Ciaran Laval

There is an absolutely massive difference between underage kids sneaking in when the door says no, and underage kids being here with consent. The whole reason Linden Lab are imposing the restrictions on 13-15 year old kids they are outlining in this post, is because of how much the goalposts move when you consent to accepting minors.

Terence this is a positive and by the sounds of it, well thought out plan, but why can't you extend this to all 13-15 year olds and give them space to socialise on a continent whereby they can't search or access items on other continents? You could even give their parents access to their continent and see how that works out.

16-17 years: can connect to the regular grid, but are limited to PG sims, not able to see mature sims, even if these are adjacent. Have you got a quote for this? I know it has been on the discussion table but nowhere have I seen it officially stated that 16-17 year olds won't be able to see adjacent mature sims.

Actually, they didn't. If you consider AU as a "test bed" for various things LL wanted to try out but didn't want to risk Gridspace doing, the way they used Avatars United makes perfect sense. Now they know what people like and what they don't like, all without using a millimeter of their Grid to find out. Now they can trot out these well tested "improvements" and enjoy the positive response thus generated. Far from being a bad decision, this makes economic sense. Now, you ask how this will benefit someone who uses "Blue Mars". Whatever makes you think Linden cares in the least about Blue Mars? It isn't a Linden product, so it isn't worth consideration unless it's a threat. Welcome to the Real Life world of business and making a buck. Thank the Gods that there is someplace like Second Life where we can relax and not give a d@rn for a while about bottom lines and profit margins. However in terms of reach, this is a massive own goal, WoW is massively bigger than Second Life, word of mouth is an important concept, what do you think users of WoW and Avatars United now think of Linden Lab?

I am all for Facebook association and twitter (which I have never used) because everyone and their dogs see the benefit to having the association, news programs, TV programs, news papers, so why people are moaning about it I don't understand. From a business pov its a no brainer why LL would "connect" to FB people using FB are prime target market for SL and if LL don't do it you can be sure as Hell some other site will (IMVU always has) When SL is released as a web based client the potential to expand the amount of users logged on will not be capped as it is now. Web based User + Facebook = more SL residents = more user to user transactions = stronger SL economy. It really isn't rocket science. And for those who prefer to keep their real pictures and real lives private, well, make a Facebook account for your SL name and avatar. People make FB accounts for their dogs and companies after all. There is nothing to fear, nothing will be compulsory (i doubt) just like Voice isn't compulsory and I recall all the "tears and tantrums" about that when it was announced by the lab. I for one can't wait for SL to be linked to social network sites. I think it's a positive move to make and will in the long term benefit us all... "as a whole" Facebook intergration would be extremely divisive, plenty of people hit Second Life because to them it's exactly that, not first life, Facebook is only interested in first life, it's against their TOS to setup a facebook account for your SL avatar. Facebook can go whistle, it's already there, if you want to use, go use it, just leave it a million miles away from Second Life.

Indeed, maybe it's overheads, I use Jive elsewhere and can blog if I choose, or setup my own groups etc.

Thank you for the comment Shockwave. Closing down AU is not really about abandoning stated ambitions but should instead be viewed as an effort to focus our resources on improving the Second Life experience for all Residents and to eliminate the brand confusion between Avatars United and Second Life. All AU functionality that we decide to fold into Second Life will be within the Second Life brand. Those who play Eve will be chuffed to bits by this explanation. I don't know what you're upto but keep Facebook out of my profile.

Daniel, whereas there are cheaper or even free versions of these commercial programs, be very careful reading the license, because many of them will forbid their use for selling content you create if you use student versions.

There will be issues with mesh that will mean the prim won't die, the same as sculpties, there will also be a market for pre-made mesh for builders, same as there is for scultpies, unless LL do something completely silly such as banning the prim, the introduction of mesh should be a boost for SL. The basic inworld building tools are a major major plus point in SL, I don't think LL are silly enough to forget that fact.

At bloody last, something to get excited about! I'm sure there will be many twists and turns to unfurl but this does look good.

Whereas this project has potential, the one size fits all solution is going to make it a jack of all trades, master of none. Roleplay names are very different to business names and should be treated as such, you're already nerfing the potential of this for roleplayers with the once a week change, charging a fee will just about kill it for roleplayers. The colour change is a welcome move, allowing people to reserve their name would be an even better move.

Are you a troll or an agent provacateur?

I'm a marketing professional in my day job and all I can say is that I'd rather try to make my SLMarketplace sales rock than spend alot of time crying over slowdowns in an "in world" store. You're not seeing the bigger picture here, if inworld stores decline and people go to SL Marketplace and then aren't replaced by new tier paying residents inworld, Linden Lab have a problem, a big problem.

User to User could pretty easily be spoofed, just set up a dozen bots selling each other $1000 items 24/7. Besides a lot of money is probably just bouncing around through free unverified alts for money laundering anyway. Who would want to spoof it? I move money between alts, but as others point out, that's far from the most common use case of resident to resident transactions, the most common use case is people buying goods or services. The stat was far from perfect, but it was a stat that we could measure month to month.

