Dartagan Shepherd

Argus Collingwood wrote: Dartagan Shepherd wrote: Sera Lok wrote: i missed the thread. darnit. no popcorn for me. It's fuzzy, something about numerology and a women of forum merchants calendar project. I think you qualified. Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do. Robert A. Heinlein Grok. For the sheer pleasure of being quoted back Heinlein and in honor of women forum merchants everywhere (and survival guide wisdom) I'm changing my signature.

Sera Lok wrote: i missed the thread. darnit. no popcorn for me. It's fuzzy, something about numerology and a women of forum merchants calendar project. I think you qualified.

True, I hate saying some of these things and it's not personal and they're probably scrambling. And there's of course a chance that it's not their fault. I mean the best manager in the world can only throw so much work on too few people. Which might be another problem, when you've got too many managers with too much time, they start to "think stuff up". What I'd really like is to have it go up the chain instead of at this team. Got a problem with their ethic, which isn't this teams fault. The overpricing and convolution, depreciating product for the price, blah. Cute move with Land Impact resulting in less resources available to users. Gained a tad in sinks and offer less polygons per "prim count". Yes, mesh is great, but it didn't have to cost "more" than existing prims in resources, and throw size and scripts under the bus to boot, that's just a cheap cheat. As you grow the idea is to offer more, more cheaply. Small time stuff. And their games with cash-out limits. Other than that if I could tell their board/management one thing, it'd be to get your people across the board to "stop thinking stuff up". When you grow up and actually have a product on your hands you lose the experimental, lab "thinking stuff up" phase and leave that to managers who can balance what the customers want and need with the direction of the company. When you're declining you need to drop every semblence of "thinking stuff up", when it creates emotional distress and loss of more users. And this is a really, really good product. It's not the first virtual world, but it's the best one yet and it's a beautiful thing. Uptime is awesome, etc. But that's all you have, LL. Just a virtual world. Not a social-media-experimental-whatever-you-think-up kind of thing. It's pretty simple stuff, crack that whip, heads down and make it a better virtual world. Your customers need an abstract framework, that's all. An example, what is a team responsible for building a marketplace doing playing around with "how" sales are made, optimizing those sales, spending thousands of hours researching how amazon does it, how ebay does it and god knows how who else does it? What are you doing playing with google, facebook, search other than the bare basics of finding a product. when the delivery was the priority in the first place? They created a team of people too busy "thinking stuff up" rather than focusing on the bare basics of commerce. I call it clipboard-itus. Give the title and they'll be walking around with that clipboard in no time getting half the work done. Heads down, Fast, Easy and Fun was it? Your World? If you want a startup go do something revolutionary like a global bathroom locater that stops millions of people from wetting themselves daily, cycles millions of dollars around in a circle until people realize they can just look for the bathroom signs or ask someone and that by the time they've used your mobile social bathroom app, the accident is almost upon them.

Madeliefste Oh wrote: Ever seen a bear that is both green and healthy? Ugg, no. In cartoons they always turn green when they eat something they shouldn't have.

Josh Susanto wrote: But what would it have hurt to ask people to refrain from using the actual deployment until the beta people had checked it as an actual deployment? That still might not have caught everything, but it could have constrained at least some of the Day 1 problems to a small group of people who would have at least some idea what they were seeing. Instead: a green bear telling people - no, STILL telling people - that they need to migrate immediately and stop using their boxes. Which idea is stupider? Mine or the bear? No, that actually would have been good. Often when a company tests (and especially when they don't foist the beta work on their customers) there are a few stages of testing. Unit tests for their code, automated tests in a simulated environment and then something like you mentioned, where you do the final tests on a copy of the production data in a sandbox. Kind of like how the beta grid is set up with a copy of your real inventory. The latter could have caught every production entry at the time the snapshot was taken. Less likely with live testers, but in this case, scanning the appearance of the actual listings manually is the first thing beta testers probably would have gone for. If the problem was happening, it'd be visible in the production sandbox and they probably would have caught it, so yes ... you might be right on that front.. Guessing here that the marketplace is small enough to set up a sandbox copy for development or testing a single decent machine. In this case those tests would take some days to a week to run, but obviously worth preventing problems like this. Not disagreeing with Paladin here, because in the past they didn't have these particular problems and probably didn't think they needed that level of testing. Sloppy, but there it is. I think the only thing we differ on is our level of forgiveness when guessing at what could have happened ... to quote the song, my give a damn is busted when it comes to why the problems happened. I was watching that other thread where they discovered the number range where the problem occured. Awesome research and useful info and great teamwork. Unfortunately LL already knew "when" the problem happened because they stopped it from happening at the end of that range. So on top of lack of testing, asking their users to do what they should be paying for themselves, they're pissing their customers efforts away while they go dark on the details. At this stage it only matters that it's back to what passed for operational before, but some heads need to roll and changes need to be done before they go much further, because there are sequels in the making if not. On the bear? Ok the bear is far more stupid than extreme views on what might be going on. The bear was like a victory dance only to discover you scored a touchdown on the wrong side of the field.

