Porky Gorky

I use Chrome and the "remember me" tick box does not work, however Chrome automatically fills in the information for me which renders the problem mute.

Obviously in the short term those effected want their money reimbursed for the enhancements that have been incorrectly charged. But I have to wonder to what extent this ongoing problem is effecting the longterm confidence of those merchants that rely on listing enhancements to generate business. So when this problem is reported as fixed and you are reimbursed Pam, do you think you will still invest as much in listing enhancements in the future?

I don't understand why listing enhancements are still even active. Clearly people are being effected in a severe way by your inability to fix the problem. I know you have made token effort to reimburse those effected but with the same hand you are still taking duplicate payments...In some instances from the same people you are reimbursing. You need to suspend all enhancements now as you should have done when the problem was highlighted to you. The words pissup and brewery come to mind.

I think the improvements to the premium account that LL has made in recent years are great for new people and casual users, the free gifts, Linden Homes, free premium sandboxes etc. But non of that is of any use to someone like me who is here to do business. I have never needed to own a home here, I have land to build on so don't need a sandbox and make nearly all my own content. So I would like to see a few premium incentives aimed more at the merchant community who have premium accounts. I think they should introduce the following. Instant / priority USD cashouts Priority placement over non premium users when placing L$ sell/buy orders on the Lindex. More flexibility on upload costs for textures, mesh, sounds, animations etc. Either let us upload a certain amount for free each month or make packages available where we can pay for bulk uploads in advance, reducing the cost the more we buy.

At the very least they could offer instant cashouts to those of us that have premium accounts.

Pamela Galli wrote: As I have said many times: A horribly botched marketplace is better than no marketplace. Well seeing as you generate profit from the marketplace and it is a significant source of income for you then I can completely see why you hold that opinion. I generate sales from it too. In fact 2 of my businesses are run purely on the MP without any inworld presence. But putting profits aside, I am very much apposed to the Marketplace in principle. Websites like SL Exchange and SL Boutique used to support the sale of inworld content. The focus for merchants back then was designing and developing engaging inworld shopping experiences with the web based sales interfaces playing a minor role in the majority of commercial enterprises. Today that philosophy has completely changed and it seems that inworld stores are just there to support the sales of virtual content on a 2d website, and not a very good website either. It is systematically diminishing the presence of commercial enterprise and ingenuity inworld. There was a time when presentation was key in SL. The way you presented creations within your 3D space was key to success. It resulted in thousands of interesting and engaging plots and projects, all designed to draw the customer in and achieve a sale. This is something that the MP is destroying and LL are primarily to blame by driving business off of the grid and onto a website. We have lost a huge chunk of what SL used to be thanks to the development of the marketplace.

Rod, you could just fix all the Marketplace problems with one simple action. The solution is simple, just turn the MP off, pull the plug. No more MP. No more MP related problems. It would mean we would have to sell and purchase our virtual products in an actual virtual world....which I know is a radical concept to some LL employees and merchants and consumers alike, but our virtual world would be a better place for it. It would also mean that you only need to focus on one system that is failing virtual commerce (inworld) rather the 2 failing systems that you are currently supporting. So come on Rod, make an impact on SL and do something notable, drive the commerce back inworld and away from this dysfunctional 2D cancerous website that is helping to destroy land ownership and inworld business

I enjoy reading your notecards on the weekend Pam. They can be informative and I like keeping up with what you are working on :matte-motes-big-grin-evil: btw, whenever I see the name Pam on the forums this is how it sounds in my head.

This week i have been mostly eating.... Prozac.

Yes you are allowed to do this. Reading the TOS would have told you that. I think the only area of concern is how you handle the real life data of SL residents. If a situation arises where you know the real life identity of an SL user and you were to make that information public within SL then that would be a violation of the TOS.

The only real option of privacy available to people in SL are closed sims. I assume I can go and look everywhere apart from fully closed sims. If I arrive at ban lines and see people on the land, then I will just move my cam inside to see what they are up to. I sell prefabs and have done so for a long time. I was one of the first to introduce privacy windows because a customer asked for them and I thought it would be a good selling point. When I started doing this I told people it was pointless as a snooper could just cam right in through the wall, but people still came to expect privacy to be built into all new prefabs, It's generally become an industry standard. Locked doors used to be pointless too, I don't know if they still are, but you used to be able to pass right through the wall of a build by sitting on a prim and moving it. I released a few houses without any doors or privacy windows and they just did not sell. Customers expected doors that lock and privacy windows despite the fact that it did not protect their privacy.

