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Clever Ghost

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Everything posted by Clever Ghost

  1. Thanks everyone for your feedback :-) I'll make sure to get a cooling pad then, from a first quick research they seem to be rather affordable and not that heavy! What I particularly like about this specific Vaio is the way the extra "battery" attaches to the notebook's bottom, I haven't seen a similar solution for other notebooks. Also, I was allowed to take it outdoors for a minute and the display was still rather good, especially compared to other notebooks. I know that SL drains power like crazy, which makes most of the notebooks I have looked at rather unusable for my purpose, many don't even come with a third of the Vaio's battery capacity. All in all it seemed to be the one covering most of what I have in mind, but like I said, this being my first one I'm always open to suggestions ;-) One last question before I will probably order it this weekend - would it make sense to upgrade to the i7 processor instead of ordering the i5? It would cost an additional 100€ and I'm not sure if there would really be a noticeable difference? Edit: I also like the option of switching between the built in Intel graphics card and the Radeon, this can help with reducing power usage when doing less graphics intense stuff.
  2. So I'm currently trying to improve my quality of living, and with spring/summer approaching I have decided that I'd rather work outdoors than spending most of the time indoors - that's why I'm going to buy my first notebook ever;-) I don't want the notebook to to replace my quite powerful desktop computer but it's rather intended as addition to it so that I can get on my new bicycle and find myself a nice spot outside to get some work done there. My basic requirements are: not too big / not too heavy / capable of running SL roughly 2 hours in a row without totally overheating / acceptable graphics performance/FTP rates (don't need SL's shinies for this purpose, basic shaders & low draw distance will be enough), and also very important long battery life. A typical outdoors work day could look like this: 2 hours of SL, 2 hours general Internet stuff (Marketplace etc.), 2 hours GIMP (not going to buy a second Photoshop license) /Blender. I've looked at a couple of notebooks and my favorite is a Sony Vaio from the S-Series - here are some of its specs: Intel® CoreTM i5-2520M 2,50GHz Windows® 7 Home Premium 500 GB Serial ATA (7200) 6 GB 1333MHz DDR3-SDRAM 13.3" Display 1366x768 AMD Radeon HD 6630M 1GB WWAN Extended Sheet Battery (power up to 15 hours) Would this be enough to run SL ? Also, I have noticed that on the Sony US-Site the AMD Radeon HD 6630M 1GB can only be ordered with a Intel® Core™ i7-2620M instead of the Intel® CoreTM i5-2520M 2,50GHz option in my country - does anyone know if there's a specific reason/advantage/disadvantage for this? Also, I'm somewhat worried about the cooling capacities of such a slim/small notebook. As I have said before, I have no intention of running SL for more than 2 hours in a row, but I'm still worried that cooling capabilities might not be enough. I'd appreciate any kind of feedback as this is my first notebook with literally no experience in regards of what to get. Thanks a lot :-) Edit: I couldn't find this specific graphics card here and don't know what to compare it with: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Typical_Frame_Rate_Performance_by_Graphics_Card/GPU
  3. You're welcome, Zhoie! The turmoil has already resulted in a change of Community Standards but the creators of these systems are constantly looking for ways around it, so even though it's been a great step in the right direction it's not really resolved and it will take quite a bit of time for people to regain some trust - very unfortunate situation when considering the other problems like search, maturity filters and such and the very last thing the economy needed.
  4. @Couldbe I'm sure that the Marketplace changes won't be beneficial to sales when in comes to adult items, but I think there's more going on in addition, e.g.. Marketplace relevancy which has also changed not long ago and which doesn't help either. My sales have been surprisingly good until about the third week of February and I've even had my very best sales day ever in February, then all of a sudden sales dropped majorly. Around the same time the alt scanning issue became known among a lot more people who had been previously unaware. 2 of my best customers who had bought from me for years even sent me a notecard, letting me know that they really like my new releases but won't buy anything in SL for as long as the issue isn't resolved, even though they knew I wasn't using one of these systems. Another long standing customer sent me a "good bye" IM, letting me know that this (the scanning issue) was the last straw that broke the camel's back and that he would move on to another virtual world. I'm sure there are a lot more people that are feeling the same way right now. If it stops being fun then people are not really willing to part with their money any longer, or at least they're holding back for now. @Zhoie There are / have been so called security systems with a "feature" that let people look up other people's alts. People felt / feel violated in regards of privacy, plus because of how these systems work they are highly unreliable and people were linked to accounts that didn't belong to them, which could easily ruin one's reputation. If you have a few hours to spare then the Jira about this problem might be a a good place to start and see what the issue is about: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-24746 Edit: Usually when I release one of my rather rare group gifts the store fills up nicely for days in a row, this time even that was totally different, I guess it only was a third of the usual visitors.
