Darrius Gothly

I am given to understand that the more Cashouts you complete without issue, the faster they become. The word is that LL is now using a 3rd Party Experience-based service. That service builds up a "Trust Profile" based on a number of factors .. apparently including your history with them and your location. With luck the 4 days may decrease as you complete more Cashouts. Cross your fingers and keep us posted. It will be interesting to see how "intention" matches up with "reality".

Really .. they need to just put a single post at the top of the Merchant's Forum that reads: "Dakota's Email Address is ... Write to Dakota to get your stuff unbroken" Of course, you might submerge and never return, but it's worth the risk!! (ducks for cover)

BTW: You do know the image in your message footer is missing, right? It's kind of difficult to take you seriously when you haven't taken the time to make sure your own posts are shown properly and without broken stuff. Just sayin' ....

entity0x wrote: <snip> ... Just seems like a horrible system to have in Second Life, and reminds me of the gambling schemes of old. If anything this needs to be observed and strictly enforced, as I can see this could cause great confusion amongst users, and a decline in confidence in shopping in the Marketplace. I'm having a hard time getting amped up or offended (what's the new word ... "triggered") about this issue. I mean, I was probably all of 4 or 5 years old when I learned that those toy machines with all the fancy things showing on the front were in fact loaded with 100's of eggs containing the same stupid 5 page micro-comic or badly cast plastic ring. Once I learned that lesson, I moved on. As others have said in this thread (and others on a similar subject) the presence of Gacha items on the Marketplace is an entirely different animal. Merchants on SLM are resellers and tend to very clearly state the item being sold. Depending on the image itself is very much like assuming every burger sold by McDonalds will be the same highly stacked and properly delivered gourmet treat shown on the commercials. You gotta read the description, study for a bit ... take your time and make a well-informed choice. Honestly? If you blaze through, barely looking and making decisions on precious little info .. you pretty much deserve to get burned. IMO anyway.

Well .. in keeping with my oft-stated intention of saying good when good sayings are due ... I began a cashout late Sunday night ... and the money just arrived in my PayPal account. It was my first cashout after the new system was implemented and was VERY much faster than in the past. Previously I would have had to wait until about this time of day .. but 3 days from now. Granted, it wasn't a lot of money (just over $50.00US) and the new fee of $3.00US was a bit more chop than I really would prefer but ... I LIKE IT! NICE! Well done Linden Lab. Now, can you make it happen in minutes instead of a whole freaking DAY?!? *grinz*

(necro-time .. sowwy .. been busy) Prior to 31-March, my most recent failure was in 2013. I have very low volume of sales but the one that failed was in a spurt of three purchases. All three were separate orders, each with only one item per purchase, all by the same customer. First succeeded, second failed, third succeeded. I notice the JIRA has a final comment from Spidey Linden .. and nothing more. Did it magically fix itself or have folks just given up remarking on it?

(General Reply) I have a PayPal account that has been open virtually since PayPal came into existence. As such I get a few nice perks, including free transfers to my bank accounts. So for me there is zero cost to complete the step from PayPal to local cash. However ... I also have and use a PayPal Debit Card. I can walk up to any ATM and make a cash withdrawal if I need cash fast. I seldom do that as most ATM's tack on a rather ridiculous fee of their own. However ... I handed the card to my oldest son the other day so he could take our car and fill it up with gas. The station is about 1 mile away. Before he returned, I had an email advising me of the amount he charged on the card. It was just that fast. There were no additional fees charged; my PayPal balance was debited by the exact amount of the gasoline purchase. Electronic money is cheap to move around. So here we have Linden Lab, purporting to have increased the speed of cashouts yet (so far) doing not that much better. They have increased their fees by a rather hefty amount. They have improved their service not one bit. I have just added them to the growing list of companies that have increased their fees this year without providing any improvement in service or product. That list includes: Health Insurance, Cable TV, Supermarket, Local/State Tax Authority, Pharmacy, Gas Station, etc. etc. Oh .. and did I mention that "Fixed Income" was indeed "Fixed" this year (in the USA) because according to the gubment "The Cost Of Living" did not increase at all in the last year. *FACEPALM*

Speaking purely theoretically technologically: It would appear they are calculating a rating based on "Purchases per View". In other words, how many times a purchase was made after the item was viewed. The obvious problem with this calculation is that copybotted products .. always priced way below the original products they are copied from .. will sell at a very high rate per view. The original products will always have a lower sales rate. I may be wrong, but just thinking "inside the box" .. this is what appears to be happening.

