Kampu Oyen

Comedy gold. If you want to know what's going to be corrupted next, it's mostly just a matter of looking at a list of things that haven't been corrupted yet. So, really, that should be pretty easy at this point.

I must admit this is not exactly what I imagined in terms of offering selective help to in-world merchants as I predicted earlier. But it does make a bit of sense in any case. If LL doesn't really have any shiny new feature to enveil, they can just create a problem for what seems like everyone, and then solve it in a way that leaves it somewhat unsolved for certain users, thus making it easier for certain others to compete. So don't worry too much. They will fix this problem. In fact they might just fix it really, really well. Maybe just, in your case, not so much. What exciting name do you imagine they will give to the "new" and "improved" in-world search utility?

>Ah ok. If what you suspect is true (and I think it probably is), then starting a new storefront with direct delivery only should not result in any cross-linked listings because there's no magic box in the mix, right? And now we're even somehow blaming the magic boxes for the 14xxxxx scramble? Maybe I'll believe that when it's been shown that none of the scrambled listings were between items to which no magic box had been connected at the time of the scramble (yarite). Really, it just doesn't follow that there's anything about box function that should cause data to be moved either into or out of listing fields such as the photos unless someone worked very very hard to assure this specific effect. The scrambling happens at the same time as the DD deployment and impacts people who used Xstreet without impacting people who came to the Marketplace later, and yet, somehow, it's got to be those pesky boxes making all the new trouble? How convenient for CTL.

>Please can you post JIRA's or other references where there are multiple direct delivery failures. I can't recall seeing any. The major issue was Unicode in listing titles but that only affected payment reconciliation. You are correct that I cannot cite multiple JIRAs for this. But there are reports on this forum by merchants who had delivery failures not attributable to Unicode. That they finally somehow cleared up (for now) is no more guarantee that they won't happen than the intermittent near-perfect functioning of boxes was any guarantee that those problems would not come back (which they did). >Magic boxes never were THE problem. The magic box problem was created by LL when they changed to the currecnt single queue processing system that doesn't properly handle resilience. Thank you. I believe that we are essentially in agreement, then, and that this should be clear to other readers. >1st June cutoff will be put back at least 2 more months is my guess so I don't see any cause for concern. I really hope that you're right about this. But it would also be very inconsistent with what CTL has indicated, by action that she intends to accomplish. The currently rolled-back date of 1 June is much like the commissions holiday after 14 February. Such things are occasionally necessary to assure the water boils slowly enough that the frog won't jump out. To look at the question a bit more naively, though: There has been no announcement about the 1 June box shutoff being contingent on first resolving the DD permissions issue, and there has been no outrage over this impending mandatory service downgrade. So, considering the urgency of eliminating any remaining evidence that the boxes only don't work because LL won't let them work, and the non-urgency of resolving the DD permissions issue, the urgency is bound to win out, even assuming no sinister motive behind the withholding of the permissions fix (which is also a dubious assumption).

>How much do you think it helps your sales. Do you have any idea on that? I felt too 'oogy' to even try testing such a tactic. ;-) It helps enough to warrant the effort, assuming you have enough products and you're not buying listing enhancements. But not much. If others were not also being enabled to do it, I would just as soon not bother.

Raffles, OTOH, are paramutual wagering.

