Toysoldier Thor

As a quick update, it was suggested to me but forum members in the SL SERVER forum that I bring this proposed JIRA for Virtual Landmarks up as an agenda item of the CONTENT CREATORS user group. Apparently LL staff actually engage at these meetings and would need to take notice of a proposed suggestion JIRA that likely wont get noticed if its promoted in the community forums or just sits there patiently waiting as an unassigned JIRA. My only problem is that all LL User Group office hours are during north american work days and hours.... well I work RL then too so attending one of these to propose the VIRTUAL LANDMARKS is near impossible. I am going to see if I can get it as an agenda item and point to the JIRA # and let the user group talk about it even if I am not there.

Indigo Mertel wrote: I know of the group mainly for posts made by Natales Urriah on her blog. What I know is that you can submit a JIRA for discussion. I suggest you contact Geenz Spad for more information on how to proceed. Thanks again Inigo for your input. I dont know who Geenz Spad is but I will search for him/her inworld when I get online. The problem I have is that almost all LL User group meetings are during normal North American business week/day hours when - well - I am at RL work. So I cannot attend almost any of these meetings. Maybe this GEENZ can place Virtual Landmarks onto the next Agenda of this Content usergroup meeting. I think my JIRA is very clear about what I am proposing and there have also been good followup feedback comments on the JIRA. Then during the next meeting, someone could speak on my behalf OR LL could read the JIRA ahead of time and run with their thoughts on the concept as well as their level of desire to consider it for future development. I can read the minutes that I hope all these office hour meetings have?

Indigo Mertel wrote: I had some reshares within minutes, so the feebback is good. Not sure if you saw my suggestion to submit your JIRA to the Content Creation Improvement Informal User Group, as I edited my previous post to add that bit while you were replying to me. That group is monitored by Linden Lab and has the purpose of discussing new features or improving existing ones. Coincidently someone in the Merchant community pointed out a SL wiki website of all these groups. I would not have thought to attend the content creators to propose this Virtual Landmarks idea. So exactly how do these meetings go and how would one propose to LL the idea at this meeting? Wouldnt I just attend and point them to the JIRA to please read?

Thanks Esepibe for this workaround idea. I am a little lost how it would work though. Maybe it too early for my brain. So when a visitor inworld clicks the LM, they will get what? An LM ? And if tomorrow I change the landmark it will change the visitor's LM or it will start handing out the new LM and the old ones are still old? right?

Tari Landar wrote: I wanted to add that I also checked, double checked and triple checked that my boxes and sim(s) were not the culprit(s). The odds of every single box failing at the exact same moment, on multiple sims, causing that one item to fail to deliver at that precise moment...yeah I may be no Sheldon, but that doesn't seem even remotely plausible. Unless, of course, all boxes failed at the same precise moment all across the grid, causing each and every MB purchase to fail. Then I'd say... oops, their(the boxes) bad, and be done with it-chalking it up to yet another annoying but temporary glitch. It was quite clearly their(LL) bad, but there is no oops involved here. I'm far from a conspiracy theory sort of person, ftr., but I strongly believe someone, somewhere was playing with something they probably shouldn't have been messing with.They aren't exactly strangers to the concept. It does irritate me too, even if it were free items failing to deliver(in my case a couple were), it would still iritate me. There's no rhyme or reason for a "glitch" like this to occur. At least not one I can come up with, or anyone else I've spoken to about it. I am glad you pointed all this out of things you checked because at first I feared the same things you did. But that you noticed all the same things further entranches that the LL Commerce Team is secretly fiddling and experimenting with the Marketplace/SL knobs and buttons and making OOOppsies. But as is typical LL style, they dont see any big risk with fiddling as it only impacts the sales of some of their MP merchant customers.

