Dartagan Shepherd

Wondering exactly at what point in the chain that the notification is sent. A chart might be nice here explaining the transaction flow. Not because people who know how to code can't use ANS easily, but generally wth a tool like this you explain the flow. Are there factors after this that may invalidate the transaction (failed delivery, refund, etc.) and if so is ANS capable of sending these adjustments? The verbiage on your wiki article is horrid. In so many words the vibe is that you grudgingly supported and actually tweaked ANS during its life cycle. You didn't want to do it, you don't like it, you refuse to implement the full functionality it had before, as with other features. It reeks of you coding for yourselves and not your customers and that when you do, you hate it. Also the brief bit of history is wrong on the wiki. It wasn't SL Exchange when you acquired it, it was already called XStreet for some months unless the deal was made many months before you announced it.

JohnMiddlefield wrote: Did Linden Lab now farm out its website programming and maintenance to a day care center or sumpin'? They are the daycare center. From their work culture document, the TAO ... Work Together We are engaged in a wildly ambitious and complex endeavor. We need to take on risk and accept the occasional failure. But we dream, stumble and win only together. This requires a level of creative collaboration you won't find in many companies. You must not only respect but actively seek out differing views, and then find closure after dissent to move forward together. When you look back, do so to find ways to improve rather than to blame. (Note the setting themselves up for failure, blunder, having to fumble for multiple views rather than solid management that runs the show. Clue, LL ... blame is good. Blame for failure is called performance based review. Better to not fail than to fail and learn from it. Unemployment is a great teacher.) Walk in our residents shoes We are blessed by some of the most informed, passionate, committed customers imaginable. They are our reason for being, they are our world, and we call them Residents. They are an insuperable source of advantage and an awesome responsibility. In every choice you make, consider how your choice will impact their experience. (Point of failure, they've always been extremely out of touch. A nice thought, though.) Good People Make Good Choices ... and Vice Versa There's love in the spirit of our mission, the enjoyment we take in each others' company, the style and humor we have at our best. We're here because we're open to all the wonders of the world and the goodness in each other; even the cynics among us harbor the begrudging belief that all things are possible. This is a place where you can be you, and we ask you to make the choices that enable your colleagues to bring out the best in themselves. (No, good people are good at what they do or they aren't. Being open to happy, fluffy love filled orgasmic experience do not good employees or an enterprise product make. Although I can see where a hippie promotion may spring to mind.) Be Thoughtful and Transparent We build trust through transparent and open communication. Be prolific in your communication but thoughtful, and remember that context is key. Report on your progress regularly and in language that benefits the widest possible range of your colleagues. You are responsible for ensuring that your messages reach your intended audience - make sure your signal does not become noise. (Partially good advice. Should probably try this good communication and transparency thing with their users. Empoyees are need to know on their particular jobs, unless they have scattershot employees that are too aware of everything else going on that they're not writing code or doing their jobs for 40 hours a week.) Add to this free food that employees get, the swag that they're so proud of and the hyper creative atmosphere. Clue, if you're creating art, you hire an artist. If you're going to build a technical widget, you hire technicians that produce a measurable amount of quality product. If you want to move forward, you admit that your own creativity and fluff bits added to a place of employment are causing your userbase to decline and your product to be inferior by comparison. Sorry for that long post, but yes daycare is the root of the problem.

Sorry, didn't mean to imply that gaming the system wasn't happening either. Just watching those search result numbers bounce up and down the last couple of days, sometimes it's stable, sometimes it's a moving target. Just one of many issues. Also agree about Pink. She's been moving and shaking since she left LL. Bring her back with a 5 year contract this time, and give her the ability to fire. It couldn't turn out any worse than to have her as Marketplace product manager. I think they let some of the wrong ones go in that mass firing. She would be one of them, especially in hindsight.

