Innula Zenovka

If anyone asks me about RLV, I recommend either Catznip or Marine Kelly's Restrained Love, depending on their operating system (if they don't use Windows) and a couple of other considerations, since those are the reference viewers for RLV, give them a basic over-view, and suggest they ask for further advice in the Open Collar group. Both Catznip and Marine's viewer have the same look and feel as the Official Viewer.

According to Google, https://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Ramsbottom It's not that uncommon a surname in Lancashire and west Yorkshire.

And he used Comic Sans!

Because MI6 need them.

You said Normally, when people talk about how much money a company makes, they mean the amount of profit it makes -- that is, its total income minus its total expenditure. What do you mean by the term?

Your source says That may well be accurate, but what of their expenditure? Whenever I've seen that figure quoted in interviews, it's always been to make the point that LL has a thriving in-world economy, where residents spend a good deal of money on goods and services provided by other residents.

The $600 million figure refers to the sum of economic activity by residents in SL -- the total amount we spend in-world on goods and services, most of which comprises transactions between residents. It's not the amount LL make in a year, which is a figure I don't believe they publish.

We don't, of course, know if LL takes decisions in such a cavalier fashion. Perhaps it would help if people were to stipulate their qualifications in US employment law when commenting on the legality or otherwise of the Mentor Programme.

I assume that Linden Lab's legal department, assisted by external counsel when necessary, are familiar with US employment law and have approved this mentorship programme. (Love and I posted at the same time).

That's my point, though. I suggest it's very possible that there's a higher than normal retention rate among new users who, like me, are introduced to SL by a friend. That's partly because the group is, to an extent, pre-selected in that people who know them think they might enjoy it, and partly because they have a friend to mentor them and answer questions, introduce them to other people, show them round a bit, and so on. Since it's possible, at the very least, that people who are introduced to SL by friends are more likely to log in a second time, and to continue logging in, than are people who come to SL cold, as it were, I would suggest that any comparison between retention rates for people who engaged with the mentor programme and those who didn't risks being skewed if you include among the latter group people like me, who did have mentors, but not official ones. That is, the point of the mentor programme is to provide support and assistance to people who don't already have someone to help them, so a valid comparison of retention rates would need to exclude people who already had friends in SL to help them.

I dunno. Let's give it a shot. My first question of these simple stats would be, what populations are we comparing? I never encountered any mentors because my first introduction to SL was when a friend introduced me. He emailed me a slurl and told me, after I'd set up an account, to log in at a particular time by clicking on it, and he'd meet me at his home in SL. When I did, he gave me a brief intro to SL and was around to answer questions until I'd found my feet. So I didn't need any mentors. And since Innula was my second or third account, neither did she by the time I created this account, or any subsequent alts (which I did, and still do, quite frequently for testing purposes). What, I wonder, would the figures look like if -- and if such a thing is possible, of course -- you were to exclude alts and to compare populations who received mentoring from friends, people who received mentoring from mentors, and people who received no mentoring at all?

If there's a keyboard shortcut available, certainly, though not all menu items in either viewer have keyboard shortcuts. But many people prefer to use menus.

Possibly so, though it's not obvious to me why that should be the case. I suspect it's just what you're used to using -- because you know where everything is, it's clearly the better viewer. However, what's indisputable is that the two viewers have their menus organised very differently, that new residents will have downloaded the Official Viewer (unless they have a friend who has told them to use Firestorm, in which case their friend can probably help them) and that if the mentor is using Firestorm when trying to explain to the new resident how to do something in the Official Viewer, they're going to get nowhere.

It's not a question of explaining concepts, though. I'm thinking of answering simple questions on the lines of "How do I do this?" Let's compare some of the menus in the two viewers. Here's the first one on the left on the Official Viewer, next to the first on on Firestorm. Different names, and completely different items. Second menus Third menus World menu on the Official Viewer Unless you're using the same viewer as the person you're trying to help do something, the result will be complete confusion.

Sure, though if I'm looking for something of mine in any viewer I simply use Build>Region Objects (which shows me stuff I can return, so anything I've dropped) and I've never used the Quick Preferences in Firestorm, since I'm used to using Graphics Presets and (at least in the Official Viewer) to right-clicking on myself if I want to adjust my hover height. But none of this (apart from maybe the hover height) is stuff I'd be covering with a completely new user who wanted to know the basics of how to walk, fly, teleport, make and use landmarks, change their avatar, use their inventory, use IMs, use search, use vendors, open boxes and so on. And I certainly wouldn't, before telling them how do any any of that, first tell them to log out, go to a third-party website, and download and install a different viewer.

It would. I'm familiar with Firestorm, though for preference I use Catznip or the Official Viewer, depending on what I'm doing. Firestorm's UI and menu layouts are sufficiently different from the other two that, if anyone asks me how to do something in Firestorm I always have to log in an alt with that viewer just to check that I'm telling them to look in the right place, and for the correct name, for whatever menu and option they need. I have to say I'm a bit puzzled that you're so allergic to the Official Viewer that the requirement to use if while mentoring is a deal-breaker, particularly since, as you put it, "it's not as if Firestorm is different enough from the official viewer that it would affect mentoring." They're not asking Mentors to use the Official Viewer all the time, after all, just while they're mentoring.

Also, I think the idea of having mentors who, when a confused new resident asks them, "how do I do this?" reply "First, you need to log out,, download an alternative viewer, install it, and then log back in and then I'll be able to explain it to you" is a bit of a non-starter. That's particularly the case because, almost inevitably, anything a new user needs to know, assuming it's not to do with RLV, they'll be able to do just as easily in the Official Viewer as they can in Catznip, Firestorm or any of the other third party viewers,

It drives me nuts sometimes. I think the restriction is because of potential privacy concerns, to spare people's potential embarrassment over sex huds and things that control parts of their anatomy, but it can certainly be a huge pain in the neck.

For comparison, I set Google's Bard the same task:

I asked ChatGPT to write a poem about the Second Life Forums. With no further prompting, it produced this:

But llGetAttachedList can't, by design, see HUDs. That's the problem with HUDs.

No. My point is that if people want to do WW2 combat RP involving German tanks, of which there are a considerable number for sale on the Marketplace, they can't avoid the connection with the Waffen SS, at least not it they're interested in historical accuracy, since all the German tank divisions were part of that organisation. Since it's now well-established that the regular WW2 Wehrmacht were just as involved in the Holocaust as were the Waffen SS, and the Japanese military didn't have a particularly good record in China or Korea, either, I can see the argument for banning WW2 combat RP altogether, but then I think you should make that argument rather than object to people wanting to RP particular Axis formations.

There seem to be four groups in search that reference the Waffen SS. Three of them (including the one you reference) are clearly WW2 RP groups (and, to be fair, it must be difficult to do WW2 combat RP without the Waffen SS, since they had all the German tank divisions). The fourth I'm not sure about, since it doesn't have a description, but it's a closed enrolment group with 14 members.

What specific issues do you have in mind that you don't think LL is already aware of from communication methods we know exist,, like usergroup meetings, bug reports and feature requests in the JIRA, or from dealing with support tickets? The fact some things don't get fixed might mean they're not as easy to fix as you perhaps think they are.