Darrius Gothly wrote: What I find most interesting about these MB failures is ... Now that most, or at least a good proportion of sales are delivered via DD and not via MB, the infrastructure that runs the MB delivery function should be less and less stressed than before. This means we should be seeing more reliability and not less. It was the contention that the sheer load on the XStreet/Magic Box system was a major contributor to its failures. But as the load has lessened, the failures do not seem to be decreasing. I'm not sure if that means the failure is actually someplace else (like in the way Marketplace drives the old XStreet system) but I find it interesting to say the least. But Darrius - the MB failures were not related to any load. My MB deliveries have always been nearly 100% flawless. These failures were caused as of July 21 or 22 by my MB listings somehow losing association to their items in the MB and my MP listings set to DD when i didnt convert them. They were not load failing - they were all 100% broken.... until i completed the conversion to DD that somehow seemed to get started without me. That is how I see it. And not Tari experiencing MB related failures too around the same period.

Tari Landar wrote: I'm sure this will be of little to no comfort, but I also use both MB and DD and on the period of 7-21-7-25 had delivery failures. Every single one of them, was a MB item. My items weren't transferred to DD items, but the only failures came from MB items. I don't normally have many, if any, failures at all. Granted the failures were on items that really don't cost much at all, well nothing I sell does, but that's not the point. I talked to quite a few other people in world last night about this after someone im'd when their delivery failed. Those merchants were having the same problem. MB items were failing whereas DD ones were not. I'm the last person to tell others they need to migrate to DD. I only did so myself because of an issue I was having and thought might be related to not having moved to DD yet. So I migrated some of my stuff, actually most of it, to see if that was the cause for slow sales. To be honest, I can't tell if it was or wasn't, even still, I gave up trying. But I haven't had any delivery failures for a good long while until just recently. Now I've had several in the same week. Probably more than I've ever had since I loaded my first MB in 2008. It bothers me greatly, because there's no rhyme or reason to it. Yes I know I can, and some will say should, migrate entirely to DD, I get it. The MB should not be failing, neither should the process associated with it like this, unless someone fiddled with something they should not have. The few merchants who actually post here and still use MB are a pretty small minority and I know for a fact there are a lot more who don't post here that had, or are having, the same(or related) issue. Personally I think it's more than a tad ridiculous at this juncture. Thanks for telling me!! I thought it was just me that got hit... so you showed that whatever LL did they caused MB grief to u too. I wished LL would just chime in and even just admit that it might have been caused by an experiment they were trying or something related to MB.

@Deja - You are surely invited! @Dart - remember that I make sculpty terrain packs.... making a bubbling mud pit would not be a tough request for the grand re-opening event.... as long as someone can create a 2 person mud wrestling animation. Then we can get two people (I would gently suggest ladies in bikinis but I am a bit biased) to be the front of stage enterainment during all the live singing gigs.

Apologies if I sounded condescending as it was not my intent. Based on your suggestion and that you mentioned you were not too technical, I made the assumption that you were not aware of how virtualization if physical hard-set assets or addressing or whatever actually worked. I might be lost on your suggestion as well as not having a deeep LL/SL understanding of EXACTLY how LM's exist inside the Asset Server of SL, because my understanding of how LMs work in SL would mean you could not create a single LM and hand out this same LM to 100's of people and then change the parameters of this initially created LM. Maybe someone will correct me if I am wrong but when I create a new LM to a location on the grid, I am creating a new asset entry into the SL Asset Server DB. If I now hand out a copy of this LM to you (regardless how I do it - i.e. hand it to your avatar directly or store it in a selling pack as part of its contents or handed to you when you touch a LM Giver vendor), your LM is now a copied asset entry of my LM I have in the Asset DB. It is not a pointer to your original LM. As such, if I change my LM or delete it, it has no effect on your independant copy of this LM. The only way your solution would somehow work would be if my originally created LM and all the 100's of copies of this LM I hand out to everyone else are all just pointers to the same LM entry in the Asset DB (I miht be using thewrong term but if they all shared the same UUID in the Asset server). If this was true then maybe there would be a way to jiggery pokery the current handling of the way LM's are manipulated by the clients of SL so that if I change the LM grid location then all the 100s of copies I handed out would see the same change. But my belief is that each copy of that LM is its own UUID asset and now independant from the original. I has no relationship now inter-communication with the original. Making this possible would very complex. And as you already said and agreed to, its only a potential tactical solution to the more stratetic solution of creating VLMs with a VLM-Mapping Service. I still belive that the more simply approach of the two would be the create this new type of VLM asset and deploy it. In this way LL would have a much lower risk of deployment vs playing around with live production and critical LMs. If LL miscodes the handling of LMs (and we all know LL's history of software development and testing - look at DD), they could potentially bring SL to its knees. Just some thoughts and sorry again for assuming the need for a simple explanation.

