Dartagan Shepherd

We've passed farce long ago. No notice of magic box upgrades, or recommendations to do so. Ignoring suggestions all along of direct delivery having the delivery receipt asked for. Not that you could trust a delivery receipt at this point. Not sure how they can convince themselves that ripping off their merchants and customers is changing the world or in line with their idiotic "culture". They get paid to build an excellent product. That's all we ask, that's all we want. If they want to change the world go fight malaria in africa or something. Because all this is doing is screwing up the virtual world that people rely on for incomes. Unless that's what they mean by changing the world. Way to go, LL. I can't begin to tell you how foolish you look to the outside world. You can't even manage to handle the basics of commerce.

Pamela Galli wrote: I have only put the on-rez script in my transfer items. I had not considered that I need one for the purpose of monitoring Marketplace software. If the script is made copy in a copy item, tho, it will send a notice every time the box is rezzed, not just the first time. It could be done. I wish I had more time this week, otherwise I'd whip something up, but some kind soul may if such a beast doesn't exist already. What you'd need is a script that makes HTTP calls to your web script which checks whether the object has already registered as rezzed. Taking it one step further it could optionally let you record mutliple rezzes, and the avatar, time, location, etc. of each rez. It might even make someone a decent third party service to provide to merchants. Maybe run it by the scripting forums and see if someone would do it on a donation basis. Or hit up Darrius or Sassy here for more input

Darrius Gothly wrote: I stand corrected. Yes indeed, Fraud would be intent to take money illegally. I believe though that while proving fraud would be almost impossible, proving negligence would be a breeze. Of course now that they've hidden the JIRA, all public record of them being made aware is now gone, so they've adequately covered their backside there. Like it or not, they've got some savvy lawyers on the payroll. The fact that they list a USD amount on products listed on the Marketplace also gives them real-world value. Thus if Pamela and others add up posted dollar amounts for products they have "lost" due to delivery without payment, I suspect the numbers in real-world money will reflect a value worthy of raising a legal stink. Yeah, I'm being a real rabble-rouser on this issue. It just galls me that they (LL) continue to act with impunity, rendering absolutely abysmal service, then standing behind their "Giant Gorilla" status as a shield. @Pamela - Your statement about living in fear that they can close your account on a whim is EXACTLY what gets my hackles up. I've never been fond of people that use their power and position to exact inequities on others. It is the responsiblity of the strong and powerful to PROTECT those in their care, not bully them into compliance. I've spent way too much of my life watching how supposedly powerful people act with complete indifference as they savage and destroy the lives of those around them. Pamela, I wish for all our sakes that I had a way to make LL pay attention, but it will only be with the courage and action of a group of people such as yourself that LL will ever be made to listen. I think it's clear that reasonable time has passed for LL to correct these errors; any delay from here on out is nothing but negligence. Now we just have to pray that enough people with enough anger will bond together and prove to LL that being the bully is not as much fun as it seems. There are things that can be done, and perhaps it's about time to seriously begin that process. Here in SL it may be difficult because things like this take substantial effort and involvement by people. Did try to predict that Zynga would be a factor in exposing some of this virtual currency "stuff", and that has proven true to some extent so far. For instance the American Bankers Association is trying to get the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to regulate virtual currency as real currency mostly because of Zynga/Facebook currency. There are some other rumblings out there, but nothing of regulatory or precedent setting substance. If enough people are interested, consumer protection can be achieved for virtual currency and goods, not just here in SL, but overall. To some people this is employment, time, income and real world worth. It "should" happen, as we see here repeatedly.

Darrius Gothly wrote: We ARE here to help. We DO want to help. But we have to know you want to make the Marketplace work too. If you don't want it to work, if you'd rather it fail .. just say so and we will work amongst ourselves to provide an alternative that will work properly. Not to get too far off topic, but at this point giving the marketplace back to us would be the best thing that could happen. An inconvenience to have independent markets that don't have direct access to accounts, but look at the other side of it ... with SLX you used to have to put your L$ in a "wallet" type of account. If we still went that way, even if billing blew up like this, people would have only lost the money in their wallet accounts and no more, and could have taken out their balance any time they chose. This would not have happened to this extent. Also, in all of this Direct Delivery "stuff", one major thing has been ignored, and that's the fact that in-world deliveries needed improving as well. If they could improve the scripting for in-world deliveries to work like Direct Delivery was "supposed" to work, then everyone benefits, including lots of scripted applications in-world and "magic boxes" would work just fine or keep the direct folder-to-folder system of Direct Delivery. But since they've pulled back elsewhere like SLB, SLCC, communications ... at this point it would seriously reduce their problems and overhead as well as development time and costs from other teams that work on the edges of Marketplace "stuff". Anyhow, just a +1 vote on giving the Marketplace back to its users. We did it better and it didn't cost them anything, including a ruined reputation. Maybe more people would actually start in-world shops again. Land Barons have claimed quite substantial drops in commercial rentals since the Marketplace was taken over.

