Dartagan Shepherd

Peggy Paperdoll wrote: And those "creators" who never fail to remind me that they are the "backbone" of SL drive me insane........that is a total crock of you know what. The creators who create because they love to create whatever it is they create are the backbone..........those with the sign on their forehead "I'm a creator. Love me" are the one that put a sour taste in my mouth. Sorry I lumped you into those two groups and went off on you. Context: "And to some of us merchants, this IS RL business, we're not playing, we're investing in a feel-good business and we enjoy what we do and the people that buy our goods. THAT's why I'm here and why I continue to try to offer feedback to LL so that they don't lose another 13% of regions next year and thus affect my livelihood, the livelihood of others, and of customers and consumers like you." Followed by in the next post ... "You're twisting things around again. I'm not trying to tell you that merchants are better, or going into the hobbyist vs. professional or merchant vs. customer debate. Everyone contributes to this world in some way, but yet here you are on a merchants forum consistently and repeatedly telling merchants that they need to just accept these ads, that it's LL that's doing them a favor, that feedback you don't agree with is whining, etc." My words are screaming out in pain at the abuse. Again, there are no victims here. Perhaps you can let us lowly merchant whiners get back to discussing advertising in the context of being a merchant though? Because we generally don't get this contentious in our discussions here. It takes a bit of provocation to do that. At least not since the Dart and Darrius show and since then we've developed a meaningful bromance. Even Toy doesn't do the red letter edition much these days.

Peggy Paperdoll wrote: I got negative last night (after several days of remaining quite pleasant in any post I made) when someone like you (not you, but someone like you) called me a pimp, then a few hours later someone called me a whore...........all because I'm taking a realistic view of LL's decision to put targeted ads on Marketplace. I guess you came late to the thread. I think some of this thread sounds more heated than the participants actually are, but let's not get carried away, by your own admission you said: "I've been call a pimp and whore so far in this thread (not by name but by the context of some of the comments)." The statements weren't directed at you specifically. I don't think anyone on either side has or would resort to name calling against any individual. Most of us respect the boundaries of the forum. None of us are victims here, especially when all sides are being blunt.

Peggy Paperdoll wrote: Then what are you bitching about? Ads or the fact that I think ads are a fact of life and that the ads are a product of your Internet browsing? BTW. Contextual marketing is search based (keyed off searches on the site you received the ad). You wouldn't get a "see your mugshot" ad unless you searched for something related to jail, crime, mugshots, or, maybe Lindsey Lohan.......on Marketplace. You would see ads along those lines if you, perhaps, searched Lindsey Lohan. The ads are behavioral............not contextual. Clean up your Internet browsing and get better ads. Take a chance.......fire up Google and search behavioral marketing. Then search contextual marketing. Read a little (the wikis are good starting points). You might learn to tell what type of ad you are getting. Jeez. You see that little icon on the ads? Click it and it will lead you to more information on Google and a way to opt out of interest based advertising. I have and I'm still seeing cheesy ads. You're not getting how this works. And I'm not bitching, that's your word. I'm a pragmatic sometimes cynical but mostly good natured business person, who compares LL with other experiences from other companies that are similar in nature in various ways to LL and to RL. Read into that what you like.

