Flea Yatsenko

It has nothing to do with any sort of conspiracy theory. It's just extremely poorly timed, no gaslighting please.

Try searching for something like "blue shirt". The expected behavior is to find something that is both BLUE and a SHIRT. The current behavior is to find anything that's blue and anything that's a shirt and then try and sort them in meaningful way. Now imagine when people start searching for "mesh shirt" or "rigged mesh blue shirt". Instead of finding you something that's rigged, blue, and a shirt; it'll find you everything that's rigged, everything that's blue, and everything that's a shirt. In short, no one can find anything because no one searches for anything with a single search term and because it's matching all items if they match just a single search term, there's so much irrelevant stuff listed the results look like garbage, because they are. Just imagine trying to filter search results by mesh, material, body type, color, etc and you see how no one can find anything. To top it off, the relevancy results were completely borked and were listing obviously old products (prim and sculpty) over mesh, let alone mesh and material. And then LL has things set up so if a user is inactive and they don't sell anything, their items are purged, yet they are giving old products a huge boost in search rankings so they end up being purchased so the old stuff doesn't get purged because it sold. They have really messed up being able to find anything in search. No one can find what they want, then no one buys anything. Then no one, LL or content creators, make any money. And people are extra mad about it because while they managed to break marketplace search and destroy almost everyone's income, they announced they'll take a larger cut of selling and buying L$, which will discourage people from buying L$ and make it more expensive to cash out. LL's initial response was "just use booleans and quotes", i.e. blue AND shirt AND rigged AND mesh but no other search engine works that way. Because the results are garbage. Just imagine searching Google for "weather today" and it shows you articles about weather, what's happening today, and fails to tell you what the weather is today.

LL just use /index/type/_search?scroll=X and /_search/scroll. Please it's not that difficult to implement. You can show all the pages you want if you use the scroll feature of elasticsearch.

Excuse my attitude, but that response from LL sounds more like they can't get elasticsearch to work properly and are telling the users to fix it themselves by changing their queries. I use elasticsearch, if it's not defaulting to boolean AND with each search token you are doing something extremely wrong. I'm starting to think they simply don't know how to fix it. They never really admit a problem either. I am going on hiatus from building until this is sorted out, sorry. Maybe if you earn my trust again and make an effort to fix search I will create content for you. Right now this is a waste of time and I'll just let my outdated products LL is promoting in search rankings provide me with some income. No reason to make new stuff if the old stuff is cannibalizing sales because of search ranking.

I'm selling old sculpty products and early mesh products more than anything. If this isn't fixed, I'm going to take it as a sign from LL that they want cheap, low quality, high quantity products and stop making complex and high end builds.

Some of this seems silly. LL is leaving a lot of money on the table just from having SLMP search be in a bad state. No one buys things if they can't find what they want and creators don't make as much because people aren't buying as much. Kind of sad, I was hoping the change they announced a while ago about shifting LL revenue from land to other means would boost content creators and LL at the same time. I wouldn't really care about the increase if I saw increased sales volume because they made some sort of huge improvements to SLMP to make buying and selling on it more enjoyable. But the last few weeks have been people complaining about SLMP having problems. And it has been having problems. I think this was very poorly timed at best as there's a lot of content creators who are feeling the pain from the poor relevancy of SLMP search and to tell them their fees have gone up at this time wasn't very well thought out. Really feels a little unfair, I'm not going to see any benefit from the land price changes yet I'm going to lose some income to make up for land prices being lower. I'm not one to usually complain, and an extra 2.5% isn't going to be the end. In fact I lose far more than 2.5% income from SLMP being broken, SLMP search sorting being completely messed up, and there being billing/maintenance problems. I'm ignorant of a lot of inner LL workings but I think they could make that money up much easier by letting SL not be broken so much

A big problem with search results showing outdated and old products is that it makes SL as a whole look out dated. Imagine you are a new user and you search for something and all you find are sculpties, prim hair, etc, a ton of out dated stuff. There's some really awesome builds and stuff creators have made and SL has added a lot of features to enable content creators to make cooler and cooler stuff. Not only does that make SL look out of date, it makes it look worse to new users. If you were a new user and people told you about SL, so you went to buy something that interested you, and only found stuff way out dated with old school building methods, how would you feel about SL in general? I know I wouldn't be excited. Not to mention LL takes a cut of sales, it hurts their revenue when they are promoting 10 year old sculpties for L$99 instead of up to date products that cost more. After keeping the grid stable and reliable, the most important thing for SL is making sure marketplace search works. That's how you start your avatar and it's a large part of how you start building with builder's kits and stuff. It might take a while for that to show up, odds are they are using a lot of caching so you're seeing the cached result instead of the latest result. Which is fine, it just means it takes a little bit to update at the cost of running faster and loading faster. It could be your browser too, you may have to force refresh the page, usually control+F5.

