Category: News

Out of the closet: The Adult Community forum goes public

Posted on by Inara Pey

As Ciaran Laval reports, the Adult Community finally gets a visible forum section today.

This seems to be the latest step in Linden Lab’s long overdue acknowledgement that Second Life has a huge user base that engages in more “adult” activities, and does so despite mainstream media’s attempts to present us, tabloid-like, as a group that operates somewhere between the level of sleaze and the dirty brown overcoat brigade.

The Adult Content Forum itself isn’t actually that new – when Blondin was around, there was a closed-door Adult forum in which a selected few were able to participate. More recently (and possibly somewhat telling), since Amanda van Nuys (Amanda Linden) departed the Lab things have loosened-up somewhat.

  • There is an Adult section in the Destination Guide
  • At SLCC 2011, Viale Linden openly expressed a desire to see Adult content and activities better promoted
  • There has been – albeit laden with controversy and still awaiting a final outcome – an attempt towards establishing an Adult Gateway which can direct those coming into to SL who are specifically interested in adult activities towards suitable destinations around the grid.
Adult content in the Destination Guide – part of the opening up of Adult Content, which now includes an Adult Forum in the SL website

The new forum is subject to the usual Community Guidelines, which include specific warnings about posts keeping to the “General” rating, and that nude images, etc., should not be posted. However, this shouldn’t in any way hamper the use of the forum to discuss adult-oriented matters and themes – we all should be able to do so without resorting to the use of sexually explicit or vulgar language, etc. We are, um, adults, after all.

Whether or not the forum moderators will allow a little more latitude with this forum, however, should anyone stray near the edge, remains to be seen. Moderation within the forums as a whole has sometimes been akin to sledgehammer-to-walnut responses.

It’s going to be interesting to see how the forum develops now it is in the public domain. Coming on top of other moves by Linden Lab to make the Adult elements of Second Life more a part of the community as a whole and more obvious and easier for people to engage with at whatever level they choose, this should really be welcomed.

Kudos, Viale!

Megaprim deletion: “Oops! We did it again”

Posted on by Inara Pey

The grid, Twitter and various forums are awash with upset. In a repeat of a situation from February this year, Linden Lab have deleted popular megaprims from across the grid, impacting, as some have said, “thousands” of builds.Interestingly enough, now, as then, the name of Crowley Avro has been mentioned in connection with the situation.

Whether the affected prims were used in a girefing attack or not, and the items used removed on the basis of the creator’s name, rather than the owner’s name is unknown at this time.

A JIRA has been raised concerning matters – SVC-7382 and Alexa Linden was on the case fairly rapidly, and the blacklist was apparently reversed rapidly, but this has not helped those builds in-world.

For those who have been heavily impacted by this situation, Alexa is recommending they request a sim roolback (if you don’t own the sim, you will have to contact the owner and have them request a rollback), quoting the megaprim issue (I’d suggest the JIRA as well). However, as some have commented on the JIRA, back in February some requests for rollback were largely ignored. And rollback don’t exactly those who are based on the Mainland…

People are understandably angry over this, with fingers being pointed in all directions; it would be interesting to know the exact circumstances under which the affected megaprims / creator (however it was done) were / was blacklisted this time around. Not that we will, of course.

Update 23:00 BST

The following appeared on the SL Grid Status page at 20:53 BST:

“Due to a change we recently made to address a griefing problem, some megaprims were removed from the grid, which has affected users’ creations containing these megaprims.
The issue has been resolved, and the megaprim objects can be re-rezzed from your inventories at this time.  If you do not have a copy of the affected build, please go to your support portal immediately and file a case.

“If you are Premium member or above, you can use these case types:  “Technical Questions” > “Objects (Rezzed) Issues.  If you have a free membership and your group owned land was affected, please use “Land & Region” > Report an Offline Region”.  We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and are reviewing our processes to try to avoid repeating this situation in the future.”

Another step or two for Direct Delivery

Posted on by Inara Pey

Alongside the new Viewer 3 UI that has reached the Development Viewer, further small steps have been taken with Direct Delivery (DD).

On the 18th October, DD related code previously released onto Le Tigre was rolled out on the main server release channel. Again, this does not mean that DD is now active, just that the road is being further prepared for DD’s arrival – or to allow for further code compatibility testing.

