Kampu Oyen

>Or it could be the Quacking duck gets shot**Only uploaded images may be used in postings**://secondlife.i.lithium.com/i/smilies/16x16_smiley-wink.gif" border="0" alt=":smileywink:" title="Smiley Wink" /> Maybe some ducks shoot back.

>Such a vague and badly defined promotion was guaranteed to be widely interpreted as there are a huge variety of items that could fall within their 'madstyle' category. At the end of the day it boils down to a personal judgement. Or, rather, it comes down to whose trademarks we understand CommerceTeam Linden intends to have us help her infringe by use the the "madstyle" tag. If Mad Men were a Nickelodeon production, that might help narrow it down. >Perhaps it is just a little commerce team experiment to determine their comunication effectiveness. Let me save them the trouble with their next idea, whatever it is: "FAIL"... unless they first replace (or at least remove) the person who is presently poisoning their efforts. >The fact that more than 1,000 items have already been key worded as a result of a very low key posting, tells me and most probably the commerce team that a lot more people read and act on the forum announcements than the comments left would indicate. Not really. The items are listed by a pretty small number of total merchants. >I'd like to be a fly on the wall to see, how many, how often and who most regularly hits the flag button to report an item for what they believe to be 'madstyle' keyword infractions. The fly on the wall is most likely the person tabulating flagging rates in order to recruit some kind of fanatical volunteer marketing police who will be naively used to push whole categories of things off the market. Legitimate psychedelic items are already being flagged and removed for the use of "madstyle" as a keyword. Yes... they ARE.

I think a better point would be that they neither close those JIRAs by providing the requested change, not by explaining why they refuse to do so. Even if they could just say "(X) remains a higher priority than (Y)", a lot of us might grumble, but it would be somewhat intelligible as a possibly good business decision for LL. Assuming someone at LL can at least bump up the IM limit to 30, I bet there's also someone who would really like to do it, although maybe not the same person. But instead of coming to even some kind of tentative conclusion on such a question (and posting it), I guess they're too busy working on a way for people to upload smells or something... you know... just in case user-end technology might eventually be developed to support that.

>Why? Because everyone else's underperforming products are just as deserving to get a boost from it; not just Tiny psychedelic bear avatars that haven't yet learned how to roast a marshmallow (or have they?) OTOH, it now occurs to me that if "madstyle" is subjective "NOT madstyle" must be equally subjective; meaning, this event may be a great opportunity for Lindens to permanently delist items competing with their own alts' products, at least if the competing products somehow happen to get flagged as spamming with the "madstyle" keyword. Of course, not using the "madstyle" keyword at all also entails certain risks. @ Polenth Yue >Though given that the Linden description of the 60s doesn't mention things people usually associate with 60s design It's almost as if the person who came up with this is either too young to remember 1st wave 60's nostalgia, and/or they grew up in some place where media was controlled in such a way that a normal conception of the 60's (regardless of historical accuracy) would never be formed. Bolivia? Mongolia? Rwanda? Texas?

Speaking of Catch 22, didn't the old guy say "No - It's better to live on your feet than to die on your knees!"? My preliminary efforts seem to suggest that the more pointedly you confront abuses by the LIndens, the less they'll actually try to mess with you. Or I could be wrong. We'll see.

>what is it with all of these scared merchants posting with alts? Well, if it's good enough for the Lindens...

>Read the merchants forums to get a feel for the views being articulated by merchants. Or at least the ones that LL isn't having deleted.

I'm pretty sure she's just following the protocols provided for her responses here. LL doesn't need Dakota getting her own ambiguous meta-alt just to continue interacting here, as has been done with Brooke after the bad interactive protocol incident setting up 13 September. Please note that Dakota did not tell you to submit a JIRA, but only to assure that one exists; surely a reasonable measure before considering the submission of a JIRA of duplicate content. Again, props to Dakota for being less than totally clear about the 25 cap being likely to be reviewed after the boxes are shut off. Being any more clear about it could eventually be construed as lying when it finally just doesn't happen. Most of all, we should thank her for using the word "after", which is not any specific time, but merely the opposite of before. So I guess the total breakdown of the message is something like "If that is ever going to be addressed at all, it will not be addressed any time before 1 June." Looking at the messages again Toy, is that more or less how you would summarize their salient content?

