Phil Deakins

Why don't you stop whining about something that doesn't affect you and is no concern of yours? If you imagine that affiliate ads might be a security risk to you, stop using the web. Affiliate ads are on almost every website and have been for many years, and, believe it or not, they haven't managed to get a reputation as a security threat.

Zaphod Kotobide wrote: AnnMarie Otoole wrote: I have been spending an hour a day visiting trouble spots and removing stranded vehicles like this but NO MORE. Then stop putting your crappy vehicles out on the roads. Regardless of what problems may exist on the simulators, those are your objects, and they are 100% entirely YOUR responsibility, NOBODY else's. I won't be filing any trouble tickets, but I will continue to file abuse reports on every single vehicle I find. Seconded.

valerie Inshan wrote: Dang Phil, the Kudos button is never here when you need it. But Kudos anyway! :smileyhappy: Give me a hug instead, Valerie

Coby Foden wrote: It just popped into my mind, will the next step be that they start flashing ads on the viewer while we're logged in? *Your view to the world will be blocked for the duration of these commercial infos. Please stay tuned in.* Or they might put an army of Linden ad bots walking about the grid carrying ad signs. :smileytongue: If that happens our only hope is that somebody develops ad blocker for the viewer and automatic ad bot derenderer too. :smileywink: If they are thinking of doing anything like that, I'll volunteer my bots for it - for a fee, of course.

Hellespont Hoorenbeek wrote: Say that im overreacting, say that im wrong or say what ever you whant i RESPECT that it is simply your opinion. But i dont have to follow the Linden Fan boys and say: "everything LL is doing is the best" Those ads are a EYESORCE ON MY PERSONAL ACCOUNT INFO!! that is all im pointing out. I dont whant ads on my personal account info when logged in, When i logg in i am taking care of sim tiers taking care of my personal things, I dont whant to get distracted by weird ads from The S*ms and S*m C*ty or what so ever i play Second Life, And if LL things its a good thing to do ads then leave that to non logged-in areas! What you want doesn't matter. What any individual wants doesn't matter. The ads are not intrusive for anyone, including you. You have a choice not to see them, so take it and stop whining.

Your "HUNDREDS of dollars into Second Life" didn't go to Linden Lab. It went to other users. So it's not a reason for LL to give you any more than minimal support.

Hellespont Hoorenbeek wrote: [...] this is bad business specially for paying residents and long term reisdents of Second Life what will happen next we all know what LL did to our viewer it looks like they are screwing it up even more on theire website with this commercial crap. Im am worried about where this will lead to. Just my opinion but who seems care? The ads are not intrusive and they earn a bit of money for site owner (LL). Therefore, there is nothing wrong with them at all. Nothing.

This is a general reply, and not specifically to you, Hellespont. When I first read about the ads, I couldn't get them and I thought that they may be geo-targetted. But today I got them. The screenshots i saw of them showed that they were so badly placed that people wondered if some hacking was going on. I suggested that it was LL trying to find the right spot in the HTML to place the ad code. I think my suggestion was right, because both top and side ads are now positioned very well. They are affiliate ads, and LL gets money for either every time one is clicked on or every time a sale results from a click on one. It's an extremely standard way of earning money on the web and nobody can find genuine fault with LL seeking to earn a little extra money. The ads are not intrusive (they don't get in the way of anything) and they don't look ugly. There is nothing wrong with them. And now some imagination: Suppose LL decided to plug SL on websites all over the world. And suppose LL decided that some of the cost of it could be recouped by plugging other websites on their own. And suppose LL had decided to ask the users if they wanted them to advertise LL all over the web and recover some of the cost through affiliate ads on the SL site. What would the users have answered? I am sure the general answer would have been, "Go ahead - and do it quickly". Back to non-imagination: I see nothing wrojg with the ads. Does anyone actually find fault with them? If so, why? (Note: don't answer that question if you are person who doesn't want to be advertised to on principle. I have no time for that kind of self-centred attitude.)

Porky Gorky wrote: Why don't you use shadows Phil. Afraid of the dark? Shadows can only be turned on if the graphics level as high enough - halfway between Mid and High. I've recently gone down from 100Mb BB to 30Mb and, at 30Mb, with the lowest graphics level that can use shadows, movement becomes slightly less smooth with shadows on. Besides, I don't move around much in SL so there's no point in having shadows on for me.

