[Blocked and derendered avatars showing up in local chat.]

I don't think it's what you want, but one way to find things without using Area Search is Build / Pathfinding / Region Objects and select the column by which the table is sorted and otherwise adjust the settings, although this doesn't list all objects, only the ones you're able to move. So that's sometimes very useful (and often surprising) but unlikely to reveal a chat extender.

But chat from an object should come labeled by the chatting object's name at the time it did the chatting. For a chat extender, it probably changed its name to that of the person doing the chatting, but unless they're doing something clever, you should still be able to right-click that label and get object-profile information about it, show its location on the map, etc.

(Maybe chat extenders do that "something clever" but I need to get in-world and fiddle a bit to see if "clever" is easy enough.)

[ETA: Nope, it's not as simple as renaming the object with the viewer URI for the agent whose chat is being extended. Not surprising when I think about it. So I bet you can click the chat-extended name and get all about the chat extender. I'm not sure that helps here though.]

[ETA 2: Oh. Well that's embarrassing. They could just set the object name to the empty string and do something like this:

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llSetObjectName("");
        llSay(0, "secondlife:///app/agent/"+(string)llGetOwner()+"/inspect says unspeakable things about your daffodil garden.");
    }
}

so then if you right-click on what looks like the speaker, instead of a menu for the chat extender object you get the menu for the agent—in this thread's case, the very agent you tried to block before. So yeah, that kinda sucks. It's not an exploit, it's just a chat extender being too "clever" for its own good.]]

[Premium membership land with no classifield and with search not allowed]

8 hours ago, diamond Marchant said:

I hate that. But...

There is a thing called the "borrowed tier loophole" that can be attempted. Say you are buying 1024sqm at auction and only have 950sqm of tier currently unallocated. You can borrow 74sqm of tier from group... make the purchase... deed the 1024 to group (getting 102sqm returned) and then reallocate the 74sqm back to group. This is possible ONLY if you have a group to borrow from. You could also borrow tier from another resident. Linden Lab lets you get away with borrowing for short periods of time without reclaiming your land. Your mileage may vary.

Unless that 74 m² was tier the account originally contributed to the group, I don't know mechanics for an individual account to do this borrowing, neither from group nor from another individual account.

It's certainly possible for an individual to withdraw enough of their own group contributions to put the group briefly underwater for tier to cover land holdings. (Some transactions are almost impossible without that ability.) But I don't know how one could withdraw more than one's total contribution, if that was the suggestion

[Lab Gab April 2024 - Comments? Discussion?]

17 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

I'm not sure how a "community round table" can function with a community as large and diverse as Second Life's.

Betting that no more than 1% of the entire active userbase will even know it's happening and only a tiny fraction of that will ever attend. We've had specific subject user groups for years and they have been broadly one sided and poorly attended.

Yeah, this sounds the same but more like Philip's "town halls". They were scheduled at times convenient for San Francisco, and despite the world back then having only a fraction of SL's concurrency today, they filled a four-region corner to capacity (160, presumably), so they were also streamed (to Welcome Center parcel media, maybe?).

Anyway, the point is the upper ranks of the org chart seem to be showing some interest in connecting with their customer base through transparent, structured interactions.

May be all for show, but maybe they'll engage for real. Kinda depends on audience reaction, I suppose. Those town halls had some acrimony too. For whatever reason, eventually they stopped happening.

I'm sure we can kill these, too, if we put a mind to it.

[Premium membership land with no classifield and with search not allowed]

You can buy all 1400 m² individually as a unit and suffer the extra US$ 4 for the first month only during which time you divide the land between you and your friend. Or—and this is much better—you and your friend donate enough tier to the group first, then buy the land "for group" and you won't get dinged that extra four bucks.

But unfortunately I don't think you can do that with auction land. I believe they will immediately set the land to the winning bidder's account and, if necessary, increase the land fee level for that account. (This is one way buying abandoned land is easier than doing it at auction because abandoned land is set for sale to the requestor, and they can choose to buy it for group.)

But… I'm looking at the current and scheduled auction listings and I don't see any 1400 m² parcels. Not only that, but there can be no parcel sized exactly 1400 m² because land comes in 16 m² quanta, so maybe the "1400" is just illustrative? But anyway, just wanted to be sure we're really talking about auction land here.