Agree. This is a quickie hack, not really suitable for promotions. You add a tag, they put up an image and link that to a custom search string that searches for that tag. No controls over the promotion, no cleanup, no tracking. It needs a proper mechanism. On seeing too many unrelated items ... have noticed that it appears glitchy, although nothing I've been able or willing to take the time to reproduce. Make sure the amount of products returned is (currently) about 1,800 with all maturity ratings checked, or about 1,700 items if you've got only General maturity checked. If you're seeing more than that, search is bugging on the results. Doesn't happen often, but have seen that it appears to happen occassionally (on a fresh login?), and it will return over 1 million results. Another good reason not to rely on keywords and search for promotions, both must work properly first.

Well yes, there is a certain amount of perks. Destination guide merchants were hand picked, the beta team and any other closed groups probably did have advance notice. This isn't necessarily an evil. There are also other reasons for the promotions such as the content itself being a commodity to SL. If they want content that appeals to popular trends and media, they're going to try to get people to create those things. Just the act of promoting something will have people trying to create content that fits, whether you actually ask merchants to build it or not. It stuffs search engines (with virtual things people aren't looking for, a practice they'd rather not have their users do on their own property) and social media. Of course that's where being a trained monkey comes to mind, with these newer attempts at marketing. They only need new trend based content as commodity because they're not doing the real work involved that would draw in and hook customers. What also comes to mind for all this effort is: Mad Men? This is your big marketing idea? Don't quit your day job. In contrast, the average merchant does circles around LL in terms of working product, support, promotion, hours invested, passion, etc. By asking people to stuff listings with the wrong keyword you're essentially saying that the way to fix the problem with LL is to stoop down to LL's level of business with shoddy product that doesn't fit what customers are looking for. Not the best strategy, really.

Marcus Hancroft wrote: I'm assuming now that the "madstyle" keyword is only to be used for clothing. I had two prefabs that I thought were perfect for it and they got removed for keyword spam. OK. Fine. I took off the "madstyle" keyword. It was only made for clothing designers anyway. That figures. Kind of what I was eluding to. A whopping sentence about the details (aside from being a bad time), meant that it was bound to result in some merchants either wasting time making new product, or some bits of nonsense in what gets listed due to some vague concept. Ah well, it's about boosting those commissions that I'm sure dipped during this mess and milking overall sales rather than a solid promotion. Hopefully some folks will make something extra off of it. Some will see less sales. Not sure what this tact of trying to cash in on popular media is though, from vamps to this. Granted IMVU makes a business of it, but LL seems to specialize in small time thinking. They've already got an enormous amount of product and themes to promote, which means you don't have to coast off of others. It is funny watching them dance around their own policy and liability of not selling established brands and property. Can't say Twilight and friends but we can say vampires for instance. "It's your professionalism that I respect." -- Little Shop of Horrors

Sassy Romano wrote: Sharie Criss wrote: You may want to wait until they fix the redelivery bug where it delivers gifted items to the buyer and not the recipient! It's crazy that they haven't fixed that bug yet. Somewhat since that's just a trivial change of "Buyer" to "Recipient" as the deliver target. While focussing on all the big issues is obviously important, to put a complete stop on also performing some wash up on the low hanging fruit does tend to call into question the priority handling. This change would take mere MINUTES and before anyone at LL yells about all the QA and regression testing, seriously, you don't need to regression test a change of recipient from TOTALLY INCORRECT to RIGHT CHOICE, that's a given. It's not a coding change that would have impact as such. Agree that they need to stop taking things away when they implement changes as someone said above ... they already know that ANS has a good in-world use cases. If they don't, a bit of homework will fix that on their part. Or they could scan their list of calls to the old ANS, I'm sure they can see that. On the small fixes, yes ... agree that there's plenty of obvious quick-fix issues. After you scan your own forums (which they do seem to read) and see after 50 or so posts, that a feature is pretty much a majority request for those interested, then that's something that's probably safe to go ahead and do. Email alert for reviews or Facebook Likes ... decisions, decisions. The larger mess in all this with the quick fixes is that for all the usefulness of development procedures, some of these no-brainer fixes can be done faster by literally writing it on a post-it note and walking it over to the persons desk and sticking it on their monitor rather than Jira's and hurry up and wait 6 months. A complete waste of money, time and resources for some of this. Maybe they should get creative and try teal tie-dyed carrier pigeons. Then they can handle getting the memo to remote workers busy in game and side project windows as well. It's still faster and cheaper than their processes.

