Prokofy Neva

Thanks that's a good start. I didn't have that link, although I do have all those kiosks in world -- they don't seem "short" -- but I'm going to compare the two and see if the one on the website is better or easier to copy and use that.

I didn't follow all the Wasted drama, it was clearly some kind of special interest aggressively at work. I don't ask Linden Lab to do a darn thing about this. They've already done a number of things in fact -- they have kiosks in major foreign languages; they have a robust volunteer translating program; they've encouraged some large language communities. I don't ask anything more. If anything, I try to take what they've done and optimize it, make sure that it is visible, etc. I think residents have to take care of this themselves and not ask the company to do anything that isn't really in its interests. It just closed a bunch of offices overseas, in part for austerity measures, in part because it didn't bring the profits they sought given the costs. So it's up to users to encourage this on their own. It cannot be an imposition on the platform. I'm not for politically-correct multi-lingual signs being forced on a populace that uses English as a working language. I'm for trying to build in some easements and comfort ramps for people so that they don't find SL such an obstacle.

There doesn't seem to be any notifications system when content posted is removed for any reason or no reason. I think it's a basic of any such community system that if your content is removed, that you receive a notification that the content is removed, and an excerpt from the relevant law invoked, i.e. the TOS or CS standard alleged to have been violated.

Yes, there are loads of lengthy multilingual cards around. But what I'm saying are quick quickstarts. Even one guide that has 10 major languages on it, like a foreign exchange kiosk does in real life. I agree about unpaid work. As a real-life translator who makes a living in part from translating, I don't accept this casually, and I might even see if I can find funds to pay for a master quickstart card. I guess what I'd find interesting is to see what is the 6 things you'd reduce down to a notecard about SL that you'd want anyone person to know so that they don't get frustrated? Like "the search box is in the upper right corner, type in words of interest to you to find places, events, and people".

I couldn't accept that as a premise whatsoever. I wouldn't be in business in Second Life today if I didn't offer my ads and cards in foreign languages. I routinely offer foreign-language ads or help cards when I can find them because otherwise, there's a simple math: I wouldn't have customers. Second Life contains a population of over 60 percent non-U.S. (not sure what the latest figures are as the statistics page was removed, but it's a lot). There are numerous people who log on regularly and shop who not only don't have English as a first language, they simply don't know English, period. Philip Linden said once "I made SL for everybody".

Lindens do have the power to rename groups. They do it all the time if a group is abuse-reported for obscenity or something else that's objectionable (for example, the use of a real-world law enforcement agency's name to mislead people into thinking they are that agency; the misuse of an avatar or business name as a form of griefing). I think for them, it's as easy as renaming a Word document in their system. However, imagine the flood of requests if they made that function readily available even just through a ticket system. Everyone who has ever messed up in a name or rethought a name would bombard them. So you try asking them in a ticket filed with support and they might go for it, but I'm thinking they won't, and you will have to make a new one. BTW, I've never seen them fetch expired groups back, either but you could try.

It's about the handover of the agent between sims at sim crossings or even just near sim crossing or due to lag. There's nothing you can do about it except open up the map and try to teleport back to where you were or relog.

One of the obstacles in SL not just to friendship but any interaction at all is the question of foreign languages in a setting dominated by English. All kinds of ingenious workarounds have been created, mainly with various HUDS, available for sale or for free, that pick up languages and translate them with Google (which isn't perfect, but often surprisingly good for basic conversations). As I speak a foreign language (Russian) and can understand a bit of another (French) and have tried to learn "landlord Spanish" to some extent, I've studied this problem a bit. I also work on this project "International Bazaar" where I make available as many real-life country sim landmarks available and try to have the foreign language kiosks from the Lindens available, the HUDs, etc. There was the opening of a Japanese railroad in Burns the other night and a friend gave me an even better HUD than I'd been using which I can send anyone inworld if you want to ping me, it was adequate -- but of course the biggest challenge for HUDs is that you have to go teleport in person, i.e. as far as I know there isn't an "IM HUD" that converts IMs on the spot. Last night despite struggling for 2 days with a guy who had Portugese as his native language I lost him because of those bugabears of SL that cause so much misunderstanding -- autoreturn, outdated notecards from 4 years ago that are still passed around even if no longer relevant (wouldn't it be great if SL had "global recall" for outdated notecards or "global override" for outdated notecards). There is a translation project putting the entire viewer into foreign languages as I know, not all are covered yet. But I wonder if anybody has made like a "quickstart" with like 5-10 basic things about SL that every newbie needs to know in all languages. I have a few of the languages.