I think what's keeping the n00bs away, more than anything, is probably just an established reputation for SL being a pain in the a$$ to use for much of anything. This has been earned not by the low quality of service (open to debate, but don't let's start that), but by the extreme lack of consistency of service.

I have specifically encouraged people to use the keyword "madstyle" for any product that is underperforming, but I have also asked people to report what proportion of those keyworded products actually turn up on a keyword search for "madstyle" after a few days. Preliminary reports are consistent with a greater than 50% failure rate for this keyword as a search word.

You don't think it has anything to do with cutting off listings for 4th Quarter products from 2010? If we look at merchants who have massive amounts of 4th Quarter holiday product listed immediately before and/or after the 14xxxxx cluster, these are people with products that are now bound to pop more readily due to the delisting of competing products. I wonder how many people on such a list are also going to have larger-than-usual Halloween promotions in-world this Fall.

What do you think would have happened if you hadn't returned the money or reported the incident? It sounds to me like someone might be generating decoy transactions in order to slow down an investigation of some kind.

I am also not seeing the reported phenomenon. I'm not quick to dismiss such things, though.

I don't think you and I essentially disagree which things are being manipulated or why. LL clearly has the right to manipulate a lot of different variables in the SL economy. But the parallel with bonds is somewhat imprecise, and in a way that is potentially important to understanding what's really going on with the SL money supply and things tangent to it as an important variable in total service value. Central banks do issue bonds, yes. But they don't print bonds for people on demand, or refrain from printing them until somebody asks for them. Linden dollars will tend to come into existence only when someone pays to produce them with real money, and will tend to cease to exist only when someone spends them in-world or causes them to be destroyed as a commission paid on Marketplace items. So they're more like bonds written by the person buying them and then accepted by the person issuing them, along with the payment. If banks did that, they would be very much at the mercy of consumers, and would have to make a industry of finding loopholes to cancel the bonds they agree to issue. LL does that, of course. And, to the extent that it is transparent, it's really a very fair thing to do. If you want to use land or upload a texture or something, you have to agree to cancel some tiny little bonds. Why not? Understanding this, though, I think it might be somewhat normal for a person to then wonder whether some of the weird transaction activity recently exhibited by marketplace function might not indicate some kind of very desperate attempt to, as you say, "tighten up" the money supply. I have certainly had that thought. If users can't be adequately persuaded to destroy these microbonds of their own accord, would not a natural next step for a company sufficiently desperate to control its own effective virtual asset values be to create some large pattern of errors in which almost all errors are too small to be legally actionable, and in which the errors uniformly result in the spurious destruction of these microbonds, rather than their spurious creation? It also occurs to me that if every Linden dollar actually had some kind of serial number (even if not visible to users), that would make the whole system a lot more potentially transparent to auditors or investigators... and that this last point might pretty well explain why such serial numbers "probably" do not exist and will "probably" never exist as long as the Lindens are allowed to generate them and destroy them according to user whimsy without really accounting for them as specific or discrete virtual objects. I suppose it's a bit like the dollars people spend with their credit cards also not having any serial numbers. Except, of course, that even the number of such dollars generated by credit card companies is at least nominally regulated by government agencies. Is the Linden dollar really regulated by anyone other than the Lindens? Even a poker chip in Las Vegas is regulated by entities external to the casino. (and my point there is....?)

Рыба воняет с головы.

>until SLM supports their products. What's the hurry? Surely the Lindens would never want to deploy any code before they're absolutely sure it works perfectly.

I have formed the impression that this is as good an answer as Dakota will be allowed to give until someone higher in the system finally gets 5h1tcann3d. Even the admission that someone wanted a 100 item limit for use with a 25 limit IM system is a tiny little **bleep** in the armor of unresponsiveness, and I sincerely hope that Dakota isn't penalized for mentioning it. To try to be fair, extending the 25 limit might have produced as many problems as changing 100 to 10, so, in principle, I don't blame LL for choosing not to risk breaking their primary interface in order to try to accomodate some new gizmo which is not technically necessary in any case. So, as frustratingly incomplete as these 2 responses by Dakota still are, I have to give props for not simply ignoring the question (or deleting it, which, among Lindens as a whole, is not without precedent). OTOH, if any Linden still might like to come forward and state unequivocably that Brooke, in specific, DID NOT push for the 100 shopping cart to be used with the 25 IM, that would tend to help me develop a more fair idea of how things are really being done at LL. Please?