The TL;DR between Geforce and Quadro is that Quadro is designed to be stable and accurate, and Geforce is designed to be as fast as possible. I.E. if there's two ways to write code in the driver, the Quadro way is the most accurate and least likely to crash or have a display errata and Geforce way is to bump up those frame rates even if there's some sort of display problem or it might not be the safest or most stable way. No one cares if there's alpha ordering issues in a game, but if you're doing CAD work for CNC machining and there's even slight inaccuracies it can cause problems.

I second a new CPU, motherboard, and RAM before the GPU. The GPU and CPU are going to hold you back, and it might be pretty expensive to do graphics card and the rest of your system. I had an i7 920, the stock speeds are horrible. Most CPUs are doing 4ghz now and in laymans terms they do a lot more for each ghz they have. I.E. a quad core new CPU at 4ghz is a lot faster than twice as fast as your 2.67ghz i7 920. Your graphics card is so old it no longer receives any meaningful driver updates, only security updates. You aren't going to see any meaningful improvements until you upgrade the CPU and graphics card. If you do one at a time you're going to be very disappointed, but if you can't afford to do both at the same time you're going to have to accept that you're going to spend money on one or the other and not see much improvement.

Pose stands are there to solve a problem. I.E. you are moving around when trying to adjust things on your AV, etc. and your AV keeps moving so it's impossible to grab what you want. If you want to make things easier, you get rid of the problems for needing a pose stand in the first place. You can't get rid of all of them, but I'm pretty sure everyone here at some point in their Second Lives ended up trying to move an attachment and fighting the AV from moving around. I know I did when I was new. For example, a way to solve that problem would be to have an animation or pose play when you open up your build tools. If you're trying to get a screen shot, turn off all other animations and open up a list of poses or animations and let you choose them. Almost all other snapshot features in other games do this, like you pick poses and stuff when you're taking your snapshot. I feel like a lot of problems with SL's interface comes from trying to solve a problem by adding a new feature, instead of trying to remove a problem. A good interface teaches people how to use the interface without even realizing it. Like, they'd have a snapshot mode that was borderline tutorial, had some poses so people could learn to use poses and what they do, give them the ability to rez some props and move them around, etc. If you have a game that has a snapshot or photo mode check it out and see how it works and compare it to setting a scene for a snapshot with SL.

Nux and having a mesh body included is going to really help with retention. The most expensive part of getting a good looking AV going is the after market head and body. It's also the first part of making an avatar, which means a new user is asked to easily pay over $40 for a head and body for something they don't know if they'll like or want to stay around for. Every other free to play game lets people get involved for nothing and slowly introduces the paid options. SL is the opposite, basically "spend L$5,000 on this body and L$5,000 on this head and we can start to pick out clothes and stuff." The initial cost of looking decent in SL absolutely kills retention. I'm sure many of you have tried to get friends into SL, only for them to wonder why they have to spend so much money just to NOT look like a total noob. SL's monetization is backwards, it should start out with some cheap and free stuff to get people involved, then work them up to really cool, rare, expensive stuff. Instead you can easily spend over L$10,000 or more just on a body and head. Only to start buying L$250 clothing accessories. Much easier to get someone buying accessories for L$250 if that's their first in world purchase, as opposed to convincing someone to spend the money on a mesh body and head. And if they want a better mesh body and head, which they will at some point, it won't be so intimidating and scary to drop so much money on it. There are lots of other things they can do to improve retention. But the initial cost is absolutely terrifying for new users. Even if they find fun stuff to do or cool people, they're going to be the odd ball newb looking user and their experience is going to suffer for it. It's also why so many people want to make money in SL, because everything seems so expensive and they think it's better to try and make money. I know the library exists but it's all sort of outdated and looks out of place compared to new stuff on the marketplace. SL has more than enough concurrent users, they have more than Final Fantasy XIV according to steam charts. But I think they are too spread out.

I would really hope they are using something like elasticsearch, algolia, etc and not a standard MYSQL server for search.

Think it won't be too much longer, my dashboard is working again. Kudos to them for fixing this so quickly on a weekend. Actually I'm back in world, nice.

