Stealth Mode

[Angelina Sinclair]

Would it be hard to impliment a stealth feature? Where you can login without anyone knowing your online? It would be nice to login in once in a while and not be bothered when I'm trying to work on something. I'm not trying to avoid anyone but it's hard to focus when nearly everyone who IMs you expects you to reply and hold a conversation with them.

The time I spent typing back, could've been used for building, inventory sorting, decorating or whatever the task of the week is for me. It's odd how in this day and age everyone expects you to reply to their tweets and facebook posts or text messages they send you.

At home when the phone rings I can decide if I want to pick it up or not. However if I'm texted or someone posts to my facebook/twitter account they want me to reply right away. The same thing with SL. Every IM feels like a needy child seeking attention when I want to focus.

So I'm wondering is having a stealth mode a good idea? Or am I gonna have to train my friends with busy messages? I'd hate to have them feel like I'm turning them away all the time especially if something takes a couple days or more to finish.

 

Thoughts?

[Paul Hexem]

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Angelina Sinclair wrote:

Would it be hard to impliment a stealth feature?

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Yes.

[Baloo Uriza]

Just turn on busy mode when you need to not be interrupted.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

I would love to have stealth mode for all the reasons you want it.  I don't have any need to stay in contact with everyone 24/7 and don't expect an immediate reply to my IM's either.  I have no idea what the person is up to and can wait until they are free to talk,  If the message is urgent and important, I say so in the message, but reserve that for things that are really urgent and important.

Personalize your busy message to say something like, I'm working now or afk and can't talk but will get back with you as soon as I can. Then hang out your busy sing.  If friends can't respect it and still demand attention, I'd wonder what kind of friend they are.

[Sassy Romano]

You really do just have the option to ignore them. Start changing the behaviour of others by changing your own.

 

Sometimes I might be logged in and then I will go out to the shops in RL. If someone sent a message while I am away that's just how it is. Just like the phone, it can wait.

 

I do know what you mean though, it annoys me when I am at the cinema and someone pulls out a phone to respond to a text, email or other online service. All of them can wait. If they can't then don't go to the cinema!

 

People can wait. I might start a campaign to reintroduce waiting.

[Coby Foden]

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Angelina Sinclair wrote:

 

So I'm wondering is having a stealth mode a good idea?

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Yes, it is a very good idea. There are times when I don't log in to socialize. Maybe just to check something, test some builds, etc. In such situations there is absolutely no need for the SL servers to announce to all my friends that I'm online.

We do need stealth mode.

 

[jujmental]

Despite what Gadget says, it can not be at all difficult, since LL has managed to do it already.

For themselves.

It's also available to those who have hacked God Mode.

But I'm not going to elaborate on that here.

© The Judge

[Nalates Urriah]

You can always use an alternate avatar.

For building you may need to partner it with your main alt.

There are settings where you can turn off notification of login being sent to friends. Unfortunately it is a person-by-person setting.

[Dora Gustafson]

Stealth mode in the sense that you would appear not logged in, in any way, would be a perfect tool to persecute and torment other residents, so we won't have that with blessings from LL

:smileysurprised::smileyvery-happy:

[Angelina Sinclair]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. It can't be too hard to develop this feature. Though I am wondering how can you hurt people with this?

Maybe someone could start a jira up? I would myself but I don't have a clue on how to get that started up.

[Perrie Juran]

This has been discussed many times in the past.

You really can't compare SL to a simple chat service.

It would be nice to have but implenting it might be a bit more complicated than it appears on the surface.  The problem is (what was discussed in the past) that  there are too many interconnected functions that need to know when you log on. 

[Sassy Romano]

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Angelina Sinclair wrote:

Maybe someone could start a jira up? I would myself but I don't have a clue on how to get that started up.

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Time to learn!

go to https://jira.secondlife.com login and click the "create" link and then just fill in the fields.  You can't do much wrong these days because it has been simplified.

After pressing "Submit" you'll be given a message that it has been created successfully and then you wait...

and wait...

and wait...

until a few weeks later (or longer) when it gets closed with one of the various comments indicating that it will not be implemented.  At that point you wonder why you bothered.

[VRprofessor]

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Nalates Urriah wrote:

You can always use an alternate avatar.

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This is my solution of choice.  If you have lots of purchased items that are no transfer this may not work very well for you.  But if you are building from scratch it shouldn't be a problem. 

[Monti Messmer]

SL is a social platform, if you cannot be arsed being social use a 2nd avatar or just don´t befriend everyone in radar range ;-)

There are already tools to answer IM´s when you are busy. A stealth mode would be an amazing thing for all the griefers, hackers and other ....

People who don´t want to talk, not to be seen ????

I am a creator too and if i´m building all my "friends" know i won´t reply quick. If that bugs them, off the list !

Monti

[Coby Foden]

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Monti Messmer wrote:

SL is a social platform, if you cannot be arsed being social use a 2nd avatar or just don´t befriend everyone in radar range ;-)

There are already tools to answer IM´s when you are busy. A stealth mode would be an amazing thing for all the griefers, hackers and other ....

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I wonder why this griefer thing always pops up when talking about stealth mode? I think that there is misunderstanding what a stealth mode would actually be like. I'm sure that those who support stealth mode do not mean that they should be some totally invisible god creatures roaming about the grid.