Drake1 Nightfire wrote: Rene Erlanger wrote: 7th March and it will dip below the 30k line! :matte-motes-silly: Well? Did it drop below 30k? inquiring minds want to know. Yes. "Total number of Main Grid regions is now 30000 ( 22879 private estates & 7121 Linden owned), though this has dropped to 29997 since Sunday, the first time since 31st Jan 2010 that the grid has been under 30000 regions." From: http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/virtual-business/8523-new-sl-sims-past-week-62.html#post1529605 I used to hate when Rene was right, since then I've come to terms with it.

Paladin Pinion wrote: Paladin Pinion wrote: The QA was very poorly done. I'm revising my opinion about this. If it's true that all the problem listings are within a certain numerical range, then no amount of QA would have ever found it. All test items would have received new numbers and would be unaffected. The problem would only appear when the changes went live with the real database. Not out to contradict you, just catching up here and there. The problem was still obvious (assuming this is what they were calling a "search" problem), during that timespan, although I have no idea when that range of products was affected. Doubtful the numbers themselves had anything to do with it, but rather the bug(s) causing those problems happened around that timeframe, and whatever was causing it was disabled, fixed (marketplace can be tweaked live without going down) or otherwise halted in its tracks. In all likelihood the problem would have been caught by QA, because it was still there to be plainly seen when viewed manually. It obviously wasn't completely global, but it wasn't rare enough to be anything near an edge case that could have only been caught afterwards in production. Automated tests of a simulated 50k merchants, 50k shoppers and 100k products with tests to check listing integrity would be what you might expect as a part of the process. Even the associated images can be tested automatically. Going with your first response on both conspiracy and QA

Darrius Gothly wrote: Tari, I agree with your intent. It's not ALL sour onions, there have been improvements. And despite the arguments of others that the speed up is purely a result of so many staying away from the site, I do not bellieve it is 100% responsible. I believe that some of their updates (and perhaps a revamp of the database with addtional Key fields to speed retrieval) have had a very positive effect on the site. For example, the Orders > Transaction History report loads a LOT faster than it ever did, even long before the release of Direct Delivery. If the "crunch" is gone with regards to everyone converting to DD then why is that report so much faster? It has nothing to do with Inventory, Products or any DD-related function. Ecommerce Products deliver reliably: No Reporting up to bare minimum standards of accounting: No Funds reconcile: No Abides by all consumer protection restrictions in country of origin: No Reasonable refund/return policy: No, as in no refunds. Ability to cash out whatever amount you earn: No, this is capped and dodged relentlessly if you try to jump to higher earning levels. Guarantee of service: None Security of product: Permission issue, mismatched purchases and multiple items sent. Transaction history is faster: Golly Gee!