The code was rolled-out alongside an Agent Inventory update which means that any TPVs that have merged merged since Viewer 2.5.1 should experience much faster inventory response times than previously.

Direct Delivery: Received Items section added to the Inventory floater

Alongside of this, the latest Development Viewer, as well as getting the new UI shiny, also gets an update aimed at Direct Delivery: a new section in the Inventory floater called RECEIVED ITEMS.

Click on this, and you Inventory floater opens a new panel (left), wherein any items you purchase via the SL Marketplace will be delivered once Direst Delivery goes live, either boxed or in a folder hierarchy (or both, in some cases).

One assumes items delivered to this area can be drag-and-dropped into your main Inventory folders; as I’m not in the DD beta, I’ve actually no way of testing this. However, until the DD system is active, Marketplace deliveries will continue to be made as before, with items arriving in the main section of Inventory.

There is currently no corresponding new section (or folder) that can be used by the system to retrieve merchants’ items that are to be listed on the Marketplace. One assumes this is to prevent any confusion with people thinking DD is now active and thus trying to use the capability.

So, that’s another couple of steps forward, although the silence that has followed what are valid and reasonable questions on the project from merchants has now been going on for long enough to give the crickets leave to start chiruping.

Mesh Land Impact now official

Posted on by Inara Pey

With all the excitement over the new UI reaching the Development Viewer code, it’s been easy to overlook the fact that the last few days saw the latest release of the Viewer, which includes the new mesh uploader floater, and sees prim counts and prim equivalency replaced with Land Capacity and Land Impact.

The new uploader floater provides improved capabilities for adjusting and optimising mesh objects prior to upload.

Mesh uploader floater – note Land Impact towards the bottom

Land Impact is introduced alongside the more familiar upload weights (Download, Physics, Server) in a new blog post from the Lab.

Land Impact itself can be seen in the Build floater, as shown in the image below, which compares how objects are now displayed (right) compared to how we’ve seen them in the past (left).

Land Impact (right) Replacing the Prim and PE values with a single figure

Similarly, the Land Capacity can now be seen under OBJECTS in the About Land floater, with the old (left) and new (right) shown below.

Land Capcity in ABOUT LAND (right) – replacing prim counts (left)

I’ve got a more extensive post on these changes, which includes a look at other options as well. With the changes now firmly in the Viewer release code, expect to start seeing Capacity and Land Impact in the About Land and Build floaters of your preferred V3-based TPV in the very near future.

In the meantime, for those trying out the latest Viewer release, be aware that there are upload issues with it that some people are experiencing, and a JIRA has been opened (SH-2595).

SL Q3 metrics summary

Posted on by Inara Pey
C & TM Linden Lab

On Friday October 14th, Linden Lab released their Q3 economic figures. The data presented is a mixed bag.

On the plus side:

  • Completed registrations remain strong – LL put it at around an average of 16K per day; the graph suggests the average might be slightly higher
  • Average number of monthly users logged-on rose very slightly (by just under 0.4%)
  • The number of economic participants rose by around 12,000 and the Linden dollar appreciated very fractionally
  • Web Marketplace sales grew by 2.78%

On the minus side:

  • User hours have declined by a touch under 2%
  • LindeX trading suffered a slight drop
  • The overall growth in Web Marketplace sales has slowed significantly
  • A total of around 20sq km of land was lost to the grid.

So, the downward slide in user concurrency has reversed itself very slightly; but the flipside to this is that people are still appearing to spend less time in-world per head than previously. This is something that LL have been trying to get their heads around for several months, and which Rod Humble mentioned it as a point of interest when speaking at SLCC 2011, when he pointed out the demographic for new sign-ups is somewhat younger than has traditionally been the case of SL.

Alongside this is the thorny issue of user retention. Sign-ups, overall concurrent users and user hours online don’t actually equate to this – and we’re not getting any kind of indication at all as to what is happening. How many new sign-ups are translating over time to retained users? Part of the problem here, of course, is actually defining what we all mean as being “user retention”.

