[New Shopping HUD - thumbs up or down?]

1 hour ago, steeljane42 said:

Big events are more than just hype and long lines over one product, like in your iPhone example. In a way they have some form of a symbiosis. They are popular because a number of high-profile creators join, a few mid-tier ones as well. People check galleries and booths at the event and see it all together. Put singular listings on such shopping HUD and you get what... a slow and likely badly designed version of MP? Well, it already exists, the badly designed MP by LL, that many creators don't even bother with.

Yes, an event is ultimately an outlet for creators, in service of the creators' revenue, so all that really matters is where those creators think they can do the best business. There's no denying there are huge drawbacks to the current location-based event model. There are advantages, too, but the question is which of those advantages might be complemented or enhanced by another medium.

This HUD doesn't do that really at all, and my point was that it cannot do that as long as it serves multiple events at the same time (then it really is just an even clunkier version of disastrously primitive Marketplace), but I wouldn't rule out an enterprising event organizer breaking away from the increasingly crowded pack of barely distinguishable events with something that better serves the shopper's access to the creator's vision, while leaving a more durable event brand impression.

-------------------------

Also, here's a grim practical consideration. We're about to see 2K texture uploads. They'll cost more, but top-tier brands will gladly pay to use them. Shoppers at top-tier events will wear them, lots of them, on every material layer surface of every attachment. It will soon take four times as long to download textures on arrival at a crowded event. Now imagine an event that distributes a pre-arrival HUD that downloads each creator's main product image and brand logo textures as part of a preview shopping experience. A marketing expert fills in the blanks here with what extra features and offers motivate shoppers to preview their shopping trip. Now the creator's imagery appears upon arrival at the event venue, while all the other shoppers' outfits very slowly fill in. At least the shopper can see what they came to see, which is what the creators care that they see.

While we're at it, the HUD can offer cam positions for each booth, no need for texture-blind navigation through the crowds to put the shopper in direct reach of a creator's booth.

At least for a while many shoppers would still value the ritual gathering of mandatory "anniversary" "gifts" and other familiar event promotions. Those may persist with or without a HUD, but they may not be adequate to preserve viability of events that don't precache creator-supplied textures when multiple layers of 4 megapixel images cover every surface.

[New Shopping HUD - thumbs up or down?]

6 minutes ago, Janet Voxel said:

say I want to go to top tier event and I can’t get in because the sim is full like for the first couple days. It would be nice to be able to get a hud and shop anyway

That's an interesting use case. Honestly, a lot of busy opening events I'd rather shop by HUD than wait for booths and all those avatars to compete for texture download bandwidth. If they could deliver clothing demos to my own dressing room, I'd be a lot more efficient shopper. It would also be better to visit a build demo location away from the main event, without needing to teleport back into the event to continue shopping.

So I can definitely see a HUD (or a good shopping website) reducing some commercial "friction" inherent in SL events. 

I wonder if high-end events could ever get onboard with the idea, or if they want to maintain the opening hype of "long lines" at opening, like iPhone new model release days used to be.

My hunch is there's a top-tier event team out there that realizes they could really differentiate their event by adding an online shopping experience done right, beyond what other events can do, and branding the hell out of it.

This HUD is definitely not that, and as long as it's a front-end to multiple events it can never become that. Instead, it's Seraphim in direct competition with the whole event business model. Maybe in some possible future Seraphim poaches enough high-end creators to participate in high-end events at dedicated locations with dedicated HUDs that extend the experience in ways shoppers find useful and meaningful. Maybe this thing gives them experience they need to make that happen. Maybe.

[Land Sales Crash]

Also Villareal.

For all I know, there may be more; if there's an "official" list of these, I don't know about it.

[Update my radar that uses Sensor to use llGetAgentList]

Ah okay so it really is only conditional on the presence of one avatar in range. Unfortunately, as the wiki says of llGetAgentList, "There is no guaranteed understandable order or randomness to the list returned" so the timer()  logic will need to loop through that list, terminating when it finds one in range, and if it exhausts the list without finding any, de_rezz as in the current no_sensor() event. And if it does find one in range, that corresponds to whatever is done in the current sensor() event.

The periodic_clean variable is currently set by the timer() event which triggers the next de_rezz to send an extra "Clean" message. What might work instead is a global timestamp of when the last such cleaning happened, and let de_rezz check if llGetTime() has gone longer than that 60-second periodic cleaning interval, and if so, send the extra message and update the global timestamp.