Read that blog post, thanks to Inara and you for contributing over there too, Toy. I thought the billing bits were halted once they announced it on the other thread. Ah well, optimism is a bit premature. I suppose we can say at least we learned what the problem actually was, although why it couldn't be caught during testing is beyond me.

@Medhue Great work, once again, congrats! @Darrius, still getting a smile out of Couldbe's "bromance" comment. Remember the Darrius and Dart show thing from way back (or was that Dart and Darrius) ? Perhaps that wasn't such a bad idea after all @LL: Looking at the sticky post http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Product-Listing-Enhancement-Update/td-p/1689867 ... wasn't sure if it was ok to post to that thread or whether you guys meant to make that read only. Thanks to the commerce team and Rod by proxy for stepping up and the generosity of the free ad listings. I would say that the announcement for that was lacking, again pointing to a communication issue, so no one knew that you were offering or would offer any kind of compensation. On the other hand, were it known, everyone would have signed up for a free ad, decreasing the effectiveness of each ad. At any rate, despite blunt critique on our part, the communication and gesture are much appreciated. All merchants want is a communicative and responsible business partner and a two way street on merchant issues and marketplace features. That and to share the danishes. By the time we get here, they're all gone.

Good points and mostly agree, except that I never consider it game money at all. I realize some of it is semantics and some of it doesn't apply on an individual level. It does however equate to money to LL and all of it affects their bottom line. To paint it in broad strokes, look at it this way... It's all real money because L$ have been purchased with real money. If you make L$1,000 from nothing, it's not "your" money whether you cash it out or not, it was purchased with real money by who knows how many other users. Part of the system depends on churn. The more it churns the less liability there is. You probably wouldn't take LL to court over losing ad money purchased with L$ if you weren't the one that purchased the original L$. Therefore it's "game money" that came out of thin air. However, lets say a million dollars USD worth of L$ are purchased. It sits in an LL bank account. The more ways LL can find to siphon that million dollars off, the less for the users, so I'm with you there. Now say that the marketplace commission comes out to say $100,000 USD worth of game money. Because that money has now been "spent" by users, LL can now cash out that very real $100,000 from their bank account. So every sink, fee and game that LL plays is actual income to them, and "was" very real money to everyone that purchased those L$ in the first place. I look at it as "our" money until LL takes it in one form or another. They don't have to allow cashing out, they could charge more fees, more sinks if they wanted to, but they don't But the whole scheme of nickle and diming it out of our collective pockets rather than being more honest and clear about pricing is rather underhanded. I think it's real currency in a fictional representation. Purchased by real people with real money and very real to LL. If they shared exactly how much they made and how much they keep, published in real dollars, people would be in for a rude awakening. So to pull something like this, perhaps you and I individually weren't ripped off. But collectively as the people who purchased the money in the first place ... we are, because LL is certainly taking it out of their RL bank account.

Didn't we used to disagree all the time? You're no fun! You might get a kick out of a couple responses. No one I ever met downtown ever heard of SL, and I kept it to a hypothetical "game", so they probably thought I was talking about "that facebook game" or EA ... A short funny lawyer said: Too bad they're not a law firm, because that kind of billing would be result in being disbarred. An accountant said: Line items without the lines, why didn't I think of that?