Auctions can be a cost-effective way to get land, but the price shown at any moment may be far below the price the land actually fetches during the last few seconds of the auction. Or not, but bid the amount you're willing to pay and it'll either win or you'll keep your money.

[as soon as i login i crash! can someone help me?]

Is it correct that Firestorm launches, but then crashes after you provide your name and password and try to login?

If so, you can (maybe) get a little more information to help figure out what's going wrong. Pull down the menubar "Help" menu, and choose "About Firestorm" which should show a window with a "Copy to Clipboard" button. Click that, then paste the results in a reply to this thread so readers can see more about your Firestorm installation and machine configuration and help hunt for clues.

It probably also generates a "Firestorm.log" file in your <home directory> AppData\Roaming\Firestorm_x64\logs directory. If you search that for "error" (and/or "warning") you might find some hints about where it's failing.

When it crashes it might generate a core dump (even if it never gets to the login screen). But that takes some special help to interpret, so let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Oh, just to be sure: you said you tried "older versions". Does that include using the standard Linden viewer instead of Firestorm? If you haven't done that, I'd very much recommend trying some other viewer. (Not that there's anything wrong with Firestorm, it's just good to know if a different kind of viewer behaves the same way.)

[Lab Gab April 2024 - Comments? Discussion?]

7 hours ago, Feorie Frimon said:

Tilia employees used my personal information to creep on my LinkedIn account. 

How naive can these Tiia people be? Everybody knows not to use their real LinkedIn account for stalking, duh.

(What? Did you think Tilia account statistics are based on real people? Somebody's gotta plumb the vast web of greedy minions of disgraced former presidents, you know.)

[Lab Gab April 2024 - Comments? Discussion?]

I haven't had a chance to watch a minute of it. Just caught this on Inara Pey's indispensable blog:

Quote

COMMUNITY ROUND TABLE

[Video: 24:14-25:17]

A new channel of communication to launch in May 2024.
Being seen as a more “general purpose” user group meeting type of forum where users can put forward their ideas on how to improve Second Life to executive members of Linden Lab’s leadership.
Details to be forthcoming soon.

Looks interesting

[Flying on Login...do we have a schedule for this to be fixed?]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Camming rows of booths only works until you get lost (forget where your cam is and have to start over).

An attachment can keep a history of your last many distinct cam position and focus pairs. That part is easy and good enough to get back to where you were looking, say, five minutes ago. It's not necessary to sample the cam all that often, and only need to record anything if the cam moves, so it's pretty negligible as a lag contributor.

It gets a little trickier (but still not very resource intensive) to use llCastRay to try to identify what the cam is looking at. That can provide a readout of stuff the script can find out about the object (or land, or avatar) in view, and to tag some stored cam positions with object name identifiers. I find it handy for personal use, but it also unveils the many frustrating ways llCastRay runs amok. As a product, it would deserve a crappy rating, there's no fixing it, and it's beyond anyone's patience to explain why it's so often so confused.

[What Justification Is There For No Mod Permissions?]

1 hour ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

THANK YOU! Seeing this more and more now. It's so mean spirited, AVSitter is a fantastic project and one we should be very appreciative of - both as users and creators - and yet I'm seeing this more and more now.

As you say it is a direct violation of the terms and arguably the products that are doing this should be removed from SL.

I suppose many of the creators just don't know any better, and have overgeneralized a rule that things they embed need to have permissions stripped (especially animations, for AVsitter users). But I'm at a loss for re-educating them that respecting intellectual property doesn't mean locking everything down. Sometimes I try to explain, but I'm not sure I've ever succeeded.

[Updater script using llRemoteLoadScriptPin]

17 hours ago, Quistess Alpha said:

Or, perhaps your updater could just rez an updated copy where the old version was and tell the old version to delete itself.

That sounds scary, though.

It wouldn't be an option at all if the objects were modifiable, so deleting one could destroy customer content it contains or links to or is painted on its side, all assuming the customer hadn't locked the thing, defeating the whole process.

But even no-mod, the object could be known by its UUID to other customer content, such as particle beams.

Then there's Land Impact: the replacement must have no greater LI than the one its replacing, and only rez after the old one is deleted, freeing-up the LI for that replacement. Even so, if I tried this, somebody would have a script rezzing up to parcel capacity the instant any becomes available.

