Phil Deakins

Leia36 wrote: Answer this then, why does LL provide customer support for non premium users? They call it customer support but it's actually user support.

Qie Niangao wrote: And sure, Basic members are customers. They're customers of the service--they get to experience Second Life, create things, maybe even sell stuff. They are not, however, customers of support for the service. Same as Microsoft products: buy Office, you get to use it; have problems with Office, buy support. Sorry, Qie, but Basic members are not LL's customers, unless they pay LL directly for something. They are LL's users, which is different. See the dictionary definitions that I posted after your post.

Since you like quotes, here's the dictionary.com definition of the word 'customer':- cus·tom·er /ˈkʌs**Only uploaded images may be used in postings**://static.sfdict.com/dictstatic/dictionary/graphics/luna/thinsp.png" border="0" alt="" />mər/ Show Spelled [kuhs-tuh-mer] Show IPA noun 1. a person who purchases goods or services from another; buyer; patron. 2. Informal. a person one has to deal with: a tough customer; a cool customer. and from the Collins English Dictionary:- 1. a person who buys. 2. informal a person with whom one has dealings: a cool customer It's very simple, and there's nothing about things like "ultimate customer". That phrase is just an easy way of describing an end user and it doesn't make an end user a customer of a manufacture that sells via other companies.

What Apple would give you is user support. Even if they call it 'customer support' you are still not a customer of Apple's, in any legal sense, unless you bought it from them. You are an Apple user, and that's very different. An "ulimate customer" as described in your quote, is not an actual customer. It's just a phrase to decribe an end user. You, madam, are wrong Apple would provide support, of course, and they say so in their warranty, as do all manufacturers. Not because the users are customers - they aren't - but because they back up their goods with warranties and support, or people wouldn't buy them. However, LL doesn't not provide any such warranty, and we are really discussing the lack of "customer support" for free accounts. As I said earlier, most free accounts are not customers, although a few are. Therefore most free accounts cannot expect "customer support" from LL. They do get some 'user support' though. Consider potatoes You buy a bag of potatoes from the local greengrocer's shop. The greengrocer had bought them from a local farmer. There is no printed warranty with them, of course, but you do have an unwritten, but enforceable, contract with the greengrocer because you paid the greengrocer for the potatoes. Then you find insects in one or two of the potatoes and you don't trust the rest to be free of insects. Do you take them to the local farmer who supplied the greengrocer? Of course not. Why? Because you didn't buy them from the farmer so you are not the farmer's customer. You take them to the greengrocer because you are a customer of his. That's what it's like with LL. You buy from LL, you are LL's customer. You don't buy from LL, you are not LL's customer.

Users may see themselves as customers but I'm being pedantic about the word 'customer', because one or two people who are not actual customers find fault that LL doesn't provide them with sufficient "customer support", when they aren't actually paying LL anything and are, therefore, not actual customers. If they claim that they should have some "user support" because they are users of LL's system, then I wouldn't argue the point.

Teagan Tobias wrote: I have a free account, have for over five years. If by having a free account, I (and all other free accounts) are not customers, then what we do makes no difference to the Lab. So if all free accounts stopped renting land, stopped buying lindens, stopped buying avatars, stopped buying clothing, stopped going to shows, stopped logging into the world, by not being customers it should not matter. I don't think that is right, it would kill Linden Lab in a heart beat. Free accounts are customers, like it or not. You were correct, right up until your last sentence. It should have stated, "Free accounts are users, like it or not".

Yes I'm saying that the company (e.g. Apple) that sell their goods to a store does not have any obligation to provide customer support to the end user. That's exactly what I'm saying. The end user's contract is with the store, and not with the manufacturer. The store's contract is with their supplier (Apple in my example). It doesn't mean that the manufacturer won't ever deal with the end user. In some cases I'm sure they do. But they don't have to because they don't have a contract with them. It may be that some manufacturers provide direct service in the guarantee user support - but the buyer's contract is with the store. The end user is a customer of the store, and not a customer of the manufacturer. In the case of LL and free SL users, there is no guarantee like there may be with some RL goods, such as Apple's goods. If you buy something from my inworld store, you are my customer and not LL's. If you rent land from me, you are my customer and not LL's. Incidentally, the phrase "ultimate customer" may be one that is used sometimes (I've never heard it before) but it won't do any good in court because, when you buy something from a store, for instance, you are a customer of that store - you have a contract with the that store - but you are not a customer of the company that the store bought the item from and, unless the company who sold the item to the store offers end users some sort of support, the end user can't take it to court because there is no contract between the end user and the company who sold the item to the store.

