Polenth Yue

I'd be one of those without a home if the mainland had build rules, so I will live with weird unfinished piles of prims in exchange for being able to build what I like. The official themes tend to favour realism, which doesn't work so well for my shop. It's currently a giant cake, which is only going to fly on the mainland. Derendering everything looks really weird. It doesn't help that the terraforming isn't great on the sim. Every issue is highlighted without the buildings covering it up. It also makes the texture repeats on the terrain stand out. What I would like is for the current rules to be enforced. There aren't many for the mainland, so it's not a lot to ask.

I don't think they're going to let us eat any of the waffles.

Yep, to get money from Amazon, I have to fill out a W-8BEN (as I live in the UK). This includes my tax number and personal information. It also includes a reference to a tax treaty section and paragraph, which means having to read the treaty and figure out the right answer. The form then has to be renewed after a few years. That's not something Amazon came up with, so I fill these out for a bunch of other US sites as well, then renew all those every few years. This can be pretty overwhelming when someone starts out as a freelance artist/writer. So I can appreciate why some people are panicking. But in the end, it's just what you've got to do if you want to freelance in a creative field. There will always be forms and contracts. There are always admin hoops to jump through. Take it slowly and just work through it one step at a time, until you've got it all done. To be clear, LL is not asking for W-8BENs at the moment. The point is more that people wanting to be paid online have to provide a lot of information, one way or the other, before getting paid. This is why I'm not worried, because it's more of the same for me.

You might want to read the current answers to questions: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/439384-tilia-takes-over/page/7/?tab=comments#comment-1929793 https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/439384-tilia-takes-over/page/5/?tab=comments#comment-1929668 And this thread as a whole where people discuss what it means and what it doesn't: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/439384-tilia-takes-over/ Or you might not want to read it, but it seems like a good idea to know what the new terms mean before throwing everything out. Most of it is legal waffle, rather than things changing for people. Only people who want to be paid real money will have to provide ID, which is pretty standard when it comes to being paid. SL was unusual in not asking for that information.

No, I meant putting an item on the marketplace, not buying things to resell. So to clarify: 1) Make an item to sell. 2) Take a picture of that item. 3) Create a vendor picture/advert with your picture of your item. 4) Place your item on the marketplace so that you can sell it. 5) Also place your item at your shop for sale. There's a lot of work involved in those steps. You need to decide on the target audience. You need to know what permissions and price you want to use. You need to decide on branding for the vendor pictures. You need to decide how you want to sell things (whether you'll sell boxes directly or want to use a scripted vendor system). Which is why I suggest starting small: make one item and sell that item. Then do the whole thing again with a new item.

The whole thing with not owning the money in your balances is pretty standard. I sell books on Amazon and that money isn't mine until they send it to me. Amazon could terminate my account and keep it all without there being anything I could legally do about it. Inactivity clauses are also popping up in other places, to deal with abandoned accounts. It's designed to drain credit from an account where nobody is coming back, rather than have it sit there unable to be accessed by anybody. What I'm not a huge fan about is how inactivity is being judged. It's at twelve months of no activity, so I could see a possibility for a person with an annual premium account to get hit by it, because they renew just outside of the twelve months. Something like fifteen months would be better for safety (this is assuming that paying for premium is considered activity, which it really should be... if someone's paying, it shouldn't matter if they log in or not).

Right now, it favours people who can be around all the time. Give it time and that won't be the case, because the overall number of houses will be high and people will move around the different themes. That could be a year or two, but that's a lot shorter than never.

It was never social for me. People either kept to themselves or they were griefers. The moment I had land, I left public sandboxes behind unless I had something big to rez. Once a friend got a sim, I moved to their build grid and never looked back. Mesh had nothing to do with it. I also didn't suddenly start spending time in other programs due to mesh. My building has always involved a certain amount of standing around whilst I'm doing something in another program. Right from the start, I needed to make textures outside of SL. I still spend more time on textures than making mesh, as one mesh will end up with multiple sets of textures. But people don't blame GIMP or Photoshop for creators not always being there to chat. All in all, a lot of things get blamed on mesh that weren't really caused by it. They were the ways things were going anyway for various reasons.

I'd suggest starting small and simple. Get items on the marketplace and set up a small shop. It's nice to have the shop as events will often ask for the location in applications and it makes things look professional... but it's not where you're likely to make most of your sales. Don't start with grand plans to open a mall. Most malls fail, so this isn't a good place to start. Work on your own stuff first before you consider selling services to others.

There is a search, but make sure you're on the correct page. You want "Transaction history" under the subheading "Orders". Not "Orders" under the subheading "Reports". You can see the links from "Merchant home" which you get to from the "My Marketplace" dropdown menu at the top of the page.

The new options have helped me make things, rather than hindering me. I started out with sculpties because I wanted to make mushrooms that were better than sticking spheres and cylinders together. When mesh came out, I learnt how to use Blender, so I could start converting sculpties into mesh (and then move on to making things from scratch). I learnt to rig because I wanted a mertail. Having projects is a good thing for me, because it pushes me to try new things.