The really sad part is that the other alternative, updating through remotely supplied object parameters, got significantly nerfed with mesh, whereas before a script could change any object into any other object of the same or fewer links (at least).

[Flying on Login...do we have a schedule for this to be fixed?]

I'm given to understand that the "no fly" land attribute is just a hint to the viewer, not anything the simulation enforces. If that's true, then anyone who wants to preserve the "feature" might lobby their favorite TPV to create such a setting.

Come to think of it, I'd love a setting that made me arrive flying whenever I TP anywhere. If the landowner doesn't like it, ban me, see if I care.

[What Justification Is There For No Mod Permissions?]

10 hours ago, Cristiano Midnight said:

I understand it with scripts or configuration notecards,

I hate no-mod, but no-mod configuration notecards are hilarious. Unless they're also no-copy and contained in a no-mod object, all notecards that can be read by script are one easy script away from full perm.

What I find especially annoying are scripts like AVsitter distributed no-mod. If merchants want people to respect their IP, they should really stop violating the terms of their open licensed components.

Furries may have a special reason for valuing mod perm, specifically for fitted attachments: the more stuff you need to attach, the more valuable the ability to link stuff together as fewer attachments.

One precaution though about linking attachments: scripts might misbehave if they're not robust to changing link numbers.

Speaking of scripts, one of the best things about mod perm attachments is the ability to fully remove all scripts—often unlike "delete scripts" options—and reducing script count really does improve the odds of arriving intact in a new region. (Please, creator, if you're going to make it no-mod, for the love of god, offer a way to get rid of that auto-alpha script; those aren't for grown-ups.)

Finally, I've noticed a little trend of giving mod perm to fatpacks only. I feel a little weird about buying those because it indirectly rewards those merchants for distributing no-mod single packs, but on the other hand it rewards them more for the mod fatpack I actually bought, so I tend to do it. And I usually soon regret it if I buy the no-mod single-pack.

[Flying on Login...do we have a schedule for this to be fixed?]

Hot off the press:

Quote

[12:02] Rider Linden: So. This week in simulator land we bounced the main channel this morning.  Tomorrow morning we're going to be doing the same with most of the RC channels.  The exception is that we will be rolling the materials update to the Preflight channel for some inital main grid testing.
[12:03] Rider Linden: That update includes both mirrors and PBR terrain.  We'll turn on 2K textures soon after but we hit a couple things that need to be fixed and gotten through QA before that happens.
[12:03] Rider Linden: On deck we have the RTC Voice which will also start out on a snack channel rather than a full RC.
[12:04] Rider Linden: And waiting in the wings is the Spring Break simulator.
[12:04] Rider Linden: So.  With all that, unless there are any announcements from the other Lindens I can open the floor.  What's on the agenda today?
[12:05] Qie Niangao: of the various updates, do any fix the hovering-at-login thing?
[12:05] Rider Linden: Yes.  (I still think that's an unintended feature) but there is a fix for that in Spring Break.

So no dates, but it's coming. Sequence of the snack/RC simulators aren't necessarily fixed (but I suspect they're pretty eager to get VoiceRTC out, whichever release it ends up in).

[Items gone after Moving Home]

No-copy items make everything so much more complicated. It's possible the ticket can help get them back, but the fact there are no-copy items involved makes it especially tricky because anybody working the ticket should first establish for sure that the items weren't returned, so as not to create unauthorized copies by "returning" them from region history.

Most of the no-copy items I ever acquired have vanished one way or another over the years—and good riddance. They were all more aggravation than they were worth.

[Very Sad News for Blueberry lovers]

2 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

Look again. That article is from January 2023, over a year before the Medium post.

Yeah, hence my earlier footnote edit. On that much longer timeline, it's possible the investors got impatient with progress and a decision became inevitable to focus on the new opportunity. Still, though, they're turning away from a pretty big cash cow here; one would think they could get somebody to at least keep it running even if their focus shifted. Roblox is big, but I'd be surprised if Blueberry is hauling in such mega-Robux as to already see all that SL revenue as a mere paltry distraction.