Oh, I agree. I don't mean that to belittle your expertise, or the contribution of time and skill of anyone who decides to beta test. Not even against beta programs with customers, when the product is ready for beta. One of their big flaws is that at the outset, they're making decisions and then backtracking due to feedback after the fact. I'm sure you know this is money and time down the toilet. An unwillingness to produce the product for the customer rather than themselves as they've said bluntly more than once when customers bring up features they preferred in the older SLX ... "the Marketplace is NOT SLX". Bad business decisions in that they're "creative" and more experimental in their methods than polished. Yes I know it takes a larger team and the testing is time consuming, agreed. On the other hand, setting up a modest test lab isn't rocket science either. Can you honestly tell me that 3 entry level full time, but capable people trained in the Marketplace couldn't have caught every bug in that post of Jiras? Come on, they would have noticed the image problem on day one as well as most of the others. If they can't manage that, they either don't know how to hire or they're just as clueless as the entry level mooks. Expand that test lab just a tad more for some entry to mid level techs to handle some of the testing processes and monitoring what we saw here never would have happened. Granted you also need more than a whopping two developers. A manager that knows how to funnel requirements and testing isn't difficult to find if you deem it important enough to pay for. This company isn't a pauper, they can afford a modest team of 10-15. Care to guestimate the amount of goods moved through the marketplace in a day converted to real dollars? Is that cost/responsibility not worth that investment? Not my problem that they won't bite it on payroll. Shouldn't be anyones problem that they won't bite it on payroll. I'm surrounded by companies with similar setups. I'm not surrounded at all by any commerce software anywhere of this quality. What about the importance of the integrity of commerce software in general. We're not talking about fake money here, however they need to work that liability factor. LL has always been known for it's fast and loose ethic and approach, experimental social aspect, an affinity for open source, etc. and it has hurt them. They lost corporate, they lost education, they lost dev because of it. As amazing as some of these merchants have been with this, they don't have the direct connection to the info, and it's worse. Not only are they expected to play a guessing game on what (some of the already known by LL) the actual problems are, after submitting hours of work and testing they're not given the feedback to know in what areas their work is redundant, useless, already known or tossed aside. From what I understand some of these workers are remote and sorry, not big on that. It works less often than it does. So basically they're not even operating the crowd sourcing thing efficiently. They can't have their cake and eat it too and the proof is in the pudding of the product. It's a joke without a punchline.

Well, Josh has one point, although he didn't make that directly in that there isn't a one of these bugs that couldn't have been caught with automated testing and simulated shopping. In fact it should pass those kind of tests before putting it out to any sort of beta. There's not a "need" to involve customers as beta testers, it's LL's choice to develop the marketplace on a shoestring budget or under-skilled labor. Many companies develop far more sophisticated software than a shopping cart and "delivery system" without anything more than internal testing and bug reporting is as minimal and as non obtrusive as possible, because you don't foist that burden on customers. Whether people participate in beta or not is moot. They shouldn't have to in the first place, nor should they have to fill out complex Jira's when a simpler interface would do for what should be far fewer problems. This is closer to open source/crowd sourcing rather than commercial development. If it were commercial development nearly all of these bugs would have never seen the light of day and it would never have required thousands of hours of customer interaction to find and report said bugs. All of this wasn't necessary in the first place if it were done properly. Things like this do tend to boggle. Apparently in extreme cases the lack of good sense and professionalism is fodder for conspiracy. I think Josh's arguments can be summed up by another Heinlein quote You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.

Josh Susanto wrote: >So aside from lack of talent in that chain I'm actually still not doubting their programming talent (especially not Malefactor Linden). What I doubt is their ability to make reasoned decisions about much of anything. Well, what I can agree with is that at the end of the day the product or service does the talking. It either does or it doesn't perform to a certain level. What SL has going for it is an immensely patient and forgiving customer base with few demands on the product and little competition in the direct consumer space. They've lost the battle as a development tool already to superior product choices in the last few years, which is a shame because it had enormous potential there and it's too late to play catch-up. Lost out in a huge way in what was a 3 year boom on virtual goods to the tune of $12 billion or so. The "lab" part of LL needs to go for one. Stop dinking around with this and that, nix the remote workers and focus on high quality for core product. Don't know, Oz seems to be getting a handle on other parts of the work, but it needs some healthy pruning and re-org.

