Linden Lab – Page 151

March 26, 2013

Common Sense Required Regarding Incorrect Category Decisions

There have been numerous reports of merchants being bemused as to why their item listing is removed from the marketplace for being in the wrong category. Sometimes it’s clearly an issue that the item is in the wrong category and sometimes it’s not so clear.

The Dwarfins Marketplace store has suffered a blow due to Dwarfins food being removed from the Marketplace due to it being deemed to be in the wrong category, the wrong category in this case being breedables. This is a rather odd move being as the breedables category has food for Meeroos, Amaretto Horses and Ozimals.

However it should be noted that Fennux and Snuffles food can be found in Animals/Animals & Pet Supplies/Animals Feed & Water Supplies. This sort of inconsistency is not helpful and really there should be some common sense applied in these situations. The Animals & Pet Supplies category is not suitable for Dwarfins items, being as they aren’t pets and as breedable animals do not belong in the animals category in the first place, it seems silly for Linden Lab to agree with whomever flagged Dwarfins food.

Now it has long been suspected that Linden Lab only respond to flagged items, they are not proactive, they probably don’t have the time to be proactive but a cursory glance at the breedables category shows breedable food items in that category, ergo breedable food should be left there.

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March 24, 2013

Is Lilith Heart A Secret Griefer?

I purchased some bushes once from Lilith Heart. They were nice bushes, helped to design the border for a park I once had in Bedos back in the days when I could afford to own a park. The sim where I purchased the bushes from was a nice sim, peaceful, the sort of place that could very well be a front for nefarious goings on.

These sort of suspicisons are confirmed by Lilith’s own hand, on Friday, Lilith Heart, part time plant maker became Lilith Heart, ban hammered, as explained in Lilith’s blog post: Lilith Heart Back From Ban-cation.

There’s no smoke without fire, as they say in the trade. One has to suspect that amongst the bushes, plants, flowers, Lilith may have been harvesting some sort of questionable weed and that Undercover Linden busted her in some sort of honey trap!

Lilith, whose marketplace store lists a rather large number of potentially nefarious plants is none the wiser as to why she was temporarily banned. Joking aside, this is probably the bigger issue here.

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March 23, 2013

Linden Lab Could Do More To Encourage Good Building Practices

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of Linden Lab’s wiki page of Good Building Practices. However now I think it’s time to turn this up a notch with Linden Lab actively promoting said resource and part of the reason for this is my own stumblings with Mesh. The thing is, these tips are good for all of our Second Life experiences.

The thing with Mesh is that you can reduce the number of faces on a cube and still display all you need to, you can also reduce the number of textures that need to be loaded, which in turn reduces the amount of work our video cards need to do, which improves the Second Life experience as a whole.

The other thing with Mesh is encouraging people to build more efficiently full stop. User generated content is an important factor in Second Life, it’s what makes the world vibrant but it also has the potential to cause problems, often unintentionally because people don’t have the resources available to encourage them to build more efficiently. This leads to people feeling that all Mesh is bad for Second Life, it’s not, but the lack of promotion of available material can leave people with a bad impression.

There are good and bad practices with Mesh, high poly models are not ideal for Second Life, they may look beautiful in a static environment but in the more dynamic environment of Second Life they can be problematic to say the least.

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March 21, 2013

Incident Reports Almost Make A Comeback

For a brief, all too brief, period of time it looked as if the incident report/Police Blotter had made a stunning return to Second Life. There were reports on both the official forum as well as a thread over at SLUniverse. Indeed not only were incident reports back, they were back with names!

Now you may be wondering what the bloody hell the incident reports/Police Blotter is, well quite simply, it listed bad behaviours and punishment. Tyche Shepherd still has them available over at GridSurvey.com. Alarmingly the last report shows an incident in LindenWorld A, for: Harassment : Defaming individuals or groups This is regarding your picks page for: “EPITHET AND SYNONYM” Your local LUNATIC ASYLUM. A warning was issued for that! That’s most worrisome!

This got me delving into the wayback machine, where you can see the old Second Life site and get all nostalgic, it’s also interesting to see what got people in trouble back in the day, for example if we go back to June 2006 we can see that the following would get you a warning:

Blocking acccess to another parcel on all four sides.
Quoting from chat logs in profile.
Posting mature classified thread in forums
Using registered trademarks on items in SL.
Nude avatar picture in profile.
Offensive and annoying remarks.
Providing fake casino script device for fraudulent use.

There are a few violations there that still come up today, but does anyone get a warning? Then there were the more serious issues

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