LOL. I'd forgotten all about that audition - and nobody has yet asked me to do one. The last I heard, you lot were getting together to organise the auditions. The Lindex is in 2 sections. One section allows users to sell L$ and the other section allows users to buy L$. When users buy L$, they actually buy from those who are selling, and not from LL. You buy in the SL website because that's where LL has set the system up, but you don't actually buy your L$ from LL. Yes, LL does create L$ when they deem it necessary, and they sell them through the Lindex. I've never seen it but it must happen. On those uncommon occasions buyers do buy from LL and could claim to be customers of LL if they could show that the L$ they bought came from LL and not from other users. Almost all the time, though, the L$ come from other users. It's very much like buying something from an inworld store. You buy it in SL because that's where LL set the system up to allow that,, but you don't actually buy it from LL, so buying from an inworld store doesn't make anyone a customer of LL. The same applies to the marketplace.

Laia. I haven't even suggested that anyone should go premium, so that part of your post is irrelevant as a reply to mine. The definition of 'customer' that you quoted doesn't support the idea that anyone who doesn't pay directly to LL is a customer of LL's. The end user is only a customer of the "intermediate" or "trade" customer of LL's, and not an LL customer. So, in the situation where someone pays LL for land (a sim or a parcel of mainland), and then rents it to an end user (the renter), the renter is a customer of the one who pays LL, and not a customer of LL's. It doesn't make a scrap of difference that some of the renter's payment end up in LL's bank. It's exactly the same in RL, of course. You buy an Apple computer from a shop. The shop bought it from Apple. You are not a customer of Apple's. You are a customer of the shop, and you take the shop to court if something goes wrong and they don't fix it. You have no right whatsoever to take Apple to court because you are not a customer of Apple's. The shop is the customer of Apple's. The shop is the "intermediate" / "trade" customer of Apple's. You are not. So SL user who doesn't pay directly to LL, is not a customer of LL.

Yep. I realised that I made a mistake when I read Amethyst's post, and I opened the Edit page to change it. But I decided to wait and see if anyone picked me up on it - and you did If your ~$100 a month is not paid directly to LL, then it doesn't qualify you as a customer. Many people put RL money in - to buy L$ - but the L$ are not bought from LL. LL operates a service that allows L$ to be bought and sold between users. LL does take a commission but I don't think that makes the traders LL customers. The only way I can see for a free account to be an LL customer is to own private sims. That way, they pay tier to LL and possibly, but not necessarily, paid LL for the sim (renting private sims doiesn't make the person a customer of LL's). I don't think there's anything else where a free account becomes a customer by paying directly to LL. Buying L$ doesn't pay to LL, and buying goods also doesn't. So... Most free accounts are not LL customers and have no reason to expect customer support. Some free accounts are LL customers and have every right to expect customer support, even though LL doesn't see the need to provide reasonable customer support to them.

Gadget Portal wrote: So, I have a friend that had to appeal a ban because she was AR'ed for being topless in a moderate sim. Well, she was wearing mesh. If there was a screenshot, the prim should have still been obvious. If there was no screenshot, I would think the AR wouldn't have any proof. The AR people are known for not requiring any proof or evidence at all to judge the 'victim' guilty. They only need someone to submit an AR.

Your question is, "Are free account residents really this low a priority?" and I have to say yes, and rightly so. Regardless of how much customer support LL provides, free accounts should be low priority. I don't mean that they should be ignored but they certainly should not be put ahead of people who pay. So, if customer support is busy, free account problems should be at the bottom of the waiting list. Remember that free accounts are not customers, so there's precious little reason to give them any customer support. But I don't think that priority is the real issue. I think the real issue is whether or not free accounts get any, or much, support at all. I only see one reason why they should get support, and that reason is because it suits LL, and not because it suits the free user. I.e. LL needs to know about problems that occur, so they can continually fix them.

You need to read the thread from the start.

You're mistaking email spam with the spam that's being talked about here. In the post you replied to, Syo was talking about about a programme making posts in forums like this one, which is nothing to do with email spam.

LOL. Yeah, I've seen that before. It was posted in a thread not too long ago.

16 wrote: both the 3rd party on their own site and linden on theirs (SL) immediate scramble everyone affected passwords. so that everyone locked out of their accounts and have to reset them. this standard security practice. safety first. which you know already being in the industry since everyone else was in nappies apparently It would only be a problem to a user if the user was silly enough to register in the 3rd party site using the same password that s/he uses for SL. So, if nobody had done that silly thing, nobody would have been affected because of passwords. I can't imagine anyone registering in the 3rd party site with their SL username AND password, but it must happen, I suppose.