Pamela Galli wrote: I filed a ticket saying I have been charged for months for things I have wanted to cancel and cannot. Dakota said when they got the issue fixed they would tell ppl to file tickets for refunds. Meanwhile I assume we can expect to continue getting billed. The house always wins. Bringing up a quote from our CEO Rod. "We may may mistakes, perhaps even bone headed mistakes but we genuinely beleive in empowering our customers with more and more ways to be creative and (hopefully) monetize their creations. Not less." Aside from the fact that most people out there on the internet don't have these kind of embarassing issues with a shopping cart. Aside from the fact that you've got a team that can't handle something as simple as ads getting billed properly, or ads getting cancelled properly, or ad subscriptions (set to renew by default) that can't be cancelled. We're not talking about one problem or bug but a handful of them all inter-related. Not only does this just not ordinarily happen .... anywhere from a small shop to Amazon or even in brick and morter setups. Actually, it didn't even happen to this extent in newspapers or magazines before oodles of technology when everything was handled by humans and by hand. It just smells bad Rod. Just on the one in a million chance that you'll actually swing by and peek at the thread, lets talk about your comment. If anything qualifies as boneheaded, this one would be it, ads and billing are one of the simpler aspects of SL. And it's not even SL itself, it's web based technology that everyone and their brother has to handle that has a shopping cart and a PayPal account. Now let's talk sincerity. If you really want to begin repairing trust, when you've got a situation where people are being wrongly billed (actually worse, some of them can't tell what subscriptions they actually have, whether they've been billed in error or not), what do you DO? Just to make a point, in my last trip downtown in my city I ran this situation by a bunch of business owners ... a couple of buildings I make the rounds in. Fear not, I did not mention LL as the company in question. However, it all meshed with my own take and experience as a lifetime employer and small business owner. Regardless, I get to chat with employees from Microsoft, tech companies, service companies, lawyers, you name it. Networking is kind of my thing locally. So after all the chortles and the smirks and the eye rolling after telling this particular story, I get a unanimous answer. "You come in like gangbusters, replace the offending employees if this isn't a first time deal, make your apologies and make some moves to rectify the situation the best you can for damage control." Suggestions have been mostly practical and do-able on your part. You email all concerned and apologize. You do not charge anything for the mistake period (Darrius put a price tag of roughly $58,000 worth of users ads you have out there, as a good a number as any, which wouldn't break your piggy bank, in fact sacrificing one disposable head at the company would make up for it). You email every customer asking if they'd like support to manually cancel the recurring billings. You also include in that email a list of every outstanding ad per customer so that they can pick and choose which ads to have manually canceled. And most importantly, you take steps to make sure that mistakes like this don't happen again and that your people are competent enough and that your quality control is enough to follow through with the needs of the customers in the future. Offhand comments also included the legality, because when it comes to RL funds ... this isn't. Explained that this was "game money" or "virtual currency" and got treated to another round of eye rolling, chortling and smirking and questions as to why people would willingly invest in something fragile enough to have no consumer protection or recourse. I'm pretty sure if I ran this as a formalized polling of a mix of businesses, the reaction would be the same. So now I'm going to quote you again: "We may may mistakes, perhaps even bone headed mistakes but we genuinely beleive in empowering our customers with more and more ways to be creative and (hopefully) monetize their creations. Not less." This is boneheaded, I'm sure on this we agree. We can probably agree that this isn't at all empowering or helping merchants monetize their creations. The plan here is to just continue happily billing away indefinately until the problem is resolved and then to only refund people who have taken the time to ask for refunds. My question to you as a CEO is again: What do you DO? I know what you've SAID. Business owners in my area are waiting to hear the punchline on my next trip downtown, because silly stories brighten their day.

The only similar thing that happened to us is when my wife's account was compromised. We reported it within 24 hours and after roughly 48 hours we were refunded only what LL could collect back from the thiefs account and wherever else they could track and retrieve that money in the chain of transactions. I believe we got about half of it back.

Cute. If you were billed then you would think the billing bug is "already" investigated and fixed, or at least manually resolved, otherwise you wouldn't have been billed for the enhancements. If they're saying wait until the bug that doesn't allow people to cancel their listings is fixed, then they may post that in the sticky thread OR on the marketplace release notes page. If you get billed for another cycle make sure to document that too. Document everything, screen shots where possible, don't let it go. Recommend sharing whatever happens as you go, as the forums and public spaces are the only avenues left for merchants to share and identify problems (and billing discrepencies) collectively. Let us know if and when your subscriptions have been cancelled. You would think that the one support request would be logged and that you'll be automatically refunded and your enhancements cancelled. Apparently they're saying that anyones subscriptions that can't be cancelled won't be able to be cancelled indefinately, which means they may bill for another cycle and that only people who submit the problem will get their money. The lights need to be kept on, on this one. Reduced to: heh.

Sure thing. Sorry Arwen. Out of gas, unless Darrius gets me wound up again in another thread.