> It will work, really it will. Maybe you're right. But have you seen it work? If the delivery failures people have reported are not specific to their inventories, in what other way would they be specific to those accounts? Why else would some people be getting multiple delivery failures via DD and others none at all? > So you're right, you can wear it, the sim location has nothing to do with it but is it smart? It's smart if you want to see whether it's the box that's the problem. If the box works fine when attached to the avatar, then the box isn't the problem. (And "guess what.") >Other than proving that you can wear it, which you can, it doesn't ever rez anything so sure it will work in no rez locations but why would anyone wear it in a production environment? One would wear it (and also experiment with removing it and reattaching it) in many a heavily lagged Linden region in order to see whether the heavy lag has any detectable ill effects on the box function, especially as compared to simply rezzing the box in a non-Linden place where there appears to be no lag at all. Especially on any day when massive system-wide delivery failures are being reported by other merchants, one would try this in order to see whether it provides a temporary solution by circumventing the region-specific "problems"* that are causing the delivery failures which LL will nonetheless choose to attribute to alleged box defects. (And "guess what.") >No reason at all. Except for the ones given here, this is quite possibly true. >It serves no purpose since if you get logged out, it absolutely WON'T work. It will work better in September 2011 than waiting another 6 months for LL to deploy DD while the rezzed boxes fail to deliver because of system-wide region "problems" which do not affect boxes attached while on Linden sims, even in spite of very intense lag. AND it will work better than waiting for LL to admit that someone is attacking box function in regions that advertise box rental (much less to actually do anything about it). More importantly, when the new "box problems" begin to emerge (any day now) in the hype-up to 1 June, it will work better for breedables merchants either than waiting for LL to support breedables via DD or than waiting for LL fix the same "box problems" it didn't bother to fix in early September "because you'll be able to use DD really soon anyway". If you don't sell items with permissions limits that will be unsupported by DD in the absence of alternatives after 31 May, this last point may be wasted on you. I understand that. In that way, it's a point I'm also sort of wasting on myself. But what's unfair to one group of merchants is really unfair to everyone. If there's a way we can help some of them mitigate the impending escalation of unfairness, I think we should mention it at least often enough that some of them will notice and take what action they can. So I'm telling them: When the boxes stop working correctly any time now ahead of 1 June, it's not the box that's the problem. All you need to do to keep selling your breedables (or similarly DD-incompatible items) until 1 June is to keep your avatar logged on with a magic box attached to it. >Back to chomping through popcorn while sitting in the front row of the stage, waiting for CTL to announce the roadmap for 2012/13... You might want to consult with a nutritionists about that. You're in for a lot of popcorn. Meanwhile, I've already given you the road map. Various types of merchants will be pushed back in-world, and their ability to do business profitably will be controlled by tampering with in-world search. The rest of the story is that as soon any anyone points out on this forum that this is exactly what has happened (some time in June?), a bunch of apparently female merchants from 2009 will emerge out of the woodwork to insist that that couldn't possibly have been the real road map, in spite of the fact that it has explained perfectly where SL commerce has gone. But they won't really offer any evidentiary argument for their position. Instead, the whole thread will be deleted and someone will get banned. Follow-up will include a statistical analysis of the product lines of these merchants to asses the question of whether they compete with other product lines disproportionately impacted by in-word search malfunctions. But that analysis won't be posted here. It will be posted where they can't get it deleted. *please note that I did not use the b-word.

Speaking as someone who has plenty of personal experience exploiting the excessive openness of the keyword function, I'd rather see it become more limited than to be given continued reason to keep trying to out-do competitors on how shameless I can be.

>Of course Direct Delivery will deliver when your inventory isn't available and while your offline I don't think I ever suggested that simply being offline would interfere with deliveries from DD. But inventory being unavailable is a separate problem. If it's unavailable, it's unavailable, whether you're logged in or not. Have you seen even one delivery made yet while inventory was unavailable? I understand that LL has people convinced that DD has nothing to do with personal inventories, but LL also has convinced people of other things that are not strictly correct. The idea that a magic box has to be rezzed on land in order to work, for example. The boxes work better as avatar attachments as long as the avatar is in-world, and the avatar can TP to other regions while the box still says it is rezzed in whatever region the avatar was when the box was attached. Even places where there are no build permissions for that account. I really would like to get off this thread soon. But I at least have to ask one important question... If you have a box on one region and that region goes out of function, you can be prepared for that by having a box on a different region. If your DD folder goes out of function, what is provided to you as a possible alternative? If it will help save some of what I think is probably pointless back-and-forth either here or elsewhere, I'm going to agree with Marcus to begin using other words where I might otherwise use "bork". A also appreciate that Sassy, like the rest of us, is eager to see CTL's road map. But CTL just isn't going to bring it. Not here. Not now. Never. Nowhere. So let me... CTL's road map is to shut off the boxes on1 June, forcing breedables merchants and other people to take their business in-world due to permissions limitations of DD. Once this is accomplished, which merchants can operate profitably and which cannot will be controlled by tampering with the in-world search functions; something we are already seeing to be reported.

You might try to produce a list of people whose in-world shops have been affected and SEE WHAT THEY SELL. If experience serves on this point, there's reason to think that what they sell might not be totally random.

I'd also like to have seen Sassy's thread stay about Sassy's topic. But importantly inaccurate things were being said about the function of the boxes. If that hadn't happened, I'd have stayed away from the thread. If you have a better word than "bork", I'll certainly consider using it instead, on the next thread that is intended to be about something else, and which subtly begins to degenerate into a thread of baseless propaganada about how the boxes, themselves, have some kind of inherent flaw that DD allegedly fixes (despite every possible kind of evidence to the contrary).