I have that title, too, and I have no idea how I got it, it seems subjectively applied, even by code (which is full of such subjectivities). I will go read up on the badges.

I've had this repeatedly happen on the regular SL viewers and the only solution I've found is to turn off the virus-catcher on the computer, and if you don't have a separate AVG type program running, indeed, looking at the Windows firewall function and try turning that off. Yes, that's annoying, because it raises concerns about catching viruses. However, I do have to say that in 6 years of running Second Life, I've never seen that Second Life *itself* as a program ever exposed me to viruses. I'm not saying that's possible, but it really does seem unlikely, as the makers of SL aren't going to casually allow their viewer to become a distributor of malware. I think they're pretty scrupulous about that thing and I'm not even sure of the mechanics of how that would work. So yes, it does mean turning off your anti-virus programs at least temporarily. One way you can tell that it's not some other factor, i.e. failure to have the latest Quicktime, failure to deed media properly on group land, etc. is if you can see the movie playing inside your "about land" media tab but can't see it in the TV device.

The 'ranks' may be there, but I certainly won't judge someone because of their 'rank' and I hope others work on the same logic too. If we all just ignored them they wouldn't even be an issue, so I've decided that's exactly what I'm going to do So...I guess that's why you've already reached the rank of advisor, then?

You don't. That option is not available. The only thing you can do if you suspect fraud or theft is to contact Customer Service and give them the information. Keep in mind that while they investigate they have to freeze and take over your avatar so you'll be offline. I've had this happen with fraudsters and the Lindens instantly took care of it, reversed the transaction, got me back online, and got the miscreant out of SL. So that's how you have to do it. You can't have a function that strangulates the economy just to fix an occasional problem like this.

No. And note that Oz Linden's threats that people who kept reopening this JIRA when it was closed would lose their JIRA privileges were in the end -- empty. People persisted past those threats to keep voting and reopening and affirming and in the end the Lindens were persuaded.

Having had this problem numerous times on many sims for many years, I have found only one solution: a region restart. You have to contact customers support if it is a mainland region.

This is an old SL problem I've had many many times. It's aggravated by viewer 2.x in my view. Go back to 1.23 or one of the third-party viewers, you will find peace.

I think that without a doubt, this is caused by Viewer 2.x I have two different computers, I can put wireless or a dedicated DSL line on each, I've experimented with this problem numerous times, and I've come to this conclusion (as have others): Viewer 2 is deliberately knocking me off my wireless; Viewer 2 is deliberately slowing my network. SO the answer is: go back to viewer 1.23 What I'm saying is denied by the devs and nearly blasphemous, but it's the case. No, moving draw distance, changing graphic cards, changing media settings -- they don't matter. It's something in viewer 2. Here's the secret path to the old viewer 1.23 which works great (very bottom of the page): http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alternate_Viewers Shh don't tell anyone I told you!

You have to dig into your own computer's folders. First, turn on the function that makes all invisible folders visible, as it is in invisible folders on some machines and some operating systems. The path usually I've found to get there on Windows goes: users/name/appdata/roaming//secondlife/secondlifename Make sure to save your chat logs outside this folder system if you need them because viewer 2's new versions wipe out all chat logs each time you install, a terrible nuisance.

Why am I "Honoured Resident" and you are only "Resident"? You're older than me.

No.

I think going on a round robin of all the welcome areas, infohubs and other Linden sites like the boating in Nautilus or the carnival game in Pyri are all good ways to start. It's good to get out beyond the original welcome area where you might have been set down on the first day. If you type "welcome" or "infohub" or "Linden" into the search, you get a list of these places. From there you can branch out, as each of them has suggested locations, etc. There's also the Destination, but now the Destination list is getting so gigantic that it almost now needs to be curated into smaller chunks, i.e. maybe there needs to be categories or interests put into posters or something.

You invoke a completely artificial and archaic (19th century) notion of the separation of government and business. Perhaps you should read Glenn Greenwald at salon.com to understand better the revolving door between government and commerce, say, in the area of IT and security firms. What is developed in IT and everything from games to social networks is part of an overall business culture and bleeds into governance. Gov 2.0 wasn't invented in an environmenatl group in Wyoming; it was invented in Silicon Valley. Watch for the "gamification" trend to work that way. No longer can you artificially compartmentalize the issue of customer service as somehow completely remote from real-life governance. Customer service has evolved in extraordinary ways along with social media. Today companies spend millions of dollars to gurus to figure out not only how to mine social media like Twitter but how to address the fact that unscripted twitterers are knocking and criticizing their brand before a huge audience, and they have little recourse. You now have Comcast and other companies openly taking criticism and solving problems in real time on Twitter, something that was unthinkable even 5 years ago, when geeks like you would have sneered that no company has to answer a crank on the Internet, they are "not representative". And you have the U.S. government now operating under TOS-like speech codes on their many "gov2.0" websites -- not the First Amendment, using methods and means crafted in Silicon Valley to structure "21st Century Statecraft". All markets are conversations, they said? I say all conversations are markets. No company can pretend that they are no longer part of a social experiment; they are indeed. There is absolutely nothing wrong with people voting with lack of complete information, or voting in flashmobs with their friends. How do you think Obama got elected? That's life in a democracy. That's never a reason for less democracy; it's only a reason for more. People become more informed in the process of voting and discussing the issue, and that's all to the good. The Lindens themselves promoted the use of the JIRA. While they could have put advertisements for Zindra or Facebook in every single welcome area and infohub, they rushed before doing that to put out advertisements for the JIRA! They actively egged on residents to go to the JIRA. It isn't little flashmobs of shoppers with misconceptions who ran there; it's Lindens telling them to go there to siphon off their criticism in every other avenue. And now they have a problem -- large numbers of votes of unhappiness on everything from Zindra to the Teen Grid to something called RedZone said to interfere with privacy -- and they don't want that indictment of their policies to stand. So the votes had to go. That's all. They are an indictment of Linden policy from the user base that no one wants visible -- not during their workday, where it is a demotivator, and not when they try to sell the platform, where it is a marker for trouble. Yes, the Lindens marketed the JIRA and so only the Lindens should be held responsible for its inefficacy. It was completely insane as a project to manage user complaints, as most people will never get past the front page to operate the wonkiness of the JIRA, and only a very concerted die-hard bunch will get involved -- the usual fraction of the 2 percent of the 10 percent on the power curve. But the Lindens pushed it as a placebo for democracy, thinking it was "productive". The amazing thing is, people aren't stupid. They may not be able to articulate their grievances very well, but once they had the structure of the JIRA, they adapted to it and used it to channel their problems. It truly is remarkable as a sociological and political phenomenon. And to be sure, while having to put up with "yes proposals" that were "no votes on Linden policies", the Lindens did crowdsource a lot of bug work and they also got a lot of very eloquently and neatly written feature proposals for policies that they themselves incorporated later into the TOS (and I'm happy to have been involved myself on issues like traffic bots.) The reason version 1.23 of Second Life says "Brought to you by Philip Linden ...and Prokofy Neva" is because ordinary people like me could bring bugs and features that improved SL (your name would be put in this list if you did that). There's nothing to say -- despite your very zealous work to the contrary -- that our lives online will continue to be dictated by IT companies and coders over which we have no civilian control. Nothing at all. Indeed, to be successful in Web 3.0 and the coming modern world, if it is to be not totalitarian but liberal and innovative, more and more, coders will have to find their place (somewhere along the continuum of garage mechanics and gas station attendants) and will more and more software executives will have to enable ordinary customers to help write the code -- not as an add-on, not as a marketing gimmick, not as a feel-good, *but a necessity* because *otherwise they rebel*. It's just that simple. Your call to get everyone to stop invoking other platforms is as silly as expecting that a jpeg on the Internet cannot be copied. You cannot stop the vote of little avatar feet, although, of course, many things are done to try. Most JIRAS are not ineffective; most in fact are very effective. The JIRA -- and its votes! -- was consciously, thoroughly, resolutely, avidly, extensively used by all Lindens in the coding department at office hours inworld and in their jobs in the real world. Voting was something THEY invoked CONSTANTLY. It's merely a little tap dance and a sleight of hand we're seeing now as they suddenly claim "it never mattere" or "we didn't really pay attention and it had no effect" and "we filtered your emails to trash" like the Linden once infamously told us. Voting is being removed because it mattered too much, not because it didn't matter enough, and we get that. Ask the Egyptian army in September what their thinking is on this sort of issue. Yelling about K-mart in the middle of Wal-mart has always worked to improve Wal-mart, and they know it. And fairies can fly to other grids in the blink of an eye...

I'm not having a conversation with Suella. I'm having a conversation with *you* and expressing my dissent to the policy as it has been articulated. What Suella is doing is what often happens in these settings -- trying to be more zealous than you are about propagandizing and enforcing a policy. But she's stating untruths in the process, such as a claim that the new dispensation has features that weren't here before. In fact, Office Hours had wikis, transcripts, groups, and subjects. They even had weekly agendas with a wiki to add items. To be sure, the more wonky groups like the scripting or open source of viewer groups had this more than others, but even so, there was enough of this with all of them to really beg the question as to why a new system is needed. When you announced groups, you should have had a sign-up page with Python listserves with the groups, and also indicated that any ideas for additional groups would be welcome. But you didn't. And then we heard Brooke tell us that the commerce group is going to be selected, filtered, FIC'd and basically be just a focus group of people she wants to talk to (based on their revenue or category or whatever). She says she'll rotate in some fresher faces than the usual suspects we can already see in one transcript -- but they have to ask, and she has to pick. So sorry, Amanda, but that doesn't sound like a lovely new communications system. That sounds like further institutionalization of the FIC. If the script kiddies can still freely sign up for a group or freely come in world on demand to talk to Lindens, that doesn't offset the lack of freedom for the rest of us on the "consumer-oriented" subjects. So I suggest that if you don't want this to be a fiasco, you get the groups up there on a listserve with other past groups that are still fun and stop fearing the public. Suella is telling us smarmily on your behalf that you can't deal with "every single customer". But that's a straw man. Only a fraction of customers bother with this forums; only a fraction post; only a fraction bother to come to an inworld meeting. Truly, a sign-up list on something like "commerce" or "land" or "live music" would get at most a few thousand sign ups (and more like 300, given the log-ons lately); at most 10 percent of that posting regularly or coming inworld. Why be afraid of 30-50 people, Amanda? That's all there are here. Let's be clear on that. OK, if it is a really hot topic like "sexual content and ratings, " you might get 160 on a four-corner sim that one time. But that's about it. So be realistic. And please, don't invoke that "it can't scale" stuff. Of course it can. If suddenly 100,000 people join SL tomorrow, why, you will add them to these groups, or make sub groups or say, finally, "You know, with 2000 people in "Land and Sea" and 200 talking regularly, we can't function so we are moving to an invite-only focus". And even there, I'd hardly think it would be necessarily. You're in marketing. You ought to be familiar with the power curve by now. Truly 10 percent of the people ever supply the content/talking/arguments for the 90 percent of the rest that just watch. Of those 10 percent, only 2 percent do it often. So arguing "scale" is a dodge. And to start with that now, at a time when you are trying to prove your spurs here as improving feedback channels, just unnecessarily antagonizes everybody.

Let me say *this* as clearly and succinctly as possible: you are telling half the truth here. You told me at SLCC when I asked directly about this that no, you had no plans to make any single viewer mandatory. But then you added cunningly: "But if you want to see mesh, you'll need Viewer 2". Sigh. So yeah, you don't "have" to use Viewer 2, but you better, if you want to see a new feature of the world that could become ubiquitous as sculpties. It's like this: you don't "have" to use a higher-end graphics card but you won't see Windlight. Yes, it was possible to turn off all the aspects of Windlight and keep one's draw at 64. But as those of who had purchased the graphic cards on the "minimum requirements" list, even with all the settings dumbed down, the new existence of Windlight in the viewer at that time severely compromised the view even without the Windlight options. That's just "how it is". Another situation like that now is with sculpties. If you happened to purchase the minimum-required graphics card six months ago (not five years ago, as Lindens constantly claim when people say they have graphics problems), in many cases, you are now seeing sculpties as balloons every time you land on a sim, and they can take 5 or more minutes to resolve into something comprehensible. This problem has worsened. So, no, you don't "have" to buy a better graphics card for $280, but if you want to see SL, you'll have to. Same concept.

