Second Life – Page 149

December 23, 2013

Club Carnage On The Move But Not Closing

Club Carnage finds itself in The Second Life destination guide, the only problem is, the SLURL is out of date. Club Carnage is no longer at that location, indeed it’s even going to move from its current location over the new year period.

In a post full of frustration and serious RL concerns over at the Second Life forums, Club Carnage owner Camelyn Witherspoon writes:

“Due to unforeseen business circumstances, namely a significant and unexpected drop-off in business over the last several months due to LL failure to move our destination from the old sim to here, Club Carnage will be closing its facility and discontinuing its operations on Flagg sim as of midnight Dec 31 2013.

RL is also partly to blame (DAMN RL!). I have a terminal illness and recently my husband was involved in several accidents. We do not know if he will ever be able to work again. We are dissolving the trucking company that we own. Things are bad but we’ll be ok.”

The club will be moving to its new home on January 2nd.

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December 19, 2013

The Trouble With Search

Linden Lab have issued a call to arms with a recent blog post about plans to improve SL Marketplace search. There’s a survey link in the blog post.

Search has been done and redone and done again in Second Life. There’s only so much you can do with search relevancy because people are gits when it comes to trying to manipulate search results. In Second Life we’ve seen the use of bots to increase traffic and therefore relevancy. We’ve seen the age old classic of using search terms that have no bearing on what the parcel or marketplace listing offers.

I can recall in the 0ld days, possibly whilst it was still XStreetSL, people using white text on a white background to hide keywords that were not remotely related to the listing. People abusing the system, unsettles any search engine and unfortunately, people will abuse the system.

Then there are issues that are pretty unique to the SL Marketplace which are caused by the system itself. The free listing forever policy means search results are cluttered with lots of old content that has been created by people who are no longer active in Second Life. There’s an argument for keeping content around, old content doesn’t mean bad content but content should ideally be tied to an active avatar.

Then there are issues such as demos and colours. Demos are an important tool for customers. Different colours offer different options for customers. However they should not be individual listings. Different colours and the demo should be available via one item display. This would make browsing stores on the SL Marketplace easier for a start.

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December 18, 2013

Andrew Linden (AKA Employee Number 2) Leaving Linden Lab To Join Hi Fidelity

Daniel Voyager, Inara Pey and Nalates Urriah have all broken the news that Andrew Linden is leaving Linden Lab. They all provide good coverage, if you want my coverage read on! My coverage owes a lot to Hamlet Au Of New World Notes. In particular I’ve taken material from the following post by Hamlet (which is certainly worth a read) :

Meet Andrew Linden, Last of the Very First Lindens (UPDATED: Richard Linden Still Thrives Too)

Andrew, AKA Employee number 2, has announced he is leaving Linden Lab, tomorrow, December 19th and will be joining his former college pal Philip Rosedale at Hi Fidelity. The word on the street is that Andrew will not be revealing the true identity of Governor Linden or the current location of Magellan Linden as he makes the short journey from Linden Lab to Hi Fidelity. However it is widely assumed that Andrew will become the artist formerly known as Andrew Linden and be transformed into Andrew Meadows in his new role.

Andrew Linden is important, very important. Andrew’s Second Life profile states that he was born 11 years six months ago, however he was at Linden Lab longer than that, he was there in 1999 when Linden Lab hadn’t even decided to develop a virtual world. Andrew was there when, according to the Second Life Wiki, Linden Lab were a hardware company involved with research and development in the field of haptics. However Linden Lab decided they needed a virtual world to test their hardware and haptics became consigned to the dustbin of Linden Lab’s history.

Andrew was the person responsible for giving avatars the ability to fly, which was apparently because Linden Lab wanted to save time creating walking animations.

Andrew was largely a C++ developer for Second Life, but took time out to look at holes in the world, literally. In the snapshot above he’s looking for missing prims. Andrew regularly talked to users at office hour/user group meetings, providing the link between developers and users that many appreciate and which is unfortunately largely lost in the new Linden Lab.

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December 18, 2013

Gor Film Shocker!

So there I am browsing late night television, you know that period when you’re thinking about going to bed but channel surfing to see if something might keep you awake a little longer as it’s not quite time yet. You’re not in the mood to watch anything meaty.

So I flip to TCM Movies and there’s a film called “Outlaw Of Gor” on. Hmm, sounds like a horror film. Within a few seconds I realise it’s not horror, I mean the acting and outfits are horrific but it’s not a horror film. Then I think “No it can’t be”, then I realise “Yes it is”. Yes I’m watching a film based on bloody Goreans! They made films of this stuff and I say films because when I check the information of this movie I discover it’s a sequel!

The film, also known as Gor II, doesn’t hold my attention for long. I’m not alone here as it comes in with a score of 1.8 out of 10 on IMDB. This isn’t like a Gor sim in Second Life, which from my brief visits were more Medieval/Fantasy in their productions. This film is more science fiction, which rings a bell as I’ve read that these gor books are science fiction.

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December 16, 2013

Bots, Communication Limits And Why Web Based Group Pages In Second Life Still Have Potential

Communications in Second Life have long been problematic, this is largely because there’s so much communication going on, this is a good thing by the way. Some people consider Second Life group chat to be broken, indeed there’s a webpage that asks Is Second Life Group Chat Still Broken? Other people login to a load of group messages and basically ignore them because they can be annoying.

In a thread over at SLUniverse, Darien Caldwell has brought to people’s attention the fact that Linden Lab have changed the bot policy, largely in terms of communications via bots. There is a temptation to raise the issue that there has been a lack of communication regarding a communication policy but I won’t go there!

The policy appears to have changed on December 11th and the new policy can be read here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Bot_policy . The page states that bots can add to the Second Life experience but that as each IM, chat message, inventory offer and group invitation creates load on the servers there comes a point where excessive use can cause problems for other users.

This all sounds quite reasonable, that is until you see that the limit where a bot’s communication is excessive appears to be at a much lower limit than would be applied to an object or regular avatar.

Bots are now supposed to send below 5,000 messages a day. Now at first glance that may sound like a lot, that is until you see that Linden Lab consider a message sent to a group as one message per recipient. This suggests that if a group has say 10,000 members then a bot could potentially be considered to be abusing resources if it sends one message to that group as that could potentially be 10,000 individual messages sent, which would be double the policy limit.

Now this is where things don’t quite add up. If it’s considered bad for a bot to be sending 5,000 messages a day then really it should be bad for anything to be sending 5,000 messages a day. I suspect that bots are being used to abuse the messaging system and Linden Lab are trying to discourage their use in communications. This policy certainly does that.

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