Sera Lok wrote: i look forward to a ton of content marked "madstyle" that has nothing at all to do with the promo but is just marked that way to try to garner attention. yay. I can see that being an issue, especially with the one post above. Would like to see Madeliefste get an answer on why, though. Although if that's true that some listings are showing with the keyword and some aren't, they should probably know about it and fix or cancel the promotion. It's already asking merchants to make unrelated products during a buggy migration, not wise at this point to do that if the listings won't be showing properly.

For 5% commission that kinda-sorta delivers, mostly pays you, sometimes points to the wrong thing, it should come with a car wash and a free web cam. Job security for crowd sourcing. Keep the same issue churning from support to forums to jira to internal bug reports, cycle it back again to the user for more work and support the questions about the de-lists and why you've created more work for the user. I think this is what they mean by disruptive technology.

They did announce (yes on Twitter) a couple of days ago that they were running a spring fashion promotion in the destination guide with 20 top fashion merchants. The time period for fashion though was the 40s to the 60s. Not sure why the time periods would overlap but not match up though. As an aside, not sure which department gets to be responsible for changing "See a daily sample of highlighted items from XStreet SL.". in the main website shopping menu for featured items. We call this Marketplace now.

Depends on the company. Some CEO's (public companies aside, this isn't) are very good about making official statements that contain a great deal of information. What we've done, what the roadmap, goals and strategies in more than vague detail ... others are completely silent. In either case, non-official statements are pretty useless. Because they're not official, you can't depend on them, the information is hit or miss. But the the main blog is filled with Flickr pic of the day and people can't get clear concise information in a central location at "all". You generally take care of offiicial information before you go around trying to score fan a few fan points in a half hearted social engineering attempt, and that on your own property. I think the idea is that the communication "needs" to be made official and centralized, because it doesn't exist. Fandom doesn't work these days. There was an interview with an ex Linden somewhere, or perhaps it was on their LinkedIn profile, not sure which at the moment ... ex Linden said their job was to build beta programs and a group of people that would be behind whatever was being promoted in beta. In other words, people in beta are more likely to be advocates for that feature because they've invested time in it, they've committed to backing it not necessarily because it's good or done right. Been there, done that in their beta programs. Looked like a fool for promoting something nearly everyone in SL agreed was a disaster. Enough with the social engineering bits. It's just lame and insulting and about as amateur as it gets. Sorry to disagree strongly, but the product either stands on its own or it doesn't. And it doesn't. That off-SL communication is about nothing other than trying to generate a handful of advocates that will do the job of covering for your mess for you. Been there too with SL. Razzle Dazzle indeed. If you want to judge sincerity you look at investments, years old hardware, lack of internal testing, high price points, etc. That's where words are judged by the actions and they match up or don't. In this case, how much of a priority is put on customers funds and integrety of the marketplace.

Create a 3D environment originally meant to test hardware, the goal changes every month until it eventually evolves into a plain old virtual world, and then take credit for inventing the concept of a virtual world with user generated content ....check. Acquire a user invented currency marketplace because you want that money and then take credit for inventing it .... check. Acquire a user invented marketplace because you want that sink to take more money from purchased L$ and then claim you invented it ... check. Complete with users on residential rentals ... check. Moves to recapture the viewer market, after figuring out open source was a bad decision, increasing restrictions and an attempt to throw a wrench into OpenSim (after promoting libSL and then libOpenMetaverseS and then inter-op with OpenSim itself) ... check. Land fire sale to pull some sales of regions from land barons back to LL ... check. Linden Realms and the new Wilderness(?) to take thousands of user hours per month away from merchants, shop owners, clubs .... check. Manipulate marketplace sales and advertising rather than letting customers decide what to purchase .... check. Only a partial list, but yes must agree. And there's more coming unless they change course dramatically.