Facepaw? Puns are too much to bear. ... More seriously, though: I'm really looking forward to seeing who has a nice big in-world strore of new Halloween items this year. You know why, huh.

I should think the first step would be to politely ask the other party to refrain from using an essentially identical piece of text, and to let them know that LL will also have received an exact copy of your polite request, simply as a point of good form. It's certainly nicer to imagine that if someone only does something like this one time, it might easily be the kind of mistake they are willing to correct without any unpleasantness.

> I too am disappointed in the lack of search-result updating. It's nearly pointless to release new items. Anyone who doubts the statistical pointlessness of depending on the search function only needs to list about 30 items with the keyword "madstyle" and check in a few days to see how many of them actually pop up on a keyword search for that word. Go ahead and try it. What do you have to lose?

>There's no need to be rich at all This remains true as long as there's a Marketplace website for people to use to get their foot in the door business-wise. But let's turn back the clock until before XStreet to consider why people of means should want to shut down commerce not in-world, and, certainly, not allow to succeed a delivery system that doesn't even require one to rent a spot for a box. Assume it's about 2006 and you're laundering weasel dust money for the Esperanto mafia... Grid expansion sounds like a great idea, because it will probably make your activity less conspicuous. A problem is that in order for this to work, in-world commerce has to expand to fill most of the larger grid. Gambling gettting shut down already cramps your style, but when the grid expansion finally comes, trying to turn all of SL into a giant shopping mall actually turns off so many new users that total economic activity goes slightly into decline. Then along comes XStreet. Because of the more defined set of records maintained by a 3rd party, the use of XStreet for money laundering is a much dicier proposition, and the shift of merchants to Xstreet leaves the activity of in-world merchants ultimately more exposed to scrutiny by interested parties. If you need to keep using SL to conduct your illegal business, and you have any influence at LL, you better use it. How? Get them to shut down XStreet and anything else like it. But they can't just do that, can they? No, not just like that. What you need them to do is to replace it with some other option for users and then gradually create a set of excuses that will allow that replacement service to be eliminated, or at least sufficiently marginalized. Of course, although this would also do a lot to explain why it's people connected to large in-world businesses that are constantly defending LL's failures on this forum and asking to have people banned, it remains quite unproven. OTOH, Rod hasn't really offered any alternate explanation, either. The default implication of his failure to explain would seem to be that the combined selection of the toxic release dates of 13 September and 14 February is merely coincidental to their high utility risk to Marketplace merchants. Estimated very charitably to LL, the company is only about 66,000 years ahead of probability schedule to make such a combined set of bad decisions at random, and yet they've made it within the space of about 10 years. Just considering the mathematics of things, does the influence of money launderers seem more likely or less likely than one chance in 6,600? If you effectively investigated 6,600 businesses comparable in size to SL, how many would you expect to be in some way influenced by money launderers? So why not this one, specifically? I'm not saying this is necessarily what has happened. But the alternate explanation that is being tacitly offered by others for Rod in his continued silence on the matter really has no greater numerical validity. The real explanation could be very, very different. But if Rod anything better to tell us, anywhere, why would he not be telling us?

> it's how most big businesses are run. Not the ones you can expect to be still around in 5 years.

>Land Required - This item requires that you have access to land in Second Life in order to unpack and use it Yet another subtle way of ambiguously discouraging new users from buying something; implying that objects to be unpacked in sandboxes will instead require them to buy or rent land. The effect is less to produce a misunderstanding than to produce uncertainty and overload of incalculables in the user's mind; this effect being the most important deterrent to new users. If people can just be kept more and more confused as they continue to try to figure things out, they'll tend to give up at some point, and probably before it starts getting easier to understand.

>Maybe the CEO of LL does not respond because of you and your fellow drama queens around here. And this isn't flaming when you do it - why, exactly? >The CEO of LL could've perhaps spared some time for a productive discussion but surely not for mindless drivel. If it were mindless drivel, it should be pretty easy for him to shut us up with a transparent explanation of the process, rather than expecting CommerceTeam Linden's loyal circle of all-female avatars to collectively condescend to LL's critics here with dismissiveness, rather than with any substantive discussion of the issue (which you continue not to offer).

I think "you don't need a house" would be clearer.