It'd seem that people can't sign the petition in full knowledge without having access to the "long list of innovative and insightful ideas of how Linden Lab might increase profits without relying on land and without creators having to bear such a severe financial burden". The signers might not agree with the ideas. I've seen ideas in the other threads on this that I think would be many times worse. Anyway, as it seems it needs to be said, I don't hate people for disagreeing with me on the forum about Second Life. I'll still buy things from them and talk to them. Avoiding is only if people cross the line into harassment, bullying, racism or something like that. Differing views on fee structures is not at that level. I'm sure I'm not the only one who rolls that way, so don't panic too much that everyone will boycott your store forever for having an opinion on it.

Probably not hamsters because Governor Linden is a hamster, so it could cause confusion. Gerbils are still free I believe.

If they'd split it, that would have improved things. I can see some merchants falling a bit between the categories, but they could pick the one that best described their store. Another thing that occurred to me was varying shop size more. If they had some smaller ones, like market stalls, it'd spread the range of merchants and provide a way for new participants to get a feel for the event (and for organisers to get a feel for who turns up and follows the rules... it's easier to get a last minute replacement for a little stall).

I saw your comment. I just didn't agree with it. The stores weren't chosen at random, so which category had the most applicants wouldn't have made a difference. The organisers chose the percentages of stores of each type. They could have made different choices. I don't believe for a moment that they didn't have a flood of stores of many types as everyone tried to get in, but let's suppose that wasn't true and only a handful applied. If an event isn't getting stores of a certain type applying, there is a reason for that which isn't about the stores. Other events have no trouble getting a range of stores. If this event had trouble, it implies people thought they didn't have a chance based on previous events, which is on the organisers to solve. They could have approached people in categories they wanted, if that had been an issue that mattered to them. Maybe the plant brand didn't sell when they were the only plant store in a sim of clothes shops. This year, they could have chosen to put the few home and garden stores next to each other, but they've spread them out. If that ends up harming sales, and if that harms the chances of those stores applying next year, it's an issue with event organisation rather than the stores. But even if I'm entirely wrong and the stores present were almost all of those who applied, and the organisers tried to get other stores and were turned down, it doesn't stop it being a disappointing event for me.

I've managed to do some exploring, including an exhibit using an experience (which was a fashion quiz, so I did terribly as I rarely wear anything that isn't a hat). It's been fairly smooth, all things considered. Slowly working my way down the sims.

I also found the shopping side of the event disappointing. My main areas of interest are gardens and (non-breedable) pets. It turned out to be mainly wearables for humans and very little of anything else. I'm not surprised they didn't want people like me, because it's only usually big brands that get in. But there are a whole bunch of big brands that aren't clothes and the like. Only a token number of those were represented. It wouldn't have mattered if it'd been promoted as a fashion faire, but it was technically supposed to show the range of stuff available in SL.

It's been better overall, but something was seriously wrong at opening time. There weren't that many people on my sim and it had all sorts of odd issues. It cleared up later after everything was restarted, but anyone who rushed straight in would have experienced that.

The sims are struggling at the moment, but people will spread out more as it gets going. I've mainly focused on making sure my exhibit still works. I'll explore after the initial rush.

Some of them are wandering about the sims, so they are out and about as well.

Paying a percentage of marketplace sales encourages diversity in the market, because people can take risks and produce niche items. Paying a monthly listing fee encourages a handful of expensive and popular products and everything else would need to be purchased by finding shops inworld. The reason people like the marketplace is it's convenient and they can find a lot of stuff there, so you aren't going to find many customers viewing a reduced range as a win. I also suspect that even the bigger creators would end up paying more through listing fees than they would from cashout fees, unless they gave up on the marketplace... which again means a reduced range on the marketplace. In other words, it's a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You would clear items from inactive seller, but also most of everything else. The marketplace isn't like ebay (outside of perhaps the gatcha reselling). The model is more like POD art sites, which also operate on a percentage of sales basis.

It might be worth asking if they can swap your performance time so it's later into the event. That way, you'll be able to see the final stage with some days to resize things to fit.

My main issue isn't that the prices went up. It's that they held off changing prices for as long as possible, so when it happened, it all happened in one hit. Everything went up by the full amount needed. Small increases over the years would have made it easier for people to budget. I don't make a living in Second Life, but it does usually pay for itself. My budget doesn't have enough space for sudden price changes at this scale, so whether I'll earn enough to pay for my premium account this year is going to be hit or miss. Which then impacts others, because I'm going to have to be more frugal about spending any money until I know I have enough for my account.

This is the issue I was trying to get at. Small creators don't have a firm separation of commercial and non-commercial. My website has some things that are free and some things that are for sale. I don't have separate websites based on whether something is for sale or not. That's where my caution about the rules came up, because it's harder to see how to apply it when not talking about a big business, but also not talking about a non-profit. A lot of people do a bit of both in a mess together. The answers to my questions are that landmarks are fine in gifts and author/artist website links are also fine. So it was worth asking.

The SLB guidelines used to be clearer, but I'm unsure with the current guidelines where the line is drawn. I'm not sure whether gifts can include store landmarks (which was allowed in the other years I took part). I'm also not sure whether freelance writers/artists are considered to be a brand and therefore any linking (like website and social media) is considered to be advertising. Or with the harshest interpretation, whether simply naming the brand (my name) is allowed at all. I usually include a notecard about the build and me, but I'm not sure what I'm allowed to say about myself this year. It doesn't hurt to ask and it doesn't mean someone is trying to get away with anything. The rules do have holes. Some of that is most likely not intended.