О деньгах, и как с ними бороться

The post is in Russian, and describes in detail the manipulations you need to perform to exchange L$ for Russian roubles and back. The only effective mechanism found so far involves creation of two bank accounts in the same bank and the use of intermediary L$ exchange services like VirWox, because PayPal discriminates against it’s Russian users and will not allow to send them money.

Business messenger

There’s lots of non-graphical clients for Second Life out there, starting with AjaxLife and friends and ending with Metabolt and friends.

And all of them are better than nothing when you can’t use a real viewer, but none of them were, in my opinion, satisfactory for what I would want a lite viewer for – and for what, I believe, most people who actually need one would want one for.

That is, customer support, when I’m not capable or can’t be bothered to start up a real viewer.

Almost all of the existing light client offerings suffer from specific shortcomings:

• None of them saves logs. Dunno about you, but for me this is a showstopper, because I rely on logs instead of memory to know who had what kind of problems and when. Without them, I would have problems remembering who all of those people are.
• Most of them include functions patently useless for the task of support — good if you want to run a model bot, or camp, but not really good for customer support — and are getting more and more bloated and jumbled.
• Very few of them actually behave anything like an instant messager, which is what I’d like most.

Well, here’s one that does.

SLiteChat is still a work in progress, but it’s fast progress, and it fits my expected use case better than any to date. It’s a neater and cleaner job than most, as well, it runs fine in Ubuntu on my Eee PC, and is developed for all three major platforms (Windows, Mac Os X and Linux) simultaneously.

Comes with Rika Seal of Approval.

Animation organiser v1.5

I’ve just updated the animation organiser. New in this version:

• More photography-oriented features, including the ability to let others switch poses.
• Some obscure bugs only appearing when a large number of units is used at once fixed.
• Units now detect each other more reliably.
• You no longer need to rez the box to check for updates.

The unit is still completely compatible with previous releases, to upgrade it, just use the sendall button to send all animations from an old unit into a new one.

As usual, it’s available in my inworld shop or on XStreetSL. Updates will be sent to you upon rezzing the box of your old version, but just in case, I’ll check my customer lists and send an update directly…

On growth and camping

Recent clarifications from Linden Research involve saying that camping is also a form of cheating on traffic, and is likewise prohibited. While it still remains to be seen that the biggest bot farms are dismantled, and I don’t honestly believe this policy will be enforced seriously1 there’s a debate on whether camping is ‘beneficial for the newbies’ which I’d like to drop my two pence into.

Now, let us consider… Discounting the points about charity spirit,² and that in a normal camping setup, the fact that you pay campers for the use of their bodies to inflate traffic, why exactly is it economically beneficial to give newbies money?

It is commonly argued that newbies cannot get money in other ways, which is, in many cases, perfectly true. Even though purchasing L$ is easy, it requires a card,³ and often costs more money than many people are willing to spend on what they think is a game in this global economic downturn. So it’s no question that in at least some cases, the necessity to acquire money inworld is unavoidable for a new resident, and the opportunity to do so is generally desirable.

However, where is that necessity to give them money for nothing?⁴ Naturally, it is in the interest of established residents that new economic agents appear and increase the value supply. However, ‘increase the value supply’ is a key point here. This is a notion both economic and cultural, because a person can contribute value to an economically driven culture of Second Life in many ways — by increasing money supply, by creating things, by performing useful work, or even just by being a good conversationalist.

Camping clearly doesn’t empower new residents for anything of the sort, because it just rotates the money endlessly in the system, and takes away time better spent doing other, more productive things. It’s only practical benefit is artificially inflating traffic, which is now forbidden.

The real question is, what can we replace it with? Just what exactly can we pay money for to people who do not yet have significant skills in Second Life⁵ and need to acquire them? Modeling? That’s no less boring than camping and it’s a job actually best left to bots.

So, any ideas?

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1. They just don’t have the resources, they’d have to outsource that too. ↩
2. I don’t believe in blanket charity. Blanket charity is for when you can’t be bothered to actually help. ↩
3. Cards, debit or credit are not at all common in some parts of the world — for example, in Russia, everyone pays cash, and ordering something on the net normally results in a courier which takes cash on delivery after you have been given a chance to test if the merchandise is delivered. Cards aren’t very trusted or desired. And PayPal doesn’t consider Russia a valid country and won’t send money to accounts registered or logging in from Russia. I imagine there are lots of other countries like that. ↩
4. Please don’t confuse that with freebies. As I have already described multiple times, freebies are potential profit traded for exposure, and as such have a very different rationale behind them. ↩
5. With the learning curve and almost complete absence of documentation, replaced by dumb tutorials, it’s a wonder anyone knows anything at all. Second Life has no knowledge, it has lore. ↩

It’s you and me against the world

So when do we attack?

• When I released the Treasure Hunt Radar, it started picking up publicity and sales, and then, Second Life had a major grid crash.
• When I released the Lucky Chair Detector plugin, it just started taking off and then, another grid crash happened, though a smaller one.
• Now there’s Designer Showcase Network. And three days into it’s operation, the server just keels over with no explanation or anything, causing the momentum it accumulated to severely decrease.

I think this universe has something against me.

Well, the universe will be very sorry later!

DSN: Service outage

Can’t rely on ANYTHING. Particularly, not on anything hosted in the US, apparently, because it’s the second time this year, but with a different hosting company.

Server keeled over with unusual symptoms (I’m pretty sure it was nothing I did — filesystems don’t normally just go and become read only). Trouble ticket with the hosting company filed.

If there’s no data corruption when it’s back up, everything will resume exactly as if nothing happened. If there is, service will be restored as soon as possible.