Tonya Souther wrote: Peggy and Teagan, you do know that there are major features under development for the LL viewer that are being written by TPV developers, don't you? That may be true, but it's not a problem at all. LL would only include uncompiled third party code, so they can see what it does. The nasty code that the guy inserted into Emerald was compiled so none of the Emerald team could readily see what it did.

BeaNine wrote: I'm sorry but I'm new here and to SL but I've been using the Friestorm Viewer, what exactly was the issue with Emerald that sours people from wanting to allow Firestorm on their computer? What happened was that at least one person of those who produced the Emerald viewer, included code that caused the viewer to use a competitor's website during the login process. The code itself was compiled so that the other Emerald people couldn't see what it was doing. So every time someone logged into SL with Emerald, their computer would also go to the competitor's site. It was a tactic against the competitior. LL described it as a 'distrubuted denial of service' (DDoS) attack against the competitor's site that all Emerald users were unwittingly a part of. It wasn't that, of course, because a DoS attack requires a massive number of computers simultaneously making requests of a site, and logins to SL don't produce that. But all Emerald users were unwittingly a part of doing something against the competitor's site. The Emerald team had agreed that nothing would be hidden from the rest of the team so, when the hidden code was found, the person who did it was told to stop doing it, and he did. Later he inserted the code again behind the backs of the others. It was spotted by one of the team and he blew the whistle. Emerald was banned from being used with SL. The guy who inserted the malicious code was one of the main people in the team - I think he was the main one. That team was not allowed to have a viewer that connected to SL unless that person was not a part of it. Then they gave assurances that he was nothing to do with the new Phoenix viewer, which was Emerald without the mailcious code, and it was allowed to be used. The thing is, the unscrupulous person was friends with some of the main Emerald people so he may have become part of it again. We only have the word of the Phoenix/Firestorm team that he hasn't been allowed back in. Also, that person had previously done anti-SL things in the past, and been banned for them. Somebody can correct me if my memory is awry but I believe he also produced a copybotting viewer. His switch from the dark side to doing something good (producing the Emerald viewer) was claimed by him to be turning his back on doing bad. Nobody should be running programmes on their computers that an unscrupulous person like that has anything to do with. On the plus side, the person who blew the whistle rejoined the Phoenix team after a while, because it was clean, so, if he's still part of it, he can be seen as a sort of watchdog.

I watched over half of it. I enjoyed seeing the guy who made a lot of money by selling someone else's work, after stealing the work, and then lost it all in lawyers costs by suing LL and failing to win. It was nice to put a face on that person.

Porky Gorky wrote: We've not had a survey for a while and I know you all luuuuurve a good survey. Today I want to know what you think about shadows. Answer the following questions please, or feel free to moan about surveys. Either is good with me. 1. Do you have shadows turned on in your viewer? No. If so what do you think of the shadows that your viewer displays in SL? 2. If you were to buy a tree or chair today, would you want or expect a ground shadow texture (on a prim/mesh) to be included? 3. What is your opinion about textured shadowing inside buildings? For example should the shadows from the window frames be built into the floor texture or do you think the viewer should be rendering all shadows nowadays? 4 Any other opinions or issues you have with shadowing on textures or shadows rendered by your viewer?

Peggy Paperdoll wrote: Emerald was also the most popular viewer in it's hayday and look what happened to that viewer. It's basically the same people.......think about it. But it was only the odd Emerald person who was bad, not all of them.

Thank you for all that, Qie. It's appreciated. Am I right in thinking that, once the OP's door surround has changed to non-phantom (the actual problem), and then it is unlinked and set to phantom (the solution), s/he can't link it back to the house again because it will become non-phantom - the same as the house?

It's just as well I never made buildings to sell

Your explanation was enough to know that it wasn't the door, or scripts in the door, that was the problem. In fact it's nothing to do with the door. The problem is the surround, which is a single prim - a flat box - that is phantom and mostly transparent. Making it non-phantom means that it can't be walked through, and that was the problem. When I've created door surrounds, I never thought of that single-prim method. I've just done a little test with 2 prims and I don't know how it is possible to have them linked together and have one phantom and the other not phantom. ETA: I made a mistake. I've always used a single prim for door surrounds, but hollow and not phantom. My brain isn't working very well at the moment. I see no reason to have a phantom door surround prim, and I'm not at all sure of why that remedy works. More ETA : I suppose the phantom prim metrhod is better than what I've always used because it allows the surround top to be the same thickness as the sides. Using a hollow prim on a surround where the door much taller than it is wide, means that the top is much thicker than the sides, and that's not very good.