So I do know what you are suggesting - basically "why create a new asset called a VLM when we should be able to just change how the LMs are used". Although at a non-technical level that would sound like a legit question, its not viable to accomplish all the objectives that VLMs can do. In fact, my idea of VLM for LMs is absolutely not a radical concept. Its just another solution extension to countless similar solutions of virtualizing or creating "pointers" to fixed physical assets in the world of Information Technology. WHY? Because is a rock solid architecture method. The best example I already presented that everyone knows is the relationship of Internet IP addresses and DNS Host names. Here is an example: if you want to go to google, you know exactly how to go there... http://www.google.com and you will get there. But what you actually did was attempt to go to a commonly known human-friendly pointer or virtualized label to the network address of the servers that run the google website. There is nothing stopping you from going to this web site's actual true physical address... http://173.194.79.103/ The reason why Google as well as no one else would rather you didnt use their physical address is for several reason - similar to what I am suggesting with VLMs. Bascially, by you using google.com to find their site, not only is it easier for you to remember BUT it give google technologies several options they couldnt do if you went to their address. For example, if they decided or were forced to change that IP address then they could do this without having to tell the entire world "WE CHANGED OUR IP". Sound familiar to LM?? Actually even within the IP addressing level, there are network devices used everywhere on the Internet that create "Virtual IP Addresses" that points to one or several other IP Addresses. With VIP's a company can change all their IP addresses or add or remove them from the VIP's configuration and no one knows. So a long winded answer is that in order for us in SL to have the flexibility of flexible LM's that an owner can manage and change and add advanced services to (like LM failover and round robining) the only viable proven solution is to create a VIRTUAL LM. With VLMs the LMs are still 100% usable assets. These are new additional and very Special types of LMs. ( I am a Network Architect in the RL so creating the concept of Virtualized LMs was not a far stretch of creativity - just shocked LL Engineers didnt think of this long time ago)

Deja Letov wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: Darrius, On the good side - I am not 100% on DD. And I know this is a coincidence or because of the publicity of this thread but I made several sales on these newly converted packs after the conversion. That proved the conversion worked and I finally had a good day ! Good to hear Toy! Here's to a much better August! Thanks Deja! So kind are your words! Here is hoping. Actually, once I get thru this massive inworld move to my new parcel of land for my store and art gallery I plan to have a whopping Grand re-opening party to show off the new digs of my parcel and that of my landowner's attached mall. I have a ton of connections with a lot of amazing Live SL musicians so I think I will call a few faves and get some of them to do a marathon of gigs. And heck - maybe finish it off with a TOY Karaoke Gig

Darrius, The fact that the anomally happened on a Sat-Sun does lead one to think the problem was possibly caused by an indirect glitch - like maybe a patch to a server or a batch cleanup run or who the heck knows. I am thinking that since we know that LL staff typically do not work on the weekends unless its to address some unusual situation or run a special process/upgrade - what happened to my MB listings likely was not targetted to my listings. Seems my MB listings were victims of something else. But I dont know how I could have MB listings that were in unassociated DD Delivery Mode state before I would explicitly change the listing from MB to DD myself. I really dont know what caused the problem 5 days ago to my MB items but I could see it was ONLY my 6 MB items and not my 40+ DD items (wow that almost sounded like a woman's measurements). I cant explain what happened but I guess this would be the same and why LL cant explain why only a certain category of MP listings were corrupting when DD was released. I think many have already agreed that the overall architecture of DD is disjointed and open to unnatural results based on certained errant events that could occur. i.e. weak on checks and balances. On the good side - I am not 100% on DD. And I know this is a coincidence or because of the publicity of this thread but I made several sales on these newly converted packs after the conversion. That proved the conversion worked and I finally had a good day !