To my knowledge, anything that is deleted, be it a rezzed object or an inventory object, will always go into the trash folder. Assume you had 1000 rezed prims or objects on your land. If you drag select or highlight all of them in one go and hit delete, then only 1 object will arrive in your trash folder. The name of the trashed object will have the same name as the last prim selected before you hit the delete button. It will also have an the icon that indicates there are multiple objects in the selection rather than just 1. So to the op.....if your friend did not plan the deletion, then chances are they will have no clue as to what the the trashed selection is called. However, as long as the trash has not been cleared then it will be possible to find the deleted items. Just go to a sandbox and systematically rez every single file in the trash folder. Don't rez one, check it and then delete it before going on to the next because that will cause confusion, as the checked items will just end up back in the trash. If I was doing it, I would go up high in the sky, rez a large platform then rez every single item in the trash one after the other without deleting it until I find what I am looking for.

I'm using MB's and have had no problems receiving payments or delivering today from the MP if that is any help.

Whether or not LL will do it I cannot say. But I know it can be done. A good friend of mine had their account hacked last year. The hacker deleted every single item in the inventory and cleared the trash. Once LL restored the account to it's rightful owner, they then restored all the items that had been deleted.

Qwalyphi Korpov wrote: Reason given: Some residents said they were of limited value. Actual reason: That would be speculating. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Discussion-Forum/Q4-Speculation/m-p/1393271#M51958 oooh I am glad you posted this link Qwalyphi. I am not right very often so we should all take a second again to marvel at my amazing speculative skills in regards to quarterly reporting......and I shall once again take the opportunity to ask you all, who da man? .....it's OK, you don't need to answer, we all know it's me. :matte-motes-big-grin-evil:

I started selling prefabs in early 2004. When I started I wasn't even aware of auto aligners. Im not even sure if they existed. Certainly when Lex Neva releases Rez Faux I was the first person to review it on SL exchange. It really did revolutionize the commercial sale of prefabs for me. Before Rez Faux I had to visit the majority of customers after every sale and set the build up for them, manually highlighting all the prims and rotating them to achieve their desired position. Prim drift was a major problem back then, as soon as you started to rotate a linkset, in some instances lots of the prims would unalign slightly, so after positioning the build I would have to go round and spend ages realigning all the drifted prims. This was the case for the majority of sales. When I discovered Rez Faux I was amazed. I remember inviting some of my friends over to my land to give them a demonstration. I was stood there for ages rotating a massive 800 prim house above my head whilst doing a funky dance underneath it! Considering that I paid about L$500 for Rez Faux and have used it to package over 10000 sold prefabs I can definitely say that Rez Faux is the best thing I have every purchased in SL.

A good way for buliders to package prefabs is to place the auto aligner (in this case Rez Faux) in the centre of the build, then bulid a basic out line of the bulid around the box, indicate where the external doors are, then attach your outline/footprint to the anchor prim, making sure the anchor is the parent prim. When a customer rezzes a build for the first time they are then presented with the auto aligner (rez faux box) attached to a handy foot print which they can move and rotate on their land before actually hitting the rez button.,

I think if you have found 3D programs easy to learn then your best bet would be to design your houses outside of SL and then import them in. This way you don't need to learn how to build everything in SL. You just need to learn a few key skills inworld like mesh optimisation etc. Check out the mesh forums if you need further details on importing your 3D models into SL.

Rya Nitely wrote: A big risk in paying for reviews, or even asking for them, is that an honest customer might just say something like this - 'I love this item, so when the seller asked me to review it I had no hesitation. I would have rated it 5 stars even without the reward'. I've seen reviews like this out there. One review like that would discredit all the others. If people feel the need to pay for reviews or game the system it's because their products aren't good enough to sell by themselves. So in the long run you will fail anyway. Success comes from a long history of selling high quality items - word of mouth, consistency, good customer service, honesty, and last but not least - hard work. I game the system but I also provide good customer service, am honest in my dealings with customers and work hard. I would also disagree with your opinion that in the long run gamers will fail anyway. I have been drawing a profit from SL longer than nearly anyone else here. You need to selectively game so that customers either do not notice it, or so that it is subtle enough that it doesn't bother them. Allot of the time people classify all gaming as being bad. But there are different levels to gaming amd each type of gaming should be judged accordingly. So for example gaming inworld traffic is allot different to gaming inworld search. Gaming traffic numbers is blatantly dishonest. You are tricking the customer into thinking that more people visit your land than they really do. Compare that to gaming inworld search. People with long established businesses find themselves buried in the search results after an update. Their only hope of climbing back up the search rankings is through gaming. Work out whatever the whacko formula that LL are using for search that week and then exploit that knowledge to get yourself back on page 1. Say for example that me rezzing a thousand prims with the keyword "house" puts me back on page 1. I sell houses so I am not lying, I also had one of the largest collections of houses so surely I deserve to be one page 1? search does not think so. If someone typed "House" into search all it displays (in this example) are clubs playing house music. So the only way us merchants can fix the results displayed in inworld search and make them more relevant is through gaming. But there are lines here that can be crossed too. Keyword stuffing for types of items that I don't sell for example. That I would consider dishonest gaming and it should be judged accordingly. So lets get down to paying for reviews and find out where the dishonest line is. So a customer buys a product on the MP without any prompting from the merchant. They don't leave a review. If you contact that customer and pay or bribe them into leaving an honest review then that I see that as OK gaming. You are effectively paying them for the time they would need to spend logging in, find the product to review and then writing the review. Now if when you contacted that customer and they did not like the product but you paid them anyway into writing a favorable review then that would be dishonest gaming IMO and not okay. If you pay someone to buy your product just so they can review it then that is not OK either. So paying or bribing someone to incentivise them into leaving a genuine review is just good business. Paying them to lie is bad business. So you should not be tarring all gamers with the same brush. Some of us game as a way of best utilizing the systems in place to conduct commerce. Not all of us are out to cheat or deceive people, we just want to get the exposure that we feel we deserve after putting in all that hard work that you were talking about earlier.