Darrius Gothly wrote: When the heck did we switch sides?!? ROFL!! No, the current state of affairs is not acceptable in the grander "compared to others" sense. But nor is it a 100% failure either. As with most things, the truth lay somewhere in the middle. I do not understand why the Lab insists on tasking employees with duties that are clearly out of their skill set, although I've also seen glimpses that someone on the Commerce Dev Team is experienced with UI and software development. (For example, the automatic replacement of MB items with DD items when the names match, and the nicely visible and well placed "Are you sure?" prompts that have appeared.) These are finesse things that wouldn't have been considered before, but they are included in this release, so I get the distinct impression that at least someone on the team has some notches on their keyboard. The way the LL staff is utilized is one of the reasons that I keep looking for someone above Brooke but below Rodvik that is responsible for assigning people to tasks. And also is responsible for deciding to accept the team's recommendations or override them and "do it differently". I'm pretty sure you have, and I know I have, worked for bosses that while not really steeped in software development intracacies were at least willing to listen and let the team have their head if they were making sense. I've also worked for bosses that were just as clueless, but for some reason fancied themselves as "Experts" in every stage of the development process and often overrode the dev team with ludicrous demands ... for no reason other than to demonstrate their control of the project. (Using their power to stroke their own ego, irregardless of how much damage it did to the software or the company.) Maybe I'm wrong, but I keep getting whiffs of the latter situation at LL .. I just don't know who it might be or where they are located. But it's those whiffs that keep me from fully roasting the Commerce Dev Team over an open flame pit; I keep thinking they're not doing these things from their own incompetence, they are being instructed to be purposely destructive so that someone else can feel they are "in charge". Heheh, true ... although I think I'm on your side these days. Call me out if I ever seem combative again. Unfortunately I think the team is pretty autonomous and it appears to be the same team (this generation) minus brodesky and pink of course. Collossus was still with them at SLCC and may be the manager rather than Brooke, but who knows. Something made me think Meta Linden jumped on board recently. Agree wholeheartedly that it needs management that has the authority and skill to get the job done. My daughter spent a few years managing her credit union software, she's not a programmer. This is enterprise stuff as you know, banking must be solid. She graduated a year ago for Project Management. She's now managing two teams also both involving software, one enterprise and one mission critical and that successfully. While I'd like to think as a parent that she's that special, half of her classmates could have handled the same given the criteria of a product that must handle stable commerce. Granted you need a good level of familiarity with software and development. That's aside from nearly 30 years of doing business with companies that would be out of business with a product of this level of qualtiy. So aside from lack of talent in that chain, and most definately with whoever is currently managing the team, who knows where the problem lies. Everywhere I'd say from management not fulfilling customer satisfaction, to horrendous reasearch to a shoddy level of QC. In my experience the whole crew is too tainted to salvage even with a new manager (who MUST be 100% performance driven with enough authority deliver a product) to do anything but replace the entire crew. Hate to say that and it's not personal to any of them, but this isn't a product that should be handling funds at all, DD or no.

The DD car has less than a hundred miles on it. So far it's been driven from factory to truck to the dealer and been test driven for a couple of weeks. Is that conclusive? Or, how long does it take an employer to realize that the employees just aren't up to the task in general? How many bugs are too many? Basic requirements here are that it gets from point A to point B reliably (not yet established and last years model has failed), that the gauges tell you what you need to know (reporting inadequate, records don't reconcile, funds are mangled) and that the passengers arrive safely (many of them seem to suffer from air-bag rash, with or without DD). This the kind of thing you'd consider acceptable in your software company? Hey, it appears that you may have gotten something right! You can stay another year!

April fools support? Speaking of April Fools, a bit of April Fools History. On this day in 2008, Phil Rosedale appears in a congressional meeting (this is true) to pimp SL/Virtual worlds before congress. While congress spent most of their time smirking, Most of the questions by congress were fielded ok, except for 2 which Phil stuttered through, one was child protection and the other was "how long do you keep logs of user conversations for?". After about 15 seconds of stuttering out "some time" and "some weeks", it became apparent in an ex-Linden interview last year that logs are not only kept around indefinately, but are actually read and studied. Aside from LL privacy being a farce, at least you can go back and tell them to do their own homework as they already have it on record. Can't find a copy of the video for the congressional hearing as it's rather dated. Priceless amateur show though.