Memory Lane Time: Many years ago I had the "opportunity" to interview with a rising high-tech company for one of several positions they had open. It was a neat sounding product idea, the offices were new and seemed vibrant, but for various reasons I did not engage there. A few months later I was glad I did not. Allow me to explain ... The founders of the company were techie types. Good smart folks that really "got it" when it came to technology and how to deliver a workable, saleable product to customers. But they did NOT "get it" when it came to building and managing a company to do the same. They recognized that they did not have the skills, so they populated the front offices with several names and bodies with good experience in the process and particulars ... then spent every minute of every day denying the advice, guidance, instructions and efforts of those people. In short they were paying massive amounts of good money for the best advice possible then dumping it straight into the trashbin. They shuttered the company within the first three years. I'm not saying that's what goes on in LL. I have no proof one way or the other. But it is a scenario played out far too often in the tech industry. It also goes a long way toward explaining why a company with so many plusses keeps doing the stupidest, most idiotic, least well thought-out things. The solution? Sadly the only two outcomes I've ever seen are either rapid cratering or a slow zombie-crawl for eternity. The one exception I know of where they managed to get the techie-fools to quit screwing things up was Apple. But Jobs was both the problem and the solution .. and that's VERY rare in this industry.

1&2) My memory was faulty, My confrontation with Jack Linden was October 21st, 2010 .. long before they dumped the GSA. I stand corrected. 3) Old search is moot. I said that too. PvR) I don't count Placements as Rankings either. My point was that to the USER they are Listings and just as useful. So trying to beat them is moot but they still figure into the user experience/response. Client Search is the automated search API used by devices. AFAIK It uses the same index and data as Web Search (which is also Viewer Search) but it presents it in an older, more "edible" format. As I said, it's been a few years since I studied it or SEO. If they have disconnected it from the real search results then they did so only to hobble use by responsible Merchants and to cripple useful devices, not to benefit anyone. But near as I can tell, even today, it still returns useful and valid results. Visitors) The indexer does run more often and seems to run on changes to Traffic or Parcel pages. That change came as they also changed the format of the human-readable Parcel pages to remove a lot of information, including the page generation time. That killed any chance of automatically knowing when search results were updated. Because it runs not on a schedule but "as needed", it is abundantly clear why that chair brought two visitors. People like going to "new" places. An item location that is not where everything else is would draw people right away. "Chair in shop? New! Lemme see!" Removal of the Parcel listings page from the Viewer was another dumb move making it necessary to go to the web to see what's REALLY on a Parcel. That's akin to taking the excerpts out of Google; it makes each headline listing in the Viewer essentially worthless and does NOT serve the end-user in the least. Another useless hobble meant to obscure and not reveal or help. Finally: You've looked at the windshield wipers and decided the car works just fine. When you spend some quality time studying the results deeper then I'll be more willing to accept your opinion. Where you really stepped on my toes was your assertion that I gave up too soon. Long after you quit and stopped posting on the Forums or anywhere else, I was still out there daily helping folks try and get decent placement. I spent many many hours every day, uncompensated in any way, doing my best to do what I could. And at every turn, LL played hob behind the scenes and undid anything accomplished. When they finally just stopped allowing the indexer to properly rank a page or a Parcel and just locked things into place, that was the last straw. You had long since stopped watching or helping anyone, so you have no place to speak with authority on how things wound up. You left, I stayed. Perhaps LL has changed things since then, I don't know either. But you telling me I gave up too soon? No, that's an insult to me, my professionalism and character .. and I won't take that. Once you go talk to the people that I spent endless hours working with and for .. then you can pass judgement on me. Until then .. talk to the hand.

I would recommend following the information provided in the post Best ways to contact the Commerce Team They can look at the failed deliveries and sales from the "inside" and tell you what did or did not happen. Here in the forum the best we can do is guess.