Hmm, sorry about the hiring question. I'm coming up empty. Have scanned some old logs, re-skimmed previous interviews and announcements. You did make me realize that I used to include links to most statements that I would make like this. They seem to have sucked so much of my brain through a straw that I've gotten sloppy with SL discussions and descended into more rant and snipe than healthy discussion. Regardless, it was sometime around the M and Pink era. Odd that you mention that old listing fee debate which was from around then as well. I know Pink mentioned that choosing a name in itself was part of their cultural creativity test. That whole time was a case in point of monetization. Pink used to say "I can monetize anything". At that time, if you remember the whole set of office hours ... lots of talk about how to monetize various aspects of the marketplace. When the old team actually engaged here in the forums they used to pretty much lay out their plans for influencing sales as much as their desire to build in any features, and even at that, all features led back to further monetization (advertising, listing fees, etc.). Embarassing that I was on the wrong side of that old debate, as you and I both knew at the time that the acquisition of the marketplace was a blatant disregard and end to independently run markets and a healthy ecosystem. Used to joke about it, but it's true that a great thing brought into SL falls under "our world" until it reaches 7 figures and then it becomes "their world" and gets acquired. So much for developing killer applications that will bring people in. Ultimately this is a "cake and eat it too" company. They've simply used every model they could and stuffed into into the kitchen sink that is SL (subscription, free play, currency, advertising, etc.). And that has resulted in less money flow for everyone except the lab (actually less for them as well, due to decline because of overpricing).. Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge them profit. Just that it should have been scaled to a simpler model and pricing that would have allowed them growth and flexibility rather than a decline that could lead to a point of no return. I could point to another virtual world out there (CP) that's starting off with a far more realistic model, or that the only realistic and consistant argument for opensim is that the pricing is reasonable. I probably harp on this subject a lot, but they're so out of date that even breathing $1,000 setup and $300/month fee for private estates or their practice of doubling tier too steeply for mainland parcel sizes is enough to be a non-starter for new users. Now they're taking SL from virtual world to the new thing a "sandbox game", which means yes we're becoming a game, where we used to be something different. You would think at some point they'd wake up and quit with the culture and reward employees for focusing on doing what they do best, rather than create this hodge podge of employees being creative, choosing project ownership and just realize the only path is to forget what they want to do with SL, and what they want out of it, and just develop it for the customers and the customers only. But the next time I want to lose money I'll surely hire someone great with say networking and let them do ...oh, whatever they want to take ownership of, whether they've got experience in that or not. If they say they can handle it, why not let them work on 3 projects. Heck, maybe I'll even spread them across the country and let them work remotely. The company excels at creating no-win scenarios for themselves. "Would you like to play a game?" -- War Games.

You know, if I could babble at you a bit, since this OP topic is resolved anyway ... Finished reading that thread that Couldbe referenced, so in the context of Rod's statement being about the Jira, and because I rarely say anything positive these days ... I partially agree with what they've done with Jira. Partially being the key word. On the plus side, Jira to a casual user is a death sentence. No average user should be exposed to that beast. If they want new users, making bug reporting painless is a great move. It was also being abused by customer support. A bug should have nothing to do with customer support. If a user reports something that may be a bug, the customer support person should be submitting it for the customer. Never, ever should they have been using it as a cog in the support machine. On the negative side, it was valuable to everyone to be able to work on a more than casual level. I know I'd built things that if not for being able to see which bugs applied to scripting, I'd not have been able to build anything resembling a stable product. But therein lies the bonehead rub ... if the boneheads were on top of quality control you wouldn't need to compare every single script function in the wiki against the situations where it didn't work (the bugs). So rather than finally admit that they need to up their game in quality (across the board), they target the entire mechanism of bug reporting. If that comes with making scripting and other areas that people rely on the Jira for as a knowledge base better over the next year ... great! We're now adding stability and reliability to SL that it's sorely needed, and the Jira is no longer needed as a knowledge base or a crutch for customer support. Unfortunately, admitting the underlying problem of quality as a priority, or to "our" level of expectation isn't likely. It's crazy in that on this forum alone there a dozen people that you could get together that overall could improve SL in a significant way. Problem is that it has to start with their monetizing, and that's something they just refuse to address that they've become too greedy. Even now they're looking to hire a specialist in "currency" and part of their interview questions have been (paraphrased) "what would you do to creatively monetize SL in interesting new ways?" in their hiring process. The monetization here has just gone way too far. Most people don't understand the 50,000 ways SL actually monetizes, although more and more people are becoming aware of game monetization mechanics, some of them being the creative people who SL "might" attract if it didn't reek of monetization. People sense it, regardless and it's distasteful in underlying ways. There are so many paths to SL growing again that it's crazy, but if they can't overhaul their ideas of monetization into simpler payment and packaging and reasonable prices instead of being so clever with (increasingly outdated) business models, it's kind of moot. To take something like this, a no brainer virtual world platform, with a die hard user base and then kill it because their implementation of their wet dreams of monetization don't mesh with an old fashioned userbase that want excellence at a reasonable (and simple) price is just well ... boneheaded.

