Sassy Romano

Open source vending system http://forums-archive.secondlife.com/54/b2/256378/1.html

Scylla Rhiadra wrote: @sassy: There are a great many people who are neither teens nor prudes who would like experiences that fall between "G" and "Adult." As in RL, I don't want much to hang out in a community run by the Moral Majority, but I also don't necessarily want to be living next door to a BDSM dungeon.  When we just had two classifcations, where did you live? I'm not seeking confrontation, just asking. They added "adult" after several years, how was it before then? After adding adult, M tended towards confusion. A is the new M. M is the new G for adults and G is the teen grid. That's how I see it anyway.

I'm all for it, i'd be quite happy to see M disappear and then we'll have adults on one continent and teens on another. Oh wait, we had that before lol.

Why not just use one of the "rent a prim" services that charge just a few L$'s a month. Even a premium membership bought anually costs what? $76 of which over the year you get back around $60 in stipend and get 512m2 free of maintenance. $4 for your land cost for the year? (check the premium price but it's in that sort of order)

...and it actually works just fine or all the inworld vending systems would have huge problems. In reality, all the inworld vending systems don't but the back end web part that is run that talks to Magic boxes just doesn't work well with the Magic box method.

AmyNevilly wrote: Yes, that is what I think too. Once I rented an adboard for 4 weeks at 500L$ per week. It was in a high traffic sim with lots of people. I got like 4 clicks and none of them turned into customers. If I'd used an pay per click network I would have got more value probably... Unless i'm mistaken, the system operated by SecondAd's doesn't report who the click was made by either so how does the advertiser gauge the success if they can't determine if the click turned into a customer?

One word... APEZ Anyway, sounds like the vendors you're describing are CasperVend. What you describe is a new feature and is optional for the merchant to use that method. Your friend has two choices, refuse the vendors or ask the merchant to use the other method.

While that may or may not be an attempt at humour, it fails. Since i'm not responsible for either:- coding the change that has so negatively impacted the platform steadfastly refusing to roll it back to a stable state Most people in a commercial environment operate in a way such that they're accountable for their results, this is often tied to their income by means of penalty or bonus. I don't see why this concept should be so alien? In the case of this disastrous server deployment, we are experiencing a very negative impact to commerce and enjoyment of the service paid for and the response is "we went on holiday so we're going to wait even longer". In an organisation with an effective CAB, this Change Request would have had a section "if it's bad, do what?", in this case, the answer would have been "ROLLBACK". Instead we have "well, if it's bad, we'll acknowledge that it's bad, then we'll have a look at fixing it, then a couple of days later we'll deploy, then if it's still bad, because we're on holiday we'll leave it to continue even longer as bad." Personally, I don't find that professional or acceptable to those of us who operate commercially here. We all have different ideas for what makes SL worthwhile, if logging in and chatting to someone is all some do, then the impact will be different but some of us are more used to a commercial world where people are held to account for their mistakes and rewarded or not in an appropriate manner.

Frankly there's one word that describes this... APPALLING! I'll say it again, link LL salaries to Time Dilation figures as a multiplier. TD=1.0, full salary etc.

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Dear LL, this isn't fixed but I have a great idea! You see, my existence in SL is almost exclusively that as a merchant. You know? making and selling things. If I don't make stuff that's not worth buying, then people won't buy, pretty simple equation. This recent sim update and it's follow up have had a major negative impact on us, your customers. It affects the shopping experience and that directly impacts me. But all is not lost, here's my suggestion. How about if your salary was index linked to Time Dilation. This would work great. If code was good and TD =1.00 you get paid full salary. Can you work out what you'd be getting paid right now? Now factor how that feels for us, the customers of LL while we wait for this recent sim code to be fixed instead of rolled back to a week ago. There isn't a single good change control practice demonstrated over this past week. Region: Cape Romano Uptime: 4 days, 5:49 Dilation: 0.78, min=0.08, mean=0.72, max=1.00, std.dev=0.27 FPS: 30.1, min=4.31, mean=31.6, max=44.1, std.dev=11.9 Combined: 72.6%, 1 min=71.6%, 5 min=88.9%, 15 min=89.1%

"Sweetest Goodbye" store is closing down

Ciaran Laval wrote: Sassy Romano wrote: The value of mall spots is in advertising and brand building and yes that mall spot might be a cost but so is an adboard which are hugely expensive for what they offer. Typically L$200 a week for a single ad! You can rent 20 prims in many malls for the same. the one thing you can't measure is whom sees your items in a mall and then checks out your mainstore based on noting your details from the items created. No but given a choice of clicking a prominent LM giver and visiting main store and purchasing or right clicking a prim, to find the creator, open creator profile, see if they have a Pick, TP to mainstore, i'll vote with them probably doing the former and that I can and do track easily. I just disagree with the general statement that "malls don't work". It's necessary to accurately track the metrics I suggested. As an example, using the simple formula I stated (sales at mainstore within 2 days of an LM being taken from a mall spot) one of my mall spots generates 50% more due to those who visited main store and shopped there. I grant that it's all a bit fuzzy, that customer could have already had an LM, maybe they refreshed it, what about someone that buys 3 days later etc. but it's a metric and that's the purpose after all. It doesn't have to be precise, this isn't about accounting but having an overview of the value of the location. On the other hand, there are some malls that don't work

The original post reads that you looked in your SL Transaction History. The advice given was to look in your MARKETPLACE ORDER history. That is where you will see the status. If the status shows as "delivered" then contact the merchant or file a ticket. Other status results will tell you what happend, like not charged. Were you offline, IM capped?

