Phil Deakins
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Posts posted by Phil Deakins
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When doing something with one of my 1000L beds, I inadvertantly left it for sale at 10L. I didn't notice until the next day when I saw that one person had bought five of them at 10L each. I corrected the price of course. That was the stupid thing but it didn't stop there.
The guy who had bought them IMed me, saying that he'd bought two of the beds by mistake, instead of just one, and could he swap one of them for an 800L sex sofa. I admired his pluck
I told him that he'd bought five of them by mistake and no, he can't swap one of them. -
If you are going to create a group and deed the land to it, when your alt has joined the group, set it as an Owner of the group so that it has as much land control as your main av does. It can sometimes be more convenient that way.
NOTE: Groups must have at least 2 members or they will be deleted. It's not instant but it will happen soon after the group is left with only one member. So don't have your main av or your alt leave the group.
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I haven't lowered or increased my prices since I started the business in 2007, but I didn't set them in the way that you did. From the start, I adopted the attitude that I'd rather sell 11 items at 100L than 1 item at 1000L. It worked great, and it earned me between US$4000 and US$5000 every month.
I wouldn't feel comfortable lowering my prices because I wouldn't feel comfortable facing people who had bought the items not long before, when they'd cost more. And even if I didn't face them, I wouldn't like customers to feel wronged by me because they'd paid more yesterday than they would have had to pay today. Fortunately, my prices are such that most of my stuff can't be reasonably lowered.
I've never sold in the marketplace, or in any other such thing, so I've never come across the "rankings by price" thing that you mentioned, so it's never affected me.
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It happens a lot, and so it should. Some people say that, to them, SL is pure alternative reality and RL doesn't affect it in the slightest. For others, SL is an extension of their RL and it's those people who it's bound to happen to - not because the RL person at the other end doesn't live up to the SL image that s/he's created, but because people simply don't fancy everyone so, when the RL person at the other end is revealed, and is found not to be fanciable by the person, it's bound to end, and so it should.
To those who say that beauty is only skin deep, let me remind you that beauty *is* skin deep, and the physical *is* a part of the attraction between people.
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Correction to the above post:
Actually, there is something positive that LL could do if they weren't too dumb to see it. They could take their paying customers into account instead of their usual practise of alienating them and driving them away. It's an "us and them" environment instead of a "we" one, and that's entirely due to the practises and poor attitude towards customers of LL as a company.
What they've created is something that is greatly, and publicly, criticised by their own customers, but they are too dumb to realise that such public criticism, from such sources, is bound to have detrimental effects on SL as a whole. Personally, I don't care - LL has literally caused me not to care in the slightest whether SL survives or not.
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"Display names" was LL's attempt at attracting people who enjoy social networking, but it failed because SL isn't a social network type of system. It initially attracted sign-ups, but it didn't increase the actual usership (concurrency), which still continued to decline, albeit at a slower rate. If a person wants social networking, there are places to enjoy it, and SL simply isn't one of them.
SL is completely different. It appeals to some people but it doesn't have the mass appeal of, say, Facebook and Twitter.
LL is a company that merely potters around with things, adds things that only partially work, with no regard for their customers, and simply makes some money while they can. There's nothing more they can do because the SL type of system doesn't have the appeal that things like Facebook and Twitter have.
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There's nothing you can do about the lost money, which is only your estimate anyway, so forget it.
You said that recently you'd started to break even and even win a little. Perhaps that's the reason for the ban. Those owners are in the business to make money - not give it away. And such things as owners playing the games with alts, in order to be the winner and prevent other players taking the money, is far from unknown.
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The decline hasn't been a secret at all. In the early days, the LL owners had a vision for the future of 3D environments, which included the inter-grid TPing. They even got as far as actually doing the inter-grid TPs. But over the years, they have seen that this kind of environment isn't going to take off so they've changed their vision to what it is now - extracting as much money from customers as they can, while they still can.
Usership peaked with the concurrency in the high 80ks, where it was for some time, and occasionally reaching into the 90ks. That was significantly reduced when traffic gaming was banned, and most traffic bots disappeared. But the disappearance of most traffic bots didn't account for all of the the decline. LLs actions and practises towards their paying customers accounts for a good deal of the decline, as does people simply getting bored with SL.
None of it really matters though (except LL's abysmal treatment of their paying customers). SL is what it is. It doesn't have mass appeal and it never will. Like many other things, it's just a thing to be enyoyed by those to whom it appeals, and to be ignored by those to whom it doesn't appeal. It's no big deal.
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You're missing the point. It doesn't matter whether reviews are faked or not because, if bad ones are faked, people will buy alternative items and LL will still get the commision. If good ones are faked, people will buy the items and LL will get the commision. Either way the purpose of the marketplace is achieved and everyone (LL) is happy. There is no problem.
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Mecha Innis wrote:I recently travelled and met some interesting people who I wanted to keep in touch with but the only option was Facebook.
Email is a good way of keeping in touch with people. Do a search on the web to learn about it
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Chic Aeon wrote:VERY IMPORTANT, while tier rate used to change based on the largest amount of land you owned in a month, that hasn't been true for maybe a couple of years. You need to MANUALLY change your TIER USE FEE amount in the land manager of your account. If you sell your land and do not downgrade there, you will be charged the same fee the next month. I know as this happened to an old timer friend of mine
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You're mistaken about that. You are charged in arrears for the peak tier actually used during the tier period, regardless of what the your Tier Use Fee is set to. If the Tier Use Fee is set to, say, the next level up, then, when buying land that will take you up a tier level, you will be told that it won't alter your tier level; i.e. you won't be warned that you'll be paying more tier. That's the difference when having the Tier Use Fee set higher than the peak tier level actually used, and you are only charged for the peak tier level actually used.
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That's a really good idea, Pamela - the best of both sides.
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Thank you for the plug, Faithless
It's still halfway up the ramp to the upper floor.FTI, it doesn't plague people in the next sim with warnings when placed near the sim boundary. It did initially because I was unaware of the problem, but I fixed it soon after I'd released it. I remember it well because a customer told me about it and I was there checking it when I was suddenly in an earthquake - a very mild one though but I'd never been in an earthquake before. They are very uncommon here in the UK.
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Murdoch Bekes wrote:The only thing I had mentioned to one of these residents was the use of a "spy" object that sends a specified resident in-world conversations. But this was only for the use of the person I had given it to. Not in any act of revenge/drama, or anything of the sort. They possibly cannot use this against me. At least I don't think it will be, the object was no copy, modify or transfer.
I don't think I am mistaken when I say that such objects are against the ToS. Someone will correct me if I'm wrong.
Residents cannot ban you from SL, and they cannot get you banned from SL. Sometimes, a person will think highly of themselves with things like this, but they are always wrong. A resident recently told me, "Say goodbye to your account" - but I'm still here
They have no power or ability to do anything other than report something, but they like to imagine that they have.ETA: Oops. I should have read the entire thread before posting. The ToS and spy thing were covered already.
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I don't like the idea of sales in SL, including 50L Fridays and such. To me, it would seem like a betrayal of customers who paid the full amount for an item not long before. That's the reason why I've never done anything along those lines.
I also dislike things like "everything at 10L" or "everything is free" when a place is closing down. How could I face a person who paid the normal price one day and then found that the same item is free or 10L the next day? I wouldn't like to face them.
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AmyNevilly wrote:Classified are useless. period.
I wouldn't say that. My business life in SL started with renting out skyboxes, and the classifieds at that time were the reason it succeeded. It was a Mickey Mouse system but it still produced results for advertisers, and I'm sure it still does.
The problem with the new system is that it isn't isn't a classified ads system at all. It's merely a general search system that's applied only to classified ads. Unfortunately, it can't work even as a decent classified ads system. It really needs to be a dedicated classifieds system. Simply getting results from a different index - the classified ads index instead of the parcels index - doesn't make it a dedictaed classifieds system. I have no doubt that a great deal of development time will be wasted on the current idea, when it could have been used to create an actual classifieds system, and the team will spend a lot of time trying to tweak this and that in attempts to improve things, but in the end, it will never work as a classifieds system should work.
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Nya Linden wrote:Hi again!That said, we've found that when people are confronted with ads that are just a bunch of keywords, they are less likely to click on them. We really encourage advertisers to use human-friendly language, as it will raise the likelihood that when people see your ad, they will actually teleport there. Whether you want to use a single ad with a high price or many cheaper ads, keyword stuffing ends up working against you in the long run.
Given that, with only 256 characters to play with, writing a whole store ad in "human-friendly language" is almost always an impossibility if the ad is to rank reasonably well for even the general product areas that the store caters to. The new design must be to force customers into having many ads, each advertising a specific product area, and, thereby, extracting even more money from customers. Yes/no?
