Prokofy Neva

Qie -- he's right, tier-stepping is non-intuitive and unnecessary and hurts sales. Even with grouped land, a bonus, a discount for owning more than a sim, I still find tier-stepping a pain. If I have to add a little bit, I can't add at the discount rate of half a sim -- I don't need a half a sim. So I put a little tier on an alt, but if it goes above $40 there's a big jump to $75. This is hugely annoying. You don't need that land or expense. Lindens could keep bulk discounts and group tier bonuses and still eliminate stepping.

My understanding is not that raw traffic isn't relevant, it's just not the TOP relevance for search. They pack it with lots of other things now, and it's a secret formula. They may even randomize it. But high traffic breedables stores or something will show up in search mainly because of high traffic. It is not irrelevant. It's just that traffic bots can't game it any more. That's a good thing. It's too bad that the Lindens punish all traffic, even organically obtained, in the quest to eliminate bots -- especially since bots have to be registered, and they should have a way to detect organic from bot traffic. But given that there is other gaming like selling "picks" and in fact the return of paid camping, stamping out bots is not enough

I find that neophytes in business often pack their search description with an unreadable mess that has no space, no commas, or if it does have commas, no space and lots of repetition with slightly changed words. This *might* work with faceless mechanical algorithms but I don't think so. Real people look at search results, no matter how they are served out. They don't like reading a mess of smushed words and repetitive terms with no space. Writing a well-composed pleasant and short sentence is more attractive to them. I think what's more important than the "right" SEO method is finding a search term that is really unique that describes your product and that has less competition in search but still recalled by a searcher, i.e. jacuzzi instead of hot tub. Also the picture in the search ad is likely even more important than the words.

Once again, and I answered in full on the other thread Qie linked to: 1. IPs are largely not dynamic; when they are, it doesn't matter, it's within a range and not randomly done. 2. Other people note intended to be banned may not be affected but *they are not likely in Second Life*. The chances that an IP ban affecting your RL neighbours 4-5 blocks away *and having them also play SL* is -- 0? 0.001%? The theory of the dyanamic IP and the "impossibility" of effective bans because innocent people will be harmed by it is a griefer's excuse that is not even true.

The theory of the "dynamically changing IP address" is the one of the standard geek fakeroos, invoked to imply that you can never ban somebody because then you can't succeed. There are two fallacies here. First, that every IP is dynamic or dynamic speedily. That is just not the case any more with American phone companies anyway. My IP has stayed the same for years -- so have others I see from looking at people who post to my blog. It's silly to suggest otherwise. Even if an IP address changes dynamically -- slow or fast -- it still changes within a range of numbers, not to some wildly random thing, so ban scripts that allow for this could still keep them. The idea that "all these people" are going to be affected by this is the second fallacy. They won't -- for the reason indicated in number one. But even if in hypothetical hysterical theory they are, there's another factor -- that they chances of the people affected 3 blocks away from you *would also be in Second Life and trying to log on there* then reduces it by a huge factor. Theories like this reflect binary thinking, 0/1, all or nothing, "just because you can't do everything do nothing." But real life is not like this. You can indeed ban by IP and have a very successful run with it because a) it's not dynamic and b) those people theoretically impacted will not be in SL. If by some fluke they are, they can contact LL and complain that they can't log on for some inexplicable reason and LL can look up their IP bans, see that it cast too far a net and fix it. I bet this happens in 0 instances. The court cases like that of the late Aaron Swartz who committed suicide rather than serve the 6 months in jail that he was only going to get circumvented his IP address repeatedly and spoofed them *for the purpose of stealing more than a million journal articles*. You have to do this circumvention for the sake of commiting a crime to get the attention of law-enforcement. Then it is a violation of the CFAA and that is a good thing, because you cannot access computers in ways not intended by the owner and cover your crimes. The 4th amendment doesn't protect criminal activity.

With these requirements you could only have a sky home in my system because I don't allow security orbs on the ground but only 500 meters or above. I have urban skyboxes if you are interested, IM me or go to my office, link below.