  5. I don't have a single mature/adult item listed on the Marketplace and my sales are totally down as well, both on the Marketplace and in world - I made about the same 3-4 years ago when my stock was really, really small and I can say that the last 2-3 weeks have been the worst in years for me, by far. Usually enhancements help to some extent with slow sales, but not this time. I don't know if it's really related, but I do indeed see a connection with the recent turmoil regarding the various alt detection systems. While I've never used one of these systems myself I hear people talking about holding back from investing in new stuff / buying L$ - this whole mess obviously took away the fun for a lot of people once they realized what had been going on all this time. My own spending habits always depend on how much I make, needless to say I've hardly spent any L$ myself recently apart from my tier for 2 sims. Plus I wasn't in a shopping mood because SL wasn't exactly fun in recent weeks. Take away that "easygoing" SL feeling from people and they have less reasons to spend.
  6. I agree that the current relevancy search is terrible, but relevancy just based on revenue won't really work either - old products would always do better this way and new products would be buried easily due to obvious lack of revenue. I don't know what magic formula was used back on Xstreet, but relevancy was so much more relevant back then. They must have used a mix of number of sales, total revenue, ratings..., and the outcome was rather good in most cases. Plus freebies / cheapies were automatically put in a separate category, now there's freebies everywhere. My own sales are absolutely awful right now, they haven't been that low for a very long time. My prices are fair and already lower than they should be - and I simply refuse to play the "sell for close to nothing promo" game. This practice has been worrying me for quite some time and it only seems to be getting worse. Unfortunately merchants don't realize that they will kill the economy in the end this way, and it's already hurting. I'd rather make sure there's a stable future for SL than take part in the "grab whatever I can within a month mentality ". Sadly there are more than enough merchants who fail to look at the bigger picture and the future of SL's economy. The change in customer behavior is also obvious - this week alone I had two people begging for free items and one who asked for a discount - for items that aren't even 2 U$ and that took me about a week to finish. All these close to nothing items on the Marketplace really seem to blur customers understanding of the time, effort and expenses it takes to keep running a business, creating quality content and providing support. The marketplace is only strengthening that kind of behavior, with all the cheap items taking up the top spots so easily. A new relevancy filter is absolutely needed, I just think it has to consist of more than just revenue.
  7. @ Winter The true name should be the one stated in the offlines (as far as I know), so that shouldn't be a problem. Answering through offlines first is also a good idea, even though that would require both of us being in the same time zone most of the time. I will just change my test alts settings to each of the given privacy option and then see what's possible or not. I'm not sure if it changes instantly so I'd better check the results tomorrow.
  8. @ Winter After having sent a 5k refund to the creator of a notecard instead of the person who had actually sent it (and who purchased the same copyable item twice) I always make sure to contact the sender by matching each notecard with my offlines first ;-) I usually have a lot of capped IMs each day, and while not all of them go to my email I still get most. So usually I copy the sender's name from the offline and then paste it in world to bring up their profile so I can send an IM / answer. If I have to spend half an hour to even find a customer first without any other way of quickly contacting them then I'll have to introduce a notecard only policy unfortunately.
  9. @ Shockwave Thank you, bringing up an item's / notecard's properties could work - which still leaves offline IMs that are capped in world, I would not know how to answer these if there's no way to make someone's profile show - unless there's another way to contact someone without actually viewing the profile.
  10. "Friends" means that only your Second Life friends can see the information on the web and inworld." Maybe I don't quite understand this one - does it mean if someone chooses this setting it will be impossible to search for them at all? How would I be able to contact a customer who had sent me a notecard (or whose IMs don't show in the IM panel because the were capped) this way? How would I be able to redeliver items due to a failed delivery?
  11. I haven't opted out either (with my business account) and I usually get these kind of emails just fine. I don't use spam filters for my SL email address at all but still haven't received the email about the maturity changes.
  12. B00tsy.Compton wrote: It is also not clear to me if the word filtering software is just checking the keywords/title/features or also the entire description. Could not find anything about that in the listing guidelines. It seems to be description as well. I had one item that was set to adult by the filter software because I pointed out in my description that the item does not have any xxx animations (after having received a bad review because a customer obviously expected xxx animations even though it had been clear from the original description that it did not, but I had still added it afterwards). This was an item that I hadn't fixed after the migration from Xstreet, so it was an item with no keywords, features or related items at all and the only instance of xxx was in the listing's description. I couldn't set the item back to general before I had deleted the "does NOT come with xxx animations" from the description.