" if you use DD, you run the risk of your user account and/or inventory being borked" I can see how that might be unclear out of context. You run the risk of your account or inventory being borked whether you use DD, magic box, both, or neither. But magic boxes can deliver while the owner's personal inventory is unavailable (tested by accident), which no one has shown to be the case with unfindable inventory folders pertaining to DD. This makes DD an additional risk for inventory borking; not necessarily an additional cause of inventory borking. I'm sorry if this was not clear before. Is it clear now? The idea that items are equally available due to loading to MP does not bear even the most basic test of trying to get box-listed items to deliver while a box is unrezzed (try it), so there's no reason I've been given to believe that items to be delivered by DD do not effectively reside inside an inventory folder much as they would otherwise reside in a rezzed box. That is, they ARE loaded to MP, but only if they are available to load either from a box or from an inventory folder. I appreciate that you want to look forward to "the road map". So do I. I have plenty of ideas such as topologically impossible wraparound bubble sims to be used for gaming purposes, and even a possible way to simulate short bits of time travel by applying saved and projected game-state data to allow different player to effectively interact with different points in a narrative stream even as it is being formed. I got me buckets o' this stuff. Some of it would be bound to stick eventually. But I'm not even willing to discuss it with Rodvik face-to-face over a free steak dinner and champagne until he cuts the weakest link out of his chain of command. First things first is the first lesson that LL needs to learn, and I think it's better that we stay on message until it sinks in.

>DD does nothing with your inventory or your account. On this thread, anyway, who even said that it did? That was not the point being made. The point being: DD and boxes are each subject to different types of borking. Boxes are affected by borked regions and DD is affected by borked account and/or borked inventory. Where the bork originates or why is a totally separate matter, and whether DD borks anything at all shouldn't even matter in terms of understanding why the different types of susceptibility to borking might be important to the question of comparative utility between the 2 systems. BTW: I would better like it if you should call me "Kampu", or "Ralph" or "Brooke". Thanks.

>Why are you shouting at me? Sorry about that. I'm just used to forums where the threading is different, so I clicked at the bottom of the thread, and that happened to be you. I understand there are other people who have looked at the box question and found essentially what I also found.

I think it might help people set priorities between multiple projects. If someone makes shoes and guns, but the shoes sell faster, maybe they might want to focus a little more on the shoes.

The item was not spam when listed. If it was spam once borked, LL should fix by unborking it. That is, if something is disallowed as spam, that's just all the more reason why LL shouldn't do things that turn legitimate listings into spam.

Closed perms merchants hate copybotters, and they should. But copybotters are also dependent on items being closed perms in order for cracking them to have any special value. Full perms merchants are actually the natural enemy of copybotters. If you make all your stuff full permissions, there will be no profit in copybotting it. And, yes, people WILL still pay for it instead of bugging all their friends to share copies.

Maybe I wasn't clear. Look at the whole listing image. Madstyle did not appear in the name of the item when it was flagged, and NOTHING AT ALL was in the keywords field. The item was still appearing in searches for "madstyle" for some period of time after those things were removed on 1 May, (9 hours or more before the delisting) but the word "madstyle" itself appears only in the extended description, and thus has nothing to do with relevance searches, which are related only to keyword, listing names, names of stores and names of merchants. Moreover, the listing specifically indicated that the item used NO KEYWORDS, and the item was specifically delisted for keyword spam. So a blank keyword field is now keyword spam? Hmmm. What is one supposed to put in there instead, if words like "sculpted" and "prim" are also "spam" when used to keyword a sculpted prim?* *(see previous discussion on this point if you really care to dig for it)

As always, I'm sure that there's some very logical explanation behind this. Somebody please tap CTL on the shoulder and ask her what it could be. This is no joke. The second image reflects the state of the listing at the time of the flagging.

>who has never closed a JIRA. OK, that's overstated, and I apologize. It should say "who evidently does not know how to properly close a JIRA".

>Why oh why did Lindens have to buy & then destroy Xstreet? Because, as a medium of commerce, either XStreet or anything that functionally replaces it threatens LL's core revenues, which are land revenues, by allowing commerce to occur without merchants paying anything significnt for land use.

You mean "communication" such as POLITELY ASKING merchants to cooperate by please fixing the listings themselves? Something like that?

But it's not exactly silence. It's more like assigning unpaid labor by merchants to manage an open-ended problem; a problem already assigned to someone who has 20% of the open JIRAs and who has never closed a JIRA.

Great work. Now, as soon as you can just get all those other borked items delisted, you can finally close a JIRA.

None of the problems described here are problems with magic boxes. They are all problems with parts of the system connected to magic boxes. When everything connected to the boxes is working correctly, the boxes work correctly. That's why it'sso urgent to get them disabled and deleted before it becomes only more evident that direct delivery is not an improvement.