to 512, not 1024.

you can always cheat and hard code the position.... sit on the target prim, find the avatar, get their key, and their position, compare their position to a list of positions and you'll know exactly which prim was sat upon (you'll want to record the positions by script in advance, they may not match perfectly to inworld reported position for the av.)

is the test alt in the second life beta group? I know the snack sandboxes were locked to them, perhaps Magnum got the same treatment?

Torley Linden wrote: I started a brief gallery of bizarre and wonderful imagery from Second Life... appropriately called SLWTF. bunneh army lol.... I've seen a few places like that....

my statement may be biased by mostly hearing from themed estates... by the time they are ready to buy/rent they've gotten past their noobhood (although many of them are still newbies to property ownership) odd fact: even though I've been in SL since late 04, I didn't own land until linden homes, and only have that because I was doing research.... I spend 0 time there.

Perrie Juran wrote: How can I tell of a certainty that they are bots outside if the behavior described here and what category do you report them under? honestly, you can't tell with a certainty, although the case in point above is pretty obviously cut from a very common pattern that fits... if it's more than 50% certainty to my mind I use "unfair use of region resources", and if not, I use "other" or don't bother. if they're on land I have powers on I will generally do a test IM and/or a test eject... no response in 10 minutes and I ban them as a bot. not because I have a problem with bots, but because they are chewing up resources, and didn't even have the courtesy to say "hey mind if I stick this bot here for a few hours?" ETA: phoenix really helps here as you can see the viewer tag, and the lookat targets. no tags/target and idle behavior is often a bot or chat client, but occasionally someone sorting inventory.

odds are that it is not a technical issue, but if they use V2, web profile options have been known to spontaneously revert or be cleared.... and phoenix has been known to give false positive/negatives when users are on regions that are struggling. that said, all you have is your friends word on it, and they say it's set correctly, so there is no moral dilema in relying on phoenix's "true online status" to see when they are on. If they are telling the truth, they won't care, and if they are lying, they are getting what they deserve =) I myself turn it off for all but the closest of people that I know will respect my work schedule by experience, including clients even. Spending time in the forums I get lots of random IM's inworld, but I reserve my inworld time for work and play exclusively, and any help I provide either goes through the groups I'm in, or gets referred to those, or back to these forums. most people understand that, although occasionaly they don't... I've had only one or two people drop me because of it.. that's their call.