Oz, I don't care if you as a proprietary private software company say, "We as a company don't want customers voting on our product features" -- that's an understandable and universal position. One of my favourite avatar profile quotes I've put on Random Unsung is from Spin Martin: "We are a customers of a software company. The end." I personally don't think that's how software projects should be run, and indeed I'm convinced that just like tyrannies in Egypt or Belarus are ended, so software tyranny will end and we will move to socialware, where coders will be constrained by user demand in ways they think "impossible" now. But we're not there yet in Egypt and certainly not in Belarus, and we're not there yet in software. What I won't accept is pretenses that what you are doing is *not* about removing democracy, and smarmy technological determinist messages telling me that it's not about being undemocratic, it's merely about being "useful". Lukashenka in Belarus tells the intellectuals dissenting in the cafes in the cities to go out in the provinces and pick potatoes and be "useful" because they are not "useful" criticizing him in the capital. (Mao did this in even more bloody fashion). It's an age-old technological determinist Leninist argument but it's no more valid today with today's modern software than it was 100 years ago with only the telegraph or the combine. As always, one must ask the question of power: useful *to whom*? As I've patiently explained about the kind of polls I ofter, I'm FORCED to offer more granularity because that's all there is in the way of products in SL, because polling products in SL are geared toward dance or song or popularity contests, product opinion polls, etc. and not the yes/no of a referendum in a real country on a real political issue. If there were products that had yes/no vote options, I'd use them. There aren't any. So don't take my setting of a commercial exigency in SL as my preference, or use "granularity" as a cop-out to dodge the need to have a normal yes/no vote in a normal system if we are ever to have a normal society online as we do in real life (where I realize that some of you are busy removing this feature, too, but at least it's recognized in real life as extreme and undemocratic). And again, you're welcome, as a company, to have any theory you want as governance -- Zee Linden once admitted that the Chinese economic model came close to the Second Life currency model ideal -- but don't then decide that the problem with critics of this sort of regime are somehow making unjust or invidious comparisons. You're arrived rather late in the experiment. Indeed Philip Linden *did* have exactly those sort of New England town hall meetings in SL for years, as the record shows. And I think one problem with people claiming that they accept this in RL but don't for SL is that in reality, they don't participate in anything like that sort of town hall meeting and therefore don't really feel any social demand for it. That's the problem. We don't have town halls; we have Facebooks and Twitters. The architecture of what you're suggesting now -- breaking up people into very narrow classes and constituencies with very narrow channels for expressing their interests and needs -- is what most political scientists would simply call "corporativism" -- and of course, we know where that leads. In fact, America is like a big game with lots of stakeholders and constituencies and interests and needs and very, very diverse views and so on, and the yes/no democratic voting system actually is pretty much in demand there, and works pretty well. There is absolutely nothing to say that a situation with multiple and diverse constituents somehow "requires" less democracy -- nothing at all! Again, Oz, I don't care if you say that software companies have to be despotic because customers can't run the product, but don't pretend while doing that, that you've now adopted a democratic model or some "new' form of democracy that is "better". It's not. As we all know, the JIRA is not anything nuanced by having yes/abstain/watch. Indeed, many JIRAS exist as a workaround to the problem of having no "no". People are forced to post a feature calling to undo a feature as their "no" to get a "yes" to the "stop this" and large omnibus features develop like "traffic" that contain within them direct contradictions and confusion. Watching is only adding to the blurring of these distinctions, as we all know that people watch both because they like as well as dislike a feature. So that's hardly an argument. What's most scary about this interaction now is the notion that someone criticizing your notion of democracy is "not civil" or must be forced to be "constructive" and accept the program. That's creepy. And you must know it is creepy at some level. There's nothing "uncivil" about discourse that makes comparisons and openly discusses models and calls them positive or negative -- indeed there's nothing about my post that has obscenity, name-calling, etc. etc. and is "TOS actionable". And yet you, like other Lindens before you, try to drive me and others into a funnel of "civility" that is really about going against intelligence and common sense, and accepting something that isn't at all about democracy and isn't even at all about feedback, but is *the semblance of democracy" I could add that the entire construct of "engage with us in a positive way" is one of those utopian ideals that neither you nor we will ever reach becauase it's a fictitious construct. The people who accept your basic premise as positive and provide you accolades for your product are only going to have minor quibbles with a bug or the speed with which something is added. If that's your idea of an interlocutor, you won't have customers, you will only have fans. Running a company and a product on the premise of "fans" is fine and can carry you a very long way. For example I'm a fan of Joy dishwashing liquid but not a fan of Dove diswashing liquid, and I'm a fan of Coke, but not a fan of Pepsi. But again, let's not pretend that this is better, or positive or engaging. It's not. It's killing a long-running social experiment that worked very well for many years despite your embedded beliefs about it and should have been improved in the direction of more democracy, not less.