Might have worded that badly, I'm not upset other than mild disgust at the fact that they think they're immune to refunding some of their customers, thus the response to that one post. Not initiating or promoting legal action toward them, in fact the commerce team really needs to speak with legal about it, if they actually care for their own protection. Not likely anyone is taking them to court, but under the right circumstances LL has nothing to stand on. Their other practices of getting away with laws on funds, sales and restrictions that other companies must abide by, because of LL's fake currency is something I've always had issue with. By all means they should just fix the bugs, but that doesn't excuse them from having to grow up and shoot straight as a business like everyone else must do. When you're in the business of making money off of other people "stuff" you kind of have to be responsible. The business world works because of these checks and balances.

I'm in lawyers up to my eyeballs, it's part of the day job. Let them lawyer up and come after me for calling out bad business practices. Rather working with other groups to protect content creators and independent contractor and consumer law in general on a larger front than the 7-11 that is SL along the highway of life.

While there are laws that offer LL limited protection from having to offer refunds if their policy is crystal clear, there are also other laws that protect consumers from being charged for non working services and products, among other things. In short this is not legal, in CA and in most states. The law is going to be with the consumer on this one, fake money or not. Ethically you can't do much worse. In the REAL world just about every company on the planet refunds when their service didn't perform and they were at fault, seriously LL .... this is every business on every corner in the country. You can't take advantage of or insult your users any more than blindly taking their money for a service you didn't properly provide. You've lost all semblence of trust and maturity in business. The corner store does better business than this. Jesus, most businesses I deal with will refund at the barest hint of a problem or customer disatisfaction, as would most of the merchants you charge money for overpriced shoddy product to. Grow up.

The assumption would be that anything search can be rebuilt as well, which wouldn't need manual merchant care. And it wouldn't need merchant attention unless there's no longer a way to reassociate those wrong records back to their rightful place. Probably best not to call a corruption problem a search problem.

I've invited Dr. Phil for an intervention. The rehab is normally free but in this case they'll have to pay 5% and follow up with community service cleaning up dog walk areas in state parks, rather than legal action. It'll take roughly 100 pounds of poo for each Jira, 20 pounds for each Jira comment, 1 pound for each lost L$ and so on. The punishment fits the crime. Night courses in computer science and lemonade stand management will also be made freely available.

Darrius Gothly wrote: Josh Susanto wrote: >Direct Delivery was designed and released to fix the ongoing and never-ending issues with Magic Boxes Untrue. The Magic Box problem was invented in order to promote the DD project. Magic Boxes work just fine in ANY sim, if they are first attached to an avatar on Linden land, and they always have. How do you explain the fact that the errors you claim were "manufactured" existed before LL purchased SL Exchange? How do you explain that people have been complaining about them since before LL got involved? And no Josh, simply repeating it as many times as you do does not make it true. Those of us that actually pay attention and arrived in SL before the site changed hands remember ALL too well how problematic they were then and still are now. But you are accomplishing one thing .. whether it's your goal or not only you know for sure ... but you ARE turning me into a Linden Lab Apologist simply because I'm getting tired of your incessant insane conspiracy-laden rants. Tone it down .. please? It's getting obnoxious. That's how this apologist thing starts. First the rants get to you, causing you to choose what seems to be the saner side. Then you find that the saner side just isn't performing no matter what you do, and doesn't match up to your own experiences, skill sets and other companies and services that you deal with. In short there's a chasm-sized disconnect going on there. Then one day you wake up and find yourself taking administrative and business feedback from someone with a business degree that admits to spending that knowledge by flipping burgers for 5 years and wears boxes on their head. Quote Heinlein, it'll cause the intellectuals to put you into an erroneous box, but it will remind you that horse sense can't be bought, borrowed, stolen or acquired by social networking skills and that it did indeed once exist. When someone analyzes your Heinlein, compare the analyst's lifetime accomplishments against Heinlein and snicker with gusto.