That should be the LL theme song, it's perfect. The only problem is that they misinterpreted tolerance as ignorance. If they were as clever as they think, they'd be able to properly hack a shopping cart that was already written for them and handle a migration among other things. In something less than 2 years. Their tap dancing needs work. Not to mention Spree was not the best choice to begin with. eBay went with Magento.

Sorry, in all that just wanted to say I absolutely agree about Twitter. Communication needs to be concentrated here, not taking the path of least resistance elsewhere. Can't remember where I saw the comment offhand, but someone mentioned that Rod needs to confront his customers and not worry about the negative reaction and I agree with that too. Lack of communication has always been about dodging here. It's a mixed bag between communication and actually being able to show results, which is the part that has always been lacking with LL, delivering after the communication, or actually finishing a project to an acceptable level of quality before jumping to the the next thing. Great related blog article here: http://modemworld.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/when-putting-the-lab-back-into-linden-lab-might-need-more-consideration/

Please don't interupt a shill, that is ... a prophet, when he's working. The beast has not yet fully awakened, so this is a Nastradamus kind of thing. Seriously though, that post was just trying to give some clues to Rod if he ever happens by to remind him of the basics he already knows, just in case he's finding himself sidetracked by volumes of data that doesn't mean what they think it means at Lab Hamsters, Inc. I think just about every customer in SL would be behind him if he were to clean up the various messes and bugs that exist aggressively. There are just too many pain points to SL stopping further progress and people are going to be volumes more appreciative of that than new features. I think I can safely say too that between two opposite sides of the coin (Lab Hamsters and customers) and the complexity of SL and its residents that it takes some time to get your head around before you can really start coming up with solutions. Some have been really good ... pathfinding? Great stuff. His contributions to our beast of a viewer? Getting there. The ones that aren't so good involve getting carried away with LL creativity, the social additions? A bit of waste considering everything that needs cleaning up. Last names? Not his fault for not being fed the right information from employees in the first place. I don't know, I just think he's the right one once he's on a mission. But really, I do think he just needs to say look guys, playtime is over until we're improved across the board, cleaned up many bugs, clean up documentation, and open that communication as if you're communicating with customers as peers. If he's going to walk like a gunslinger I'm going to start building temples in his honor.

Rod is the thunder. He sires children with a mere wink. He is the stick in the woodshed. Rod is the one that understands that employees only need to do their 40 and what they said they can do on their resume and that customers pay the bills. He understands that when bill-paying customers are happy, they tell more people. Rod is the one that crushes buggy coal in his bare hands and produces enterprise level diamonds. Rod's pair cannot fit on the largest of land baron estates. Rod can do this.

Pretty much. Maybe that's the problem, we've warped into a TV version of the 60's. Of course in the 60's if it had "anything" to do with technology, and a product like this was released, or they were drinking on the job at their level of employment, their green cast iron desk would be cleaned out faster than you can adjust your yellow plaid cinch-waisted cardboard consistency dress.

Just strange. You feel like a parent. Eat your vegetables and you can have dessert. This bit was funny though: "A time when a drink and a smoke at work were the norm and the cut of clothes celebrated curves?" I was there, in the 60's. Cigarette butts on the floor of the grocery store and yes you could smoke at work. Drink? errr ... no. Not sure how the clothes celebrated curves unless they're honing in on hippie gear. The rest was pretty unflattering and well, loud and ugly.

Sorry, we must have been posting a thread on the same topic at the same time.