Dilbert Dilweg wrote: Yea I thought about this as being a possiblity several years ago. But not as a DNS thing.. But really. If a resident loves your product or store/business, and wants to return, they will find you if you advertise properly about having to move. I built my first and second club on main land and had to move the clubs to a private region after we got massively popular. Everyone found us with no problem . I have done this 2 times without any one having trouble finding us. Club and mall for both places... You location may have changed but your profile and business name is still the same and searchable... and they can seek you out like that... If something was to be done Maybe would be easier just to set up a simple change of address system . Where merchant/business owner submits to the landmark change of address system. So when any user tried to access the landmark to your old location . the system sees this and drops the user a new popup and landmark letting them know you have moved and to update their landmarks. Would probably be less complicated than a dns naming system. And the change of adress should have an expiration date. 6 months or a year like you would have on US postal service.. All you are suggesting are alternatives and mitigations that we are forced to accept because of SL's current limited deployment of LMs. Since we ALL currently have this major limitation with LM's in that they are independant "cast in stone" definitions of a specific inworld location that cannot be mass changed (nor should they be as they do serve their specific purpose), then anyone that operates any public / commercial traffic attracting & promoting location has no choice but to come up with several other solutions to overcome the limits of not have a Virtual LM system. Yes I do know that if a club of store or concert place is popular enough that customers / guest will eventually find you - but that really isnt the point. As much as I agree that when I move my store and gallery in the coming 2 weeks that "I WILL SURVIVE" , the point is that 3 years of a growing footprint of my distribution of LM's in all my customers and potential customer's inventory will be instantly wiped off the face of the SL virtual world. Over the days, weeks, months after my move there will be SL residents that might have my LM and want to use it and land in some abandoned sim or worse yet a sim with Adult content when they didnt expect it. Many SL residents that will try the LM and land in a place they didnt expect will more times than not simply assume my SL business went under and shurg and say "Ohh well thats too bad". Please dont say this never happens because this happens all the time and even by me. I just did it this week when I was looking for a blues club and I Searched my inventory for "blues". I saw 5 LMs in my inventory for blues clubs - I clicked on each of them and only 1 was a valid location. Did I look for the alternative place for the ones that were invalid? NOPE! I couldnt be bothered. I just assumed these clubs went under and looked for another place. I deleted the LM and this club will never be looked for by me again. For the club owner.... a lost visitor. Now... if we had a VLM system and these clubs all set up a VLM to their club. They now have full flexibility to change their club's main LM location since all they have to do is make a quick change to the VLM on their VLM Management page. They could also overhaul their club and very easily temporarily change all the 1000's of LMs they handed out to a temporary club space until they finished rebuilding the main club. If they have to move to a new parcel of land - they could not avoid all the effort of communicating and advertising how the club will be or has moved to a new location (I have seen this intense effort happen with many clubs I followe). All they have to do is quietly change the VLM mapping to the new club location at the new sim. BOOM - in seconds all the 1000's of VLMs that all their guests have will now have the new location. So you are right in that without VLMs - store club owners are forced to use other means and take countless hours getting their base of visitors to become aware of their new location. But this does not solve the root cause of the problem that the inventories of every SL resdient is completely polluted with countless invalid, stale, out dated, several versions of LMs. It does not solve the root problem that tons of promotion and marketing in distributing LMs over a long period of time is wastede simply because SL does not have a system like VLMs that can quickly and effectively change the parameters / location details of all these LM's they handed out. SL needs a VLM and VLM Mapping System as much as the Internet needs a DNS.