Within the Lab, retention is clearly tied closely to engagement. As such, the Lab have indicated they are working on a number of initiatives aimed towards people engaging more directly with the platform in shorter time periods than might currently be the case. Again, at SLCC 2011 a number of Linden Lab employees spoke to this, including:

  • Colossus Linden, who indicated that currently, it might be several weeks between someone joining SL and actually engaging with the economy in terms of buying L$ – and that LL are looking to reduce this to a matter of days
  • Durian Linden pointed towards LL developing more in the way of “directed experiences” in order to get incoming users to more rapidly engage in aspects of SL such as building and creativity.

Certainly, it’s hard to argue against these approaches. At the end of the day, obviously, the more a user is actively engaged in the platform, the more they are likely to stick around and grow within it.

So there is work to be done, to be sure. However, taken as a whole, the Q3 economic figures as presented do suggest that SL continues to be relatively stable. Obviously, it would be nice to see more some definitive signs of growth, and the fact that these figures fail to demonstrate this might explain why they were slipped quietly out late on Friday afternoon…

A step closer to Direct Delivery?

Posted on by Inara Pey

Direct Delivery (DD), the means by which items purchased via SL Marketplace (and which in theory should make Magic Boxes as used by merchants a thing of the past eventually) took a step closer with the arrival of code on the Le Tigre release channel.

This does not necessarily signify that the new service is about to go live. It may signify that Linden Lab are pushing the code out for the purposes of production-side beta testing or perhaps for compatibility testing. News on the move is rather scarce. Brooke Linden promised to clarify the roll-out on the 4th October (when the code initially reached Le Tigre), but nothing further has been forthcoming from the Commerce Team.

New Delivery System

For those not in the know, Direct Delivery is intended to massively improve the way in which customers receive good purchased through SL Marketplace, and how merchants manage their SL Marketplace inventory locally. The beta for the system was originally announced back in April, although at the time the call was light on specifics.

So, in a very brief summary, for those purchasing items through the Marketplace it broadly means:

  • Recipients will no longer need to accept delivery of an object in order for the item to be successfully delivered in-world. Items will be delivered whether the recipient in in-world or offline, and a notification of arrival sent
  • Rolling restarts will not result in failed deliveries
  • Purchased items should be received in a new system folder, probably to be called “Incoming Items”, with purchases delivered to their own folder (or folder hierarchy) within this system folder
  • Failed deliveries as a result of multiple purchases through the Marketplace should cease.

For Merchants, the new system broadly means:

  • No requirement to use Magic Boxes (although support for Magic Boxes will continue for an unspecified period after DD has rolled-out)
  • No requirement to box items (although boxed items will continue to be supported)
  • Local management of inventory handled through a new system folder, probably to be called “Outgoing Items”. Items placed in this folder will be automatically retrieved and copied to the Merchant’s Marketplace inventory ready for listing (no copy items will be flagged as such and then moved to the SLM inventory once the merchant has OK’d the move)

Other aspects of the new system include:

  • To prevent over-inflation of local inventories as a result of large numbers of items being delivered into folder from the Marketplace, the number of objects a merchant can place in a folder will be limited. If a merchant is selling a large number of items in a single listing, they will be required to box objects within their folder hierarchy
  • The system will allow merchants to indicate to purchasers whether an item will be delivered boxed or unboxed
  • Merchants will no longer need to keep adding one unit to no copy item listings whenever one unit sells
  • Gifting and limited-quantity items will continue to be supported by DD.

There is also an API for the marketplace that is being developed with should also provide merchants with additional capabilities within the Marketplace. As well as Direct Delivery, work is ongoing to improve inventory services in general, including faster and more reliable inventory loading within the Viewer.

Concern

Overall, if implemented properly, these changes should benefit everyone.

However, it is fair to say that Linden Lab have not exactly covered themselves in glory when making massive changes to the Marketplace environment, as many of those involved in the switch-over from SL Exchange to SL Marketplace will testify. More recently, the Commerce team caused considerable consternation when making changes to the Marketplace.

Ergo, people are understandably nervous around the implementation of DD as a whole, the benefits it will bring notwithstanding. A number of merchants have already requested (via the Commerce Forum) than any formal roll-out of the new system be delayed until after the New Year, so that merchants face minimal disruption in the run-up to, and through, the busy Christmas period.