  13. Loving Clarity wrote: The issue is that we, the merchants now have to go in and REMOVE any of those keywords (which LL has not posted yet) that might cause this effect. So for those with 1000 listings and all pertaining to Gor, even if HALF of them aren't mature or adult items that's 500 items to manually change keywords on within ONE WEEK. Sorry but I find that just plain inconsiderate on LL's part. Especially since we all just had to go through listing keywords again during migration back in Oct. Oh, I absolutely agree with you on this one - I have close to 1000 Marketplace listings myself with my business account and haven't even managed to finish the mess the initial migration from Xstreet did to my listings, actually I haven't even managed to fix half of my listings after months and I have spent weeks working on them already. Copy/paste unfortunately doesn't work for my items, so I have to do each one separately. It's pretty clear that they have no idea how time consuming all this fixing can be. One week is indeed a total joke for those affected, even for those who can dedicate all of their time to this task as it can take hours to even find the one word that has to go. And what about those who are on holiday right now or away for other reasons? Those that have other deadlines to meet? And those who don't even know about the change because they are not among the few who actually received the email and stumbled across this coincidently by browsing the forums? There should be a minimum of 3 months, you can't announce such a major change "last minute". The Marketplace issue should have been taken into consideration and planned ahead long BEFORE the actual merger.
  14. I think people will get used to searching for medieval again really quickly. When I started SL a few years ago the kind of items you mentioned in your post (kitchen, couch...) would have been tagged mostly medieval instead of gor /gorean. While not my lifestyle I wouldn't consider it particularly naughty and I wouldn't have put it on the bad word list myself (in addition to never having merged both grids), but since there's a very good and proper "replacement" keyword available I don't really think that there will be lots of lost sales because I'd assume that all merchants will adjust their listings accordingly. For the "naughtier" aspects of the gorean lifestyle there will be the mature setting and people will quickly learn which of the two keywords they have to search for in order to find what they are looking for ;-)
  15. Brooke Linden wrote: For those who didn’t receive the email, please make sure you check your spam folders. I did a quick check and your names were on the list we submitted to send. I haven't received the email either with my business avatar even though I don't have any spam filters enabled for my SL related email address. I don't know if this has been brought up yet, but I was wondering what's going to happen to "related items"? Will related mature / adult items be allowed in general listings? Or will they be blocked from sight? Will a related mature / adult item in a general listing make the general listing mature / adult as well?
  16. I'd print the HTML page and see if there's still something in it that could qualify as adult. Have you made sure it's in the right category (in one that isn't set to adult by default)? The name of the boxed item? Oh, and totally unrelated, but in order to avoid flagging or other issues I'd remove the celebrity names from the listings / keywords, there's a paragraph about it in the listing guidelines which says it's not allowed.
  17. Something in title? Or even the name of the image? They no longer rename images like they did back on Xstreet so image name will also be in a listing's HTML page. Just an idea if nothing else helps ;-)
  18. I found an item that was set to adult among my items which I had missed when first looking at my listings. At first I couldn't change it back to general, but then I found the reason - it's an item with a few cuddle poses and I made it clear in my description that it doesn't come with xxx poses, just so people won't expect something else. After having removed xxx from my description I could change it back to general. So it seems that not only keywords and titles are being taken into consideration but descriptions as well.
  19. Could it be possible that there's some kind of daily "maturity check" in place, not updating maturity rating instantly? I've seen delays for other items as well when I updated keywords, some of them took nearly 2 days before the changes where reflected in search.
  20. I've just picked the two examples from the last post I had read before my reply, this applies to many, many, many other keywords as well. At first I thought we were given too few keywords / characters to work with, but I find results to be utterly frustrating in many cases (unlike back on Xstreet where I could always quickly find what I was looking for) - too many merchants use every available character just because there still are a few left, no matter if it's really related to the item or not. This is especially a problem for those who sell items that depend on these keywords because there's no other way to describe them differently (like the Christmas tree or skin example above), results are cluttered with so many unrelated results that it's not really fun to shop for these kind of items unless you spend a lot of extra time to refine search. Like I said, there's hardly an item that you couldn't associate to one of the "popular" keywords if you just use a bit of imagination, but this serves nobody in the long run. For customers this can only lead to a very frustrating shopping experience. I always try to be very considerate with my own keywords, but when I see how other people list their items I might as well stop fixing my items by adding keywords for each item separately and just copy/paste one general set of keywords to all the remaining listings I still have to fix. My own Marketplace "shopping volume" has decreased by about 90% compared to what I spent back on Xstreet because of the unsatisfactory results I tend to get. Anyway, I didn't mean to derail this thread but this maturity change might in fact solve some of the keyword related problems because people have to pay more attention to them now, making some choices.