i created another thread that explains it all...... My MB listings were all switched to DD on July 22 (maybe a lil ealry as i can only see the first time my MB sales ll started failing). When i came onto my inventory i saw my MB listings where set to DD even though i didnt do that AND i obviously had none of the items uploaded to MP (since i had no plans to convert them). I was forced to convert them to make them work.

well if there is a good side... i am not 100% on DD and i wont have to worry about packing up the MB in the next week to move it to the new sim. Also, since i fixed the broken MB-DD terrain packs today, I have made 4500 in sales on those packs and it was 100% delivery. I just hope the 7 of 9 customers that had failed deliveries will all come back to buy. A few said they would but they will buy inworld as they dont trust the MP to buy. They were just happy that their money was refunded when the delivery failed.

well that is why i started this thread to point out what they did to me and to find out if others have had the same problems since about late 21st or 22nd with your MB listings. I am hoping LL will make a rare appearance and explain what they are up to and why they are fiddling with Merchant's store inventory and not notifying MB listing Merchants about MB 4 weeks prior to shut down. I want to have a LL Commerce member explain what they were doing on July 21 - 22. Something happened...

Me complaining to the LL Commerce Team has about as much value as talking to a brick wall. LL hold grudges with SL residents they dont like and they dont like me. Its a rare thing if a LL ever communicates with me unless they are sending me a Forum posting punishment PM. As soon as I noticed the problem today.... I went to see if anything happened to my MB - something that has not screwed up on my land almost the entire 3 years it has been positioned in the same place. My MB has been pretty much 100% flawless all these years. It was still there and I reset it just in case. Then I went to look at the MP listings / inventory management and I saw my 6 listings with all their photos and descriptions like I would have expected but my jaw dropped when I saw them all set to DD. I knew right then that it was the root cause to the 3 days of failures since these MB listings cant be switched to DD if there wasnt an actual uploaded inventory to associated to it. So I decided I better bite the bullet and convert these last 6 listings to DD or else I wont get any sales. I uploaded the packs and edited each of the listings and re-associated them to the items I just uploaded. There was even an empty duplicate listing of only ONE of my MB listings (not 6). So after I associated all my packs to the converted listings - I deleted this weird single empty listing that was there. dont know where that came from either. I performed a test purchase and it worked. I performed a test delivery and it worked. So all is working now. I think its STUPID that LL would do this to my listings and with no notice. And that someone else noticed delivery failures on pretty much the same day (july 21 & july 22 ish) as me - tells me LL did something on the 21st or 22nd. Not sure what they are up to but for anyone that has MB listings..... WATCH THESE LISTINGS REAL CLOSE if you are going to stay on MB.... our loving secret LL Commerce Team is up to something as we are getting close to the date they wanted to shut down MB.

Ela Talaj wrote: I don't use DD but magic boxes only. I've had 5 delivery failures on July 21, which is highly unusual but as far as I can tell no one attemted to convert my items to DD. Well it could have started on the 21st and i didnt sell one of my MB packs until a few hours later on the 22. But all MB listings on my MP inventory had switched to DD mode with now associated assets of course since I never moved them up into MP. They were orphaned. So of course every time a sale was attempted for the following 3 days they woudl fail until I just completed the conversion a few hours ago. It wasnt me that switched my MB listings to DD. So the only ones that could have done this was LL.

Indigo Mertel wrote: I had some reshares within minutes, so the feebback is good. Not sure if you saw my suggestion to submit your JIRA to the Content Creation Improvement Informal User Group, as I edited my previous post to add that bit while you were replying to me. That group is monitored by Linden Lab and has the purpose of discussing new features or improving existing ones. I didnt see your suggestion. I am not aware of this User Group. Maybe if you are part of this group you could mention the idea and point LL to the Jira. LL doesnt really read whats in these forums - well at least not the Merchant forum - not sure of this forum.

Rival Destiny wrote: So LL has, without warning, made the switch from MB to DD & none of our MB should be working? I dont know about anyone else but all 6 of my MB listings were attempted to be converted to DD and broke all of my listings on July 22. An hour ago I was forced to upload my 6 inventory items up to MP and associated the 6 converted listings to what I just uploaded. Who at LL thought this would work???? Converting my MB listings t oDD without the inventory wasnt gonna work.