[New Shopping HUD - thumbs up or down?]

I don't understand what problem(s) it's supposed to solve. It would make sense, maybe, if you're in-world, can't teleport, and either

1. desperately want to shop a brand, but can't handle Marketplace, or
2. want to shop products at an event known to the HUD.

The HUD's product pages do offer demos, so that's a step beyond the website, but the galleries aren't organized in any way I recognize, so scrolling through them is just bewildering. Search works, but event shopping starts with browsing not search. Or maybe they intend to compete head-to-head with Marketplace for product-search shopping, which seems unlikely. And yet, a few merchants have spent tremendous effort to populate brands on this thing, so they must be afraid of missing out on something. I just can't figure out who's buying stuff with this and why.

Technically, it seems about as well made as currently possible. Maybe they're anticipating more feature-full scripted UI, come viewer-side scripting.

This all adds to a puzzle I'm facing with the concept of "Events". Consider the Friday L$50 event vs the L$77 event vs the L$99 event: who cares? more specifically, who cares enough to know which one(s) to shop next week? Not all events are so indistinguishable, some are helpfully male-avatar-only, some have vague themes like "decor" or "seXXXy", but interchangeable "events" proliferate. Maybe organizers impose different terms of participation to filter-out different calibers of merchant, but if so, the effects are mighty subtle to shoppers. Maybe the event logo is a little distinctive, or the name, or the gallery page (or, god forbid, the Facebook page), but there's rarely enough there to hold an impression, and whatever there is, it's overwhelmed by individual creator signifiers on product listings.

Now suppose those "events" are hosted in a HUD. Is anybody going to be able to distinguish one event from another when they lack in-world location or even a distinct webpage address, and instead share the whole HUD apparatus in common to all such events?

(The same semiotic dilution applies to slotting brands in the HUD, but that's already a problem on Marketplace, and it sorta doesn't matter: I don't see brand shopping in the HUD has any advantage at all over Marketplace unless they slash commissions and/or really innovate with unifying in-store, in-HUD, and on-web shopping experiences—which the Lab+CasperVend is uniquely positioned to do, but too hamstrung by supporting and extending the current mess to ever do anything new. It's all so dismal that any day now they'll scatter AI pixie dust over Marketplace in hopes magic ensues.)

[Update my radar that uses Sensor to use llGetAgentList]

If there's not already a timer() event handler, one might simply replace the call to llSensorRepeat with a llSetTimerEvent with the same interval, and then move the logic in the existing sensor() and no_sensor() events into a new timer() event, stepping through the list returned by llGetAgentList() the way the sensor events stepped through llDetected* agents.

Here the existing timer() event is pretty simple and apparently driven by a global counter on the same interval, so could probably stay there with a little tweaking, but…

… problem is, I can't figure out how this existing code steps through the agents detected by the sensor. The llDetected* function calls only use the zero-th detection (so the one sensed agent nearest the sensor), so… I guess I'm stumped. Are we sure this sensor code is actually doing the thing that instead would be done with llGetAgentList ? If we really only care about the nearest agent, I guess we could step through that list hunting for it by llVecDist between each agent's OBJECT_POS and the scripted object's position, but is that really what this script is trying to do?

(I have no idea what Primsave is, but it sorta doesn't matter until I understand how the sensor results work.)

[Land Sales Crash]

From a browser logged-in to your SL account, you can start at https://search.secondlife.com/?search_type=land&land_type=mainland&method=buy&maturity=gma&query_term= , filter by size and maybe sort by price.

But that's very general. I think most people eventually decide on whereabouts they'd like to buy and open the map with For Sale turned on and look for yellow of about the right size.

You can also snoop around for abandoned land in areas of interest and file a support ticket requesting it (or part of it) be set for sale to you. If they agree, it'll be L$1/m². If instead they need to bring it to auction, that's another way of shopping for land. The daily selection is pretty limited but over a few days there's quite a lot of variety that comes up. But buying at auction can be frustrating until one internalizes the blind bidding process. Still, sloping around the "Recently Closed Auctions" can be an education in what sells and for what price—sometimes to flippers, and sometimes to neighbors in a bidding war.

[I'm comin' back, babes!]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

So, this is all a lie? If so, good job!

At least you didn't accuse me of being a lawyer!

