The ongoing hoo-ha over the proposed solution to revealing a resident’s true online status has generated a lot of feedback over the weekend on Jira SVC-4823. The issue, about online status being respected has morphed into something else with lots of use cases being cited for keeping this function alive. Oz Linden has now made a plea to try and help improve feedback as well as assuring people that The Lab are listenting:
“Everyone…. I don’t know if this will help or not, but I’m going to give it a try and see….
We hear what you’ve all said, we understand the issues, and we’re going to discuss what we can and should do about them.
Nothing is final.
We appreciate that Phoenix is moving appropriately to remove the privacy violation from their next release, and hope that they’ll do that soon, but we understand that these things take time.
In order to help us to have a better understanding, I appeal to the many of you who are posting messages that essentially say “I agree – this will be bad for me too” as opposed to describing a specific use case not already described here (and thank you to the many posts that have done a good job describing use cases): please stop with these “me too” posts – they just make it harder to read the full stream (and yes, I at least am reading all of every comment). We know that for every use case there are many users… we don’t need each of them to post something.”
I would advise those concerned with this issue to help Oz here, because filtering feedback becomes difficult when the same use case keeps getting cited, but what are the reasonable use cases?
Well let’s start from the other end of the spectrum, what isn’t a reasonable use case remains a general undermining of this functionality, that is allowing anyone to see someone’s true online status, which is why I believe the requirement for TPV’s to remove this, will be enforced.
However there are lots of decent use cases, online staff boards, these are handy tools. There are workarounds such as each staff member having their own board or script, so the proposed solution wouldn’t be the end of the world although there are probably lots of cases where the product purchased is not transferable.
Mailing lists and delivery lists are another decent use case of this feature, the reason they check for true online status is because offline deliveries are unstable.
A use case that many wouldn’t have considered comes in the shape and form of Darien Caldwell’s Logos card game, a perfectly innocent use of true online status, as Darien explains in the Jira:
“This is kinda bad. My LOGOS card system has the ability for people to manage their card decks from my website. If they eject cards from their deck using the website, I check if they are online before ejecting, and block it if they aren’t.
The reason is, items delivered by an object behave differently than items given by hand.
Items given by hand are saved, even if your IMs cap. Items given by an object, silently vanish if your IMs cap.
If my server can’t tell for sure if someone is online or not, I can’t reliably send them their cards, and content loss is possible.”
Logos is a popular game and hasn’t been scripted this way under any sort of malice, but because it’s a sensible way of doing things, it’s fair to say that the more decent use cases like this Linden Lab get, the more likely they are to come up with a different solution, which is why it’s important to take note of Oz’s comments about the me too posts, more use cases is good, more examples of the same use case isn’t so good. I understand of course that people want to have their say, but try and be constructive here.
The issue isn’t set in stone, as Oz points out, so work with LL on this one and hopefully there will be a happy ending, I fully support the issue of people’s online status being respected, but on the other hand we shouldn’t be in a rush to break content to achieve that goal.
Me too.
Smartarse :p
What we have here is something that was perfectly valid and possibly to innocently use, but easily exploited.
One set of folks exploited it, violating everyone’s privacy – and they got banned from SL for a different reason, alongside their malware viewer. “In theory different” folks came along and kept up a new variation on the malware viewer, minus the malware that got it banned… but left this exploit in…
Leaving it and the many complaints about it to fester for a few years…
And now all of the innocent cases will suffer for one teams conceit about what they could ‘get away with’ rather than what would be responsible to do.
Its nice that they’re removing the crack in the next update, but its a little late to hide the monster back in the closet now.
Indeed, the past does seem to be biting, possibly a little harder than it should do but it should never have been allowed to stretch it’s jaws so wide in the first place.