Josh Susanto

I'm seeing the appearance of messages "Linden Lab" starting on 20 May. That's essentially the point at which I would like to know whether there was an upward or downward sales trend.

These actually don't look all that different, but I don't want to cherry-pick people's graphs in order to make my point, so if I am eventually able to produce an aggregate graph of some kind, I'll be sure to include your data. I may be confused about the precise dates when CTL was gone. Can anyone help me figure that out?

My boxes all seem to be working GREAT. Maybe the borking team has decided to steer clear of me until the end of the process this time? That would make a certain amount of sense.

I'm choosing to put up with an environment where LL routinely steals from users because, in spite of that, I am at least making some kind of money, and I appreciate the activities of users on the whole well enough to want to keep offering stuff they can use to accomplish results and effects they want to accomplish. But that doesn't mean I have to be happy about the stealing. I keep thinking we're eventually going to discover some way to plug one of LL's vital legal loopholes, and that they'll have to start being more proactively fair with people who will then represent to LL the possibility that they are vulnerable to legitimate punishment in ways they haven't anticipated. Of course, I'd prefer to see LL start to straigten out its act before that, of their own volition. I can dream, can't I?

Nice graph! Please note the sudden dry-up of (visible) orders just as CTL suddenly starts posting again. Do you have graphs for the 2 preceding months? How do I know that they'll show an abrupt increase in visible orders right after CTL makes her last April communication?

In my own case, the general trend was a continuing increase in revenues. But some days were so wildly inconsistent (the bad kind of inconsistent) that I should stop short of leaving anyone with the impression that I consider there to have been no kind of problem. On dismally slow sales days I was still selling a normal number of freebies, so it's easy to interpret the data as saying that whatever was producing lower total revenues was a matter of user behavior and had nothing to do with LL. That could be correct, but it does seem like some long periods during which people all around the world spontaneously agreed only to buy freebies. Such a uniform response would seem unlikely in the absence of any kind of uniform stimulus. What seem less unlikely are 2 possibilities which are not necessarily mutually exclusive: 1) That bad delivery rates were enough to discourage people from paying for things, but not enough to discourage people from ordering things at no risk. 2) That some number of sales, not to include freebies, simply did not show. Whether anything was paid or anything delivered are 2 other questions, but I guess you can imagine what I would expect. That there would be nothing for anyone to gain by making freebie orders invisible would seem to explain why they were allowed to show. At least continuing freebie orders could be pointed to as evidence that the system was still working, in order to slow down any administrative process that might have to lead to anything like a timely investigation of the perceived problem.

If you never expect to receive satisfaction from the merchant, one thing I can suggest is to talk to some competitors or potential competitors about finding a way to offer other customers an even better product at a nominally lower price.

The deploy and the deploy date aren't really that important. The reason 13 September 2011 matters is that it's the date on which merchants were given no notice at all of code we were spefically told would not be deployed without advanced notice. Don't get me wrong - deploying code without notice is still not a great idea. But if you're going to do things that way, it should be an easy enough thing not to promise anything different. The immediate point to be made, being: Just because it might be both easier and more truthful for CTL simply not to say something doesn't mean that CTL won't say it.

Yeah. I feels good to make even a small amount of money without subsidizing some boss whose various creditors are each getting a bite of that raise that just isn't coming to you no matter what.

>CTL has promised a 4 week notice before any MB shut-off. CTL has said a lot of things. Do you recall 13 September 2011?

Well, I sell full permissions copymods, so I have no problem with customers reselling my stuff. On that principle, if CTL wants to buy my whole product line and remarket it, there's not much I'm going to do about it other than subject her to even more public ridicule than I already have. Until then, though, I CAN at least say that whenever I get a message from someone who hasn't received what was ordered and I can't find any such order, it DOES make me wonder how many other invisible orders there are that delivered but sent the money somewhere else.

My own fee structure gripe isn't about some kind of a fee that LL charges or might yet charge. My fee structure gripe is that what they do and what they say they do are not really the same, and that the difference tends to be a value loss to users as a whole, and to merchants more specifically. I also don't have a complaint about the mere existence of direct delivery, which I think, as an additional utility for users, is at least great in principle. My issue with DD is that it seems to have other purposes behind it, and that indirect promotion of DD for those purposes has included the scapegoating of magic boxes for problems that are really website problems; that is: problems created by the same people who created DD, and problems which mostly continue with DD, even as they continue to be intentionally misconstrued as the same magic box problems that were initially used to rationalize an intended complete transition to DD.

"Lamah". I see; by the same logic, when my step sister started driving an Impala, she called it "Vlad".

I can't drop anything on my avatar. I've tried that. And nothing shows as worn in my inventory, which is definitely wrong. It's also not viewer specific. I updated Imprudence, but that just turned me from a white cloud to a purple cloud.

Is it just so that no one will see that I'm RUTHIE?... AGAIN?

>The stunted growth and behavior indicate that it may be a mule. In reality it's just a lamah. Based on the spitting behavior, I would have guessed camel. Maybe that would also explain why it doesn't drink.

>[snip[ .. At this point i'm also of the opinion that LL have largely abandoned Marketplace .. [/snip] Too good to be true. If only they could have abandoned it on 12 September 2011 instead.

This problem is simpler than that. The problem is: Object, even without contents, using only full permissions textures (yes, double checked) is copied to inventory. Once inside inventory, object loses the mod permission, but retains copy and transfer permissions. When object is rezzed or moved to a magic box, it lacks the mod permission, but still has copy and transfer permissions. This is especially annoying because I have to open the objects's properties tab to see what permissions it has; the new no-mod property does not show to the right of the name of the object in inventory, or in the magic box, even on LL's own viewer. And it doesn't happen every time, making it very difficult to report persuasively to LL, who, naturally, don't want to hear anything about it anyway (go ahead; ask them).