Phil Deakins wrote: I simply did an inworld search for 'low prim furniture' (without quotes). I had it set to Places and no restriction on Adult. I'm ranked #1. Lok's is ranked #2. Lok's listing that is above mine isn't a ranking. It's a placement, so it doesn't count as a ranking and there's nothing we can do about it. Btw, it's not a placement for any of the reasons you mentioned. They placed exact name regions at the top when they used the GSA. It's the equivalent of search engines like Google placing advertisements above the rankings. In the past, you couldn't tell the difference between them with some engines. GoTo (it became Overture later) actually placed paid ads within the rankings, and there was no way to spot them. That caused a change in U.S. law, and it became illegal to do it. The point I was making with those 2 visitors was that, in a very short space of time, an item was listed so that it caused people to come to the workshop. I don't know the mechanism behind it but it almost certainly happened because of inadvertantly leaving a chair set to show in search for a very short space of time. (I haven't totally ruled out the possibility of it being someone who knows me, but the chair is by far the most likely reason, imo). Darrius Gothly wrote: There are terms that makes sense, but a vast number of others that don't. It's that focus on the high end and total disregard for the full picture that makes the tool mostly useless. If you want shoes, land or low prim furniture (in your case) then it will send you to places with top traffic. But anything else? (The Places tab of Search is purely Traffic ranked and has no bearing on anything. Just make sure you have the search term once then load your land with Bots and you win there.) However, I gave up on search a few years back. I stopped caring when they added their own internal weighting and destroyed its usefulness. It may have improved some over the years but .. I don't see it being as useful as it was or could be. It doesn't do that. My top ranking is above others that have much higher traffic than I get. One place, ranked 2 down from me, has over 3 times the traffic that I have. And there are more higher traffic places below that. Incidentally, there is no Places tab in search. There is in the old search that can still be used with some 3rd party viewers, and that's always been listed solely on traffic. Could it be that your mind is getting things a bit mixed up? I might suggest that that is the reason for your pessimistic views. Perhaps your interest faded too quickly, before they got the new thing working as they wanted it to work. I think you may have become a bit out of touch, Darrius. I certainly have. It's been years since I looked at search in the detailed way that I used to, but I see nothing wrong with the results that I saw yesterday and today. For that reason, and because I have no real interest in it, I'm not going to study it in the depth you suggested. I was simply curious about your statement that LL had destroyed it, and I wondered in what way. I'll start with your last paragraph. After you gave up and quit watching the SEO activity, I was still in the thick of things. I was active in it for quite some time and saw everything going on. I was involved daily with many clients working around the clock to keep them ranked well. I gave up after I saw the writing on the wall. I'd spent months working hard to make good stores stay in search, only to watch "Big Names" with near zero keywords or traffic fly to the top of Search and stay there. I was the one that attended Community Meetings with Jack Linden, and I was the one that confronted him in one meeting with hard evidence of their "tinkering" .. only to have him lie to my face about it. I didn't quit too early, I stayed through the whole process until LL made it abundantly clear they had no interest in being fair, only in helping out specific people. Now about the "Traffic Only" ranking in places. You are correct, I was looking at the old style Places search as shown here: Hardly anyone uses that .. unless they see the "Places" tab up top before they see the one along the side. I use Firestorm exclusively and never run the LL Viewer, so I'm biased in that respect. But nevertheless, that's the tab I was referring to when I made my earlier comment. Now the "New" (or "Web") Search: What you refer to as a "Placement" is to the untrained eye the same as a regular listing. Here's what I see and I believe you see from the Everything search:  The first three entries are a Region and two Groups. Untrained eyes will see those as #1 through #3 in results. They will be able to TP to the Region listing but won't get far with the Groups .. at least not for going somewhere. I still don't understand why they place Groups at the top, but I'm sure most people that click on those entries either get fed up and close Search or understand what's going on so it probably doesn't do too much harm. (Although it would seem more logical that they should be ranked within Everything appropriately and not pushed to the top as they are now.) Directly below those is what is called a Placement as you pointed out. That is for LOK's. Even though it has a different icon, it provides a TP function and is every bit as useful as a normal Parcel listing. Below the Placement is your listing. So as it stands now, you and I both see the same thing. And what I see now is not what I saw earlier today. So as it stands, my earlier observations are no longer correct. When I looked earlier (but did not screencap darnit) you were not in the listings. LOK's Placement was immediately followed by two other listings and then her Parcel listing. That is what I saw and why I made my comments. But it has changed. The New Places tab shows something a whole lot different .. and here is where the power of the Placement works well:  LOK's Placement comes ahead of your normal Listing. But they are identical in appearance save for some very tiny differences. Those differences won't matter to most people .. if they even notice them. The upshot is the Placement puts her shop "ahead" of yours for anyone using the New Places search. Now .. back to why you are ranked first in New Everything: We can only get real gut-level details by doing a manual "Client Search". The previous ability to see what items were marked to "Show In Search" is no longer available from the Web Search. So how those two visitors came to be in your shop instead of your store is beyond me. However the Client Search does allow you to open the Parcel's web page. You and LOK have entries that link to your Listing pages as follows: (and btw her listing comes before yours in Client Search) Furniture at LOK'S LOW PRIM FURNITURE Low Prim Furniture These two links open the Parcel Listing Pages for you both. They allow you to see what items are marked to Show in Search. You have 21 items listed, she has one. Directly below you is a Parcel with four items listed. So clearly the content of your Parcel, the items marked to Show in Search, are not very heavily weighted. You've also pointed out that Traffic doesn't really count much either. So they've eliminated (for the most part) Items for Sale and Traffic. That leaves only Parcel Name and Description for ranking. Here is where the "Foot on the scale" comes into play. During my final days of caring about Search, I conducted a number of tests using the exact same Name and Description on multiple Parcels. I found that my results would wind up on pages 10+ or further down. Even duplicating the Items listed and besting Traffic only resulted in moving up a few slots. But the slots on Page 1? Always stayed the same small group and never varied. In short there was no way to advance to the first page unless you were already there. Final words: I didn't become cynical too soon. I stayed at it and flogged at it for months after they stopped listening and stopped communicating. I finally came to the conclusion that they had "frozen" rankings as they were and thus were not allowing the system to work. In other words, they killed it as a Search Tool and turned it into a Listings Service for the chosen few. Who those few are and why they were picked .. and more to the point are they ever switched up, I cannot say. But in my months of testing I never saw things vary. No one new had a chance .. and that just wasn't fair in the least. And THAT is when I quit, stopped taking consulting work, pulled my SEO devices off the market and stopped blogging about Search. It wasn't fair to anyone to spend money when it was all too obvious that nothing could be done to realistically get them good placement. Now to bring this full circle and back on topic for this thread: Search was a useful tool and needed only some careful engineering to make it really work properly. Instead LL fired the GSA team, went to an in-house system and completely buried any information that made it valuable to the entire platform. They have done the same thing with Resident to Resident transaction information, Marketplace Advertisements, page views on Marketplace and now .. they are "adjusting" Cashout volumes and fees. It all comes back to the fact that LL does more to destroy income and customer participation than any Griefer or Hacker could. Rather than look at the big picture and make decisions based on the bigger benefit, they almost without exception take a path that results in alienating a majority, hiding basic needed information .. and ultimately harming more than should be harmed. So yeah, I'm cynical .. and remain that way any time I hear "News" from the Lab.