Given the state of the world economy, this looks very promising going into a recovery. Thanks LL for weathering the economic storm with hard work and dedication to your product. I appreciate the efforts. LL have, like the UK government are planning, cut too much, too fast, this greatly hampers growth.

So I think saying the entire user-to-user transaction is worthless because of one possible confounding value is silly. It may still be useful, though should always be evaluated with possible confounding variables in mind. It's a figure that leaves a lot of questions unanswered, but it is a benchmark, you're right, people need to take it with a pinch of salt and in context of the whole economy, context is the important issue.

Whereas user to user transactions aren't the greatest of benchmarks, they are a benchmark, I can see why it's a skewed stat as I send money back and forth between alts, the same for PMLF, I'm not a fan of the stat but it is a benchmark. The overall tone of saying you're changing the way you report things, but not putting in replacements has an air of spin, whether that's intentional or not I cannot tell, you seem to be well meaning and trying to put in place more meaningful metrics. Fixing search, would help greatly by the way.

ha! That works a treat and there I was thinking "This won't work, I'm not logged into the Jira" and it did work, at which point I remembered logging me into the jira whilst I'm already logged in here was part of the upgrade!

How do I get back a list of issues I've voted on? Can you do something about the colour scheme, the green font works ok where it's infrequently used but as the Jira has lots of links it's a bit hard on the eye.

And to be honest, Q's attitude towards us has not made us feel warm and cozy inside. His attitude is fine, it was a sign of honesty, he maybe should have kept it to himself but it's refreshing to see a reaction like that, it shows he's human and it also shows he's not bullshitting us, I'd rather someone was straight like that rather than than talking through the side of their mouth.

Wow, people. I'm amazed at the way folks are misinterpreting what I said. Some of it is, I'm sure, deliberate, by people who have axes to grind. All I tried to do was explain why options should be a last resort. Nowhere did I say we won't have them. I welcome your blog post, however I don't think it's so much people having an axe to grind, some people read things differently, go to any forum and you'll see people taking something someone said the wrong way, or not in the manner the other person intended. Whereas I don't agree with you that options should be a last resort, I do agree that options are in themselves added workload and problematic. Regarding the various accusations of condescension and not listening to our customers, how about a little reciprocity? I'm trying to have a somewhat nuanced, open discussion, explaining some of Linden Lab's desires and constraints, and what I get in return seems to be an attack because I haven't simply agreed to some hypothetical ideal. I'm listening and trying to engage, are you? Please, let's assume good intentions here. If we all listen and comment with respect we'll get farther. Many things Linden Lab do are full of good intentions, it's when people point out flaws and don't get listened to that the problems arise, you have a whole sackload of users, you're never going to please all of the all of the time, but when people point out glaring flaws and they get ignored, then you're going to run into conflict. Two Jira's that highlight this: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-1819 A user even developed a fix for this, it worked for a while but someone at Linden Lab is absolutely determined not to fix this issue, they haven't even tried to give a proper explanation of why they won't employ the fix. http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-2001 The infamous search maturity ratings bug, fate even dealt a kind hand here, the Jira was reported a full month before search was rolled out into the wild, at the time of the report it was only a viewer 2 issue and due to other issues the planned search rollout was delayed and yet, despite this serious bug, they went and rolled out search anyway. These are the sort of things that lead people to say you're not listening, by the same token you're right to ask people to listen to you and point out that this process is a two way street, it has to be for it to work.

Options aren't so much bad, they're problematic, I think that's what you're trying to say, they're problematic for designers and users but they are required to help the user experience. An overly cluttered user interface will put users off and having advanced options openly on display will lead to people changing things they don't understand. The challenge for you guys is finding out which options are most commonly used, personally I don't think "Highlight Transparent" should be an advanced option, I use it frequently enough to see it as a more general option but I can go weeks without needing to use it, ideally I would be able to setup my own regularly used options menu, but that throws the ball back to you guys to design an interface that can be used that way and you probably have better things to do.

Let me use Curse of Agony!!!

There's a jira asking for a mute feature, that may be of some assistance: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-1074 Other than that, you just need to ignrore those comments you find offensive, getting into a debate about it generally just makes the situation worse, if you don't like someone's comments, gloss over them as best you can.

Fillo.Farber wrote: If an account is upgraded to premium, is the stipend 300 regardless of account age? I read where older accounts still get 500 stipend. I don't have a premium account now - if I upgrade today, do I get the old stipend rate of 500 or the new rate of 300?. My account is over 5yrs old. No apparently it's not L$300 according to age, it depends upon when your account was created. However this is based on people who were premium prior to 2006 but went basic after upgrading again and then getting the old stipend rate. LL may have changed this now so I'm not 100% sure but at one stage it definitely would pay you the stipend based on when you first went premium.