You're twisting things around again. I'm not trying to tell you that merchants are better, or going into the hobbyist vs. professional or merchant vs. customer debate. Everyone contributes to this world in some way, but yet here you are on a merchants forum consistently and repeatedly telling merchants that they need to just accept these ads, that it's LL that's doing them a favor, that feedback you don't agree with is whining, etc. Your facts are consistently wrong, such as your last bit: "And screaming that LL is ruining your business.......come on. Get back down to earth. You're just an amateur making something to sell to other amateurs........making a few pennies (and if you are good, a few dollars, and very, very good, maybe something decent). You have practically nothing invested in the company that gives you all that. You are not what makes SL go around. I am.......the consumer. I can survive without you since I can create...you cannot survive without me.And that is why I get sometimes rather passionate about people constantly bitching about LL.......it's not constructive criticism like you always try to tell me. It's whining and crying because you don't like something or you think LL is taking something from you. You, wouldn't be here if you couldn't "make money". I would. That's my investment. I guess you can say I've lost a lot of respect for merchants (and even lost some respect for creators.........the creators who wear that title on their sleeve). You're really not special.......not special at all." Any criticism is constructive if it's honest, you may mean not positive enough for your liking. That's fine, you've stated it many times in this thread, you're entitled to your opinion. You're wrong that I wouldn't be here if I couldn't make money. I was here for years out of pocket for tens of thousands of dollars. You're wrong that I'm complaining that LL is ruining my business, my business isn't reflecting the same losses as SL. You're wrong that I'm an amateur or that others here are, content creation and virtual goods are a healthy business. We really don't need to do a dictionary definition of amateur and professional here do we? Are 3D artists all amateurs now? Remember that the next time you watch a film. Programmers who script are amateurs? You got a professional response from a professional web developer bullet pointing your errors about advertising and cookies and sessions. You're wrong that if you're very good you make only a few dollars, I've done better as have many others. I still manage to pay a couple of hundred dollars a week to my staff. Others own multiple sims and profit above and beyond those high tier costs. One person I was talking to owns 40 sims and doesn't like the image it gives their business either. I've done some quickie stats of all the feedback here, on SLU, a bit in-world, and on blogs and my numbers are telling me that most people would rather not see the ads. So you seem to be a minority here (not to slight your opinion) about the ads and yet you're claiming that people shouldn't vocalize this. Or perhaps you're saying that they should be hugging plushies while they disagree meekly. You're claiming that consumers make the world go around and yet the largest income sector are land barons. There are more people than you think that earn full time livings here that do it because they love it, they love SL and yet they're just bitching amateurs. We can keep going around this bush, countering fact with your passion against "complainers", but seriously you couldn't be much more insulting or condescending. I've had to learn this same lesson myself, having done the cheerleader thing and I'm still picking out buckshot from the experience. The lesson here is to take everything at face value. If someone has an opinion, deal with it or counter with facts that actually hold up, but insulting and dismissing anyone who doesn't agree as an amateur or complainer isn't making your case any stronger.

Peggy Paperdoll wrote: Let me tell you how merchants are making money. LL provides a way for them to make money by providing the web space to sell their products for a pretty small fee (5% of the sale). The merchants don't have to rent or lease web space for their "store".......that's free. LL is paying real money to make the space available.....upfront. I don't know what contract LL has with the whoever they have the deal with but I'm sure it's not free to them. The merchants make money without having to lay out any of their own money upfront.......they only pay a small 5% fee for any money they make (after the fact). That means the merchants pocket 95% of all the money they make (their ain't many businesses in the real world or virtual world where profits are quite that good). I'm sure you (and most other merchants) would love for that deal to continue. Perhaps those hideous ads are going to make that possible (if LL doesn't make money or Marketplace costs them money then Marketplace is gone........or the merchants are going to have to start footing some of the bills upfront). Pop-ups and ads might be hideous (even to me......I've said numerous times I don't like ads, especially pop-ups) but if it means keeping my expenses down then I'm willing to endure that inconvenience or annoyance. But, again I guess I have to qualify my statements. I don't use Marketplace (I've not ever visited Marketplace in fact......on back when it was XStreet and that was a long time ago). The reason is simple. It revolves around your statement (the one I quoted).......keeping people in SL and not somewhere outside SL. Marketplace is outside SL. I'm guessing you're not a merchant at all then? I could be snarky on this one, but I'll ask the same thing you asked me ... if it bothers you so much then why are you here? Rhetorical, I can script the answer for myself But on this last bit, wow are you way off base. LL isn't doing merchants a favor by letting us sell goods on the marketplace. They are monetizing our goods for their profit. All of that profit isn't financial, you need to understand how content and the people in SL are themselves monetized. At best it's a symbiotic relationship, The content from merchants doesn't belong to SL, it belongs to us. It's our hard work, our copyright, our sweat and blood. They get free labor and "free" content to monetize and they PROFIT from it. Let me say that again so that it's crystal clear ... LL makes far more off of us than we make off of them for far less labor. There's a cost on both ends. We trust them to handle our funds, our goods, our image. We in turn use their services so that both of us may profit. If you think what we do doesn't come at great cost, you're not familiar with content creation as a business. If you want to see what a real site looks like that respects both their merchants creators and their customers, has no ads and has a good level of consumer protection go check out Turbosquid. That's how it's done. World of difference isn't it? That's how my suppliers in RL do it. That's how I treat my customers in RL. And to some of us merchants, this IS RL business, we're not playing, we're investing in a feel-good business and we enjoy what we do and the people that buy our goods. THAT's why I'm here and why I continue to try to offer feedback to LL so that they don't lose another 13% of regions next year and thus affect my livelihood, the livelihood of others, and of customers and consumers like you. But nowhere in business do I put this much labor in to be told that I should bow and scrape and accept whatever my partners or suppliers throw my way. Mostly because they're open to feedback and they know it's in their best interests to keep good relations in a business that's symbiotic. As a non merchant though, you're kind of bringing a knife to a gunfight. We're allowed the right to want to be respected as business partners and to have a say in how OUR goods are monetized by LL. You may have missed the bits over the years where LL has stated that they want feedback no matter how critical. But one thing I can assure you of is that the feedback is honest. You're gunking up those works a bit by saying we should happily eat bloody eggs and battery acid and be thankful for it.. We need a content creators Teamsters, not a fake religion.