In a previous profession we had a term for people (mostly males) that would add some alcohol to their system then get very macho and aggressive: Beer Muscles. When one is attacked verbally, called names and belittled but strictly on the Internet .. that needs a term too. I agree it isn't Cyber Bullying. But it is bullying and it does happen in Cyberspace. So what do we call it? Cyber Muscles? Carried out by Internuts? We need a new term for it. It does happen and it can lead to some unfortunate and very irreparable actions in real life.

GSA! Thank you. Appliance not Engine. (duh!) I'm not sure where you're searching, but I don't see your store listed. I do see LOK's as the top ranked place though. Your store must be listed under a different owner name. (btw: I see her store ranked #1 as a Region too) But the situation you are describing doesn't begin to reveal anything about Search in total. All that happened seems to be one item drew the attention of two people. Spend some time plugging in different search terms that casual shoppers or searchers might use, then look at the results returned. Study the places and their listings to see if you can understand why they have been ranked highly for those search terms. I'm fairly confident that in short order you'll start to see how irrational the results seem to be. There are terms that makes sense, but a vast number of others that don't. It's that focus on the high end and total disregard for the full picture that makes the tool mostly useless. If you want shoes, land or low prim furniture (in your case) then it will send you to places with top traffic. But anything else? (The Places tab of Search is purely Traffic ranked and has no bearing on anything. Just make sure you have the search term once then load your land with Bots and you win there.) However, I gave up on search a few years back. I stopped caring when they added their own internal weighting and destroyed its usefulness. It may have improved some over the years but .. I don't see it being as useful as it was or could be.