[I'm comin' back, babes!]

12 hours ago, Lillani Lowell said:

A random stranger.

Well, I remember you! I remember you being pathologically patient with me, a newbie, stepwise approximating a working rotation script. So welcome back!

Stories? The best storytellers are liars. … Or lawyers.

[Not sure how he finds me every time]

1 hour ago, ValKalAstra said:

No what's weird is how he keeps finding you. VPN, new computer, new account, new social circles - he shouldn't be able to link things that easily. One thing did set off serious warning signals and that's giving him Teamviewer remote privileges because at that point, he could have done just about anything to your computer.

Yeah, Teamviewer can be safe or very dangerous. If he was given control (not only viewing) he could have "diagnosed the network" to download and install a backdoor quickly enough it wouldn't be obvious what he was doing, then used it later to install something more permanent and cover his tracks. Could he get something into a web app or some program that would follow you onto a new machine? I guess, theoretically, but it seems a stretch. The only reason to consider anything like this is the extent of steps already taken to defeat more typical stalker behavior.

57 minutes ago, InnerCity Elf said:

Things you could try might be being online when they probably aren't if possible, being very careful with your profiles, go to REALLY "out-of-character places", think about things you could say in conversations with new or "new" people that would either make them think "oh, that can't be her, next!", or might reveal their identity to you early on, before you've invested time in your new "bff".

All that won't help if they really have a way to technically identify you despite your technical measures, though.

That suggests a test for whether the technical threat is real here: Continue to use an already stalked account as close to "normally" as possible, despite being stalked, but also create a completely out-of-character alt. Make them something totally unlike your past accounts and explore like a newbie role-playing an opposite sex furry or whatever it takes to be utterly unlike anything you've been before. Tell yourself you're taking a "holiday" on a completely different game for a while. Gradually stop using the stalked character (you'll need to replace it eventually anyway, right?) to see if the stalker follows you to the new account. If so, it's a pretty big clue that some tech tracking is going on—and that this stalker is obsessing over RL, not any SL feature absent from this new account.

2 hours ago, Myrthe Mysterious said:

 SL is no fun like this

Indeed, and it's a miracle you've stuck with it through all this, so it would be too sad not to find a way to fix it.

Responses to these situations usually focus on how to just ignore the annoying parts, but I wonder if anybody knows the kind of specific records that could be used in Abuse Reports to actually get him (and future alts) banned.

[Things that Happened in SL]

On 4/9/2024 at 2:57 AM, Conifer Dada said:

There were ad farms all over the place and they had become an eyesore. LL made some new rules that saw off most ad farms. I wonder if any have been preserved as part of SL's heritage. 😁

Don't know of any proper museums, but I took pictures.

I also made a "Temple of Adfarming" to celebrate a nest of virulent adfarmers in Dallows, in view of the Forums Cartel Hangout, but I lost track of all contemporaneous pictures, so here's one from a copy I just now rezzed in a sandbox:

The conspicuous holes aren't bit-rot, they're 4m x 4m microparcels where the ad towers rose through the structure—and god forbid anybody encroach on an adfarm! This was long before we could return encroaching prims ourselves, but never fear: Governance was uniquely diligent in their protection of adfarmers… right up until Jack finally made policy.

[Grant and corrupt a wish game]

57 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

I wish I was 16 again

Granted, but all your friends are also 16, and all of you are stressed-out about the trig test tomorrow, and because you're 16 it takes forever for tomorrow to arrive.

I wish AI would hurry up and make me its pet.

[[Scripting|SOLVED] Cloudflare Firewall -> External requests]

Although I too am forced to use CloudFlare it's not for anything SL-related, so this is just a shot in the dark: Have you looked at disabling Bot Fight Mode, perhaps just as a test?

[Attention! Use of Red Cross mark]

This is kind of fun. In 2007, Johnson&Johnson sued the American Red Cross for trademark infringement. J&J has used the red cross mark since 1887.

Quote

The company entered into an agreement with the American Red Cross in 1895. The agreement acknowledged Johnson & Johnson’s exclusive right to the red cross as a “trademark for chemical, surgical and pharmaceutical goods of every description,” according to the lawsuit

The lawsuit says that the American Red Cross has the right under a Congressional charter awarded in 1900 to use the red cross design in connection with its efforts to provide voluntary relief.

(In 2008 a US court got the parties to agree that the American Red Cross is allowed to use J&J's trademark even to sell first-aid products to stores.)

