The latest edition of the official Second Life viewer isn’t too bad, it has some nice features, the ability to be able to put buttons on toolbars and move things around means the experience has a better level of customisation but one area where it falls down badly is with regard to inworld classifieds, which really are in need of some care and attention from Linden Lab.
Let’s start with the most obvious problem, the create a new classified link doesn’t work, so how do you create a new classified, or even find your old classifieds to edit them? This is where you start to realise how shoddily inworld classifieds are being treated, because it’s not obvious at all.
To get to your classifieds you need to get to your picks, and these aren’t the picks on your web profile, they are a different set of picks, well they’re the same picks in a different module, but they aren’t the droids you’re looking for if you want to play with classifieds, the picks you need are a toobar button, so to get started you need to go here:
Then you will see a screen which is a useful one to use to help you customise the viewer, however when it comes to classifieds you need to find the picks button, which is easy enough to find:
Then you need to drag the picks button to a toolbar, I decided to drag mine to the bottom toolbar, so now I have this:
Now I can click the picks button on the toolbar and get to my picks and classifieds! Hooray!
Once there I can either create a new classified or edit an existing one, now I’m cooking on gas! The classified world is my oyster, if I click one of the arrows I get into an existing classified and can edit it once there, by clicking edit:
Alternatively if I’d wanted to create a new classified, I’d have clicked new classified … go me! However another issue with classifieds is the dearth of decent categories, Second Life has changed a lot over the years, I wanted to create a new classified for a category like roleplaying and found, well, there isn’t one!
Those categories don’t really match where we are today, although they are all useful categories, they are way too narrow. Then of course there’s the atrocious character limit which makes writing any sort of creative advert extremely difficult, I don’t know why LL don’t have a free form classified description that isn’t indexed and then a keyword section, like they have on the marketplace, this would allow people to write decent adverts but would help to alleviate the issue of too many words being indexed for search purposes.
Classifieds deserve a little bit more loving from Linden Lab, they are a useful tool but one that seems to be being neglected.
The categories for both classifieds and ‘place my land in search’ need updating…
I want added:
‘roleplay’ (game system, like DCS, vs. freeform RP spots?)
‘club’ (subcategories for dance club vs. live music venue vs. ‘come watch the show’ places?)
‘education / help’
Something that distinguishes a ‘chat’ hangout from say… a themed discussion spot. Not sure here on how to do that. But say, the ‘Forum Cartel’ is a general chat spot, but the ‘Brownstone’ (I think) is a place that hosts specific discussions on selected topics, and there’s a philosophy group or two that likewise hold themed topic hangout spots.
And a few more where one of these has a choice the other lacks, like ‘Newcomer spot’ (or whatever its called exactly) – that I think is in land but not classifieds, unless I’m wrong. 🙂
Land Rental and Property rental? Should those just be combined?
Well that’s another issue, as far as I can recall the show in search places categories have never matched the classified categories, which I always found odd, I agree with you, they could both do with being updated.
Whereas land and property rental are slightly different beasts, they aren’t majorly different, they could even have sub-categories surely.