The problem with this concept of "trolling" is that it is overbroad, wildly subjective, and merely a tool for whomever is in power to ban others they don't like on a whim. "Trolling" is supposed to be defined as the act of deliberately, with malice, posting something nasty to get a rise out of someone, and then pretending that you aren't doing that. To me, that is what trolling is -- deliberately, with ill will, harassing and harrying someone on minor points, or literalisms or fallacious points to incite them to anger -- sometimes to goad them into swearing and getting them banned. But because trolling is so overbroad, people have come to think of trolling as "whatever I don't like" -- it's hugely arbitrary. The bad faith and ill will with which people in Second Life approach the intentions of others is breathtakingly astounding. But they make these assumptions of ill will in others precisely because they themselves are ill-willed. Example: I post a thread asking for comments on the fact that the voting feature is being removed. I put in a link to my blog merely because I've already spelled out my arguments there in depth and don't want to repost them or shorten them. I definitely have no reason to try to provide "link bait" to my SL blog, because the ad-sense is insignificant -- the people who click on it from SL that day who either aren't already clicking on it or have it subscribed in a reader But what happens is that instead of people just reading it and commenting it without assumption of malice and manipulation, I get comments from several ill-willed insisting that I have deliberately posted a link to my blog to gather link-bait income. They persist with this because the come to the entire transaction with ill will, with much baggage. Obvious spammers in SL are doing this, but the average person caring enough to post a thought on the forums isn't doing this, and the malice that goes into treating people this way is always, as I said, astounding. In an ideal forums moderating system, the moderator would step in and tell *the person with the malice and ill will making the presumptions* that it's ok to post links to blogs in a discussion, and that assumptions are misplaced. But that sort of moderation in trying to insist on good will and good faith almost never ever happens in SL. Lindens themselves make the assumptions of ill will, or they refuse to make a value judgement and comment on the real problem in the thread. *It's that failure to moderate very early in instances of this kind of nastyness and ill-will that make the forums impossible to use*. So what happens in this situation is that the person slighted and harmed by others with their false assumptions and ill-will begins to fight back, and eventually finds themselves then in a true flame war. He may now be goaded into TOS-violating speech; others may, too in his defense. Meanwhile, the original person who really is the troll with this bad faith is rewarded by remaining unreprimanded, and turns around and gloats at his handiwork and lives to harass another one another day, Lindens oblivious. It's that dynamic that is really loathsome here. Some of the people calling here for more strenuous "community guidelines" enforcement are just those sort of malicious trolls themselves -- goading and harassing and insulting others just to get a rise out of them and to emphasize some tendentious and outrageous claim, and then getting off scott free. People always say "don't feed trolls," i.e. don't rise to their malicious bait. But the problem is that when no one pushes back, these people keep lording it over the forums, smugly gloating at their sly malice, hatefully silencing debate against what is often outrageous tendentious or sycophantic behaviour.