[LL are not acting against pedos in SL.]

1 hour ago, AmberJoyBliss said:

Please excuse me while I go and throw up while considering if SL is worth it.

If that's your honest reaction then no, SL is not going to work out for you.

On the other hand, if that reaction is all performance, you've found the right place. We do drama here on the daily. 

[My alt accounts are my imaginary friends/allies/acquiantances/enemies/etc.!]

12 hours ago, Rick Nightingale said:

I think that's one of the worst things about SL. It's the root of having to buy multiple copies of an item if you want to use them on different alts; I hate that. As far as I'm concerned, *I* bought it, I should be able to use it on any alt I want. […]

Occasionally I buy a thing and decide an alt also deserves a gifted copy, but way more often I see a thing I like but there's just no way Qie will ever wear or use it, so I try to imagine it working for an alt.

That would work better if I had more diverse alts, and had interest in more diverse content. It would also be a lot more expensive. At one point I had tiny, furry, and even female alts, but I somehow couldn't be bothered to spring for their mesh upgrades. Never buying female clothes, especially, saves a lot of both time and L$s.

[Anyone found static mesh items increased in LI?]

On 4/6/2024 at 3:19 AM, Jaylinbridges said:

I had a build that was 24 prims that went to 44 prims after the recent change.   I traced the problem to 3 regular prims set to prim, linked to the rest of the mesh.  Changed the prims to convex hull and the build dropped to 19 prims. 

The mystery to me is how it was 24 prims before the change. (I'm trying to understand more precisely what happened in specific cases led to higher Land Impact with this accounting change.) In this case, the prims were set to Prim physics which presumably was also true before the accounting change, so maybe somehow their proper Physics weight was being ignored in the object's total LI until this accounting change forced a recalculation. It would be fun to see what happens if the linkset were merely re-linked in the few briefly-preserved regions on Aditi.

(Although, come to think of it, do mere mortals have a way of forcing an update of their Inventory over on the beta grid? At some point, one could trigger that with an account password change and a couple logins, but does that still work??)

I'm also pretty mystified how Server Weight could change. It's a simple calculation on counts of links and scripts* that, to have changed, must be simply wrong either before or after the update. (That's in contrast to both Physics and Download weights that include in their calculations some quantities divinely revealed, so if those change we can at best discover patterns in the whims of the divine.) I guess a correct Server score of 2.8 could only happen with objects of 3, 4, or 5 links, with script counts of five, three, and one, respectively, but how could such an object ever have scored 2.0?

Hmm. I just discovered that a 4-prim linkset can have four scripts added and remain at 2.8 Server weight whereas that number should be only three scripts. That 2.8 is very volatile, though: take a copy into inventory and re-rezz it and it's 3.0, and changing Physics Type causes a proper recalculation, too. (I have a feeling this bug is reported already but searching Canny is hopeless and there's no telling what made it into the github jira archive.) It's not obvious how that particular bug would generate the 2.0-to-2.8 discrepancy, but bugs tend to be buggy.

________________
*Note in that wiki article the link to the "final" formula,  MIN{ (0.5*num_prims) + (0.25 * num_scripts), num_prims }

[Are there methods to find out a person's other avatars]

2 hours ago, AppleJellee said:

And my issue was not bringing multiple alts to a sim, I just wondered if an avatar not used would show up as connected to me and as I understand it, I have to bring both avatars to the sim for that to happen, which would never apply to me.

It depends who is doing the address tracking and why. One of the big problems with RedZone was that it claimed to provide "networked security" which meant that it collected every IP address/avatar identity pair it could detect and then shared that information with any paying subscriber so the landowner could ban all avatars matching the IP address of the one they thought needed banning, no matter where those "alts" were observed. I'm pretty sure it even let subscribers go snooping for alts of avatars none of which had visited the region where that subscriber's RedZone box was located, and it would know about them if they ever had media enabled while visiting any region in which RedZone was active.

So if such a system still existed, a subscriber could learn about your shared-address "alt" even if neither you nor the alt ever visited that subscriber's location. Why anyone might want to do that is none of my business, but it seems a sport of only specialized interest.

[Can we have the release notes for 2024-03-18.8333615376]

6 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

The feature in question already existed !

Before this bug, when you were flying at logout, the viewer remembered it in its settings, and made you fly on next login...