They are aware, database outage. It might take a while, depends what database is having problems. I would assume it's a login database server if the website and viewer logins are down. https://status.secondlifegrid.net/

SL has been doing this for a long time. I would (and still do) go through phases where I would sell outdated sculpty stuff like crazy and no one would touch the mesh or material+mesh stuff. It was pretty baffling to me until I went into my store and started sorting things, only to find it would bury some of my complex and fan favorite builds in favor of things like sculpty rocks and outdated stuff that I just keep around as legacy content because people still want it on rare occasion. If I go to my store and search by relevant it's all really old stuff. I have no idea why it goes through phases like this. But it's doing it now, and I'm assuming sort by relevancy applies with or without a query like it does with other search I deal develop with. All my sales are organic and rely on search and word of mouth. So my store is pretty sensitive to changes in marketplace sorting and other changes. For me Amazon shows things I was searching for but didn't buy, more things I was searching for and didn't buy, then items related to what I've purchased in the past. At the very least it has a remote clue of what I'm interested in. Marketplace not so much. If marketplace was smart enough to know which mesh body you've been purchasing stuff for, and then show you similar clothing and styles I think it'd be a huge improvement to randomly showing you featured ads. Nothing ever really breaks or degrades in SL like it does in RL but there's lots of complimentary products to things people buy. I.E. you buy stuff to decorate your house then it starts showing you more home decorations instead of stuff completely irrelevant to me. But regarding normalization I thought search used something like Elasticsearch and not database, but that wouldn't surprise me I guess if it did just query the database for search.

Every additional step that a potential customer has to take to get to a product is a lost sale. The default response for a user trying to find something is to search just by typing in a raw query, lace reborn, and if the results are not relevant, they just assume it doesn't exist, not that the search engine isn't working properly. Considering LL takes a hefty commission from each sale and they want to change their revenue from land tier to sales, you'd think they'd want to increase sales for everyone. The only users who know to start using quotes and booleans are the power users (congrats to you if you use them, you're probably in the top 10% of search engine users), most people just give up and assume it doesn't exist. They direly need a data expert who can somehow waddle through the free for all of marketplace listings and can correlate products with other products, as well as provide a highly effective search. It needs to be ran like an ecommerce site like Amazon, Google Shopping, Wayfair, Overstock, you get my drift. Also, get rid of useless classified ads and create an expensive, manual review system where products can be grouped on the home page. I.E. you pay and things get grouped into "male mesh body accessories" that's a big category on the front page. Something like this but converted to SL would be amazing. Just imagine going to marketplace and seeing products you actually want to use and buy, and they're on sale. There's so much they can do but they keep thinking search is the end all, be all. This is not a search engine, it's a commerce site. Look at when you go to Amazon logged in, it shoves things you've bought and similar items in your face. You can find stuff to buy on Amazon that you want without even having to use search. Meanwhile, front page of marketplace is so irrelevant to me, suggesting me female body parts and all sorts of weird stuff. It's not that difficult to create a personalized homepage for marketplace, just grab the keywords for a user's previous purchased items and search for items they haven't bought yet and sort by whatever you've been using. I'm sure someone might complain about privacy but what Google, Amazon, etc are doing dwarfs anything like I'm proposing.

I ran lighthouse, a website performance tool in Chrome, on marketplace a while ago and the results were quite terrible. I posted about it here. I ran it again and it's not amazing but it's not too bad either. I think they are making some big improvements, just not mentioning them because "we reduced content shift by 200ms and time to first render by 300ms" isn't exciting to talk about. That said if you try to visit marketplace when not logged in you get redirected with 302 redirects like 3 times before the page displays so it takes a while to display, but it skips it if you're logged in. They are trying, pretty sure they're aware. I haven't used the official viewer in a while, but marketplace search results doesn't have a tab when you use search in Firestorm in the search toolbar, and it should. You should be able to search everything from the viewer search results, including marketplace listings. I think SLMP runs pretty well right now, there's room for improvement but I think it's hosted on AWS, I don't think the actual hardware/cloud has anything to do with it.

I kind of wish you could just mute emails for specific products. It's annoying to get an email for things like some of my L$49 products.

I've been having problems with the official viewer as well. In a VM or under WINE it will run once, then after you start it again it fails any start up checks (either invalid graphics or invalid bit depth on the new materials viewer). It's excessively obnoxious because it works fine in WINE until you restart, then it just fails the start up test. And --noprobe and --ignorepixeldepth do not work either. I just want to upload some mesh and get to work and I have to download all sorts of different viewers only to find random things are broken (latest Firestorm doesn't keep linked object names from Blender anymore, which I need). Same thing happening in my Windows 10 virtual machine. Forgive my little rant but this is completely ridiculous I have to go through so many hoops just to do basic tasks in SL.

