Prokofy Neva

Welcome to the actual practice on the Internet, where in fact voting dominates all over, including gamed voting, and ways are found to de-weight the gaming, including by the recent revision of Digg, which caused enormous howling from the regulars and the oldbies there. There are many ways you can prevent gaming of voting -- the Lindens already have a way of monitoring related accounts and blocking accounts from the forums, and it's a trivial matter for them to require that people chose one account per unique IP address (not even unique payment form) and help control this. It's not gamed anywhere near the extent that people imagine, and while alt-abuse goes on, any perusal of the JIRA's votes see that in fact people's alts are *not* on parade. It's just a geeky excuse to prevent democracy from prevailing, which would curb the power of coders. And that's why they invoke it, and that's why they imagine it is worse than it is, so they *can* invoke it to undermine democracy. HARDLY an argument!

Q, once again you are doing something really quite evil in the long term, and which is ultimately very sinister in the project of Second Life as a prototype for a larger Metaverse in which we will all being having our lives 24/7 online. And that is to pretend that democratic voting will be "gamed" or "lobbied by special interests" and "can't work" and only "only random samples work," and therefore using those built-in problems of democracy to get rid of democracy entirely and keep your authoritarian system. SHAME ON YOU for doing that! Frankly, then the authoritarian system gets gamed and lobbied, far, far more by being a function of the heavily spiked and loaded JIRA and the skewing of office hour lobbying with the "tyranny of who shows up". Random sampling isn't the only legitimate sampling; don't be ridiculous. If real life were run like that, we wouldn't have elections or propositions. Oh, wait, I guess you'd be perfectly fine with having a wired elite decide everthing for the "masses" who can't be trusted. Given *those* terrible developments that keep hobbling SL's development, democratic voting, before or during features, is perfectly fine, perfectly good as a corrective, and its gaming isn't the horror you imagine. When you allow the community to vote straight up and down "yes or no" on propostions for features, you enable the community to *know itself*. That's what is so often missing in Second Life, which is an atomized amorphous mass of conflicting interest groups and an uninformed majority which don't have enough impartial information from the system to see what other constituencies really believe. Geeks constantly imagine that their preferences are "popular" and point to dubious projects like Emerald to "prove" this. Certain special interest groups imagine that the world should stop until the viewer satisfies their yen. But the mass of the public has no way of really seeing how much of a following these notions really, truly has because you don't create a fair voting system on the JIRA -- first of all the JIRA is too wonky to use, and secondly you constrain it with your weapons of banning arbitrarily and enabling a small clique to keep closing everybody's ideas or findings they don't like. If JIRA had "no" votes instead of just "double plus good", you'd have a much better idea of how much special pleading and edge-casing is going on there. If it were impossible to close proposals and if you stopped your arbitrary bans, real public opinion could begin both to be seen, and in turn be shaped through debate. If you stopped the practice of letting your fanboyz close JIRAs and get people banned, you'd have fair votes. Scientists should never cut off feedback loops in their experiments. By skewing and loading the game of SL constantly with the dumbing down or destruction of real democracy, you are constantly reinforcing the authoritarian -- and ultimately the totalitarian system. THIS WILL FAIL. This intervention of yours here is terribly discouraging. Because it means that even a thoughtful and considerate and intelligent Linden like you is not willing to understand that your own power, and the power of your little fanboyz in office hours, simply has to be curbed by democratic participation. Simple polls on subjects like "move by double clicking on the ground" would uncover how much usage there really is of such features that certain minorities began clamouring for and which you cave to.

*Now* you can Cybin. But the very first iteration took that out, under the theory that "newbies don't need it". And that was fallacious reasoning, as lots of people at least do some casual rezzing of blocks and such now and then, and people like to experiment. So the Lindens got this one wrong and put it back. The options for the bottom bar don't fix the chat clustering nonsense, however. When you install SL for the first time, the grid view is imposed on you and you have to uncheck it. It's one of those many things that Lindens impose in the viewer, like putting land to default to "no safe" mode encouraging gamerz and shooting and killing instead of defaulting it to the "safe" mode that most people use, and then letting the tiny minority of shooters have to do the unchecking.