So I now see why my sales seemed to have been impacted this week. It seems that LL attempted to transfer my remaining MB listings - my 6 big ticket money makers - over to DD and they failed! Today a customer contacted me saying he tried to buy my pack and got a delivery failure. When I looked into his issue I noticed that since July 22 all my MB listing purchase have been failing. 7 failures. 100% of all my delivery failures were my MB listings. I went into MP and noticed that all my MB listings were converted to DD but of course since I did not upload my inventory items into MP... the converted listing had nothing to deliver !! I can tell you with 10000% assurance that it was NOT ME that in any way could have changed my 6 MB listings to DD. I havent been in MP for a while. So it had to have been LL that tried to convert my listings on July 22. I was forced this afternoon to shut down my MB and transfer my remaining MB items to DD. I just shake my head at LL. Thanks LL for the 4 week warning that MB listings were being abandoned!! What a gong show ! I have potentially lost some of these sales these past 4 days. I have contacted each of the customers and told them that LL screwed up my listings and I apologize on their behalf. I hope all of them come back and buy.

So it seems sometime around July 20th, LL somehow tried to force my MB items to become DD listings. It failed and I had DD listings with no asset item tied to it and my MB listings were orphaned. I have lost about $8K in sales this past week from all these failed deliveries! So much for advanced notice of MBs being abandoned.

OK!!! I just realized why my MP sales have sunk in that past week at least. GRRR !! I just got a message from a customer that said he order product and he got a failed delivery on one of my packs. I went in to MP Transaction History and my jaw dropped when I noticed that since July 20th I have getting a rash of Delivery Failures! Prior to the past week I amost NEVER get delivery failures. Since the 20th I hve had 9 delivery failures - mostly on my sculpty packs (my big ticket items). And they of course are my MB. GRRRRr

Thanks Indigo! tonight I will try to socialize the JIRA on my facebook and hope others will grab it and re-socialize. I find for me that for an SL Account Facebook, everyone seems to do a lot of talking but little listening at least for my account. So me posting the Jira on my facebook wont likely go far. I have Twittered my blog of the same idea and the jira to @rodvik @ozlinden and @secondlife. I dont expect any response from that but at lease I posted there. What would be really nice is if LL would just look at the Jira and regardless of the voting popularity - just look at the common-sense logic to the idea and how realtively simple it would be to deploy VS the huge positive impact it would have on improving the SL EXPERIENCE. This idea should fly in LL's mind regardless of the votes.

Thanks Deja for the insights. I am not 100% sure why I noticed a sudden drop in early June and for the most part it has stayed low. Could be the weather. Could be an instant customer wide realization that I have competitors that I have always had. Could be that Everyone decided that buying Sculpties now is outdated even though mesh is not great for large landscape terrains. could just be a quiet cycle. My inworld sales have ALWAYS been the minor part of my overall sales - about 20%. As such I can go days some times without an inworld sale. So I cant really use that as an example. Also, you are correct that my 6 Landscape terrain sculpty packs of all my items in MP make up about 90% of all my sales. My art sales are not even really sales - since typically in SL art is not something that anyone will get rich on. In SL there is generally an impression that Art in SL is nothing more than another pretty texture. As such, the vast majority of SL residents cant justify why they would pay 495 or even over 1000 L for a pretty texture. As such, Art is typically sold to a VERY SMALL % of the SL population - those that really do appreciate the art for being ART and not just a very expensive texture. Sadly there is also a lot of art in SL that is simply stolen as some SL residents actuall come to art galleries and take inworld snapshots of the art and make them into textures for themselves or they just take an illegal copy of it from flickr and bring it inworld. So... I do not have an art gallery for the prime purpose of making me rich in sl. I love showing my art off in SL and if ppl want to buy some of my art - great! I sell my art RL on my RL art website.