As I see it, the stealth mode would be something like this:

 

• When you log in the system does not announce to anybody that you logged in.

• You appear offline to all who might check your profile.

  (there are already lots of people using this - only friends see you're online)

• If somebody IMs you, there would be a message "User not available - your IM has been sent."

  (it does not reveal are you online or offline)

• You are not invisible god nor invisible griefer, anybody near you can see you and chat with you.

So what kind kind of amazing thing for griefers would this stealth mode be?

I cannot see any use for griefers in it.

 

 

PS.

Who defined that SL is solely a social platform? Even in RL we can be in "stealth mode". Why not in SL too when needed? There are times when one does not login to socialize - for some good reason (as said already earlier). Alt avatar is not a solution in all cases. One might want to "make up" one's main avatar totally undisturbed - for example. :smileytongue:

 

[Paul Hexem]

Without totally rebuilding the entire platform from the ground up, we have either god mode stealth that the Lindens get, or we get no stealth mode at all.

That's why the griefer thing comes up.

[Qie Niangao]

The only way this could be (somewhat) effective would be to keep "stealth" sessions from getting into the Presence system. That might work, and "God mode" must work something like that, but users would have to live with some fairly bizarre inconsistencies.

For one thing, IMs (and teleport requests, friend requests, most voice connections...) probably couldn't work at all, despite the person being right there in the same sim and communicating in local chat. Anything involving Group communications would fail. And some scripts would fail because somebody detected locally would not show as DATA_ONLINE for llRequestAgentInfo (although that might be a race condition for such scripts anyway).

I'm not sure how badly the existing "God mode" leaks. I'd guess that some Group operations might leak a "most recently online" date; no idea how far such information might spread.

I must say, however, that this all seems completely misguided. I mean, FFS, do we really want our friends to feel entitled to indignation every time we accidentally leave the viewer connected for hours while we are off having a life? Screw that noise.

[Paul Hexem]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

I must say, however, that this all seems completely misguided. I mean, FFS, do we really want our friends to feel entitled to indignation every time we accidentally leave the viewer connected for hours while we are off having a life? Screw that noise.

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+1

[Coby Foden]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

 

For one thing, IMs (and teleport requests, friend requests, most voice connections...) probably couldn't work at all, despite the person being right there in the same sim and communicating in local chat. Anything involving Group communications would fail. And some scripts would fail because somebody detected locally would not show as DATA_ONLINE for llRequestAgentInfo (although that might be a race condition for such scripts anyway)

....

I must say, however, that this all seems completely misguided. I mean, FFS, do we really want our friends to feel entitled to indignation every time we accidentally leave the viewer connected for hours while we are off having a life? Screw that noise.

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If user has chosen a log in mode "Log in but appear as offline" then why should IMs, TP requests, friend requests, etc work? They don't work when user actually is offline. In "log in but appear as offline" mode everything should naturally work the same way as when the user actually is offline. Naturally other avatars near the user can see the user and can local chat with the user. In the viewer there should also be an option (when already logged in) that the user can change the online status from "appear as offline" to "appear online". And vice versa. I don't see what is the big difficulty in implementing this kind of "stealth mode" feature.

 

I don't understand how friends would feel entitled to indignation if one uses stealth mode? They wouldn't even know are we online or not (unless they happen to be in the same region near our avatar). So how could they get mad about this matter?

 

 

Anyway, there is a long forgotten JIRA about this matter - having extremely long and winding comments:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-4823

Status: Deferred - The problem/idea is being evaluated but will not be worked on at the moment.

Resolution: Incomplete

Assignee: WorkingOnIt Linden

 

The JIRA was created Created: 15 September 2009.

Four years have already passed without final resolution (note: it's still as "Incomplete").

It appears that "Deferred" actually means "Forget it - no more work will be done on it."  :smileylol:

I think the nay sayers won this case. :smileytongue:

I can live all right with the present system, but I still think that the stealth mode would be very nice feature to have.

[Qie Niangao]

I guess you're fine with the apparent inconsistency, but I can imagine folks getting exercised about chatting in local with their friends but having IMs and stuff fail. At least it would be another little mystery of SL to explain to newbies the first time they encounter it, if ever.

But that's not what I was mumbling about, with "entitled to indignation."

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Coby Foden wrote:

I don't understand how friends would feel entitled to indignation if one uses stealth mode? They wouldn't even know are we online or not (unless they happen to be in the same region near our avatar). So how could they get mad about this matter?

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What I meant was that we need to break our friends of this sense of entitlement that whenever they contact us we'll respond. I didn't mean that a Stealth Mode would make it worse than it already is, only that it's pandering to expectations we should instead be discouraging.

Now that you mention it, though, a Stealth Mode might make things worse in the scenario I mentioned: something unexpectedly pulls us into RL for hours without logging out nor setting our session to Steath; our friends are even more indignant about being "ignored" because Stealth Mode conditions them even more to expect us to "appear as offline" if we don't answer immediately.

I think it's simpler (and healthier) to train folks that just because we're online doesn't mean we'll see any messages they might send. With any luck, they might adopt a similar, less obsessed attitude toward their own SL use.