I don't pay attention to decreases, only increases. Decreases happen in blocks not related to anything we can measure. But increases happen when someone places a block for sale, so it represents one sale.

Phil Deakins wrote: Darrius Gothly wrote: Those they don't obscure, they flat out destroy. (In-world search for example.) They destroyed the inworld search? I never use it for objects and such. What's wrong with it? For a time (up through about 2012-2013) it was possible to use keywording techniques to promote your listing in Search. I'm not talking spamming though, I'm talking proper use of keywords and object naming. They were using a Google Search Engine to index the listing pages, but asking it to do more than feasible using the incredibly sparse content on those pages. But then they chose to stop paying the service fees on the GSE and instead switched to an in-house developed search appliance that uses "secret techniques" to rank parcel pages. In the process of trying to make the GSE work and then switching to the in-house system, they were assaulted by a LOT of pressure from big names to "get rid of the spammers". In essence what was requested was "get rid of my competition". The end result was that they tweaked indexing parameters enough to destroy the actual relevance of items for sale, overweighted words found in the Parcel Name and Description .. and then added a foot on the scale so that they can arbitrarily rank any parcel they wish much higher than any other. They also imposed some very arbitrary "rules" that totally eliminate smaller shops and overly weight those with massive amounts of entries. The end result was that only those with a finger in LL's ear can easily rank; those just trying to make a living or that are part of the herd don't even show up ... and the whole process became yet another skewed game controlled by unseen hands for secret purposes. What was a useful tool, able to be used as a good advertising and marketing tool, was reduced to yet another worthless waste of time and computer cycles. Like the scroller ads on Marketplace that show only the top names and sometimes sprinkle in ads bought and paid for by the many other Merchants, In-World Search is a showcase for the chosen few and has no useful purpose. As evidenced by how few use it to find anything any more. As you well know Phil, Search can be a very useful tool to find relevant things and places. But since they've got it working the way they want, it really isn't useful for finding new things; it only works to aim you at things they want you to see.

I just noticed this part: Alwin Alcott wrote: [updated 7:34 AM PST, 11 March 2016] Concierge phone support down time has been extended through March 13th at midnight PST. Phone support will be available again beginning March 14th at 8 AM PST. If they have extended down time through March 13th at midnight, but will reopen March 14th at 8AM .. where did the hours between midnight and 8AM go? "Thank you for calling Concierge Phone Support .. please hold ... for 8 hours ..."

I'm not sure what to say .. other than "I swear I've seen it." There may be lots of reasons neither you nor others are spotting this happening, but I'm at a loss to explain them all. I can only say that it's behavior I have witnessed many times. Backed up by conversations with my "circle", I am pretty confident in my estimation of the cashout distributions. Granted I don't have many "Big Fish" in my circle, but it only takes one or two to more than overmatch the total of all the little fish. I think this is going to go down in the annals of "questions LL will never answer" .. which is really the biggest shame of all. They have their own reasons for completely hobbling the financial market, and the merchandise market, and most every other market in SL. They also have their reasons for obscuring or hiding every other datum that could be of benefit to anyone trying to improve their business. Those they don't obscure, they flat out destroy. (In-world search for example.) To me the final bottom line is .. I will never understand why LL has now and has always done everything in their power to destroy any user-income from their platform. This is just another example of them shaking down and crippling one of the most obvious and vital sources of revenue growth stemming from Second Life.

I do it by refreshing the page every minute or so .. sometimes more often .. then mentally comparing the total available for sale to the number shown on the previous refresh. This method presumes that only one (or maybe two) chunks of L$ have been put up for sale during the time between refreshes. But if you do it often enough, the chances of LOTS of little sales is minimized. It's more likely you will catch only one chunk placed for sale on each refresh.

Umm ... when the last guy pulled a Rage Quit without notice, the one they hired to take his place showed up for work stoned and with a propensity to tell people the truth. So they had to find someone else? (Okay .. it's just total bs'ery on my part .. but it did make me giggle to thunk it up.)