Thanks much for the extensive rundown, there was a great deal of misinformation going on and that clears much of it up nicely. I'm afraid I may have brought up the LL financial state issue, although it was off topic to some extent. That mostly because with all the cutbacks LL has made in the last year from pulling back from SLCC, the birthday celebration, closing down a data center, consolidating more regions onto newer hardware (supposedly), region idling to save resources, the new products, a whopping 13% loss of regions last year and now 3rd party advertising on top of it. It was just one of those merchant speculation things does this have anything to do with LL needing the money that badly. If it's an indicator of LL financial trouble, it's a merchant consideration as RL speculation is to RL business. Probably best as a conversation in its own right, poor Gadget got hijacked in this thread. It was good to see subjective turned back to fact- based though. Thanks again.

Your factoids M'Lady, are a breath of fresh air. Rusty myself, but there may be another consideration in that it's possible that browsing habits picked up by surfing the marketplace (and any other ad riddled pages) may propagate back to the ad network. Meaning it may be possible that SL browsing may taint ads that are delivered to you elswhere. @anyone else Apologies if I came off as an unsavory individual or a know it all and overly combative. Had only meant to debunk some things, interject some fact and to defend the right to have an opinion on issues and not have to be criticized for it, whatever that opinion might be. Not that I would admit to personal flaws, so I'm just going to blame Darrius for all of this, who should have been here doing his job, but who has been negligent and missing in action of late. So thanks Darrius, thanks a bunch.

RealExtend: http://realxtend.org/ ... Added mesh capability to OpenSimulator roughly 4 years ago. Game mod folks were able to upload mesh before that. VRML folks could generate mesh via VRML in the mid 90's to create their own worlds full of user generated content.