  21. Ji Yheng wrote:. So now things like a barrel stove and vegetable stand are unsafe for teenagers to purchase. I am furious -- as merchants we are expected to weigh now whether to market to Goreans or to teenagers? Wouldn't someone looking for a barrel stove more likely search for barrel stove? Someone looking for a vegetable stand search for vegetable stand? I think the "too creative use of keywords" is part of the problem with results that don't necessarily make sense to a shopper, I pretty much gave up shopping on the Marketplace because of this. There's hardly any kind of item that you couldn't "link" to a certain keyword with creative explanations ("this skin will look fabulous when standing next to an Easter bunny" (so let's add Easter bunny as keyword), "these shoes will look fabulous under your Christmas tree" (so let's add Christmas tree as keyword), "this shirt will flatter any high quality skin" (so let's add skin to keywords), "this beach hut will even look better with furniture" (so let's add furniture as keyword)....... Unfortunately many merchants do just that, not realizing that it will harm their business in the end. This change might actually help with unrelated results to some extent because merchants have to chose more wisely. Regarding your two examples - both of the items you have mentioned are not specific Gor items, they can be used for pretty much every kind of SL lifestyle. As a shopper I'd prefer to get results that are specifically Gor if I searched for that term and not hundreds of items in between that can be used for pretty much everything else as well. Apart from that all of my Marketplace items show "general", it seems like nothing has changed for me Marketplace wise. Inworld is a different matter with my mature land that I had bought in good faith years ago when it was perfectly ok to have a PG store on mature land...
  22. Very strange indeed ;-) VAT ID shouldn't be an issue - most countries in Europe are subject to paying VAT on all USD transactions, like tier, land store purchases and such. When you are self-employed and your income exceeds a given amount (varies from country to country - in my country it's 17500 Euro / year) you need to pay VAT for the total in addition to income tax (which you only don't have to pay if your total yearly income, no matter if self-employed or employed or a combination of both doesn't exceed roughly 8000 Euro / year). So if your income from self-employment exceeds the given amount it will be a good idea to register your VAT ID because this way you can deduct VAT paid for business expenses like tier payments from your total VAT bill. LL introduced this sometime around mid 2007, so it's been in place for a while and shouldn't be the reason for me to not see a button to add payment info ;-) Edit: Thanks for the link, I hadn't found that earlier! I guess this line does explain it: Quote: "For security reasons, payment information can only be stored or changed when a payment is being processed" Edit 2: So each time I want to update payment info now like updating an expired credit card I will have to buy L$? Who came up with this "brilliant" idea... Very interesting link, thanks again for finding it!
  23. Thank you Kei - this is what it was like before and how I had done it previously, but there no longer was a possibility to just add payment info today under Billing Information. I'll upload 2 screenshots that I just took with this account (Clever Ghost), this is exaclty what it looked like earlier today, there no longer seems to be a way to simply add a credit card / paypal info.
  24. Ok, here's a quick update to my former posts: After having failed to add a payment method for inworld L$ purchases to an alt account (payment details couldn't be associated through the web interface even though I had added a payment method for web based L$ purchases which was troublesome enough), I tried again with viewer 2.x and I was given a clickable link that worked, but I had to buy L$ again for my payment method to be added to "Buying L$ in the viewer". My alt's profile now says "Payment Info Used". It seems that it's no longer possible to simply put payment info on file, which is actually all I had wanted, I needed none of the additional L$ that I had to purchase today. In my opionion this clearly is a step backwards. Adding payment info should be an easy and intuitive process without having to try various things first just so you might be lucky and one of the countless buttons you click in the process might turn out to be the right one. I wonder how many people simply gave up and go the freebie route instead. I will spare myself the trouble in the future ;-)
  25. You getting a different comment than me made me try something else - instead of placing a limit buy order I placed a market buy order. This time I was taken to a page where I could enter CC info. The buy order wasn't really completed though but instead it now shows the equivalent USD balance. I was able to associate the CC to "Buying L$ on the web" and "Increasing your US$ credit", but I can't associate it with "Buying L$ in the viewer". When trying to buy in the viewer my alt is still told that it doesn't have a payment method set, and the status in my alt's profile hasn't changed either (even though I know that this can take a bit). Oh well, I'll just leave it at that but considering that most people don't seem to be happy with the current state of the SL economy it's rather strange that they would make it so difficult to easily buy a bit of spending money. Edit: And to add more strangeness - when placing my L$ buy order the estimated amount was deducted from my trading limits balance again even though the order is already covered by my USD balance. All this can't be good for retention numbers ;-)
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