"Sticks and stone ..." I agree with the majority here in suggesting you mute and move on. It's been my experience that people with intense overdone reactions to polite requests are either devoid of their own personal power and self-respect, or just doing it because they enjoy making others feel belittled. (Maybe those are the same thing?) In any case, there really is no recompense to be found through Official Channels. What you encounterred is a Sim Owner that exercised no self-control and clearly has no respect for others. Time will be your biggest ally here as those that stand with her now will eventually fall under her sharp tongue .. and then abandon her too.

Sorry .. I was less than clear. What I meant was to post a screencap of the Edit Item Listing page for one of the products that keeps unlisting itself. For example: I've only included the top part above, but you should include the whole Edit Item Listing page. That way we might be able to spot what about the listing and its options is set wrong. Or .. the other alternative .. you can file a Support Ticket. But I haven't a clue what topic or category you would select. There is a thread on this forum that explains how to contact Support though.

steph Arnott wrote: Am going to make an award for you, "The grumpu old man award". "I suggested that you might try a few techniques to improve your communication" am not American, so get over it, we not all think your way. Its call tolerance, try it. I'm well aware that you are not American. I'm also aware that English is not your first language either. I'm not attacking you .. no matter how much you think I am. My only reason for being so open and upfront is because I see how often you wind up in spitting contests with others and I'm pretty sure they are not enjoyable .. for you or the other person. In the hopes I might help you enjoy more, I have offered words that might help. But you have rejected those offers. That is your choice. You demand I be more tolerant. But in demanding this of me, you demonstrate your lack of tolerance for other points of view. In the past few days you have gotten into arguments with others over several different topics. Yet in almost every instance there was never an attack or even affront aimed at you; you just waded in and started sniping at people. You don't earn tolerance by being intolerant of others. You don't gain respect by being disrespectful of others. Those two traits are among the many that must be worn first before they can be required of others. You may have noticed that I am among many here that have remained very tolerant of your attitude and attacks .. even when they are nothing more than angry personal insults. But then .. no .. never mind. It's abundantly clear you are not aware of that. If you were then you would be less confrontational and a lot more tolerant yourself. FWIW: I've tried to offer advice that I know to be good advice. I've tried suggestions that I know to be workable and successful. You have steadfastly refused to listen. Thus I have reached that point in this conversation where I will offer no more and try no more. To quote a TV show I like: "You can't save every puppy in the pound." Best of luck Steph. I wish you well.

As a long-time trouble shooter, I learned that when 25 out of 26 computers arrive at the same answer but one of them gets a different answer ... chances are really good the broken one is the one with the different answer. As an old man of near 60 years, I learned long ago that when everyone around me says I'm out of sorts and grumpy .. no matter how un-grumpy or in-sorts I think I am .. I'm just lying to myself. I said to you yesterday that perhaps you are not communicating yourself correctly. I suggested that you might try a few techniques to improve your communication and help others "hear" you better. But today once again you claim the failure to understand you is my fault .. not yours. Yet in all your interactions here, it is always you that comes off angry, snarky and out of sorts. And not just according to me, but to almost everyone that you interact with. Stop and think about this some Steph. Fixing this and many other issues you face begins when you accept that some of the fault may belong to you. That things going wrong are not "everyone else" .. but could quite possibly be you. Even when you aren't at fault, often times you can help improve a situation by looking inward and changing your habits some. I know this to be true .. because I have lived a lot more years than you have .. and I've had the benefit of learning this lesson the hard way far too many times. I'm hopeful you will hear me this time and try changing just a little bit .. if for no other reason than to get others to see you as you wish to be seen. The real bottom line? The easiest one to change, the one person you can fix fastest and with the most benefit .. is always yourself. That goes for everyone .. me included. Yes, there are times when you must stand your ground and defend your position. But those are rare, not that common .. and certainly not "just the way it is." If you live your life demanding everyone else change just to accommodate you then you will not ever find a time or a place where you are at ease. You will fight that fight forever ... and never ever win.

Madelaine McMasters wrote: The inescapable problem of this hypothetical situation is that, for each bucket of wisdom you scoop from the lesson pool of life, two more are added. Hmmm... I've always considered this more a benefit than a problem. Wisodm has proven to be the one thing I can take from everyone without them missing it. I can also give it away all day long and usually end up with more than I started with. Maybe I just need a bigger bucket ...