The idea is that if you're on the ball you don't make boneheaded decisions in the first place. And that when people do make too many boneheaded decisions, they're shipped back out into the world so that the boneheads can make boneheaded decisions elsewhere. Calling attention to your own boneheaded-ness only empowers your right to continue to be a bonehead, it doesn't empower your customers to do anything but use a boneheaded product that's even more difficult to monetize for anyone. Decline should be a pretty great indicator that it's not working, the rest is denial and boneheaded management. We should teach this in school. It's ok to be a boneheaded failure, as long as you want to empower people and change the world. Jeez, trying to communicate with LL to make a better product suited to non-boneheaded customers who value stability, consistency and a platform that's not already overly priced and monetized is like talking to a bunch of boneheads. This is just embarassing.

Darrius Gothly wrote: Just Moe. We Residents play the role of Larry and Curly .. as we're the ones getting bonked on the head at every turn. Well, that's spot on. Normally I'd tell them not to quit their day job, but ... you know. Also agree about the financial amounts, it's not couch change. Digging deep for optimism and coming up with thank god they don't work with anything nuclear, or mission critical, or financial or medical. Well, anything involving heavy machinery or fish, actually. Good team to send to an opposing political party in an election year.

Clothing deformer, ugg. Meanwhile in another galaxy, on another planet in the 'verse 4 guys finish new avatar rigs, complete with sliders, and that along with a new from scratch marketplace and other work since July. I think something is wrong with the hamster wheel physics at LL. On the meetings front, there's an interesting new concept. You get fewer people to "think stuff up" and replace them with managers to vet customer feedback and build the workload and everyone who used to think stuff up gets to know what they're doing when they come in, in the morning. Then you have far less meetings. I don't envy the employees on the lack of sound direction, which seems to be an issue with LL based on some ex-Linden feedback on sites like glassdoor and such. The think tank, love machine, "lab" kind of thing is a failed experiment. It just resulted in too little bang for the buck.

Medhue Simoni wrote: My guess is that it was on their list of things to do and it was the easiest. Isn't that how everything gets fixed in SL. The low hanging fruit gets picked away, while all the rest rot on their high branches. Low hanging fruit indeed, all the way back to March. Rule of thumb seems to be that if you can't reach it from a sitting position it doesn't exist. Low hanging fruit ... check. Beer fridge ... check. Job security ... check. Breakfast burrito ... check. One lonely known issue listed ... check. I'm thinking the average merchant gets more done in a day than the commerce team gets done in a month. Which may be the only difference that matters between an entrepreneur and a salaried employee. Just in case they were wondering where the angst comes from.

Good points. Down and dirty estimates are that developing and implementing direct delivery have cost this company somewhere near $250,000 or more in salaries and expenses over a prolonged timeframe. No company in their right mind would look at this kind of non performance and not do something about it. But an indicator of whether it is a winding down phase, or lack of management is what work comes next. Last we heard was something along the lines of "perfomance should be better, come test it!". As if every web developer doesn't know how to set up and test performance without live users. Last we knew that on this team there were at least 4 or 5 non-coders. Brooke, Colossus, Dakota, etc. The support person is justified, the "business development" and management positions simply aren't needed, one or two product managers overseeing the overall product line (SL only, not the newer products) are all that's needed. The marketplace never needed and still doesn't need anyone tweaking how sales are made, optimizing the market for more sales, etc. All it needs is a simple working product and let the rest of the market take care of itself. The more clever these employees get, the more the market degrades for individuals. The overall spread may be best to rack up the commission for LL, but certainly not best for the market and the seller. So now that they've blown more than a year (going on 2?) on direct delivery and and over a quarter million dollars in expenses, have to agree the big question is ... what's next? Features we've been asking for or promised 2 years ago? Anything? Half expecting Rod to come in on a white horse with new merchant programs and features that cost people even more money. That was hinted at in his roadmap. You know it's not going to be free if they come up with some "power seller" type of thing. We've all got another 6 months to kill waiting to find out if LL can actually handle features in a glorified open source shopping cart patched into virtual items in a database, right?