I was reading Tyche Shepherd's grid survey which is extremely interesting and useful, especially because the Lindens no longer publish economic statistics. We always hear the gloom and doom that the Mainland is dying and is "all" abandoned but this survey lets you know that abandoned land is only 18.2 to 18.8% of the Mainland. That may seem terrible, and it's a figure that is increasing - from 13% two years ago -- but it's not literally the end of the world. Now, Linden Lab owns 54% of the mainland, which consists of 6,744 sims. The total grid is 24,754 sims. I can remember when they were 32,000 in the heyday -- but again, this is not the die-off everyone imagines. It ensures a completely respectable and even enviable revenue for Linden Lab, which Facebook or Twitter could only envy despite their vastly more large memberships and concurrency. There are about 39,198 Linden homes. That doesn't mean premium accounts are down from *their* heyday of 90,000 plus, because not everyone has a Linden home. In fact, Tyche writes "44,936 landowners (74%) pay no tier above their premium subscription" -- i.e. 512 parcel owners -- so that means there isn't such a great drop in premium account as imagines -- although they are not likely 85,000 plus, just adding those figures together, because there are the Charter Members that got the 4096 for life -- I don't know how many people are in that class. Yes, more land is being abandoned than purchases, but it's not a disaster, far less than even I imagined when I fly around and see abandoned land. I also fly around and see land growing and people buying entire sims even on the Mainland so life goes on. Most likely the fact that Linden owns half the Mainland now fed their decision not to make a Mainland in Project Sansar (not to mention their abandoning the effort to make contiguous geography). In part, they own land because they decided to create themed areas with easements, like Bay City or Nautilus, and if anything, they should do more of it. They also have some tied up in areas developed by the Moles, and that's a good thing. As I've said before, the Lindens could cure the glut of abandoned land by creating automatic processes for anyone currently on a sim being able to buy the parcels, which should be divided into 512 pieces, so that they don't have to fear flippers and griefers. Then after 30 or 90 days -- they hold abandoned land for years so they shouldn't mind that! -- it opens up to the public. If they open this up on a mass basis a lot of it still wouldn't sell even at $1/m but it would be there fo people to develop. I had another idea: if the Lindens would consoldiate some of this abandoned land, they could then put Linde ponds in the middle of certain tracts as they did on the Heterocetera continent -- although often imperfectly as they allow private ownership of pond water, which creates havoc. But once they made Linden-protected ponds or creeks, they would instantly sell more parcels on the Mainland. There is nothing that jacks up the value of land like Linden protected water -- or Linden protected anything, even a cobblestone square with market stalls with free Linden content or whatever. If they did this, I'm confident they'd start selling more of this stuff.

I have been in the rentals business for more than 11 years in Second Life, and I have new customers every day. This surprises even me. How can this be? Some of the people are brand-new to Second Life and saw an ad or read about it. Quite a few have sold their land or left rentals that are supposedly purchases on islands -- the owner suddenly dumps them and disappears. So why not rent out your land? I have an open-source rental script if you don't want to invest in a rental system. It is hard to sell land for more than a dollar or even half a dollar a meter now, it's a buyer's market.

I don't see anything wrong with seeing your avatar as an extension of yourself because it is a vehicle of your self-expression and you "invest your consciousness in the toy" as Will Wright, inventor of the Sims, explained it. If someone suddenly burned down your house or threw away all the papers and knicknacks on your desk, even, you would feel sad and angry. Why is an avatar different? So I think you should keep your avatar, but like a computer can be put on "sleep" or "hibernation" just give it a rest. For that you might have to put a lot of your goods on the Marketplace to sell, and downsize your store so you have only the premium fee or perhaps $15 or $25 a month at worst. You could rent from a high-traffic mall which will still be less than tier if you shop around. The people at Alchemy Immortalis are the model for this. Due to RL illness and RL work, they left a tiny old-fashioned store inworld. They put everything on the MP. Then periodically, they come out with a real gangbusters special item even limited and sell that, from the store and from blogs. You could do something like that. There is no need to delete your avatar. When I had family illness and my own illness to address for over a year, I could only log in literally 15 minutes some days to take care of customers. I had to sell land or even abandon it, not respond to requests, and I stopped making things of course (I'm only an amateur puttering around but it would still give me joy to make some little thing and sell it). I missed a lot of the gatcha explosion of the early days. Then I had the war in Ukraine -- so it stretched to two years. Finally I was able to come back invest in mesh content, add some properties, and even make some things again. With gatchas, I try to sell more than I pull -- try to do that and once you see it's impossible, you will go to gatchas less LOL. Two things to do -- keep a record of all purchases and see if your sales are really covering them. Keep a record of time in SL -- there are various online trackers you can buy and you will be surprised at the results they show either how little or how much time and what days you might spend more time.

I get this all the time, and worse, get it on avatar profiles. I can't see a profile unless I re-log in every time. This has got to be a bug.

Live in Barnesworth Anubis' new Marylebone sky loft from the latest Collabor88 -- tintable windows and skylight, beautiful textures, spacious loft with fire place and bathroom or kitchen.   $150/150 prims for you to use, management prims don't count. Or ask to have the furniture removed and reset to $250/250 if you want. Teleport to Flamingo Court Sky Home

It isn't corporations that entered SL; it was PR firms. They over-hyped SL because some of them were afraid of missing the next big thing after missing Twitter. When the corporations came in, most didn't try to sell to avatars, i.e. avatar clothes or homes or vehicles, but real-life products that no one came to SL to get because they could go to a Sears or an IBM or a Century 21 in real life or on the web, and didn't need cumbersome SL to access this. The corporations found it difficult to adapt to virtuality -- there is no mass media in SL and hence no advertising --- the Lindens, who are something between communists and libertarians, hate mass advertising so they never allowed it, i.e. by selling their splash screen space or by creating roadside networks. Developers who once worked developing the internal world of SL and their own inworld businesses stampeded to work for the corporations via the "Big Six" companies called "Solutions Providers" -- nearly all of which are defunct now because they failed as well. That meant that SL's "special sauce" and biggest asset -- its powerhouse resident economy -- got gutted and suffered. It never really recovered, and when it did, it was mainly with breedables and gatcha, both of which are a form of gambling and don't build lasting economies. The Lindens have an allergy to business -- except for their own -- like most technocommunists or state capitalists. So they didn't do the minimum to secure what in fact is the most robust economy of any social media platform in the world, with more revenue per capita than Facebook (especially Facebook!): 1. They did not secure private property -- anyone could be kicked "for no reason or any reason" even for a speech offense. 2. They allowed the few techies with abusive and disruptive ideas to take over the view, i.e. a few 16 m microbaron ad extortionists, who could have built a world-wide tasteful ad board business, instead opted to put their 16 m blight on prime waterfront, on mountain tops, etc. Eventually -- it took four long years! -- the Lindens stopped both microplot extortion and blight like "The Bush Guy" who was never about politics. 3. The Lindens have a vast aversion to governance, and never adequately dealt with griefers, enabling many to flee SL, and allowing some of the most notorious griefers back again and again on new alts -- some of whom were dear Linden friends. 4. The Lindens believed - and still believe -- that only content creators are worth bothering with as a class of prosumers and so coddle and fete them (which is why I dubbed them the Feted Inner Core) and scorn and ignore land barons, small businesses, amateurs, etc. 5. The Lindens allowed a few of their Silicon Valley buddies to give terrible press to SL on ideological grounds, whether TechDirt simply because people wanted copyright respected and ultimately LL got rid of copybot, or Chris Pirillo, who never got SL, or Howard Rheingold or Larry Lessign who had their lefty ideological axes to grind. LL never cultivated good press from mainstream journalists because they themselves were not mainstream, but near-cultists (Burning Man, etc.). 6. LL had trouble governing its own staff and running its business -- it first hired residents as staff -- a terrible idea. Then raided people from every huge tech company in the world -- a good idea but too much of a shock after their small boutique cultural roots failed to cope with the 2006 influx of big business. 7. LL tends to blame its customer instead of first its board, then its staff for problems in Second Life. That's funny, because in the rest of Silicon Valley and business in general, CEOs are fired if they can't produce and so are staff. The problem with SL is not that it doesn't have the latest game engine or lag or sim seams -- millions will play Habbo Hotel or The Sims Online or World of Warcraft with not even one/one hundredth of the creativity and capacity available in SL. The problem is governance -- governance of the company, and governance of the world.

Qie, once again, the question is simple: *why can't the Lindens just type in the name of the object you claimed and send it to you from the asset sever????* You didn't answer it because the answer must be "because they can't prove you own that item." Of course they can, however, as all they have to do is look up your transaction records *for more than 32 days* and see when you bought or were given the item in question -- a simple search with a name. Now, why can't they do that? 1. Because they don't have records beyond 32 days -- although they should, given how much they lose things. 2. Because they're not willing to do even this, if they have the record, type the name of the object twice? See, THOSE are the answers. Not the answers you gave which are irrelevant. Sure it's "nice to have" if they can figure out the WHY of it. But we need customer service, not a science project. Therefore the Lindens either have to keep records going back at least 90 days and tell people claims can be made for items purchased or received 90 days (ideally, longer).\ OR -- if this is the issue -- overcome their unwillingness What is the downside to keeping records 90 days? I don't see it. Keeping records 90 days is just like keeping them 32 days really -- these are web site records of the sort all companies have and they aren't huge weights on the server surely. How can something go wrong for *40,000 records*. Those complex issues of modifications blah blah might explain one or ten or 100 but *40,000*? That's something completely different Given that in my case, the Lindens fixed a non-loading inventory that never loaded more than 20,000 and refused to let you even rez anything searched with by name -- you'd have to first erase that name, then rez it -- and did this by removing a few corrupt items, putting it back to 50,000 -- without any complaints of heavy lifting or huge amounts of time -- I have to assume this is not the big deal you're describing. I want to understand precisely the mechanism for how 40,000 items go missing. In my case, it's as you say, they didn't load/display (and no, they weren't all "in one folder" -- who does that???). The corrupted items prevented this, they removed them. What OTHER reasons would there be for this phenomenon?

I'm not getting why there are so many man hours here. If you send the Lindens the exact name of an object, why can't they type it in on the asset server and shoot it to your inventory?

I totally disagree regarding breedables. They are essentially "licensed" to you because you have to keep feeding them or they die, so their creators keep selling you food and various accessories like ways to breed them, etc. They are all maintained on servers outside of SL, so it should NOT be a problem for a creator merely to replace this expensive item that is NOT on transfer, that is NOT the issue. You're haranguing me about transfer items but the lion's share of things lost are NOT transferable, that's the point. Many merchants are better than you, in fact, and find that being able to RE-DELIVER is in fact a valuable feature. Nowadays with the monopolist Casper, you can go and see an entire page of your items purchased from various stores but all with this vendor, and re-deliver anything lost. It truly is no skin off theirs. As for your fussing about proof of purchase, with the 32-day SL records that is an annoyance. But again, we're talking about people with SERVERS OUTSIDE OF SL for whom it is a trivial matter to type in a user name and find out the product and simply make one click to restore it. I'm also not getting any answers to my question here about what the technical reasons are for inventory loss on the server side.

None of that applies and we're WAY past that. The Lindens need a whole new section: "My inventory disappears completely for no reason, not due to a crash, deletion, or anything you have listed ,it just DISAPPEARS."

I'd really like to understand this. I have a tenant with *40,000 lost items*. He's been up and down and around with the Lindens and with various expensive content makers like the breedables. The Lindens shrug and don't answer finally, and the breedables gang do a little bit but ultimately don't care because they're coining money anyway, I guess -- or they just can't get anywhere on this issue. Obviously, nothing is really "lost" in SL, because all content exists on the asset server, for one, and for two, is often in the inventory of somebody who did NOT lose it, namely its creator. So what's "lost" is the pointer from the asset server into your inventory. What makes this get lost? Is it about connection quality and lost packets? Is it about corrupt files? If one thing can be found, why not all? I had an inventory that constantly varied from 25000 to 50,000 so I asked the Lindens finally to fix it. They had several goes while I got back to them multiple times. They removed some "corrupt files" and then just about every thing came back and stayed back. That's all it took. They "ran a script," they said. But then, I went on a candidate viewer one day and my $3000 skin I was wearing got lost, never to return. So what causes this? I don't have packet loss. Are there different reasons for it in different cases? Does keeping things in folders help or hurt in terms of loss? UPDATE: This is SEVERE inventory loss, not fixable by clearing cache (that's been done dozens of times), relogging and loading folders by the letters of the alphabet; logging on to the beta testing sim (an old wive's tale) and then relogging on to the main grid -- none of the tips and tricks work.

This sim is stable and half of it has my SL Public Land Preserve and Carlisle Yacht Club, and nice neighbours so you will have great views and boating in this classy sim. 1,572 waterfront for $15,000 - 336 prims Teleport to Carlisle 

Here's a lovely hilltop meadow with a view of the Linden sea, nice neighbours and trees all around, established, stable sim. Asking $15,000 or best offer for 4160 sq. m with 952 prims Teleport to Gunfunk 

  Enjoy a Valentine's getaway for $100/50 prims this month at Ravenglass Bed & Breakfast on Hidden Lakes Island in Hite. http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Hite/96/111/28 Valentine's suite and unique decor. Or ask to remove and have your own. If you want the Valentine's items in another room at another location, that can be added for $25. And even if you're not renting, come enjoy an espresso at the cafe, pick up the $1 gift this week and see the AF Chocolate Kitchen.

You're on the DO NOT RENT list and will remain there forever due to multiple, repeated, egregious bad behaviour on my rentals, even after being given second and third chances. That means overprimming excessively and repeatedly, putting out huge houses that don't fit your lot and go on to other people's lots, putting out sale vendors in non-commercial residential areas, and being vulgar and abusive when reminded of the simple rules of the lease. Other landlords - beware! People like you need to SERIOUSLY grow up and take RESPONSIBLITY for your abusive and selfish actions, and not accuse others of "bad energy" or "bad karma" -- that's just childish. It's a TOTAL lie to pretend that you "made mistakes" and "were a newbie" when you did this multiple times over years, and when you were viciously abusive -- something that isn't a "mistake" but deliberate. Grow up!

February Valentine's sale! :heart: Come to Ravenglass Realm and rent a 4096 for just $1200 wk - and extra prims so you get 950 instead of 937. Ask for 100 more for $250/100/wk. 4 weeks advance payment gets you 10% discount. PayPal also accepted. Breedable pets and skyboxes welcomed. 2048s are just $650 and with 500, not 468 prims -- enjoy the few extras! You'll also find here some prefabs from recent merchants' events that you might enjoy - or ask to place your own. Here's a sim corner $1200/4096/950 prims with Barnesworth Anubis' new Riadh house, beautiful courtyard, textures, plants and many rooms.  Or here's Barnesworth Anubis' Carraway Bungalow

I've never been in RP groups so I don't know how much is involved here. But I like the idea of giving people freedom from sim owners. Maybe what the Lindens have to do is just put out the rough sketch of a possible RP sim, make the tools for using them (perhaps have "OOC" functions in a group or something) and then let people just work with those basics to elaborate their own RP. The land could have covenants with rules. The Lindens always shy away from anything that sounds like governance and making little governments. As a result, they get them anyway in their worst form. But to sell them on the idea, you'd have to have a very efficient thing that doesn't cost them much work.

That's an interesting idea. I agree Security Orbs should have 5 minutes. I also think they should not teleport you home but only bounce you away. Of course, until the Lindens address griefing better, it's hard to expect people to do without banning ability. "Access only" is really a more common annoyance as it essentially "bans everybody" not in a little group. Why don't people just uncheck "avatars can see you"? I find people don't even know about this. Make yourself invisible, then you don't have to work about intruders.

As others have explained, you can't change texture on the Mainland. But there's this great easy-to-use tool that enables you to map your land, make a sculpty automatically, and texture it. Find it here.