Again: most people ignore the minimap because it's rotating is confusing and it's hard to orient because it contains no landmarks on it visibly like the regular map, which you can also pull up and also use to see if there are other people on the sim. Many, many people use Mistitool to let them know if another avatar is approaching or lurking. They don't use the mini map because it gives no names. It doesn't supply enough information. Certain oldbies, long-time gamerz, geeks, they swear by the minimap because they are people who like maps and directional interfaces in RL, too. But most people in America are poor in geography, especially women, and don't use maps. Googlemaps has spoiled them further; they don't have to read maps now, the map reads them... A simple poll will show this, so I'll do one inworld soon.

No, there's no sizeable population that "needs" double-click to move on the ground or "teleport". That's a geeky gamerz affectation from MMORPGs -- Raph Koster rushed to put it in Metaplace, and it was only annoying and confusing. In the SL setting, it's double annoying as clicking on the ground now brings "create" or "about land" menu. Why are the Lindens working on this sort of thing without REALLY canvassing the *bulk* of the user population that has not asked for it and doesn't need it? It's a MMORPG hangover and the discredited Emerald geeks putting it in their now-banned viewer doesn't mean it "has" to be brought forward to 2.x This is exactly the sort of thing that I mean by asking Q exactly what is hiding under the hood of the idea of "more options". If all it is is catering to special interest groups like this, why are you doing it?

Jopsy, I am not a builder, but I use the build tools every day anyway, to place and adjust houses, to make little things that are simple like decks, etc. So I'm as annoyed as anyone when I can no longer right-click on the ground and start the "create" process, but have to scroll through a menu selecting two or three options. That's what happened in the first iteration of viewer 2.0 in the name of "think of the children" (making it easier for newbies). That happened because the Lindens didn't seem to realize how much casual use there was of build. But in the name of de-cluttering the menu, they could justify the removal of the "build" button. I don't *have* to have the build button on the front page taking up scarce real estate, I can access it through some other layer of menus, or, if "right click on the ground" is retained, get it that way. I don't have to have "grid" imposed on me every time I build if I'm not a professional builder; that could be accessed through an extra click. And so on. That's the kind of mentality I mean -- framing the viewer so that it is not destroying functionality for those who need it but not imposing hobbles for those that don't. What keeps happening in SL is that the Lindens keep claiming they're going to make things easier for newbies but instead, they keep catering to a small faction of extreme coders and aggressive designers and builders who keep pulling the blanket on themselves through the "tyranny of who shows up" at office hours or through the politics of the JIRA. And the Lindens keep blessing this clique as "the community" and keep thinking this is "user feedback" and it isn't. They then claim that they do have all kinds of feedback from testers and commentators outside the office hour regulars, but the outcome never seems to show that.

An honest and full poll would show most people do not use the mini map at all. That a small sector of mainly male geeks use the mini map, and most other people either don't use it, or only rarely use it, i.e. if they have lost an object and need to see the lighted item on the map.

Let's start with the facts that are often denied: The open source movement in SL has not brought benefits, but has brought only destruction (libsl copybot, Emerald/Onyx/CDS griefing, extortion, etc.). None of the costs have been overweighed by any benefits like ostensible "bug finding". Now let's look at that office hour you were in, Q -- toxic, extreme, off the rails, like so many, where you more moderate Lindens face extremist Stallmanites that are stealthily applauded and aided and abetted later on the JIRA. And the proposition is a misleading one -- too many preferences or too much toggling and too much variation *along what decision path to where?" If the decision tree is about "groups" that's one story. But if it's about "more and more exotic and unused use cases for builders" then it can't be endlessly supplied. There has to be a weighted curve of usage -- those facing the burden of the most clicks to their goal -- i.e. their offered option on a decision tree -- simply have to be those who have the least-used use cases. For example we're always hearing about the builder or merchant who has to set perms on boxes of 88 or 444 things and is full of resentment at not being able to do this swiftly with one click or with a few easy clicks en masse. But...That's an exotic use case. There are perhaps at most 10 people doing that kind of bullk merchandising per concurrency -- well, perhaps we might even find 50. It's not rational to supply WASD and the solving the focus loss issue just for that tiny use case. A key problem ensuing from options clutter and confusion is the failure to use parallel construction in the SL user interface narrative. This is one main points of dissonance in the story of SL. Did you ever learn parallel construction in English class or study literature, or did you only study coding? What this means is that to perform one function, you use a pie menu (now a list); to perform another function you check or uncheck a box or a line; to perform yet another function you scroll down a list look for a selection off a menu; for still another function you type something in and it saves (search places ad or land description or title or avatar) but for other functions you have to type in AND perform a "SAVE" click as if it were a Word document...sometimes you right-click; other times you left click. You are constantly fighting with this interface because it can't make up its mind HOW to do things in a consistent way. In short, nothing works like anything else. Some things tear off and push around; others don't. There is constant cognative dissonance and it tires the eye and mind. What is it so hard to put parallel construction into this viewer?! I'd love for you coding Lindens for once in your lives to meet with a group of 20 people who *aren't* the geeks. Who *aren't* the hacker freaks. Who *aren't* the JIRA lifers. Who aren't there to goof around with you, impress you, talk shop with you, suck up to you, or bond with you in tribal opensource ecstasy, but who are just there to tell you very, very simple stuff about how the viewer as it is now *hobbles commerce*. That's all. How it *destroys business*. By people who actually use these tools all day in their full glory, unlike you all, who use only pieces of them, and only usually to obsess on one piece of them or break them (Sorry, but Esbee telling us she shops and jetskis and all the rest doesn't cut it, because she doesn't *run a business all day* with group tools, land tools, communications tools, etc. Let her even do something fairly small like I do, running groups with 500 or 700 people in their and half a million meters of land on dozens of different sims with all the group permissions and issues, and then tell me the UI isn't broken.) It would be a very different conversation. I challenge you to do this. And no fair having land barons or merchants who double as JIRA obsessives i.e. weapons sellers. You know who you are. As for your premise, I support your general thesis that we don't need to have endless fungibility and endless flexibility. At a certain point, you make a decision and a decision tree, and you have to stick with it. You can hide some menus out of the way (debug) or make some functions less obtrusive (build) but the functionalties you've particularly broken in Viewer 2 are all about group permissions, notecard giving, communications -- the stuff that is even more basic than building and scripting that need create and debug. The breaking of functionality happened due to ideology about trees, and ideology uninformed with real *business* use for *inworld business* (something the Lindens have essentially neglected for 7 years, chasing after outworld enterprise, educators, etc.) I'd accept your premise IF the decision tree that flowed from that *led to real business functionality*. But...it doesn't. For example, arguing for 45 minutes about WASD is untethered from reality. Gamers are in the wrong place if they are in SL looking for WASD.

Hi! I'm so glad we're done being told SL is "not a game". It has been very tiresome these last six years hearing that, especially given all the game aspects like "Lucy and Peanuts and the Football". Can you make SL a game now? Like for example group job objects like we had in The Sims Online. The dollars earned could show as credits on Xstreet and be a bonus to merchants they could use to pay tier.

Instead of driving people to the wonky, tendentious, hateful battleground of the JIRA, Ellen, where a bug that is actually stopping people from buying land gets a yawn from the devs because they hate land buying, and no votes from the largely geek population of JIRA users who have other arcane priorities, you should tell this user ONLY the workaround that the reporter of the bug found, and baby-step them through it if necessary: Namely, that you need to make sure that your preferences for content are set in ME to MATURE, and not GENERAL, or you will be unable to buy land in MATURE. That seems to be what is triggering this.

Keep asking questions about the Emerald viewer, and do not be dissuaded by the propaganda. The issue of scraping the avatar key needs a lot more debate than it gets from the cheerleaders here. http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2009/12/the-key-to-avatar-keys.html

This sort of harassment is unacceptable, and I take it seriously as a rentals manager and I don't trivialize it, as some do, by saying "it's only pixels" or "RL sexual harassment and rape are worse and therefore put it all in perspective." Well, we are supposed to be making a better world, and online people are supposed to have freedoms without being able to take them away from others -- which is what happens when you don't take this problem seriously. So here's my advice, in addition to what others are saying here, as not all products are configurable and when you are attacked in this way, you can't always get your wits about you to go into "edit" mode and start trying to fix things. Locked doors and security orbs can't prevent something like this from happening, as there isn't any true privacy in SL given the capacity of camera zoom. You can take a preventative measure by using a free avatar radar hud that will show on your screen whether avatars are in range -- and then you can see if strangers are approaching. You can also use a visitor list script in your home to see if anyone is using your furniture while you are away, and then ban them next time you are online. If you are attacked, while it can be hard to do and you feel angry and entitled to your time online, especially if you are paying for a rental, you must log off. Even five minutes will help break the chain of attention that griefers thrive on. If you are not there to react, they will move on. It helps you become composed and realize that while your avatar is an extension of yourself, it's under your control and you can use log-offs to stop an attack like this. Another option is to teleport away to a landmark in your inventory or to another place on the sim. When you log back on, change the log on place to a generic welcome area like http://slurl.com/secondlife/Waterhead/128/128/23 r ather than your own land so you don't land back in the middle of the harassment. Then approach your land and ban the person harassing you. Be sure to abuse report and include the chat history. Although sometimes griefers are day-old alts, if you find a sexual harasser like this who isn't a day-old then it's good to publicize the name in groups so that others can ban the person from their land and that some sort of community condemnation might work.

If you see land inworld that appears to be abandoned: 1. Click to find the owner or group and its officers, and see if any of them are missing from the People List. That's an indication that they may be gone from SL. 2. If they are still in SL, they may not have payed tier for a long time and the land may be reclaimable. 3. File a ticket with Support indicating the exact coordinates and ask Linden Lab to check whether it is abandoned. Usually Lindens answer within 3-7 days on such abandoning questions, and if they can put it on the auction, they will. 4. Then be sure to keep a hawk eye on the auction, because the Lindens often get the land turned around quickly, i.e. in days and not months. Then you can bid on it if it is of interest, or perhaps buy it later inworld if a land dealer bids and gets it. 5. It's always a good idea to check with all your neighbours to see if any of them are bidding on the auction just to save the land for the neighbourhood, just to make sure you won't be bidding against each other needlessly.

Even one second of usage of land tier over your current level will make you bump up to the next level. That's why you can't make an overage purchase even temporarily, with the intent of fixing it -- the Lindens will not help you on this (you can petition and beg, and sometimes on a first-time newbie mistake, they will fix it as a courtesy one-off offer, but it is not their default.) There is absolutely no reason why you cannot undertier your group temporarily to make the purchase, then purchase it, and then deed it to the group -- if you've done the math. The reality is that there is a window of about 24 hours before you will get messages from LL about needing to add tier to your group. Indeed LL does seize land (the latest land to be added to the group) if you are undertiered. But it is a process where you get a warning first, and there is a window. It is not worth risking more than a few minutes, in my view, but I've seen it go to a day or more when I've accidently had a group under tier. There is no stated rule about this anywhere, it is a discretionary and manual process. But you shouldn't be forced into upping your tier level, or renting tier at much higher prices, merely for a transaction like this IF you have determined that you can add the tier in through the group bonus or other residents helping you. BTW, you can "buy for group" to instantly make use of the group bonus -- again, if the math is working out.