"Marketplace is provided by Linden Lab free to anyone who wants to use the site with the only charges made are to anyone selling something in the form of a "commission" ( a fee LL levees for each sale)..........there is no charge until something is sold. The seller gets that charge and the consumer does not. That's a very sweet deal.....sell nothing and you are charged nothing, sell a bunch and you are charged a percentage of that bunch (you can't loose with a deal like that.....don't you wish real life was like that?). Someone has to pay for any website on the Internet. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth that every user (consumer or merchant) consumes.........that ain't free. Someone has to maintain the site (the consumer doesn't and neither does the merchant). All that is money (real money........not Linden dollars). LL happens to be the one who foots all that expense (and more that we are probably not even aware of). I doubt a 5% (or even a 10%) commission would pay for those expenses. And you are bitching about ads (if not ads then anything else LL might put forth to help defer the expenses). How would you make ends meet........short or charging a fee for a shop or business on the Marketplace? Eat the expenses (which is what I think you believe is the solution) and end up closing Marketplace all together due to too much loss in revenue? You seem to think you know business............is that sound business?" Well, beyond getting into the whole sinks as monetization thing in great detail again, yes sinks are money. Sinks are money that "would have" been taken out of the economy but is instead absorbed by LL. When they last published gross marketplace earnings, if you calculated the 5% commission as a real dollar exchange amount, it came out to over $100,000/month USD that the marketplace brings in. Do I wish RL let me sell first and take a commission later? It does, consignment shops, Turbosquid, Amazon, wholesale accounts on credit with the ability to return unsold items, etc. Do I think it's good business to use existing revenue to defray costs for free features in order to keep a good image? Yes. "I love the red herrings like "universities". What university do you think would have a Marketplace presence?" They indicated that ads would go on all web properties, not just the marketplace. Ads on top of existing marketplace enhancements in the marketplace itself TO MERCHANTS is just double dipping. They're already paying for ads on the marketplace. Ads EVERYWHERE of this caliber will be something that a university or non profit notices when it comes time to consider funding. Will it be a deal breaker? Not sure, but it's something they should think about. I understand that you're not pro ads, neither am I necessarily anti-ads, only that this implementation is horrible and inconsiderate to especially merchants who already pay time, tier, comission, advertising and sinks to do business. The more extra ways they find to suck money out of the economy the less merchants make. As the world shrinks, it gets harder to profit and LL increases the money it takes to compete where those costs never existed previously. They're optional advertising opportunities, but they're also costs that never needed to exist before and there's no reason why a banner ad can't be both marketplace and off-marketplace advertising for a single fee. As it is now, marketplace enhancements are broken, people have been over billed multiple times and some people can't cancel existing recurring ads. Now we're going to pile new advertising on top of broken advertising. "Which reminds me...when was the last time LL increased the premium fees or tier?" Premium they could do if they could actually find a way to add real value to justify it. Tier? I hope they don't attempt it, because it's a pretty safe bet that they'd lose some hundreds of sims in the first week of a tier increase. It's rediculously high as it is.