Unlike a lot of the people I talk to, the majority of my sales are still made inworld. I can definitely say that MP maintenance repeatedly results in loss marketplace sales in the period following the maintenance. Comparing the consistency of inworld sales against MP sales, I do not see the same slumps inworld. So I don't think there are any other factors in play that are stopping people from shopping full stop.....they just seem to stop/are stopped from making purchases on the MP after maintenance down time.

ab Vanmoer wrote: Wow, that must be so disheartening for the commerce team, a whole months worth of work rolled back That's an hour of their lives they will never get back. :smileyhappy:

I've been doing business in SL for 8 years now and learned pretty quickly that the various systems which support our virtual commerce are flawed and open to exploitation by it's users. I've gamed dwell, traffic, search, picks, classifieds and MP reviews, all to varying levels of success across a variety of business types. I didn't do it because I enjoy cheating or for any other nefarious reason. I did it because lots of other people did it, and not doing would it have put me at a disadvantage. People game the system in SL. You need to accept this as a fact of doing business in SL and then use it to your advantage. Some people may view any form of gaming the system in SL as cheating and acting morally wrong, but merchants who adopt this type of attitude will find it to be a detriment to their business because the majority of the competition will not feel the same way. Some of the systems in place in SL have been severely lacking over the years, most notably inworld search, especially in the last 4 or 5 years. There have been times when inworld search has come close to become almost functional, but that has only been because us merchants game the bejesuz out it resulting in a better chance that search will actually deliver some relevant results. I think paying for reviews is the lamest form of gaming we have seen yet and learned pretty quickly that it can be of a detriment to your business. Allot of the people who take payment for these reviews leave generic short reviews that are obviously fake. As more and more people become aware of the fake sounding reviews on the MP they may avoid your products all together as they may feel they cannot trust any of the generic sounding reviews that your listings may have. Getting the auto reviewer will result in getting crappy generic "OMG it's awesome" type reviews. You should take a more hands on approach, You see a customer buy something on the MP and they don't leave a review then contact them directly inworld. Tell them you are trying to boost your profile on the MP and would greatly appreciate it if they could leave you some feedback on there if they could spare the time. To show your appreciation you can offer them a little freebie item. This works great. You are still effectively paying (or bribing) for reviews, but because you engage with the customer directly before hand I find they put allot more effort into writing a constructive review.

I like getting feedback on the content I release, especially if I've invested 3 months on a house with furniture and landscaping etc. After release I want as much feedback as possible as quickly as possible, giving me the option to tweak the product to make it more appealing to the masses, So quite often I will send a notecard to the first 20 to 50 customers who purchase the build with a questionnaire and generally asking for their feedback. I offer them a free item that will suit the build if they respond. I normally get allot of responses from doing this and it offers results on multiple levels. First I get the feedback, which helps me fix any mistakes early and improve the product. Second it gives me an exscuse to engage with the customer, If they complete the questionnaire it generally results in a real time conversation as well. It gives me a window to lay down some bonus sales patter. And lastly, if people purchased the build via the MP, and then complete my questionnaire, I have found that they are more likely to go back and review the product on the MP. So although this could be interpreted as paying for reviews or bribing for reviews it was never my goal. I wanted to incentivise customers to provide me with genuine feedback and this resulted in more MP reviews.

Ah...this would explain why my main inbox has started filling up. I set MP notifications to auto file into a folder and then I ignore them. Was odd seeing these notifications again after all these years.

Nice post Sassy....I did a proper LOL :matte-motes-big-grin: