Prokofy Neva

The problem is that if the fee for cashouts and the fee for premium account increases, not all will justify then a lowered rental cost. I'm one of those who lowered costs even before this latest round, after the increase in prims, because the economy has simply shrunk in recent years.

I don't know if LL realizes how many free account holders are holding up the economy. I have many of them as tenants. That's because they earn money inworld. They work in various clubs or at rental agencies or all kinds of jobs from sex work to administrative work in stores, and get paid in Linden dollars which they never cash out. They use it to fund their SL -- clothes, furniture, rentals, services, etc. They don't have premium accounts because a recurring cost is too much for them and just not justified, even with the stipend and land credit. They can get land in a rental for the fraction of a premium account, and have a job for spending money, and it's more interesting for them. I have some tenants who pay me their earnings from jobs daily to a rental cube, in fact because they don't seem to have the larger amounts needed to pay 4 weeks in advance for a rental. And I'm one of these people myself -- I almost never buy Linden dollars, but use the income from rentals to buy services inworld like scripters, or furniture, or gatchas or whatever. Yes, you can cash out Lindens to pay for premium accounts and tier.

It's not true that it "costs LL nothing". Sure, the state can print money endlessly -- and does. LL is like Yeltsin's Russia in that respect. But it comes at a cost -- inflation. If you have lots more "free money" injected into the system, then the rate of exchange worsens to that people who earn that money trying to cash it out -- who are already facing new, stiff fees -- will get less for their cashout. It's a basic economic rule that any increase of cash into a system DEVALUES that cash, so that the rate goes down, i.e. it may cost less to buy, but makes less to sell. The more Lindens there are to the US dollar, the worse its value. The Lindens have this in fact carefully calibrated, by their lights. I'm not sure they still use "Supply Linden" to artificially suppress the value of the Linden, but likely they do. Otherwise, when you see 14 million Lindens for sale, yet the offer to purchase 2500 Lindens for $11.47 US *within 10 minutes* would not be possible. Huge pots of money disappear mysteriously often, and not because somebody bought those millions. It's not clear HOW it is run, but THAT it is run to "balance the economy" is a given -- to keep Lindens cheap enough to make players feel 1000L is a big wad, yet not so cheap as to go below $3.50 US for them when cashed out by merchants.

Well, one thing to keep in mind, Grumpity, is that the reduction of grandfathered and regular islands is cancelled out *if you have more than one premium account*. Now, why would anyone have more than one premium account? And the answer is: because groups don't work. It's not about the limit on the *number* of groups. But the *functioning* of groups internally. So you need multiple premium accounts to make land groups as an owner - hence 2 or 6 or more times $72 a year really adds up -- and now will be so much more expensive with multiples. So I went from having one big land rentals group 14 years ago, to having 6 or more such groups now, each with a few hundred people but also each with their own separate premium account owner. Why? Because once you get over about 400-500 people in a *land* group where varying permissions are handed out to tenants and managers; where land lists have to load; where notices have to go out, it starts to lag and become unreadable. Trying to go back and forth *on one account* between such groups gets really crazy. Logging into each one of them separately is much easier. Also, note that in the old days it was NECESSARY to make multiple groups with multiple owners because of the nefarious "officer recall" that would remove the tier payer from his own land. Sure, these groups now could all be turned over to one account. But then they are no longer original owners and founders, but merely "made owner". I'd be reluctant to do this, to be honest because it's also useful to spread tier out over several dates to pay. Making the conversion inevitably means that you are stuck with much earlier tier dates -- you lose some money. Even so, due to your cost increase, I'll have to struggle to do this and get rid of premium accounts -- how many others will be doing this? In the larger groups when I try to change a person's role, it's not uncommon to wait more than a minute for the menu to "turn over" or "save". That's a long time. It's useful to put group ownership on different accounts so that the requests go to the owner and you burn through them in one quick session, successfully, instead of having ALL of them bombard you at once, with some messages inevitably lost in the system. Typing a name into the search box simply *does not work*. You have to trick it into working by typing only the first letter or two. There are a number of other annoyances with land groups as you may know -- even if you are the owner of a group and you put a prim on that land, unless you set your tag *to that group* it returns. There was a very brief period when LL played with getting rid of that -- but since it required looking up and reading all your groups each time, it abandoned it. Still, it's a huge pain when all day long, you have to keep switching your hats just to go from one sim to another -- because you need multiple groups because big ones don't work. So many things in SL that aren't so great and are chronic annoyances occur because they are workarounds to some other thing that isn't so great...So groups never really got fixed up right, after LL made the very important reform of transferring them from hippie communes, where anybody could steal land by triggering this insane "officer recall" which was conceived as "democracy" (it was more like anarchy or terrorism). They converted them to *differentiated* role groups, where owner, officer, member etc could have different *powers*. Some of the socialist furries howled, because they wanted absolute equality everywhere, and even if one person had to make another an equal owner, that wasn't perfect equality. For most of us, however, it was a great benefit and made the economy more secure and helped it grow. I like to think I helped bring about those necessary reforms (if you wanted a land-based economy, which really, you still need) with this blog post, which Cory Linden then read and showed to Philip. It's hard to imagine that yes, there was a time when all funds distributed equally ("group dwell" or any payments from sales) because there weren't differentiated roles or a checkoff box to enable or stop this: https://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2006/01/imagine-if-the-pizza-guy-stole-ll.html Another chronic annoyance -- which I was willing to suffer a permanent JIRA ban over -- is that "share" can override group "laws" -- like the ability to set whether any member can return group-set prims -- something you want to keep turned off or members return rental boxes and buildings, by accident or on purpose. The ability to "return shared items" is a pet Linden feature that I suspect most users don't even know about, much less use. Because if a group-set item is accidentally or on purpose put on "share," it can be returned -- and lost or broken -- or it can be griefed by members in fact not empowered to move or return group-set objects. Some Lindens favouring open-source culture love the idea of group builds and being able to return any other builder's prims in the collective. Others in SL don't favour collectivism but capitalism, where the person who paid for the sim and pays the tier controls the land, rather than Soviet communes. And if you don't want to hear my thoughts about the historic ideologies of your old and new homelands, understood, but then there's this, that affects every member of a shopping or fan group -- group chat often lags, to the point where you really can't have group chat in a group also holding multiple roles and land. The reality is, if you have multiple premium accounts, some of them will be almost free of inventory, and then never lag in any way. So that's useful also for trying to perform chores on really laggy days in SL.

I'm glad you explained them to me so I can use "waterfall" again. But Andrew Linden's droplet actually isn't in there.

It's good to know this exists but it's dependent first of all of having those link-sets. That means you have to MAKE THEM first, out of all objects at a "level" or "site" in a quest like this, which is at all different levels and buildings in the sky. This is time-consuming but I'm going to try to do it. Of course no-copy things won't get picked up and linked. What might make more sense is to have a series of platforms. Each platform is labelled as to the level or site it's at. Then *that* platform prim could have the location fixer in it. You can't link things across big distances I don't think. But you could rez out all the platforms individually and they would go to their previous position. Some rezzers come with an option to save the location so that you can get the skybox back at that perfect level you found if you have to delete it (or if it is returned). So I may try this just for the platforms, not the linked sets simply because it's easier.

Yes, they NEVER EVER do this. I did ask several times because virtually the entire sim's builds were all returned. I own all the land on that sim except one other person whose build was very static. I made those arguments and I guess they conceded it was their fault, a problem with the rolling restart/patch so they did roll it back. As I mentioned, this is always a mixed bag. The "last save" might be quite a while ago in which case all new builds/rezzes will be lost. They don't do this because fixing one person's problem will cause problems for others, etc. etc. as I explained. But rarely, they will do it. Always worth asking, although usually they say "no".

The Catholic Church still exists and has millions of faithful followers and a Pope who is listened to, not only by Catholics. Capitalism, which has existed through the millenia because human beings find it more convenient and more prosperous to buy and sell in a marketplace rather than wait for sub-standard goods to be distributed to them badly by corrupt leaders. Pussycat's notion that VR can only succeed if people "get over" capitalism actually contains the reason for why VR fails -- it is made and promoted by people who believe in either outright communism or some version of socialism, or state capitalism which is really oligarchic communism. VR in fact will succeed when it can *get over those people who think we need to get over capitalism*.

Philip coined or popularized a saying, "Fail fast, and learn from the experience." It's important in Silicon Valley to fail fast, and not spend years on a failed idea. Interestingly, Philip had just received $32 million in VC cash not long before this announcement. Perhaps the VCs put a word in his ear that consumer VR was not the money maker planned. And why would it be, when it makes many people dizzy and others just don't immerse because they prefer real life, or at least Facebook. It's a niche. The headline on this post is completely false. Read not just High Fidelity's own site but even read the site linked to. Philip didn't give up on High Fidelity or VR, and didn't close it and it didn't "fold" -- he just gave up *on the consumer facing side of it*, which involves us. Note the headline says "Pivots to Enterprise Communications". This isn't just techno-babble -- it's where there is a lot more cash, and steady cash, by contrast with ordinary users. Third-party developers aren't just kids in their basements -- it's the US military and corporations who will use the enterprise version. The old virtual world "There" had a good long run with such customers even after it closed its doors to ordinary people. Philip is not going to end up in the poorhouse, nor are the Lindens he lured over to that project. SL Hamlet may whine in "New World Notes" that Philip isn't reporting the "actual latest" numbers of concurrency for the VR worlds cited but honestly, if he's 1,000 off or even 10,000 off, it doesn't matter. VR worlds don't have a lot of uptake. Even 3D videos and 3D Facebook photos don't have a lot of uptake. The future is unevenly distributed, and we do well to remember how the lamps appeared in my grandmother's day -- one part turned up with a light-bulb for the newfangled electricity which was sometimes spotty; the other part turned down with a gas jet for the gas lighting which still reliably worked. People in this thread are likely too young to remember the first "VR winter" in 2008-2009. That followed the incredible boom of SL when it really shot up to its first million accounts, and even if these were alts or try-bys, the concurrency really was much higher. There was a time when there were close to 100,000 premium accounts; I doubt the number is half that today (the Lindens used to publish these statistics because they were proud of them). SL was such a fad then that a popular TV detective show even built sims here and made an episode about SL. That "VR spring" of 10 years ago came because PR AGENCIES (which now have all kinds of other euphemisms like "Experience" or "360" or anything that doesn't sound like "advertising") were the drivers. THEY were afraid of the IBMs and the Xeroxes being "left behind" as they were with the original Internet and PC desktops. They really thought -- as they all buzzed among themselves on the virtual world of Twitter, which still had the fire-hose turned on in 2007 -- that this was the "next big thing". THEY convinced their really reluctant and skeptical clients from IBM to Sears to buy islands in SL. THEY were infatuated -- so much so they even paid the SL Herald and their band of griefers to be "consultants" and made story books about them. They then rapidly grew disenchanted when they found their stuff got stolen, their sims crashed, they were griefed, but worst of all, they built it and nobody came -- not even the existing customers of the virtual world, who didn't want to go to Sears to buy a RL washer; they wanted Sears to make a little virtual washer they could put in their homes in SL. These companies rapidly discovered that even with a "private island" they had a problem -- their business communications were still open and exposed to LL itself. They also saw the copyright of "little dressmakers" as "a problem" and even insisted on their own corporate store with separate content uploaded by the Lindens to special sims, etc. Now they're gone, all these corporate customers. Remember "Nebraska"? Not likely. The Lindens probably prefer not to think about it. Griefing was one big factor -- remember Anshe Chung and the Business Week cover and the CNET press conference with Daniel Terdiman? There is a cultural reason for this not fixed by technology: a good chunk of the user base, let alone the griefer groups, as well the Linden staff itself, loathed capitalism and despised law and order. As soon as they saw SL become commercially successful and viable for its time, they wanted to kill it because they're little totalitarians who want everyone to live in "freedom" and "creativity" as *they* define and dictate it. At best they were "anarcho-capitalists" of the Internet type or rather more anarcho-communists.... As we can see from the history of the Internet itself, nerds and dreamers required to build an idea like the Internet can't keep it paid for, and it gives way to entrepreneurs that techs loathe like Amazon. Linden apparently decided to develop various other games or worlds -- Sansar being the biggest -- to compensate for that VR Winter that was decimating SL, which never recovered. The "second VR winter" (there are actually people like cube3 old enough to remember even earlier the 1990s VR winter which I'm not even counting here) shouldn't be a surprise to those who watched the first or previous winters. Philip predicted that virtual worlds would become so ubiquitous that office towers in NYC would go empty and downtown would be an empty canyon. He actually said things like that at the first meet-up in 2004, even after 9/11 showed the real way that office buildings become useless, from virtual extreme ideologies learned on YouTube. Fast forward 15 years, and office buildings are filled with stores on odd upper floors containing things like men's suits boutiques whose owners can't afford street-level showrooms; people living in their offices because they can't afford rent; multiple strangers jammed into "co-working spaces" together which is supposed to be "cool". Yes, some floors are empty. But not because of virtual worlds.

So Second Life is down, as you can see from this thread -- the old graphic of the monkeys banging the bones, taking from 2000: A Space Odyssey are invoked. So the question is: why? The word on the street has been because LL is "moving SL to the cloud". But every time in the past year or so I've heard that as an explanation of bad things, someone will say "but they didn't move it yet". So did they or didn't they? "Moving to the cloud," as anyone who has run an office or a busy web site knows, can be a mixed blessing, but generally it's supposed to be "better" and "faster". So...why? Each time one of these hard crashes has occurred, I've been busy putting out animesh dragons or trying to run them with a HUD that won't work, or trying animesh developer kits or making a feeding bowl for my dragon that uses up lots of particles and scripts. There's been an absolute explosion of dragons and dragon-theme related items in SL because of "Game of Thrones," which is something my son watched years ago and dropped but has become wildly popular even among middle-aged people who never did dungeons and dragons before. Probably there is a political and social reason for this... I was just at an event with a whole bunch of roaring dragons, dragon eggs, dragon throne, dragon tea (which not surprisingly consists of dragonfruit, which I'm not sure actual dragons use). So I blame the dragons, but more technically, I think it's this: o Animesh was grafted on to a world not originally intended for it. o Bento was grafted on to a world not originally intended for it. o EEP is being grafted on to a world not originally intended for it. So it's like grafting "Western capitalism" on to "Russia," or something. The "shell" of SL is changed since 2003, but perhaps not greatly. It's not like every atom has been replaced. The other day, again, I was putting out an animesh thing and a gatcha rare house when all of a sudden, I had a message that "4 objects have returned to lost and found". Four is nothing; maybe I didn't set it to the group. Then more and more trickled; soon it was "58 objects". So I immediately flew to the scene. A few tenants were crying that their skyboxes were returning. Now the returns were deluging -- virtually everything in the sky was returning, and some of what was on the ground, although large houses and rocks remained -- very odd. A quest I had spent three months laying out -- all bunched up in Lost & Found. THOUSANDS of objects, many no-copy gatchas or things made on the fly and never copied into inventory (lesson learned!) Curiously, scripted things just made not returning; old things unscripted from years ago returning... I was in such shock that all I could do when I called the help desk was say "Something bad is happening in Winnipeg..." This "something bad" shaped up over the next few hours to be an enormous disaster -- builds returning, no-copy items not returning -- etc. And the sim was not overloaded. I usually keep a buffer of at least 1000 or more prims and it was more like 1500 when I had last checked. A few tenants had a few things out overprimming, but that was not by any more than say 200 or 300 prims. The animesh dragons or pets or breedables are always on that sim and don't cause any problems. One tenant was upset that maybe it was her scripted baby. But I don't see how that could possibly be the reason. When things return, there is usually an order to it -- last in, first out. In the old days, if a griefer fire-primmed your sim, you could face returns, but Lindens built this "grey-goo fence" thing and made other changes to prevent that. Normally, a tenant attempting to put out 500 prim jewelry on a table will see it bounce and get a message about the parcel full or even the sim full. If I imprudently link mesh to a twisted prim suddenly creating a 3000-prim monster, it tells me I can't do that because there isn't enough room. So something is wrong in that "last in, first out" system -- and I know in the past they've had to fix that over and over. In this case, the Lindens rolled back the sim to restore the builds at least to the last sim save. They NEVER do this. In the time I've been in SL (nearly 15 years) I've seen them do this perhaps 2-3 times for Mainland. The reason is obvious -- anything you've just spent the whole day building, any gatcha rares you put out, now disappear forever if the sim is rolled back in time (which was sad, but I was happy to sacrifice that for the whole sim's sake). Conversely, you may get doubles of gatcha rares in a rollback, which may or may not make up for what you lost. And this is also PS a copybotting technique the Lindens are wise to. Also what happens is that with a rollback, too, you go back over the whole thing and find odd things missing -- because you didn't know they were missing before or "just because". This is a real wake-up call for me on the Mainland, which I remain devoted to. Large projects don't really fit on the Mainland. They should put put on private islands you have more control over, you can watch better as to top scripts, and which in theory can be rolled back upon request to the Concierge if there's a crash or return of a build. If you insist on big builds on the Mainland -- and the Lindens have them, too -- you should go through and make cluster copies and put them in folders and/or take a picture. This is a bother. But better than crying when a year's work is deleted.

I realize I am about 15 years late to the party here, but I found out that at Jopsy's Particle Station, an old famous SL build, there are a lot of useful tutorials. You can pick up a template switch that will turn off any particle, or at least *his* particles and Omega's. Yes, it would be better to build the shut- off order into the script itself. One thing that has baffled me is why copying and pasting what seem to be the obvious on/off switch code lines (that I commissioned a scripter to do) don't work on every script. In fact, the lines are different than yours, I don't know why, I just live here. In fact, changing burst radius to higher *does* slow things down on *some* things, but maybe it depends on the texture or other parameters? Another thing I was trying to do was make a dripping spigot. One sold on the MP just shot out too fast, and while the creator was apparently willing to adjust it, it still didn't look great. I noticed a really good-looking dripping faucet I have in the form of a maple syrup bucked (my goal is to make a pine tar bucket) had Jopsy's drip particle and Andrew Linden's water drop texture. Sadly, I can't find Andrew Linden's texture anywhere -- and the Lindens have now for some reason put all their content in the Library on no-transfer (I suppose their glory days of open source mania are over now that they rely on top content creators for the library who understandably don't want to release their creations into the wild, but it seems crazy to put on no-transfer the water falls and such that were on all perms 10 years ago). So I had to buy such a water drop that I have to say looks an awful lot like Andrew Linden's drop. Oh, well. I have to say, that with the combination of what Qie explained here, and Rolig, I was able to get a drip going which I made into this dragon medicine drip. You really feel like Helen Keller after Annie has signed words to you when the SL darkness is dispelled at these moments. Yes, I realize the temp-rez mesh object has more capacity as a "wafting leaf," and from examining their contents, I see now the best tree makers have things, not particles. And it only temporarily uses the sim's prim buffer. But in fact using these things does involve having the server take a beating. RE: No .. stop ... Go look at those rotating butterfly rings. Make a curve in blender that fits the path you want to leaf to fall. Make a shallow V shape and extrude that along the track. Make a texture that's 1024 x 32 .. place a 32 pixel square leaf at one end, the rest should be an alpha mask. Upload your texture & mesh, use texture animation to slide your texture along your path. The leaf will appear to follow your path. You may have to tinker with the script or uv mapping to get it right, trial and error here. So there are a number of problems with this advice. First, there's an assumption that I "know Blender". I know Paint. I'm not likely to get beyond Paint. My daughter and her boyfriend may teach me Blender some weekend but it's unlikely it will "stick". I keep making new discoveries in Paint after years of use. For example, that if you can't get "magic wand" to get rid of a background for you, if you shift the number on "Tolerance" (who knows why it is called that), it will make it possible. I found this on a help forums after searching (still in vain) for advice for how to get the white line off a transparency if you've already used Magic Wand, already erased in "zoom in" etc. A mystery. Second, I'm quite capable of just buying a nice photo or artwork that does these things on istock, especially from starving Russian artists, and did, to make a sort of feathery V-shaped spray -- by accident. I still don't understand why these things called "Vectors" have checkerboard squares on them and how/if you should get that out. I don't know what alpha mask is. I do notice that if you try to switch things to that, it turns them from clear to white, despite its being named "alpha" which is usually the thing that makes your body disappear so it doesn't stick out of your clothes. So I don't use it. I don't know how you "upload mesh" because I don't know how to "make mesh". I suspect this is going to be beyond me. But it is on my to-do list for the next 15 years. After all, I have now managed to make a potion bottle with a cork that pops and goes back and has sparkles and liquid that goes up and down, using templates and trial and error, and I'm happy, even if no one will ever buy it. Texture animation, which slides photos along prims giving you the illusion the prim is moving, is actually something I have gotten to work in making my Narnia quest, but again, only by trial and error. Another thing I don't understand is why, when you buy a sculpty or even mesh template, these different maps are sometimes in black and white, sometimes all clear, and sometimes already "look like" the thing you want to make. Naturally I opt for that third version and try to cut and paste something into it that will "work". It doesn't, always. It's always a mystery to me why sculpties just don't texture very well unless you go through these gyrations outside of SL in at least Paint if not something better. SL would be a lot better place if you could texture sculpties the way you can prims. So you see the problem -- levels and skills. Yes, you can read tutorials. I can't learn from watching YouTubes, they go by too fast. My son even makes them for me -- too fast. When I get absolutely desperate, I will even watch a Torley video, which is what sent me to Jopsy's about which I had forgotten.

I didn't realize the trees were actually putting out temp-rez prims, I thought they were all particles. So no, I don't want to do it that way as it can be laggy as you say. I'm going to try tweaking PSYS_SRC_ACCEL I hadn't noticed that. I thought it was all about the "burst" number. The number for "nothing" is "0", right? And then if burst radius is *higher* they should move *closer*? I don't care about stopping already emitted particles, I care about stopping new ones. And so few creators seem to build that in. So I had a scripter add it in. Thanks, I will try to work with this.

Just so you know -- yes, I already hired a scripter. I always hire scripters. Multiple scripters. But not all of them know how to do a specific thing. Yes, I went to Jopsy's Particle Laboratory and that was helpful in reaffirming what I had gathered from what one scripter and from testing -- the higher the "burst" number, the slower it actually goes. But there is so much information about the history of the watch there that you can't find what time it is. Yes, I bought full prim scripts and examined them to see how they might work but couldn't figure it out. Yes, I read the SL wiki but couldn't find specifically what I need. Maybe it's too complex. So all I want to do is make a leaf waft. Yes, I know about "drop" -- I have that. Yes, I know about the burst rate as I mentioned. But what one particle expert told me is that particles don't always change just because you change one number on one parameter -- sometimes multiple changes have to be made in sync, which is why I'm asking this question. PS I've also bought multiple emitter and particle scripts, most with no off switch. Honestly, there should be an AR category for not putting off switches on particles. It's like some scripters or copiers of the classic Omega particle script want to stay in the eternal trance rave of 2008. But the rest of us want to be able to turn them off. And the "off" switch isn't something you can just copy and paste from one to put on another, they differ. I just want to make the leaf emerge SLOWLY, fall, and waft on the wind and be able to TURN IT OFF. That shouldn't be too hard, no? BTW I'm puzzled why certain dandelion emitters I've purchased have the image emerging so far away from the small prim -- obviously flowers can't be that way. If the particle emerges from the center of the prim, what's up? Maybe they didn't test it on an actual flower, but only the big box they made as a sample? But the images emerge quite far from the box, too., Yes, I realize that because of some *thing* about SL, the particles don't come from where they should, and you have to make an invisible prim to link to another prim, like the Moles' incense. But what if that still doesn't work?

Thanks for the tip. I didn't find the Omega thing you were describing but while hunting for it I found something else -- UKD Mens Sock Colour Applier HUD for $99. This product requires that you turn the sock ON on the "Slink Utilities HUD". There are two Slink HUDs. I remember trying them both in vain and wondering -- why don't they have their own built-in sock feature? They have a thing that *says* "SOCKS" (like painted toe-nails!) but clicking it on and off seems to "do nothing". If you look closely, however, the "On" mode does seem to striate the texture of the mesh foot. So once *that* is "on" then the other product can paint socks on it that more or less look like cotton socks (or you could buy nylon). Mesh socks, however, of the type that are both manual and resize as to whether you can change dimensions of them just never seem to go in right -- you can try fitting them on (they aren't really true socks, just a gap filler) but they are constantly poking through shoes or jeans. If you just lucked on the right combination of jeans, I suppose, the mesh socks will look more realistic and painted on. To be sure, this is just one more attached thing making your score rise This is why I don't bother with clothes. It rapidly becomes insane -- and expensive. I don't think people engrossed in clothes realize the insanity of all the things they are asked to do, all the instructions and facts and tips they are forced to absorb; all the glitches and their compensations they are forced to adapt to. I don't want to spend the time on it. Speaking of auto-hide, the whole reason I just bothered with looking at clothes, which I rarely do, is because a 50LF shirt had an "autohide" in it as a separate add-on. I used "add" and it didn't hide my chest. I suppose this is because it's a system body and not mesh body? But alphas work on it.

I was finally forced to buy Slink mesh feet so that I could put on all these sneakers and shoes I had, some at bargain rates or which came as gifts in events or hunts. It was really annoying. One of them keeps disappearing. The alpha to some jeans extend all the way to the ankles and disappear the feet. I don't see how you put socks on, which I'd really like to do. I got mesh socks but when I put them on, they make the ankles turn invisible, likely due to the incompatibility with the jeans. Some people have told me the socks are in the Slink feet HUD, but I don't see any. Ideas?

No, switching from prim to convex hull definitely does not work all the time. Really. No, you may be saying that it does because a) you never log into SL b) you never actually try to change and improve things all day. The reality is, for anybody trying to reduce prims all day, convex hull does not work all the time. Here's what happens: 1. Sometimes it just flat doesn't work, period, and never will. 2. Sometimes unlinking a complex item and convexing some of the parts might work, but usually not. 3. Sometimes you flip back between convex and prim several times, it finally kicks in. 4. Sometimes -- too often, really -- it makes the object FAR WORSE. it is not a cure-all. Why? 5. Sometimes, if you change to "no shape" to clear it, which the server hates and sends you scary messages about, you can then force it to go to a convex that lowers LI. It's too bad that happens -- if the shapelessness is really the horror the server thinks. But it's often what is required to get the convex hull to work, i.e. to reduce LI from prim shape. 6. With things like houses and cabins that have doors, convex hull more often than not BLOCKS the door. House creators who don't actually ever try to live in their houses are guilty of causing this some time, you have to then get them to adjust it. Why does it do that? I'd love to know. THAT it does that is obvious to anyone who tries to place mesh houses or reduce prim houses. Apparently convex hull is a "thing" that isn't "supposed to" always make less LI because XYZ[ physics, math, Lindens]. I do wonder why, however.

And...so what? Read what I wrote. You don't take edge cases and make policy; you don't take *some* cases and make policy. You make policy by an acceptable level. MANY IP addresses do not change OR people don't figure out how to change them OR as you point out, it's a *pool* (if you mean like mine, a range, that is the same range) and therefore it is not the endless defeat of a system you imagine. Even if it is possible *for you, as someone determined to defeat the system by endless "whatabouts" and "buts", IT DOESN'T MATTER. Because some griefers -- likely most, in fact -- will be deterred. Especially if you block the proxy addresses related to persistent groups you see. When you decide not to be ideological but practical; when you decide that "good enough is good enough"; that it doesn't matter if there are some people who create the exceptions and the edge cases. You will accomplish a curbing of griefing. Same concept with gun control.

This feigned futility that you "can't" ban by IP or Mac addresses is one of the banes of SL. It is a contrived geek hypothetical that in reality doesn't play out as imagined. In real life, no, not all IP addresses dynamically update -- some stay the same. In real life, if you ban IP addresses you might succeed in at least curbing the problem of griefing by some useful percent because not all griefers will keep making new addresses through proxies. If the Lindens would pull up their socks and ban by proxy companies and stop pretending the changing of IP addresses is "needed by activists in Iran" then they will make progress. Sure, there are always some percentage of people who are in oppressive countries or who are victims of partner abuse or whatever who need anonymizers but most anonymizers do not fall in those categories, let's not be children here. If the full class of people using particular European anonymizers realized that their advantage of using this feature has been threatened by a few who misuse it, they themselves become part of policing their own community. Because it is not unrelated. The population of SL is not that large and concurrency means it's a village. Groups who use anonymizers come in packs. Get the pack to keep their others in line. Not a perfect solution -- I'd rather have independent media and an independent judiciary, democratic elections, separation of powers and the rule of law, but since we can't have that and have to live in Lindenstan, let's at least have Lindenstan be an authoritarian country that has some publicity of crime and some abiding by its own rules. It's either having the Lindens start doing this, or losing customers and facing constant efforts by the user population to make their own devices with IP bans which is always invoked as a privacy issue, because it outs alts or supposedly has false positives. Supposedly there are entire dormitories or large housing complexes with hundreds of people logging on to SL and OMGODZORS you can't ban all of them for the sake of one miscreant. Except....look at the IP addresses and geolocate the servers. It's some kid in Omaha, not entire complexes in New York City. Again, let's be practical, let's look at field experience and stop invoking fake extreme hypotheticals. I haven't heard that the governance group still meets inworld. It does? If it's anything like the Concierge group, it cancels all its meetings instead of having them. For weeks on end I have some psychopath threatening me with RL harm -- I have no idea why because I don't understand anything he is talking about and referencing -- and it's his fifth similarly named alt. The Lindens can't see their way clear to banning that name generically always, and banning his new appearances. Why would someone be able to threaten to kill you in RL, invoke your RL identity, and continue to do that for weeks on end after multiple abuse reports? This isn't an IP address problem or a proxy problem. When the Lindens publicized the "police blotter," which was only a partial report, at least we had a better idea of what was going on. They should bring it back. Like items purchased, it should show ALL reports and then report honestly on which were acted on. We all get it that some ARs are frivolous or stupid or involve vendettas. But most don't. It's real griefing and real harassment and stalking. For bonus points, put the names of those who weren't just charged, but sentenced, i.e. the Lindens disciplined or banned the account. As in RL, this will help deter crime.

I don't know what this is until you can get the exact spelling of the name but it's possible that this is a private island that "sold" the parcels which really remain in their ownership and they have not transferred that land to your group which is possible. Or another very likely possibility for the message "the owner of this parcel does not allow..." is that it has nothing to do at all with ownership -- you are the owner if you bought a 1024 parcel on Mainland. But MESH BOUNCING gives you that dumb error message. You must make sure you are not trying to put a mesh house down on a mesh foundation OR that you have the group tag on your head if your land is group so that it isn't rejected.

You can also look for houses that have a large base on them to start with that enable you to sink the house into the ground and then appear level. Otherwise make a rock foundations as Aethelwine has suggested. It's better to put the foundation down first then adjust the house to it, but if you are already all decorated, you could slide the foundation under the house. Another strategy would be to buy some big flower beds and arrange them around the gaps, or some bushes. Most of the mainland has land you can terraform; only some old Linden sims like Brown and the newer Linden Homes don't have terraforming turned on.

Look in lost & found folder -- your items are returned to you, and usually not lost. They are returned to you in big bunches -- read the notices. It may say "58 prims" and "table" but inside is "lamp, bed, rug," etc. all coalesced in a group. No, there is no way to restore the situation before your deed, especially with only a 4096 and 1024 involved. Very rarely -- very rarely, I can tell you from long experience! -- the Lindens can roll back a sim if there was a huge loss but they can't do that for 4096 because the sims are dynamically changing constantly among multiple owners and restoring your parcel means ruining someone else's parcel. Keep all land on 0 autoreturn while changing from individual to deeded and from one group to another and it shouldn't return. But it's another mater if you suddenly remove from the total available square meters of land in changing the groups, then there are too many prims on one of the lots and some of it will return. So if you have 4096 and cut it in half to put in another group, the prims will return. Land and tier are separate things. Tier covers land like a blanket. Not enough blanket, and the land is not covered and is lost, i.e. seized by the Lindens after a few days. Your table of land donated is confusing -- are these all different owners? All the same owners but different avatar? If you have 4096 level account, that is actually 5120 meters available to use to group land because the premium account gives you an additional 1024 m. If you had 5120 meters in one account and grouped that land, you should have had 5,632 meters available in a group to have group land. You should always first make the group and deed land to it and fill it with all available tier before purchasing more land to make sure you have enough tier and aren't forced into a higher tier level. It sounds like you didn't have that many meters so maybe I'm not understanding something.Deeding land to a group shouldn't remove all the content if you keep the autoreturn on 0; it is moving from one kind of owner (single) to another (group) so it's status changes and everything set to one group or no group will then return if the grouped land has a different group. But again, in theory if you always keep autoreturn to 0 you could avoid this. Go here for a tutorial on group land and its problems, with help cards and also a visual diorama: Memory Bazaar. Look for the little post office down the stairs for the group tutorials.

I have never known the Lindens to find lost inventory -- ever, in their lives. Even if you lost 15,000 items due to a bug and contact them soon enough for them to (in theory) still find it on their servers. Second Life, like Real Life, is about learning to accept loss. You may want to come to my Shaman's Gatcha Addiction Treatment Center. In addition to tips and cures and such, I now have a Sorrow level.

Totally agree. And there are scripts that deliberately disappear the box and send the item to your inventory -- and you may not realize that, either due to lag, or thinking that something is still in the box and focusing on its contents, and not looking up to the right, to see incoming inventory. I've been burned a number of times even on COPYABLE non-transfer items! I assume a copy is left in the box. I bat away and discard incoming automatic deliveries because I want to file it myself in a folder, not just have it add to a huge list of "objects". When you refuse a delivery like that, it is not in trash and not anywhere. It's gone -- until you ask the merchant to redeliver or hope they have a redelivery system.

It doesn't work that way. If you have a rare to sell, in a box, or out of a box, you are allowed to put only one copy of it at a time on the MP, or you are flagged for a violation by the Lindens, who remove the doubles. So it sells, you get a notice "out of stock," and then you replenish it -- the item automatically goes to the "Unlisted" folder in your Marketplace tab inworld. That means there is no "empty" showing for sale on the MP. To replace it, you have to drag a new copy in and re-list it, if you have multiple rares. You get an empty box not if the item is sold out -- when it sells out it is removed to "Unlisted". You get an empty box if the seller accidentally or deliberately sells you an empty box. Then you have to rely on their good will to get it. Sadly, there is no way to rate this bad experience if you see it recurring without remedy because the items get unlisted. Merchants who sell copyable items or items that are copyable but to next owner on transfer only can be rated and you can be warned if you see somebody with one star, and people leaving reviews that they didn't get something as advertised. Not so with gatcha sellers. It's too bad there isn't a way to rate their store overall as a result, not just the individual item for sale.

I think that this is deliberately left somewhat vague in the TOS or community rules because on the one hand, the Lindens don't want to lose customers give what the main attraction for their customers is, but on the other hand, they don't want liability for some activity that may bring them unwanted press attention or even a lawsuit from some countries. What I've always found the basic truth to be is this: Lindens themselves don't go out policing the world, hunting for pictures or skyboxes. The world is too big and complex. They do this on the Marketplace very vigorously, but there they can use search globally more easily. So they rely on ABUSE REPORTS. And the favourite sport of people griefing you, or people who have become your enemies, is to try to AR you for something in G that is not G, whether a swear word in chat or a picture of a nude or adult furniture. So it's a vulnerability you have, that griefers or enemies or just busy-body neighbours who think you are lagging the sim can use on you. But most people mind their own business and don't do this. So really, it's a question of "Better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission." If you put out adult furniture in M, behind closed doors, or even in G, in skyboxes, likely nothing will happen. And the worst that can happen is that some net nanny will AR you and you will be told to remove the offending item. Or it might be returned and you'll get a warning. But it's not a big deal.