Peggy Paperdoll wrote: Linden Lab refuses to be "innovative"? Are you sure about that? Perhaps you should read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life Everything Philip Rosedale (the founder of Linden Lab) did was "innovative". Who did it before? Tell me, who thought of and put those thoughts (or ideas) into play before Linden Lab? What company is the first and last company when someone mentions virtual worlds that is user created? Is that EA sports? Maybe Blizzard Entertainment? Who? LL was built and continues to survive on innovativeness. You need to get some more information before you make such statements. Will the ads be SL's demise? Maybe.....only time will tell. But, let someone who's been reading crap like your post for years, history is not on your side. LL will survive or die on their decisions............but some amateur with no knowledge making statements like "But then again they never been too bright, there are many ways LL could make more money and make sl better but they refuse to be innovative!" is absolutely beyond ignorant. You don't like the ads..............so what? Actually, neither do I but I know enough about life (real life which is what LL's decisions are based upon) to know someone made a decision based on some research and facts. Especially if that someone has made decisions in the past that have advanced the company they are making the decisions for. Since SL has advanced over the years and is still a viable (and, apparently) profitable company those decisions have been sound and good. LL not innovative? Probably one of the most stupid statements I read in years. Would like to respond first about the targetted bits once again. Yes, it is Google advertising, you can view the source. You can also cruise the AdSense and AdWords and related documentation to find out how each person in the advertising chain can customize advertising content. The API documentation is freely available. I'm sure LL is also not done tweaking yet, so the situation may improve as far as actual ads that show. Whether they should or not is personal preference and opinion. However, general perception isn't a luxury LL can afford to dismiss. On your innovation comments. The SL we have today contains no broad elements that were invented by LL. Before you misunderstand, let me say that I do recognize SL as the leading virtual world of its type. However, SL evolved from the years of projects of its kind that have come before. From BBS games to text games, to eventual 3D worlds with user generated content (also for sale by their users). There were many projects very similar to SL done in VRML with user generated content. The exchange is not new. It wasn't a new concept when Gaming Open Market ran it: http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2004/01/61999?currentPage=all It wasn't unique when they took it out from under Gaming Open Market: http://alphavilleherald.com/2005/08/betrayed_linden.html LL didn't know exactly what to do in the beginning with SL as they'd changed tactics quite a few times before they settled on tier "and" an exchange with sinks to take more money out of the economy, and advertising (advertising first in-world at open ended rates, and then on the login screen and the marketplace and now banners on all web properties). Land sales and tier are nothing new, I believe BlackSun(?) was doing this a few years before SL was on the radar. As you know, neither was the marketplace unique innovation, many marketplaces were developed by users before finally being acquired by LL so that they could control the sales of virtual goods on the web. As a matter of fact, the "new" products LL is working on are actually retro products that have existed in various forms years before. Interactive Fiction for instance existed before the internet. There is little innovative or new to SL, it is an evolutionary and iterative world based on what has gone before. There is no shame in this and it follows the law of natural progression. The new bits are that they were able to achieve a level of funding and viral marketing that caused a hype wave. I've personally worked with people who have created most of the core elements that make up SL, years before SL existed, including 3D worlds in VRML made of nothing but user generated content, with monetized currency, etc. The concept of virtual economy goes back decades at the very least. What new things are innovative? Mesh? Pathfinding? These are standard game engine fodder most of which exceed SL capabilities by quite a bit. That we're here spending massive hours and effort taking a chance on SL as a business venture is a great show of support for SL despite one mistake and bit of ineptness after another. Other than disputing that support as whining I'm not really sure what your underlying message actually is.

No problem here, I got what you were saying, I'll offer a counter disclaimer that some of what I'd said was a knee jerk reaction to those who were eluding that people that didn't like ads were just whining. Working off some bad karma for having done sort of the same thing in the past. There are times when it goes beyond just whether we like or dislike a given feature and try to get LL to stop shooting themselves in the foot. On the one hand, they're trying to get universities to come back, on the other they're presenting the kind of image via this advertising that wouldn't get a university funded. LL has never been good at laser focus when it comes to direction. I think in this case they need to decide if they want professionals back like universities, solution providers and business or whether they want to cater to the gamer/griefer/casual crowd. I think there's a happy medium, but not if they're going to downgrade their image and make the world think they're paupers.

Not sure if you're getting the fact that what ads are shown, allowed and blocked and what types of ads display are under LL's control. Google delivers ads to me all over the internet, and these types of ads to this extent are not at all common for me. This has less to do with peoples browsing and internet habits and more to do with LL's implementation.

Czari Zenovka wrote: This is not a direct reply to you, Evhalyn, although I agree 100% with your post. This is an "in general" thought: What I find interesting about this whole ad issue is that, here on the Merchant Forum, most of us dislike these ads, don't want them on our MP stores and, in some cases, are blocking them. However, this same topic is ongoing on the General Forum and many of the people there think this is an excellent idea for more revenue for LL, are berating the people who don't like the ads to "get over it" or "don't open the website," - some are even intimating that by using an ad blocker we are somehow "cheating" or opening our PCs to more intrusive data mining. One difference I note is that the majority of people responding on the General thread are either not merchants or do not have MP stores so they are mainly referring to the ads on the SL website in general but I have to admit I am surprised at some of the heated exchanges over there in support of the ads. Just caught up on some of those threads over there. Looks like a few are advocating them or advocating LL's "right" to use them. Personally I think it's obvious that LL "can" do it, although there are some discrepencies with the reasons: 1) LL needs the revenue. Cannot be proven. All statements by LL claim they were in profit and comfortable. Phil Rosedale saying in a recent article that "LL didn't fail --- it's still profitable". Regardless there are no statements by LL that they "need" the revenue. There are indicators that LL might be starting to feel the decline, such as privately offering universities a discount to come back, trimming down data centers, etc. If they do need the revenue they're not telling. Either way, it's doubtful that LL "needs" the ads for survival quite yet. 2) Ads keeps the marketplace free. False, LL can provide the marketplace for "free" (although the sink can cover operating costs) out of any other revenue stream including tier or L$ sales or premium accounts. There doesn't need to be a direct compensation for every "free" feature of SL. As far as them trying to convince people that don't like the ads by telling them it's just the internet as usual, that's not entirely true because there are many professional sites that won't "cheapen" the experience by 3rd party advertising. One of my sites is one of them and I know for a fact that my customers would consider ads "cheap" ... I talk to them. I also use sites that share the same opinion about advertisng. Some do, some don't. The sites that don't usually will give the "cheapen" reason as well as that it makes them look like they need the money, which is not the image they want to give. Also, if someone says "I don't like it.", then people who are fine with the ads need to live with that, the same as people who don't like them having to live with LL. "I don't like it." is pretty much something that can't be argued, it's subjective, it's honest ... deal with it. It's as valid as anyone elses opinion. However, it would be silly for LL to ignore. When too many people don't like something, they can lose more money in the long run. If they determine that it's worth the short term revenue boost and it's not adding to the list of peoples "don't like" experience in SL that will cause users to leave, so be it. I think merchants don't like it because they see it as competition for eyeballs. It's supposed to be merchant space for commerce. 3rd party ads that are hokey are that much more insulting to a merchant that makes a great effort to establish a trustworthy brand. Shoving arrest record lookups in their face isn't going to be a happy thought moment. Merchants ads are superior in general to some of these 3rd party ads. In that sense they destroy the look of the marketplace. They're badly done for the most part because of the quality of the advertisers and LL's poor implementation. Whether they stay or go, they need a great deal of tweaking to look like someone else besides LL slapped it together.

This person sells some Pandora stuff, links on pages to go see them in-world. https://marketplace.secondlife.com/stores/44210 Can't vouch for any personally, it's been a while since I dabbled with Pandora. I do remember a Pandora conversation I had once with a rather funny talking pig in SL though.

Peggy Paperdoll wrote: Bingo once again. Y'all just don't understand the ads are keyed off your personal browsing habits. You don't like sexy ads or get of out jail ads then browse better sites. If they don't bother you then what's the beef? Everyone is their own worse enemy on the Internet. I would think you would know that by now. Yes and no. A few of these I get normally ... if you surf anything 3D you're likely to be pulling up those Full Sail University ads for instance. The rest of these tacky ones I get from no other sites that I visit, which is why some of them are particularly obnoxious or just plain amusing due to the hokey factor. Who knows what criteria they're setting, but it's looking like LL's own special blend. Bloody eggs and battery acid through a plastic tube, I have to thank Couldbe for that lasting vision.

Herkimer Highmist wrote: Show me an unobtrusive ad and I'll show you an ad that was never paid for or shown to anyone. I was wondering why there were empty spaces on SL web sites - even with an ad-blocker, they are obtrusive! Since I'm paying commissions on MP sales to LL, shouldn't they in turn compensate me for turning my MP store into a billboard for other people's products? Well, they are obtrusive, and like one blogger mentioned, when they show specifically on the marketplace, they become competition for people already paying for marketplace enhancements. On compensating you (or us)? No, but if you pay enough in the future you just may get to see your ad there rather than someone elses. I'm feeling included now that I finally got the roman orgy ad showing that some others have pointed out. It's also showing me an ad for Front Sight Firearms Training Institute which brings new meaning to "targetted" ads. (Disclaimer that I've never been to a roman orgy with guns, despite what the ads tell me about myself.)

I feel cheated, I got ads for Zwinky, a free hobbit game and California Psychics. Agree though, it needs to be work safe and not tacky, if that can be said of the kind of ads that they'd rather you just click on and not purchase anything.

Right. Not sure if you spotted the announcement about it: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Featured-News/Advertising-on-Second-Life-Web-Properties/ba-p/1927315 Ads on every page coming up. Merchants will be able to eventually advertise on most pages. I'm wondering if that's before or after current marketplace advertising is fixed.

Heheh. "Your world, our hallucinogens." has potential. Just stare at a spot on the wall and focus until it wears off.

bk99 wrote: With that said, I believe there is some valuable information in these results that may be useful to business owners in SL or LL itself if they were so open to looking at them. (I may open a can of canibalistic worms with that one....) Heavenly's response was not meant in the regard of not needing anyone who posted on this thread. Quite the contrary, we welcome constructive criticism from the community, but we're hoping, I believe quite justifiably, not to be attacked. (And I'm not saying anyone here did that). I seem to have found another of your canibalistic can of worms. I could have sworn it said baked beans. Just a thought. I hadn't taken your poll but did notice in your copy on your site and a few postings you were mentioning positioning yourself between merchants and LL and that your position was going to be one of constructivism. In that sense you were already setting yourself up against what you'd already perceived as lesser input and dismissed as unconstructive. It shouldn't be a surprise that you got what you considered some negative response, when you already drew the line internally about what is and isn't constructive. Just to put it in perspective, you're dealing with merchants as seasoned or possibly moreso than yourselves in the forums here (certainly more collective wisdom by the numbers), many of us having had years worth of discussions on every topic imaginable that relates to doing business in SL. We've seen employees, CEO's, ideas, successes and fails and many business organizations come and go. If you ask for a discussion here in the merchants forum (or in the more or less official merchants group in world), you're likely to get volumes of information, and that far more comprehensive than a survey. You've got people here in mostly every niche, with varying levels of success. You've got people here that have been in or are still in various beta teams working with LL in a very constructive and non critical atmosphere. That includes people earning full time livings. Basically what I'm getting at here is that the bar among merchants who are seasoned with years of experience is pretty high. LL itself has attempted many times to operate on information harvested from surveys and at times failed miserably to understand. A lesson that I personally have to relearn every 5 years or so is that all feedback is good feedback. Especially for a troubled company like LL which is declining. The disgruntled customer is their single best source of feedback, because those are the ones that give up and go away. A close second are those apathetic customers who have little positive to say but also give up and go away unimpressed. In either case, feedback isn't going to be "constructive" but will be more valuable monetarily than "constructive". Since this organization also mentioned contacting Lindens and acting in some internediate role between LL and merchants, you may want to realize the biggest single overwhelming complaint that can boiled down to a canabalistic can of worms is this: Merchants are best served by LL stepping up and making everything that's "supposed" to work, work properly. This includes everything from search, to handling our funds, to items being listed, displayed and sorted properly, to our funds being reported properly and on it goes. These are technical hurdles that can only be resolved by LL getting their act together and producing higher quality software, that functions more reliably, that is tested better before being put out to the public. If you can help with "that", then you can do something about the biggest complaints and problems merchants face. Otherwise your best role is probably going to be advising merchants on how to market better, brand better, package better, etc. in an educational role. If you want to get right down to it, we really don't even need much of a communicative role from LL, we simply need them to fix the thiings we've been telling them about for years. They've already got the feedback, which is overwhelmingly consistent and now they need to do the doing. And this is enough to keep LL busy for the next two years. Trust me on this, been an advocate, been a beta tester, been constructive, been negative, been positive and like many others, I've got the battle scars and tattered cheerleader outfits to prove it. I also find worms are best when fried up in butter and more cost efficient than horse meat.

Ciaran Laval wrote: VonGklugelstein Alter wrote: I think it is an excellent idea to finally get rid of the boxes for unlimited quantity items. I am curious to see how many really old listings by inactive accounts get wiped. That's likely to be a bigger issue going forward, as magic boxes need to be somewhere inworld to function, take that away and dead listings will grow. I think the drop in listings is more likely to be due to people not bothering to move to DD, which might not be a bad thing initially. That's a point, that bloat may increase in the long run. Although the "less than L$10" part of the phase-out makes me wonder if it's a precursor to restrictions on free or less-than-L$10 items. It'd be better if they announced that now rather than later if that were the case, because the angst of people who first migrated only to find restrictions later would be more than justified. It also makes me think that perhaps their view on free and no-copy items are changing as they're both items that take up more resources in the marketplace than copy items (in the case of breedable items for instance an egg or nest can sit there forever without selling). The move will also help determine just how reliable direct delivery is as more people move. The obvious reason for not moving no-copy items to direct delivery is that it isn't reliable enough to not "eat" those irreplaceable goods. Of course the one stat they won't publish is the reliablity, other than once when they claimed direct delivery was 2.5% more reliable than magic boxes, which is not exactly a huge improvement. They boasted speed over reliability. Also interesting will be whether there's an increase in region bleeding during and after the cutoff period. In the meantime, we can follow Phil Rosedale's lead and count to 10,000 while we ponder, because using up brain cycles on obsessive behavior is surely one way to solve problems. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand ....

To amend my previous post, you and Torley may be exceptions to cleaning up after the kennels that is LL. Would send you a new stainless steel pooper scooper, but I'm suspecting you two may need bulldozers and bucket loaders. We'll keep this between us, because the powers that be tend to fire LL'ers that are too well liked by the lab rats. A message to your boss on monetization though: When running a lemonade stand, it's better to focus on making a better glass of lemonade than it is to to develop a straw with more holes in order to sell more lemonade.

The TOS absolves them of all moral obligations. Or put another way, a dog can happily do its business wherever it pleases, however, its human must clean up after it. Left as an exercise to the reader to determine who is more evolved and thus gets to wield the pooper scooper.

Ciaran Laval wrote: I'm a Rod Humble fan and not just because he has an excellent taste in football teams, he has moved Linden Lab forward. However the marketplace needs some serious attention, I don't know if the issues with these dodgy stores are new or whether they are just being reported more, but action needs to be taken. @Czari: Whew, escaped with my bits intact then. I promise to try harder not to worry about being offensive! @Ciaran: I see some movement in fixing bugs, although when you add it up, they're still developing and releasing the same level of buggery rather than holding back and releasing more of a quality release. They don't seem to grasp the importance of less buggy releases and how important that is to retaining users. I get your point about football and Rod. Personally I like Torley because he plays a mean keyboard (check him out on YouTube exposing Philip Glass techniques if you're into that kind of thing). He still makes me think of a watermelon Barney though for some reason. Because it can always get worse and usually does, with Phil endlessly tweeting about counting to 10,000 and Rod creating products for tots, that particular pair tend to make me associate them with Bill and Ted. Dude, you made me lose count! Suspecting that we can't make progress on issues like theft because we may not be dealing with adults here.

Wasn't trying to be sexist (or reverse-sexist) with that comment, although in my experience, women do tend to be more consistent as problem solvers in management positions when they're focused. Men tend to run hot and then cold and then hot on the next project and women tend to remain hot until the task is done. Not to put anyone in a box ... I hate boxes, as I say just personal observations to which exceptions abound. Very serious about needing a new CEO though. While I think someone with game industry experience was needed, I thought that might come with more extensive executive experience and someone more leader rather than team oriented. When we petitioned to get a response from Rod, I tried to make a point of saying the situation here is that the board and management had chosen to back employees and bad behavior, and lack of production and employee coddling over its customers. It has become a situation where they really need to choose sides. His response only reinforced that this was the case to me, in a rather watery "we come to work thinking of you and read the forums everyday", rather than tackling the issues. They can pay lip service to being a company of change and chant their TAO all day long along with the rest of silicon valley and San Francisco and the startup mentality in general, but a winning product and company bucks those feel-good-sound-good mantras. Meanwhile LL still comes across as daycare coddling their talent, with a lack of focus, follow-through and speed, which keeps pointing to an ineptness in both management and employee talent. But right, back on topic ... to get things like fraud and commerce under control we need a board that allows a new CEO-as-pitbull that is a friend to no one but the customers and that in action, not as a community manager spouting more Linden love. Ignoring customers needs in the core product and dinking around with new products that any 4 guys can build in a year in the basement of LL isn't going to turn this virtual world around. That was a limper from the moment it was uttered at whatever bar it was conceived in.