Trinity Yazimoto wrote: Yes this happens and this is normal. once you edit and change smth in your house the phantom door is not anymore phantom to fix this : unlink the frame around the doors and settle them as phantom again. :smileyhappy: And you'll be able to go accross them again I didn't understand that at all and I almost posted to query it. It hadn't occured to me that the frame is a single hollowed out prim. Now that it's occured to me, it makes sense. I didn't know that a phantom prim can be linked to non-phantom prims (I've never needed to do it) so I've learned something

Porky Gorky wrote: Phil Deakins wrote: This is why I was delighted when Netscape folded and left us with just one major browser. Later I was very disappointed that other browsers reached the 'major' level of usership. I was a voice in the wilderness though. From my narrow minded perspective, in relation to the MP I think it's a good thing. The more problems the MP has, the better imo. I hope all of mine and everyone else's listings are effected and that we all loose sales as a result. Every issue and ongoing problem with the MP counts as a small victory for IW commerce. IW commerce does not have that many weapons in it's arsenal at the moment and it's best hope for winning the war is for the MP to keep on shooting it's self in the head as it has been recently. Hopefully It will die before SL does and we will see a resurgence in inworld commerce. I don't disagree with any of that.

I can confirm what Immy posted about numbers, and on a much larger scale. But perhaps LL have updated things in more recent times. I haven't created an alt for a long time, and I haven't logged in more than a few simultaneously for a long time. So my experiences are way out of date. Perhaps they are attempting to mildly disuade people from creating an army of bots.

Porky Gorky wrote: OK I just did an experiment. I looked at the op's listings on 2 OS's win7 and win8. On both OS's I used the latest version of 4 different browsers. Firefox. IE, Chrome and Opera. Using Win 7, everything is groovy for all 4 browsers. Using Win 8 Firefox and Opera were fine, however with IE and Chrome I encountered this missing image problem both on the OP's listings and my listings and others too. So yeah, you are right, not a local problem. Didn't realise it yesterday as I was using Win7 when I checked This is why I was delighted when Netscape folded and left us with just one major browser. Later I was very disappointed that other browsers reached the 'major' level of usership. I was a voice in the wilderness though.

Darren Scorpio wrote: Yeah that was my first comment too. To me it seems as if it had been hacked because the ads lead to cheap scam sites. But I would think that by now the lindens would have resolved the issue, so it is very likely that they are doing this themselves. I am interested to know what makes you think that the ads lead to "cheap scam sites". Have you clicked on them? If so, what did you find? I read the thread you linked to and the ads don't look like scams to me. They look like genuine affiliate ads and Doubleclick (mentioned earlier) is a centre for affiliate advertising. Because of the very bad placement of the ads in the screenshots, and the fact that they come and go, it makes me think that someone at LL was experimenting with the code placement - the code being what an affiliate needs to place in the html page to make the ads appear. I've been trying to see the ads by refreshing my dashboard but I can't get them, so it could have been LL trying to place them properly, and not yet succeeding.

leon Bowler wrote: lol, ty, I don't have any more things to say, here I may have got a bad response, only cos you remember the first parts of the theory and got stuck there with unresolved issues, but I have been putting out the same bit for a week now in selected places, have got some very good responses, shows the difference when you don't have baggage, but as for sl, well when I joined it was a good business opportunity and I ended up owning 31 sims, but now it is not and is time to go. Excellent

leon Bowler wrote: You don;t find odd that this wacko is neither abusive and only expresses a view, yet gets banned, when a bitter troll is abusive in every post and is free to bully. But not every thing is gold, your not or are you. Who is the bitter troll?

The spam will be removed. The 'fun' thread you mentioned was bound to be removed because the person who started it gets all her alts banned from here. Personally, I agree with the removal because i don't think this forum needs, or benefits from, a whacko, but that's what the person is.