As to the cast of characters, I realize the Forums policy forbids naming names, but we're quoting from an article here so there's:

• "Founded in 2012 by Mishi McDuff", "… said McDuff, in a statement", and "excited to support Mishi and her team", and
• "Katherine Manuel, chief operating office", "Manuel will be speaking", 

Then in another GamesBeat article from April 2023, more names:

• "Ashley Hopkins, chief creative officer at House of Blueberry"
• "Emily Eitches, head of business development at the House of Blueberry"

So... I've kinda lost track of why it matters and don't know any of these people, but I don't see why we'd need to skirt the known identities of company officers with titles and all. 

That's a very long, detailed interview article. It's a subject I never cared about before this thread, but I found this quote interesting:

Quote

A lot of times in something like Roblox, they will advertise that they only keep 30 percent while the creator keeps 70. But one thing that was sort of shocking to me is that then there’s the currency conversion. Everything happens in the local currency, which is Robux in the case of Roblox. Then there’s a currency conversion on top of that, where they take a further cut. It ends up that the creator makes anywhere from 25 percent to just shy of 10 percent, with 10 percent being the most common. Roblox is doing very well.

 

[Very Sad News for Blueberry lovers]

!

[Very Sad News for Blueberry lovers]

12 hours ago, AzureWaves said:

The departure might be related to Blueberry accepting $6 million in investors funding: https://venturebeat.com/games/house-of-blueberry-raises-6m-for-digital-fashion-in-the-metavese/

It's possible the investors decided to focus entirely on Roblox.

Interesting. That was public back in mid-January and it took them another quarter[*] to announce they were pulling back from SL. Their SL revenue stream must be pretty big, and the investment is US$ 6M, so the clock is now ticking for offsetting loss of that revenue as the operation shifts to the Next Big Thing.

I guess Roblox would be the safest bet but it seems a little boring to attract investment, unless it's just a first step towards something more exciting.

Something I wouldn't have expected:

Quote

This latest round of funding will accelerate growth to new communities by expanding from a primarily
female design aesthetic into male and androgynous design, […]

________________
[* Edit: Wrong! See Kylie Jaxxon's post below. Make that a year and a quarter.]

[I need help... Bot accounts following me wherever I go.]

4 hours ago, SarahThe Wanderer said:

When I was new to second life and bought my first land, I bought a script from the market place for 10$L after I used it I noticed lots of bots coming to my parcel, […]

Yeah, it's absolutely possible for any script to report its location (and anything else it can detect) to a remote server, without any way for the script owner to know it's happening. This is usually mentioned in connection with attachments (that give the info to stalkers), but it's just as easy for unattached items rezzed on land.

And now that you mention it, I can imagine that especially something like a "security" script meant to appeal to landowners concerned with "privacy" would be the ideal delivery vehicle for a system that sends bots to investigate "private" areas. Fiendish.

["Scripting Error" That Bans Me?]

5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

But are you saying that merely being bounced a bit under an "eject" is the issue, so that they want not even ejecting (which can force you on to another parcel, sometimes farther away than just a mere bounce). 

I fail to see why this "good" would override the senselessness of banning everyone who came on a parcel. The chief problem with this is that it bans a lot of your fellow tenants in a rental system -- where they, too, have ban powers and can merely reach into the parcel menu and unban themselves then.

That seems to have been the idea, with the bans taking effect before the potential intruder gets to the parcel. So it would deny access to the same avatars as would a regular whitelist banline, with which only the elect few can enter the parcel, the main difference being that being blacklist bans these go all the way to the sky. And yeah, that's the other analogue, the zero-second orb, that ejects or teleports home after intrusion. People hate zero-second orbs. Me included.

(I agree that teleport home is vastly more disruptive than ejection. As I've said many times, llTeleportHome should never have worked on the Governor's Estate; what private Estates do to terrorize visitors can be up to them. I'm told there's money in marketing to "special" tenants who long to ensnare and tear the wings off careless passersby.)

Anyway, operationally the device in that thread would be deeded to the land group, so in a rental situation the landlord could decide how avatars get exempted from the device's auto-ban. Maybe tenants wouldn't get direct land ban/unban powers but instead use a script or otherwise interact with the land-deeded script, and might themselves be added to the whitelist by the rental system. (I have no idea whether that thread's specific Marketplace item supports rental scenarios, though.)

But none of this makes any sense for a public-facing parcel. 