I think that point is past, although it might be a good business strategy short-term. As an ex-Linden employee stated (not going to dig up the reference, LL isn't worth the effort these days), his job was to recapture the viewer market with the official viewer. As the official viewer gains domination 3rd party viewers must of neccessity decline in popularity, however that needs to happen. This was clearly stated as a goal. It seems a long term strategy to also capture sales of goods, sales of land and first dibs on destinations and user hours (expect more official LL destinations and activities in the future) in order to more completely control SL, the product and the venues. While this is understandable in the face of decline (those numbers indicating decline also magically lessened as of the last 3 weeks, and that in the face of the Marketplace fiasco), it's too late to "take back and control the experience" without sacrificing the earnings of the people who control the creation of content. Expect your in-world strategy over 2012 to be shot full of holes with merchant programs, in-world official vendors, and more control in general over where users go and how they find product and where and when they shop. I believe DD is a necessary precursor to these. As LL revenue declines they get more desperate to capture and control more of the experience. Meanwhile, incompetence and strategies incompatible with users opportunity continues to be attributed to communication problems. The best strategy for being a merchant in SL is something I posted way back in on SLX roughly 4 years ago. Supplement your income with other things and don't ever neglect your RL, your contacts, your family and friends and don't burn any bridges. Even WoW will tell you not to neglect your first life (although their disclaimer relates to their responsibility with minors) in their tips of the day at the login screen (although this applies in SL to not only life but personal income). Until such time as normal business and consumer law applies to virtual sales in SL, you need to take your own protection upon yourself. Wishing you merchants the best of luck with your endeavors, may you never lose the entrepreneur spirit and the love of creating product, these things are valuable in their own right anywhere in the world.

Re-allocated some time that would have been spent doing icky things like beta testing and Jira's and applied it to learning guitar in RL. Besides, I never could get a Jira to carry a tune. Of course that led to finding an idea for a guitar related product, which seems to be a winner thus far. I can list that nifty product and move onto other things, without being engineered to believe that contributing free labor besides commission makes me "community". Spring appears to be coming early this year which means more yard work time, besides tending those other baskets. Conversation with my neighbor today ..... Me: What a nice day, this first life thing isn't so bad. Them: Huh? Me: You don't want to know.

Then again, seeing you get called an apologist made my day. Come to think of it, you may be that Malefactor Linden Glad they're listening and opted for a minimal approach though. Can only imagine the time/energy/money that would have been saved if they stuck to that from the beginning of concept up through beta, public beta, etc. Thinking simple, transparent iterations in public is probably the way to go. Some central source for changelog style information besides docs. A locked thread here wouldn't hurt for that.

Well, when you deal with one bit of incompetence after another and pay for that in dollars, extra work, spend hours sorting through disjointed information scattered over various sites, all while being socially engineered as a passionate resident, you're bound to vent at around the hundredth time you face frustration. But that said, NO ONE is required to think of a company, service or product as a bunch of humans slaving away that deserve our utmost sympathy, or the best in human behavior. Especially when a vent is the only choice short of leaving. Or you might feel like you're a sucker in a stream of social experiments with something like a chairman of the board who manages to do this ... http://www.ipromisephilip.com/ built on software that was crowdsourced for a fraction of the cost with yet another venture (coffee and flowers). But what I've learned is to not create an endless loop by playing advocate for a company that does manage to frustrate a good portion of their user base, and thereby water down what may be a sincere complaint born of frustration, but sincere feedback nonetheless. This team shouldn't be making decisions. A product manager should be dictating what they should do and what they should implement who "does" understand the way people use SL, rather than the team wasting yet more time hours playing around in-world. All it needed was a simple folder for marketplace deliveries in the first place. I don't humanize companies, I judge them strictly by their product, saving the humanizing for when that product exceeds my expectations. If you're going to humanize LL employees and a product, maybe humanize the venting customer equally and call it a tie.

Very nice, good to see us watching out for each other. On that decline and speaking of final acts of desperation, thought you might want to get a load of this: http://www.ipromisephilip.com/ Who needs conspiracy? It just doesn't get any more silly. Give me your new years resolution money. Next up ... willBuildVirtualWorldForFood.com or willBuildAnyStartupYouLikeForFood.com