For the record, I tend to read all of your posts, although most of the time I find them with lots of words and little substance and fact. Also I tend to agree with your targetted Linden, or whoever is leading the commerce team ... at best it's horrible management and at worst they may actually be getting paid somehow, some way based on marketplace earnings, which is not in the best interest of individual merchants or in the long run in a declining market. I do have doubts of your sincerity, sometimes it seems like you just get off on the conspiracy thing. The breedables point hits a nerve, as far as direct delivery not handling unique items, and so of course I'm with you on an incomplete implementation. On the other hand, if you're going to start including too many merchants in the grand conspiracy, I think at that point it becomes completely useless ... if everyone becomes an enemy you're talking to yourself, not the community. That said, if I could wear a cheerleader outfit with pride and not be a victim, then you can be our resident nutter without being a victim, which is kind of my stance ... "he may be a nutter, but he's OUR nutter". If someone from outside of SL were to pick on you, I'd be there defending you, just because you stick up for your own. Forums have always been a problem for me with communicating, humor, sarcasm and the smirks that you can't see that might imply the light hearted bits behind the point are often lost. The one thing you might want to recognize though is that conspiracy as opposed to a reasonable bit of conjecture doesn't help the credibility of the community as a whole, in fact you might just be a Linden sent here for just that purpose, making you the most evil critter in the petting zoo!

Deja Letov wrote: Actually I just recently started using the Caspervend system because I knew this was coming and i wanted the "redelivery" option available via the terminal. And since it works for Marketplace deliveries too, it has already helped me even while still here. And I'll definitely pop something into my profile! Thanks Sassy! If babies weren't no copy/mod/transfer I'd say put in a feature request to Caspervend to be able to deliver them as well. Alas. Edited to add: And best of luck to you and yours.

It's almost like when Rod said they were testing Linden Realms in public rather than beta grid to make it easier to test, and that only to develop tools for "all of us". And yet here we are wtih Linden Realms still capturing away thousands of user hours from merchants, club owners, etc. Only different. Or when you try to get more money out that you earned and find you have to actually be approved to get your own money and that you'll get the customer support dodge when you try. Only different. Or that you'll get a fully working direct delivery in less than 2 years and get a partially working direct delivery and a bear with no pants. Only different. Or when you get professionals that go by psuedonyms (Lindens) and then decide that this isn't secure enough so condense their identity down to "Commerce Team". Only different. Or a Rod enhanced roadmap that in the last quarter of 2012 is still incomplete. Only different. Or that you'll get a project "shine on" which invests in new servers, but which actually nixes one datacenter to save money and then stuffs even more regions onto newer machines paid for with the savings. Only different. I'd suggest that maybe they should try something simpler as far as products than a virtual world as it seems to be a bit beyond them, but they already are.

Then again, if what they responded to was the support ticket Porky sent in, mentioned in this thread your whole scenario falls apart. Besides, they're too busy with other products they're getting around to releasing. If you want an evil conspiracy, consider LL's new Creatorverse product. This is an obvious theft of Professor Phineas J. Whoopee's 3D Blackboard (otherwise known as 3DBB) from the 1960's cartoons Tennessee Tuxedo and Underdog. Professor Whoopee should be contacted immediately.

Did you just claim that DD was delayed by a too small team of under-talented people late for an appointment with the unemployment line on a bit of reverse psychology you used in a forum post? Even my Magic 8-Ball doesn't do that. Dr. Phil says you need to take some ownership. Chatterbot says: Shall? Did you mean oops?

Cincia Singh wrote: I think the Jira had become a bully's playground with more opinion, ranting and flaming than bug reporting or relevant information posting. It had degraded to the point where it failed to serve its originally intended purpose. No where in the blog posting does it say anything about shutting down server development ... that's just an example of the type of inflamed rhetoric that resulted in the change. Aren't claims that these changes are because of bullies and user rants, when the company is saying that its goal is to be more helpful an example of inflamed rhetoric? No where in the blog posting did it blame users or point at having to read some extra text in the form of complaints and "chatter" were the cause, either. But the best part about whether a disgruntled customer has a reason to be disgruntled enough to rant and complain are the judgements passed on them by others. What's worse, the bully or the bully bullying the bully? Or, is this feeding the trolls or meta trolling? At any rate, it's not just the people complaining, it's also the people complaining about complaints. You'd think at the end of the day that something is wrong and that it isn't with the end users, because a solid product is fully capable of speaking for itself in terms of demand. Complaints won't change the demand for a great product. They might give clues to paths of improvements though, for a company willing to develop a product for users instead of the company. All users eventually vote with their wallets or their feet, and if you ignore those signs, you're ignoring the problems.