[Coming to Accept "Different" people in Second Life]

1. Happy Birthday!

2. "Different" is such a relative term. I grew up in a patch of Midwest US so homogeneous that the Norwegian immigrants thought the Swedish immigrants too alien to qualify as fully human, and vice versa. And the local town kids were a different species from the local country kids, and everyone knew and respected those distinctions.

But facing Godzilla, even Kong is close enough.

3. Identities in SL are always at some level performative, or constructed at least. Some profiles, for example, are aggressively individualistic. Like "anybody who got the vaccine will be muted on contact" individualistic. While it might be amusing to try to bridge those differences, there's nothing generous in doing that, so I'm inclined to give them the wide berth they seek. At least until Godzilla blurs some lines for them.

 

["Scripting Error" That Bans Me?]

Oh yeah, now I remember that thread. I remember trying very hard to behave myself even though I'd hate for such a system to become commonplace. It's really a way to use a "blacklist" named-ban script to get around the height limit of "whitelist" access control, but it's gussied-up as a way for orbs to avoid ejecting people from parcels by pre-banning them.

So that script would indeed ban everybody upon entering the region unless they were excepted, perhaps in an owner-supplied  list, or by having an owner-favored Group active, or whatever. That all would be working as designed, though, so the "scripting error" here would be… something else?

["Scripting Error" That Bans Me?]

It's a good question why a public venue would ever resort to scripted access control at all. An explanation for that might be pretty hilarious. 

But program bugs can be arbitrarily nonsensical. It's perfectly possible to keep a list of special accounts intended to populate the land access list and instead a bug adds them all to the land ban list. That's not to suggest anything like that is happening here, just an example of nonsense a buggy script can get up to. It's essentially unprovable that a particular outcome wasn't a bug but was how the script was intended to work. So I don't think any technical analysis of this situation could have a definitive result.

[I need help... Bot accounts following me wherever I go.]

There are a few different things this could be, but because they only stay a few seconds, it's quite likely they really are just bots ("scripted agents") that are visiting many different regions to collect data. Most of these are harmlessly collecting and aggregating data about fashion trends, or the popularity of other products, or Mainland for sale, or other boring stuff. Some, however, are looking for specific avatars to keep track of where they go, when, and with whom—those aren't so harmless.

All such accounts are required to be registered as scripted agents, but if they're doing something naughty, they probably did not register. And the fact their profiles are blank suggests these aren't the "friendly" bots. Either way, it would be interesting to know if they're registered as scripted agents, which a script can determine while they're in the region by checking the AGENT_AUTOMATED bit of their llGetAgentInfo; that's a common feature of up-to-date parcel security scripts. On private Estates, it's possible to ban them from entering the region at all, but again, that's just the ones that are registered as bots.

Thing is, if you set the land options on your parcel to only allow group access, there should be no way for a bot to get on the parcel. (I mean the "About Land" access settings, not a security orb which can't be very useful against agents that only spend a few seconds in the region anyway.)

It is possible for an avatar to appear on a different parcel than where they are actually located. They'll be located correctly on the mini-map and by scripts, but simple animations can offset the visual appearance of the avatar quite far from that actual location. I don't know why anybody would bother to do that with a bot account, but people are weird so we can't rule out the possibility.

 

[Not sure how he finds me every time]

2 minutes ago, Liaa Nova said:

it should be banned but never is

And it can never be banned unless somebody identifies it in an Abuse Report—and then, if true, it'll be gone grid-wide.

And that's pretty good evidence that it's not true: it would not exist if anybody could actually identify it.

Given the bugs in some of the third-party libraries used for SL (viewers and server-side), I'd never say it's exactlky impossible, but it's definitely not possible within SL's designed architecture… but anything goes if victims are using media or a third party viewer, either of which may operate outside that designed architecture.

[Does anyone know the real truth behind Second Life Servers?]

On 4/12/2024 at 4:37 PM, Hucasys Jacobus said:

at least for me, changing from FS to Alchemy made a HUGE difference

Coincidentally I too recently found Alchemy making a huge difference, discovering that it somehow cured a problem that has plagued me for months: very frequent system dialogs that "SLPlugin.exe has stopped working" that make both Firestorm and the Linden viewer unusable. (I reported it ages ago. No change through generations of updates including Friday's 7.1.6.8632452945.)

I realize it's not exactly the point of the thread (and nothing to do with framerate either); just another case of Alchemy unexpectedly coming to the rescue.