IM's would be trivial, emails would be trivial. Notecards would be much more work for LL and besides, notecards are so "yesterday", be a proper merchant, forward IM's to email EDIT: However none of the above currently happen.

Here's my suggestion for the developer/person that thinks 8 hours is ok. Go to the cinema, say half an hour before the film. Order the tickets online using your mobile phone or whatever. Wait around in the foyer for 8 hours while it says "tickets are being delivered". Got the point yet? 15 minutes MAX, absolute max for a timeout on a virtual product. There is no other commerce platform that makes an electronic transaction last more than 2 minutes before either succeeding or failing and backing out. I don't care what the excuse is be it "it's your magic box" (it isn't my magic box) or "it's the volume of sales" (yay us!). The timeout is innappropriate and expects people to wait online lest they lose the item if they logoff and are IM capped. Please fix it, this cannot be more than changing a constant in a line of code. 2 mins to fix.

My view on malls... In the beginning, Mall spots delivered most of my sales, since then main shop gets most sales by far and malls spots have reduced hugely. Is this due to a change in shopping habits or wrongdoing by LL or other forces? I'm pretty certain that many people will click the "see my main store" LM giver and go there or if they like their first purchase will go to the main shop so as the brand becomes more established, it's inevitable that a main store presence will dominate sales but I wouldn't say that "malls are dead". I track all LM's given at a mall spot, I keep track of rent and I keep track of main store sales by someone who took an LM from a mall spot within a 2 day window. If they then buy at main shop, I attribute that sale to the mall spot. This gives a fantastically different view of some of the mall spots which by themselves would look like they weren't worth it but when compounded with the value of their traffic feed to mainstore can swing their overall value by a huge amount. I have this view as a single web dashboard so can see at an instant the status of every spot, rent, profit, LM's given etc, referred sales. From this, I don't call malls dead at all though of course some spots are better than others. I'm a firm believer that the mall owner has a huge part to play too and simply rezzing a few booths and expecting mall renters to pay their tier while they go off and play is not a great partnership but quite prevalent. When the rents dry up, so does their income and poof goes another spot. The value of mall spots is in advertising and brand building and yes that mall spot might be a cost but so is an adboard which are hugely expensive for what they offer. Typically L$200 a week for a single ad! You can rent 20 prims in many malls for the same. You can have the glossiest, slickest main shop you like, you'll probably get one for huge prims and very low cost in a region called "no traffic" and remember, Coca Cola doesn't just bottle drink and then place a single line advert in the phone book.

Rya, also, look into Pivot Tables, you'll have fun sorting and analysing with those. (In OpenOffice "Calc", they're called Data Pilot)

Isabel, what you describe is normal behaviour for the Marketplace. It has been decreed that "up to 8 hours delivery" is quite acceptable for an electronic product. Personally, I disagree, a matter of minutes would be more appropriate. Anyway, if the item doesn't deliver in that time, the MP will refund the customer and you lose the business. It is intensely frustrating to have to wait 8 hours for a refund if you're a purchaser, equally as a merchant to tell customers that they need to wait for 8 hours. If they log out and their IM's get capped and MP eventually delivers 7.99 hours later, they won't receive their item. Anyway, what can you do about it? Wait for direct delivery. I remain unconvinced that the problem is "communications with the magic box". At least the problem isn't communication with my magic box when someone buys from me and it fails, therefore the problem must be with the back end failing to communicate with my magic box because of the back end part. Adding lots of redundant magic boxes as is often suggested would make sense if the region where the magic box was located was laggy or could not be contacted but then why do these failures occur when the region is online and not laggy? Without knowing how the communications is implemented, I remain sceptical. Anyway, Direct Delivery is coming...

With Viewer 2.7.2 (or whichever the latest is), as soon as I set Ultra, the viewer just evapourates. No error nothing, just poof. Can't use Viewer 2 and that's that.

Allow inventory drop could probably work, if it's owner only, just get them to touch it first and choose "AllowDrop" on a menu, then they can drop and then it time out and stop allow after a minute or something like that. As you said, delete from a menu is easy enough too. We're having to guess though as we don't know the use case. I have my own methods of modify prims while making it very hard to unlink but that's for my products.

There! Now you're thinking logically

Pamela Galli wrote: Does anyone realize that we are trying to run businesses here? Silly Pammy... don't be silly, SL is just a game right?

Why don't you leave it no modify but then have a separate prim that can be updated with content and use llRemoteLoadPIN and send the content via a secure update? Depends on the use case and we don't know it. You can detect link count and that won't bring up any dialogs.

When people derive an income from a platform then it's not a game to them. But this isn't about game or no game but purely good change management practice and putting into practice what is industry standard would allow better continuity especially for those for whom it's a platform for commerce.