It sounds to me that LL is behaving like a web search engine in this respect, when it isn't one. Web engines don't care which webpages rank highly and which rank lower down, because they aren't affiliated in any way with the website owners. But this search system isn't that sort of search engine. It is a "paid advertisement system", and the "owners" of all the ad listings are paying customers - they pay for the ads. As I said earlier, the whole classifieds system is bad and, instead of trying to make a good one, it looks like LL is trying to make a bad system work. It can't work well enough to be what it's supposed to be - paid advertisements - until the whole system is redesigned from scratch. It's a shame that, with the new engine, LL didn't do that. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that a relevance-based search engine is definitely not needed for a classified advertisements system, simply because the results are not classified advertisements at all - they are search results, which are quite different.
That said, we've found that when people are confronted with ads that are just a bunch of keywords, they are less likely to click on them.
Whether people are more or less likely to click on ads that are merely bunches of keywords, is not the business of LL. It's entirely the business of the advertiser. Any fiddling on LL's part, to try and handle keyword ads, can only be negative for advertisers. Classified advertisements are just that - advertisements. They should never be subjected to rankings in the way that webpages and parcel pages are.
In a nutshell, a good Classified Advertisements system cannot be run with a general search angine. It has to be a dedictated classified advertisements system.
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Interesting. Cheers.
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Darrius Gothly wrote:They're moving to a new system based on the SOLR packaging of the Lucene search engine.
Ah. I assume that's one of the open source ones?
Do you know if they are using it for the classifieds tab?
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If they are still using Google's GSA system, and I haven't heard that they aren't, then they cannot change the ranking factors or even change their weightings. What they can do is create some pseudo factors outside the GSA, such as traffic, parcel size, and repetition spam, but such pseudo factors are difficult to control, and there aren't dozens of them.
If they are using the GSA for it, Nya wasn't exactly accurate in saying that there are dozens of ranking factors (there are over 100), or in saying that they are changing them according to feedback. As long as they use the GSA to rank classifieds, I wouldn't hold my breath while waiting for your problem to be resolved.
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Arduenn Schwartzman wrote:Yup, I singled outh the words P38 and P-38 as the evil-doers! Omitting these foul words will restore the rating to General.I reopened the ticket.
I'm completely gobsmacked. I honestly cannot believe the sheer stupidity displayed by some of the people at Linden Lab. What the hell are P38 and P-38 supposed to mean that some idiot decided they are adult words?
Over the years, LL has done so many negative things towards customers that make my heart sink and my head shake in utter disbelief that any company could be so bad. Even though they don't affect me personally, it's those things that have developed in me the attitude that I won't allow Linden Lab to have a penny more than is absolutely necessary from me - which is why I've never used the marketplace and why I abandon land rather than sell it - so they'll actually lose money (tier) for a while. This is another one of those things.
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Void Singer wrote:actually I find the idea of idle avatars sitting around on region, camping out on abandoned or linden parlces, eating up resources on a consistent basis, whether they're bots or not to be abusive of resources. they can do so anywhere, so there's no point in them bogging down a particular region, and frankly as a user of the region they're a nuisance in more ways than one.
All avatars use some resources and all avatars are allowed to - bots and manned. Whether or not the useage constitutes "abuse" is another matter. One avatar, as in this case, isn't an abuse in my book.
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Void Singer wrote:Phil Deakins wrote:[...] the idea that it shouldn't be using sim resources if it's a bot is a non-starter, because it's allowed to. [...]
actually I find the idea of idle avatars sitting around on region, camping out on abandoned or linden parlces, eating up resources on a consistent basis, whether they're bots or not to be abusive of resources. they can do so anywhere, so there's no point in them bogging down a particular region, and frankly as a user of the region they're a nuisance in more ways than one.All avatars use some resources and all avatars are allowed - bots and manned. Whether or not the useage constitures "abuse" is another matter. One avatar, as in this case, isn't an abuse in my book.
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Pussycat Catnap wrote:Phil Deakins wrote:ARing it would be silly AND a waste of LL resources
Unless the AR worked, in which case it would be effective. :smileytongue:Even if the AR worked, which it shouldn't, it would still be a waste of LL resources
I told him that he'd bought five of them by mistake and no, he can't swap one of them.
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The only sensible change to the rank system is to ditch it altogether. It's completely pointless and meaningless.