There was another thread in the last day or three, in which it was said that a texture was being used to gain control of the computer. Have a look round the forum. It may be related.

leon Bowler wrote: ok i will spell it out, get rid of the sl browser and all linden software and move the cache to a isolated drive, to protect yourself, i did find another reason as to why this may have been done, but to be honest if true then most of you deserve it and i wont help you. PS: i removed all my card info from sl to. think we might be seeing a world wide meltdown soon, and the stripping of every penny from the cattle, lol, still eat a horse burger. It's good of you to spell it out. May I spell something out too? Since you're the only one to report being affected, I suggest you look elsewhere for the source of your problems.

Yes, that definition is why the word is used for search engine crawlers. I'm merely observing that the word is used in this community for anything that's negative and automated.

The person you rent the sim from has a website that was hacked. How did that compromise your wife's passwords? I can only use imagination but maybe what happened is this:- Your wife rents the sim and the method of paying for it each month is to use the landlord's website. Since it's paid through PayPal, the site has her PayPal details, which became available to the hacker. Is that what happened? If it is, then the hacker cannot have got your wife's PayPal password, because the website doesn't need it and doesn't ask for it. It would be a problem is she used the same password for everything, including the website and PayPal. Unless the same pasword is used for the website and PayPal, the hacker couldn't have the PayPal password. I doubt that it's possible for the hacker to emulate fake sales that your wife pays for through PayPal. I imagine that PayPal only accepts sales from registered sellers. If that's so, then that's not a problem. All in all, I can only think that the passwords problem was caused because your wife used the same password everywhere (you did say that all her passwords needed to be changed). It's the hacker's doing, of course, but it wouldn't have been such a problem if your wife had done better with passwords. And, yes, the landord really should have told you immediately.

Yes I know what is meant, and that everyone understands it. I'm just observing how, in this community, the word 'bot' (robot) has come to be used for everything that is negative (as in spam) and isn't hand-controlled. Syo Emerald wrote: Somewhere in this world is a computer, a machine, who sends out the spam. The computer is controlled by a software and fills out the orders it gets...just like a robot. The computer can't be considered the robot machine, or you'd have to say that everything a computer does is a robot. Your viewer is a bot. Your email client is a bot. Your text editor is a bot. This forum is a bot (it does auto-save). And so on. Also, much of the spam here has nothing to do with sales, so no computer fills out orders.

The best thing you can do with your idea is forget it. It sounds very good but it's a pipedream. As people have said, nobody is willing to pay to go to venues in SL, so nobody is willing to pay L$19,000 - that's nineteen thousand L$! To get anyone to pay anything like that, you'd need to get top live artists - and I mean top RL live artists - and, even then, who would pay L$19,000 to get into a virtual venue to see pixels of live artists who are merely playing recordings of their songs? Your idea is good but it doesn't offer anything that is worth even a tiny fraction of L$19,000 to attend.

It's amazing what this community has come to use the word 'bots' for. Everything is called a bot. 'Bot' is short for 'robot', and a robot is a machine. In SL, it's a virtual machine, usually in the form of an avatar. Bots don't post spam in forums. Computer programmes do. So the thing that posts the spam is a computer programme and not a bot. Having said that, the search engine spiders are programmes that are commonly called robots. They are the programmes that get pages from the web to index them. Every website can control what they do within the site, by using a text file called 'robots'txt'. Only bad spiders ignore the robots.txt file. Spider programmes crawl the web; i.e. get a page from one site and follow any links that are on it. Then get the pages at the end of those links and follow any links that are on them, and so on. So they can be thought of as automatically making it up as they go along, and they may merit the word 'robot'. But a forum spamming programme doesn't do anything like that. It simply posts in the forums on its list and is just like any other basic computer programme. So, like other basic computer programmes, such as Internet Explorer, viewers, etc., they are not bots The OP asked why they do it in Turkish. The language is irrelevant because every language has people on the web who speak it, and forums cover people over the entire world. They do it for 2 reasons. One is to get people to click on the link(s) in the post, so that someone makes a profit. The other is to post the links because search engines index the forum pages that contain the links and credit the target pages because of the links, which causes the search engine rankings of the target pages to improve.

As well as what's already been said, it used to be that, when an avatar hasn't logged in for a specific amount of time (only weeks), then they would be dropped from the database, so they couldn't be found in search. That was when LL still used the Google system. Now that they no longer use the Google system, it could still be that avatars are dropped when not logging in for a while. It probably doesn't apply to the ones you're looking for, because those people would almost certainly log in after buying something, but you never know.

Gloria Marchant wrote: I think we are going off topic here. The question is not "how do bots work", it's more "what do they do and possibly want". Any ideas? It's quite annoying to be stalked or monitored. Does LL know about that? Are they legal? More specifically, the question was what does a particular bot do. I know, 'cos I asked it But, since I started the thread, I'm allowed to stray off-topic