Phil Deakins

Any SL businesses. The 2 she promoted were totally unknown to me. I'd never heard of them,, and I found great fault with it immediately.

LOL. I like that

Whether or not LL is favouring Blueberry with free premium accounts or simply by accepting payment for them from Blueberry instead of the new premiums, the reason I started the thread isn't changed - Xiola Linden promoting 2 specifc SL businesses in LL's blog. I find huge fault with that.

Fair enough. The Blueberry group message does thank LL for making the 10 premium account giveaway possible. It may be that LL agreed to accept to fee from Blueberry instead of the new premium member, but the impression it gives is not that.

I definitely don't agree with that. I don't really think it's necessary for me to explain why.

Do you know that Party B is paying for the premium accounts? If they are, it's fine.

That would be an enormous task, but yes.

Even subsidising them (making them available at a cheaper rate) would be astonishing and saddening. If LL openly offered such things, alright. Excellent. But it does sound like a back door sort of deal - to me, anyway - especially as Xiola Linden is now promoting those businesses on the LL blog.

Apparently, it's an SL clothes business.

I just received this URL - https://thewhisperer.wordpress.com/2018/08/08/why-is-linden-labs-sponsoring-blueberrys-latest-attempt-at-staying-relevant/ According to that, LL is giving 10 free 1-year premium memberships to Blueberry customers. I had no idea that LL got into bed with users in that sort of way. And now Xiola Linden is promoting Blueberry in LL's blog. It doesn't say where or not Blueberry is paying LL the cost of the memberships, but it doesn't sound like they are. If they aren't, then I'm both astonished and saddened. I've always believed that Prokofy's alleged Feted Inner Core (FIC) was just a figment of her imagination, but now I'm not so sure.

Yes, I realised that it was there when I got up today, so it wasn't just posted. But it's a plain advertisement. It's none of my business but I don't like the idea of LL using their blog for advertisements like that - unless they charge for them and reduce land costs further because of them, of course

I've never understood the desire for Linden bears. But, then, there's a lot in SL that I've never understood. But I'm curious. What do people do with the bears they collect? Display them? Just leave them in their inventories and rarely see them? It amazes me that some people want to collect them, but it shouldn't because some people collect all sort of things.

@Xiola Linden Xiola Linden just posted a blog which is nothing other than an advertisement for what I assume to be a couple of private SL businesses. One is Uber, and the other is Blueberry main store. Are they private businesses? I hope not because I hope that Linden Lab is not going start using their blog for blatant advertising like that.

What it doesn't include, and it's a bad omission, is state that your username will be your avatar's name inworld, so choose it carefully.

You live in a different world to me. I told you that when I visit town, it's full of people shopping. Do you suggest that that isn't true? In fact, recently a new mall was built and opened in the centre, and it's always full. Allow me to refresh your memory. You wrote that most people don't care whether or not there's a high street to shop in. That's what you got wrong. Of course, with online, and out of town, shopping, fewer people visit the 'high street' shops OR many people visit the high street shops less than they used to. That goes without saying. But you're mistaking that for most people not caring whether or not there's high street shopping. It's not an easy mistake to make. It takes real dedication to make a mistake as glaring as that.

Blush didn't suggest the need to do anything like that. You've misunderstood her. What she suggested was making mainland more attractive with such things as woodlands and water. She never mentioned oceans. When reading her post about it, I imagined things like lakes, and I imagined that lakeside properties would be nice and desirable. Oceans are not the only forms of water. In fact they're the least attractive forms of water. For sailing, huge lakes (what we call oceans in SL) are needed of course, but Blush wasn't talking about sailing. She was talking about making the mainland more attractive.

My mistake. That does now ring a bell. Thank you, Blush.

LL acknowledged that we had no way of knowing whether or not a bot is registered as a scripted agent, but told us to report what we thought were traffic bots, and they would deal with them. So enforcing the rule is just like anything else - ARs.

Definitely.

LL could do that with some of the abandoned land, but there needs to be plenty (most, I think) available to request and buy. If they did it with some parts, then I'm sure that the land around those parts would be bought up. They could do a little experiment and just do 1 or 2 bits to see what happens.

I'm not one who thinks that the mainland needs saving or fixing. From my point of view general mainland is much better now than it was before the marketplace pretty much removed shopping from SL, and adult places were moved out. The open spaces (abandoned land) are much more desireable compared to the mainland back then. It could have been better if LL had seen what was happening, which they did, and designated many new sims as 'residential', which they didn't. It was all one heck of a mess back then, and so much better now - much more like the real world, as Theresa pointed out. So, if anyone really does think that the mainland need saving or fixing, please tell us why you think that.

Ah but a bot isn't a traffic bot if it's set as a scripted agent, regardless of what it appears to be, so the statement about traffic bots was correct ETA: And LL (Jack) did say to report what appear to be traffic bots, and they would ascertain whether they are or not. For some obscure reason, they chose not to let us see for ourselves what an avatar's scripted agent status is. They probably decided not to waste time on programming the addition of it to an account's profile, possibly due the haste in which they implemented it.

I'm sure you know what I meant, Callum There's nothing negative about being a land baron, though. At least not that I'm aware of.

LL didn't envisage uers creating mesh avatars when they introduced mesh. That's not what they intended mesh for. Just sayin'

I think that's the silliest thing I've seen written here for quite some time. I don't often go into the centre of my city but, when I do, it's full of people shopping in the "high street". Some people (me included) prefer to not to use high streets, and shop either online or in out-of-town locations, but I doubt that even most of those "couldn't give a damn" whether or not the high street still exists. And, of course, it's self-evident to 'most people' that mainland is worth saving. If nothing else, it's the entry level of land ownership, and the only level that a great many people could, or would choose to, afford. Imagine an SL where the only way to have a home is renting the space from a land baron, or shelling out a lot up front up front, and US$295 (recently reduced to US$249) a month thereafter. That SL would have a much smaller population that the current SL has. Apart from that, mainland earns money for LL, some of which is passed on to us in the form of paying for improvements, and all sort of ways.