It's not that weird to me that LL prefers to deal with a new bunch of users, rather than people who have already reached an informed opinion about the condition of things. Part of the basic strategy of people with most forms of self-destructive behaviors is to move on to a new crowd of acquaintances with enough regularity that almost no one who finally sees through their BS stands a chance of calling them on it in any way that produces a practical consequence. Like junkies or crackheads, LL is nosing about for even more well-meaning people, as yet unprepared for what LL hopes will be a more polished, more plausible set of lies and deceptions. Assuming we could perform some kind of intervention, what form might it take?

Whether we need to withhold the benefit of a doubt to the 99% of sincere users is probably related to our specific product types and specific larger marketing strategies. Maybe not everyone should trust buyers. I'm just suggesting that maybe more merchants could at least give real consideration to the question of why they shouldn't do things the way I do them.

The general trend in my case has be growth, but it seems to be related to the fact that the person identifying as CTL was apparently away for about 60 days, and was thus unable to test more strange new ways of making things not work even as clumsily as they already do. I think the system is actually stable enough that if they just don't break it any more, it could actually grow and develop a bit. Existing users could be pulling enough new people in if the way that things don't work would just not change as often as it has. In that sense, the best thing the Lindens might be able to do for a while is nothing. It's not the JIRA's they haven't fixed that explain why SL is in decline so much as it is the new ones they keep creating. The recent unannounced change in mod permissions function is pretty good example. It's not big enough to raise the stink needed for them to change anything back, but it is nonetheless another drop of flavorless slow poison that will have some fraction of a percentage of users scratching their heads and then not logging in quite as often or spending quite as much when they log in. It's not the showstoppers that are shutting this place down. People spot those and work around them. What's shutting this place down is the smorgasbord of tiny annoyances that leave users with an undefined kind of disaffectation connected to the perception not that some problem is too large to fix or deal with, but that there's a more essential, fundamental problem with how endlessly new, superficially unimportant difficulties are being allowed to gradually accumulate and negatively syngergize into a tedious and inefficient in-world experience, subtly overshadowed by the banal funerary crepe of dysfunctional and abusive Linden conduct on the Marketplace website.

3D scanners would be the extreme. I can't even afford Photoshop. I don't blame people for using 3D scanners if they can, but they shouldn't expect any more Linden protection for their work than can someone sculpting blind with RGB data in the application "Paint" (yes, I have done that).

I appreciate people saying that my stuff looks "original", but I wouldn't be doing justice to the facts if I merely accepted such a compliment without any clarification. My surface textures are mostly very heavily edited, but almost none of them are SOPA compliant. Just because a photographer would, in many cases, never even be able to say with certainty that the image is even of the same object he or she photographed does not mean that I've retained some kind of signed release from the IP holder of every single image I've used. The 512 kludged stone series is mostly derived of public domain images treated to negative and color layer swapping treatment. I have other more explicitly public domain derived items, and the Selena Wells stuff is all broadly authorized by Selena Wells, whose etsy link is on the description lines of the items. I don't remove seams form my textures the same way that people do it in PS, and the result is different in some ways that are better and other ways which are not as good. I mostly just square cropped images, retile them so that the frame forms a cross in the center and drop a corroded circular punchout of the unretiled square image on top to cover the cross. There's nothing mysterious about this, but I haven't seen that anyone else is doing it. Why not? I'm not sure. They're using plenty of other methods that only yield a more problematic set of results. For shapes, I basically mediate a set of sculpt templates with versions in which I've put gray data in any place that should be moved toward the center. Usually that's just the darker 50% of the surface image. That's already probably about half of what would distinguish what I do from what someone else would probably do. Not that complicated, huh.

>On a different note, from reading the General forum apparently LL made a change in how age verification is done which has many people in a dither. Was this part of the announced updates or was it part of the unannounced update that also borked the mods permission button?

I didn't call anyone an idiot, and that includes you. What I said was that even being an idiot wouldn't prevent someone from doing what I do. But I should clarify that for the geometric stuff, I'm not using a free app; I'm using a cheap device that I bought with money from the stuff I made with the free apps. People are limited by the perceived need to buy applications like Photoshop almost as much as they are limited by any lack of basic ability, and it is often difficult for people to distinguish someone else's greater ability from that person's greater ability to buy things that make everything easier to do. I'm sorry if I've got off on the wrong foot with you. Even if you never buy anthing I've made, ever, I'll be happy to tell you anything and everything I know about my own production process, provided that there's a good time for such discussion. The larger point, though, is that I don't need to be dependent on templates and such to see the use of templates and such as creatively defensible. Consumers decide the value of things. No matter how unimpressive someone else's product may be to me, I can't really fault that person for offering it if there is any indication that someone is willing to make an informed purchase decision that will result in a profit. I know that some people are arbitrarily retexturing my image-derivative relief sculpts and producing grossly inferior effects. That's the downside of offering things full-perms, so I accept it in order to maintain the upside. A lot of recycled data produces value-subtracted items, and that's sad. But I don't think such things do much to detract from demand for the better items. When something is actually improved by continued tampering to a point where it upstages the original item, I understand that some people are upset by that, even if they have no special proprietary right to the same or similar data. I don't see things the was such people see things. I see this phenomenon as part of an evolutionary process that gradually raises the bar for anyone in a position to try to produce a competing item at a competitive price. If the bar gets raised too high too quickly for a few people, that's sad for them, but it wouldn't justify punishing consumers by offering them fewer choices as a means of subsidizing people whose valuation of their own products is out-dated.