Oh, now I see the confusion I caused. When this was first reported, for me it appeared to happen not only at login but also when I teleported to a new location, but apparently that wasn't a normal part of the bug, or at least I'm not seeing it now when I teleport. It was that quirky flying-after-teleporting behavior that I would have liked to keep as a feature, so we're not standing on top of the previous arrival. (It would still be congested at landing points, but the inevitable collisions would be a little less impactful if everybody were to arrive flying. On the other hand, that would completely defeat the kludgy little collision_start-triggered landing pad contraptions that try to slide new arrivals off to the side randomly.)

The flying-on-login thing doesn't make the viewer present a "stop flying" button, which was the part I found briefly disorienting.

(Now suddenly I'm curious about the specifics of what happens when teleporting in to a no-fly parcel when you were flying before the teleport. I vaguely recall that sometimes you stay flying and sometimes the parcel forces a ground landing. Maybe it depends on whether there's a landing zone or something even more obscure. Or maybe that was all a bug that got fixed at some point.)

[Are there methods to find out a person's other avatars]

3 hours ago, AppleJellee said:

What is media streaming exactly? 

It's not limited to audio. In fact, the original "RedZone" plague was based on a particular flavor of Parcel Media (typically used for streaming video, such as in-world TVs) as opposed to Parcel Audio (DJ or "land radio" streams) or Shared Media (aka "Media on a Prim" or MoaP, used mostly for interactive webpages on in-world objects).

There's no secret about how RedZone worked. An in-world script used PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_AGENT to know the key of each avatar its media successfully targeted and passed that to a web server along with the connection attempt so that server knew the avatar key associated with the IP address making the connection.

(Sorry, somehow that comes out sounding complicated no matter how I try to explain it, but it's actually stupidly simple.)

That particular form of Parcel Media can be very handy. For example, I used it ages ago to show in-world webpages in the same language the avatar's viewer is using. It's also especially handy for this address-tracking junk but there's nothing prohibitively challenging about using other media and audio streaming to map an avatar's identity to its current connecting IP address.

The sledgehammer response is to just disable all media and audio in the viewer. Third-party viewers added a way to whitelist and blacklist specific stream addresses so you could still listen to your favorite DJ and use your SL TV, etc., without opening up to everybody's address-tracking streams.

[Anyone found static mesh items increased in LI?]

Oh boy. If this is happening then somewhere, stuff is getting returned for exceeding parcel LI limits.

[SL21B Applications Now Open For Exhibitors]

3 hours ago, Harper Held said:

I plan on applying. I wiped out my flickr so I'll have to upload photos of my past SLB builds onto a new flickr account...that might mean I won't get approved. Still, I'm going to roll the dice.🎲🎲

In lieu of Flickr, you could show them a YouTube:

 

[Can we have the release notes for 2024-03-18.8333615376]

I usually try to arrive flying when I TP into a populated area, intending to quickly vacate a crowded landing point without inflicting much carnage. I'd be all in favor of keeping it as a feature, but starting out that way when first logging in is a little disorienting.

[Are there methods to find out a person's other avatars]

1 hour ago, xDancingStarx said:

VPNs are out of question, as are manual attempts to obtain a new IP address, because that's not what the average user does. Nobody obscures an alts IP unless they do something shady, which is not the point here.

This is where the logic goes off the rails for me. Why are these snoopy people trying to discover alts in the first place? Just idle curiosity about "the average user" who really doesn't care whether somebody discovers their alts? If that's the game, then sure: let's congratulate IP address matching for its marksmanship in shooting all those fish lined up neatly in a barrel.

But anybody with reason to care whether their alt is discovered is simply going to hide their IP address. It's just stupidly easy to do, especially with relatively cheap, fast, and safe VPNs (in parts of the world where people have the luxury of worrying about alt detection).

I haven't seen this mentioned but maybe it's a tacit assumption: It's true that estate bans extend [temporarily] to alts with some reliability. Notwithstanding what Estate owners may say, I don't think you'll ever find a Linden saying that's done exclusively with IP address matching. 

[Are there methods to find out a person's other avatars]

34 minutes ago, xDancingStarx said:

An IP match is no 100% proof but what is it? 99%? Close enough.

Except it works for exactly 0% of those with alts they try to keep anonymous.

So, yeah, it'll identify some alts whose alt identity only matters to the creep obsessed with finding alts.