In the nicest possible way and as clearly as possible while banging ones head against the wall ... In the middle of a buggy rollout, in the middle of a migration, while people are still getting used to DD, while merchants are having to support DD questions, while merchants are busy with the time consuming task of catching up on news, Jira's, forum posts, checking their listings ... probably not the best time in the world to run a non seasonal promotion. Or expect people to rush off to make new unrelated product from their lines ... many people can't, it doesn't fit. And, why in the world are you trying to influence what sells? Aside from holidays, let the market take care of itself, it doesn't need intervention. Is this about making up for lost commissions during this rollout by a promotion that'll boost sales for you in the larger spread? Because it probably isn't going to help those who have lost sales and are looking to get their regular daily items back on track. Some people will spend more during a promotion, others will spend money on the promotion that they might have spent elsewhere. Please, focus on a marketplace that just works properly. Consider relocating a non developer/non support person who just thinks these things up to another team, if that's the case. It's really not needed any more than dash deals were some months ago. What is needed? When you do a holiday promotion? Do them on time (or rather in plenty of time), please. Thanks for listening. -- Trained monkey 204020979802

Agree with your points on legal. Got Peggy's point as well. You're a grown up, this is business, buck up. And that's generally great advice. What people sometimes don't understand is that a merchant who has achieved a level of success has indeed bucked up many times over in business for themselves. Creating, packaging, support, promotion ... it's about one of the most time consuming things you can do. We've pulled all nighters and for years supported not only our products but also bugs in LL's product. For instance I pay a staff tens of thousands of L$ (more than couch change when converted to dollars) a week to support almost entirely LL bugs. $300/month for the land. Some merchants earn livings and rely on the income here with LL's blessing. Seriously, it's easier to run a small retail store than to be a merchant here. That you can do in a 40 hour week and earn $50,000/year. Speaks volumes that people choose here to run a business, it's a huge compliment to LL and the creative environment and great world that we have. Might want to either walk in those shoes a bit or cut critical merchants simply asking for a higher level of product, communication and business the same slack you think they should cut SL. Could be better. MUCH better. That's all. I think at the end of the day we all want to be on the same side and move on. And it's not addicting, I can stop anytime I want. Really.

Right, on the same page there, that's why I suggested a good old manual. One singular entity to maintain for them, portable enough to be used anywhere. Anywhere you see that little world Help or ? ... you go to the manual, whether it's in-world, on the marketplace, etc. People develop muscle memory on table of contents once they get familiar ( ... let's see marketplace is about halfway down). People memorize locations of manuals they're familiar with and navigate there easily. Is it easier to say rtfm or rtf(forum/wiki/chat group/Twitter/knowledge base/Jira)? Thousands of hours saved. No icky URLs to go look up. I know where to tell you to go to help you (and so would LL and support more easily) Go to to the manual under Marketplace/Magic Boxes/Migration. You might even find some great user contributed notes in the manual. Download version doesn't have comments. I mentioned PDF though, that was silly. HTML format for portable goodness.

Sera Lok wrote: bumping this also. hope you all don't mind. I'm bumping it because you were kind enough to activate the Rod hotline. Many thanks.

Fair enough, let me rephrase. State by state in the U.S. refunds on defective merchandise is generally a given. In either case it generally comes with an in-your-face clause about displaying policy. Do they "have" to? Yes. No. Maybe (state by state) Do they? Generally. In LL's state, no they don't have to. Then again the non virtual world has something we can't accomplish quite so easily because of the obfuscation of business with LL. They can easily avail themselves of the legal system for very small amounts, they can class action by the numbers more easily. They have consumer law and protection agencies to help them more easily. You stand a fighting chance with these mechanisms if you've been wronged. Let me say that I'm not trying to come off as legally threatening either (I'm also not a lawyer), and that it's not at all likely that any of this marketplace stuff will result in any legal action. I'm not for it, I wouldn't bring a case personally against LL or be part of a class action. I think that's silly. I do think that LL needs to be more thoughtful, sophisticated as a company and do what Walmart does do, regardless of the letter of the law in each state.. Because it pays to be smart enough to not put yourself in those situations to begin with by making a minimal effort to your customers when it comes to fairness. Any action can be initiated and tried regardless of who says what in a TOS and what the current law says. And what it costs you in having to re-shrink wrap it in the back room to sell to the next customer pays off in good will.

True, heheh. Well, a ray of light, from Rod (of course on Twitter), regarding this latest marketplace release: "No I dont think its an over reaction. It was not an acceptable level of quality roll out. I will say the the team is crunching hard" Dr. Phil says the first step toward healing is admitting you have a problem.