SUGGESTION: Add ''subscribe'' button to MP stores

[Adams Scarmon]

Hey

 

basically the idea is very simple and its like youtube.

You can ''subscribe'' to the stores/creatores that you like and everytime they upload a new item to the marketplace you get it on the MP homepage in your overview.

It's a so much better way to get informed whenever your favorite store comes out with a new item. You don't need inworld groups anymore to receive news about updates either.

Please can you implement such a feature? It's the biggest thing that is lacking on the mP right now for me.

 

[Pamela Galli]

This is frequently requested. And ignored.

[Adams Scarmon]

Why do they ignore it if its frequently requested?

[ChinRey]

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Adams Scarmon wrote:

Why do they ignore it if its frequently requested?

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I suppose you'll get about a dozen "because LL doesn't care" replies to that question.

But I think they're wrong actually, LL does care and I think they're even beginning to understand what is expected and needed from a good web store now. But there are so many things that need to be fixed and they're so far behind. And the core of the MP software is rotten, there's no other word for it really. That means everything has to be done slow. The poor programmers assigned to the task have to somehow try to figure out the mess before they can do anything about it and even then they have to be very cautious because any changes can have unexpected consequences.

[Pamela Galli]

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ChinRey wrote:

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Adams Scarmon wrote:

Why do they ignore it if its frequently requested?

---

I suppose you'll get about a dozen "because LL doesn't care" replies to that question.

But I think they're wrong actually, LL

does

care and I think they're even beginning to understand what is expected and needed from a good web store now. But there are so many things that need to be fixed and they're so far behind. And the core of the MP software is rotten, there's no other word for it really. That means everything has to be done slow. The poor programmers assigned to the task have to somehow try to figure out the mess before they can do anything about it and even then they have to be very cautious because any changes can have unexpected consequences.

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While I agree with all the above, I also think LL could improve communication with creators. I mean, we do build the fracking world after all. The Bento thread is a model of good communication for the most part. There needs to be a whole lot more of that. To me it is just bizarre that there is still so much silence, after all the vows that things would be improving, which they have to a degree, but not enough. 

[Codex Alpha]

I'm very confident they can figure it out technically.. now desire is another thing.

Time better spent on Second Life 2 would be better, and probably more profitable than Sansar, at least in the next 10  years.

[ChinRey]

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entity0x wrote:

I'm very confident they can figure it out technically..

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Of course they can, anything can be repaired. But as an instrument repairman friend of mine once said to a customer who brought in a particularly battered up cello: "Yes, it can be fixed but it's cheaper to build a new one".

One part of it is the stereotypical programmers' tendency to regard web and database programming and design as "second class programming", grossly underestimating the complexity and importance of these two specialised branches of their field. I know that's more of a cliche than reality but LL did suffer from it for a long, long time. All LL's web applications and pages and most of their database systems are horribly amateurishly made although few are as bad as MP. (It's the same syndrome that hits the UI and documentation btw: the stereotypical Dilbert style programmer who simply can't comprehend that the code you write in C++ only is 20% of the full product. )

The second problem at the core of MP is that it wasn't originally a part of the SL system. Various people had the idea of making an internet store for SL merchandise. LL saw this and thought it could be a good source of income so they bought the two biggest and forced the others to close down. The Marketplace has never been Linden Lab's baby, for them it's just a milk cow adding to the revenue. Add to that that it's a web site, not "real programming", the general lack of targeted development at LL around the time they bought MP and the general problems integrating two wildly different software systems and it's easy to see why MP went off to a bad start.

As if that wasn't enough, for some reason it was decided that the MP software should be written in Ruby. Now, Ruby is a good programming language and well suited for a task like this, so there was nothing wrong with that decision in itself. But Linden Lab didn't actually have anybody familiar with the and they weren't going to hire anybody else just to write something as trivial as a web application. The result was that Linden programmers were struggling to learn the basics of a new language whilst they were writing some really advanced code in it. That's a recipe for disaster.

I think we've seen a very good example of the result of this mess recently. The fairly minor update to MP search should be about a month's worth of work for a good programmer, possibly even less. Grumpity is a very good programmer and he even seems to be especially good at cleaning up messy code. The job still took him almost a year. It is of course possible the reason was that he was kept busy with "more important" work but it's more likely he had to spend most of that time code cleaning.