I don't think you need to delete, you need to create a subfolder in the listing folder that has the version of the product. It's kind of confusing at first and doesn't make sense. It should be something like Winter Outfit Copper DEMO (addme) 1.0.0 (CONTENTS)

Yes, I love SL being commerce driven, it has some flaws but it means nearly limitless content a single content creator for a locked down virtual world could never dream of matching. LL basically outsourced their content creation to their users by giving them financial reward and it's created the most dynamic virtual world in existence, probably that will ever exist. Of course that huge amount of content makes it more difficult to use because it's very difficult to find stuff. If everything is made by the developer, they control search and how you find things. LL has to basically try and wade through millions of things on the marketplace. UIDs for products are already in the 24 million range and every new listing gets a UID that starts from a low number (usually 0) and increments with each new addition. The content here is amazing, you can find whatever you want. There's so much potential with SL but it's being held back by around 20 years of legacy code, but any major changes can break existing content which is SL's most amazing feature (don't get me wrong, there's lots of other ones too). SL reaching more people means the cost of SL is going to drop. I feel a lot of merchants could sell at lower prices if they had more volume, but because their stuff is somewhat niche it's not worth their time to make niche products for a lower cost. Basically, the easier SL is for new users the more will show up and stay and the cheaper and better everything gets.

How SL runs on your computer has nothing to do with the cost. Simulators are expensive because they can't be suspended. If you have an empty sim with a pet walking around, and no one enters the sim for a week, LL still has to pay for that server or virtual private server or whatever they are running. Existing content makes the assumption that things will always be running. LL could offer cheaper sims and land if they came up with different simulator software that could be slept and hibernated, frozen in time, when no one is there, so they could put more land on the same amount of hardware as most of it would be suspended anyways. But last I heard sims were given dedicated hardware, and they are always running no matter what's happening on it. In fact if you just buy a sim, leave it completely empty, and have no one ever enter it, it still takes up hardware and still runs the simulator, even if it's not really simulating anything. This made a ton of sense when SL was created and it's how everything was done. But with virtual machines and virtual private servers the cost of hosting websites dropped massively. LL has to run their simulators on dedicated hardware (even if it's in "the cloud" it still has dedicated resources). A dedicated web server is usually around $125 for an alright spec server (when not discounted). People who make web sites for hobbies and stuff can't afford that. But you can get a VPS for $4 a month because it's shared, can be suspended, etc. LL is still running a dedicated hardware model for their servers when most places have moved to VPS. Look at Minecraft, you can run a server on a VPS for $4 a month because it's not dedicated hardware, it's a VPS for a world that can go to sleep when no one is in it. People would be paying $100+ a month for a minecraft server if it required dedicated hosting. But because of VPS they aren't.

People are giving me issue over this, but in 2009, smart phones were brand new and quite honestly not really popular yet. Now there are lots of people, especially younger, who grew up with nothing but a phone or tablet and something like a computer is completely alien to them. There are plenty of articles about people who can't even handle or understand files and folders because all they use is search. People who can't even use a keyboard well because they grew up on touch screen keyboards. A lot of these people are in their 20s already. It's safe to assume almost all of us grew up with actual computers. We're used to all this stuff. A lot of people today aren't. The times have changed, and unfortunately they've gotten simpler and, ignore my lack of political correctness, dumber. It's really easy to look at the viewer right now if you're used to actual computers and think it's fine. But the majority of people aren't fine with it anymore. And if you want SL to be anything other than some niche thing only hardcore computer users like it's going to have to change to get with the times. The times have changed, in 2009 the primary computer device was an actual computer. Now it's a phone or tablet. Computer people can easily handle files and folders and huge menus and busy interfaces. Phone and tablet people can't, everything is based around search and being simple and easy to use. Computers are the opposite. There's also a billion things on the internet vying for people's attention, 10 years ago it wasn't so bad. But with all this competition, it's very easy for someone to look at a complex interface and just go "NOPE!" and move onto something else. It used to be if you wanted a virtual world, you basically just had SL. Now there's minecraft, roblox, VR chat, all sorts of things. And all of them are easier to start with. VR Chat has (had?) virtually no IP enforcement. You could go on there and dress up as your favorite IP for free and no one (legally) would care. People had patience for SL when it was the only one in town. Now there's competition and being difficult to use means people will just give up and try something else, instead of trying to take the time to learn.

LL really needs to turn the current client into the advanced editor and make a lightweight client that has an interface that only contains the most commonly used features by the average user, and work on making them as easy to use as possible. No build tools, a very simple avatar editor (editing shape, editing outfits, etc), great chat/friend system, easy way to explore and find people and places, and an easy way to shop. The current viewer is way too complex for any sort of newbie, and it's designed by people who are so familiar with SL that they don't realize how complex it's gotten. Really, they need to take inspiration from games like The Sims and VR Chat and how those interfaces work, and apply it to a lightweight interface on the current viewer. The tech updates they have planned for 2023 are fantastic, and some of them would make a simpler interface way better than it would be based off of what the official viewer is now (like outfit previews), but besides missing support for mobile platforms, this is probably the second biggest thing holding SL back from seeing major growth. Content creators are usually 1 in 100 users, the default client shouldn't cater to 1% of users.

Those are just what LL recommends, the minimum is only 2 cores. You don't need 8 cores. But SL is currently limited by the CPU, not the graphics chip. But that might change a bit when PBR releases.