I wish my connection to overseas wasn’t so flaky, so that I could run it myself under my own table.

Update: Back up. Their only response was ‘Fixed’. Grrr…

Bloody LL!

Notice anything odd? Apparently, Linden Research doesn’t, because it’s been like this since the 9th of May. It’s not a glitch, the map tile files are actually missing. Normally I wouldn’t care, but the planetarium code relies on the presence of map tiles to determine which grid coordinates to check for sim names.

As such, I had to upload the map from the 8th today, and it’ll stay like that until they upload a fresh set of tiles to Amazon S3 service again. If by the next Monday they don’t, I’ll rewrite the code to brute force the coordinate numbers.

Can’t rely on ANYTHING with these people.

Designer Showcase Network: It’s Live!

I said it would be done by the weekend.

Well, here it is. Please go to the official project site for all information, including how to subscribe, how to join as a designer, how it works, etc, etc, etc. This here is just a very brief summary.

The Designer Showcase Network connects content creators of Second Life with potential customers. Subscribers of the network receive a randomly selected promotional sample each day. This takes the pressure out of visiting shops and grabbing freebies, and potential customers can check out the sample at their leisure in the comfort of their own place. The aim is to bring targeted potential customers to a store, thus generating more sales. The focus, therefore, is on sales instead of traffic.

Traffic versus clients

For the longest time, traffic was the mantra of many Second Life businesses. The higher the traffic on a parcel, the better the business was supposed to be. This was fostered by the fact that places with high traffic appear higher in various search listings. As a result, the goal of high traffic numbers led to questionable actions like bot farms, ridiculously high priced classifieds, reward systems for profile picks and an abundance of gridwide hunts.

While at first each of those measures seemed to have the desired effect, lately residents grow weary. Places with high traffic scores are more and more often seen synonymous with “bot farms”, and the number of those reached so high that anti-bot policies have been instituted by Linden Labs. And with almost weekly new gridwide hunts, the patience of the shoppers gets challenged.

On the other hand, business owners realize that traffic does not equal revenue. In fact, too much traffic makes a sim laggy and a shop less attractive to regular shoppers. So instead of having 200 people coming into a shop because of a hunt or a FashCon announcement — but leaving with empty hands except the advertised freebie — it is much better to have 2 people come into the shop who actually buy something.

Our solution

Despite some prominent voices claiming otherwise, we are convinced that a free item is the best way to show a potential customer the level of craftsmanship a content creator can offer. Our vision is to connect the brilliant and gifted creators of Second Life with potential new clients, to remove the stress and drama from SL marketing, and ultimately, add value to both the consumer and the designer.

The “Designer Showcase Network” is a new and unique approach to bring customers and creators together. The network automates the way in which content creators deliver their showcase samples to targeted potential shoppers. The subscribers of the network only receive items from areas they are interested in, and the content creators only connect to people looking for their kind of products. (A description of how it works behind the scenes can be found in the FAQ section)

Taking the stress out, taking the sense of entitlement out, bringing a surprise and fun factor back in, giving small creators a huge audience, and allowing subscribers to discover new and exciting shops is the idea behind the Designer Showcase Network.

Sign up today as a content creator. Subscribe today as a resident. There is an amazing world of creativity to discover.

Designer Showcase Network

I started describing this in Plurk, and the response has, so far, been overwhelmingly positive, so I actually started coding. But for those who do not plurk, I’m going to clean it all up, and turn it into a more coherent text.

Gridwide hunts are legion. Gridwide hunts are popular. And the problems with the currently popular variety of gridwide hunts are numerous, so numerous, in fact, that they put the whole idea in question.

1. Order of the hunt is strict, largely immutable, and prevents designers at the far end of the chain from getting any return from the hunt at all, regardless of how much work have they put in, because getting stuck somewhere on the way will be an insurmountable obstacle for the majority of the hunters. Handling those obstacles creates extra tension between the designers and the hunters.
2. The tendency of the designers to hide the items, brought on by the word ‘hunt’, creates undue hardship for the shoppers with the current scale of gridwide hunts (Find 30 tiny items, ok, 300? 500?!) and turns them off from the whole idea.
3. Limited time during which prizes can be collected creates a requirement for the shoppers who wish to have complete coverage of the hunt offerings (It’s obsessive-compulsive but everyone’s entitled to that.) to spend many hours — and days! — looking for prizes nonstop, which annoys them further.
4. Pressure on the designer to participate in a hunt like right now causes them to offer prizes which do not represent their full ability and are often simply a poor excuse to participate, which further decreases the chance of positive return from the hunt.
5. The designers are severely affected by the quality of work of other designers participating in the hunt through no fault of their own. One piece of trash spoils it for everyone else, lots of trash and even the really good stuff gets ignored.
6. Large numbers of hunt prizes collected in a short period of time create mountains of unsorted inventory which frequently get deleted wholesale with no consideration of their merits or possible merits of the designer’s other offerings.

In short, as they are now, gridwide hunts do not increase sales or exposure significantly, and are a waste of time of the organisers and shoppers and designer effort — like someone said to me just today, People are so busy HUNTING for free, they dont have time to SHOP! Free things as such do not kill the economy, since actual demand for virtual objects is almost limitless, but time spent looking for them is a limited resource, it’s the time that could be spent deciding whether to buy something else.

Nevertheless, the gridwide hunts have certain points which are beneficial for both the shoppers and the designers:

• Shoppers have the opportunity to become aware of new, potentially interesting shops, that they would not have otherwise, or are reminded of places they could have otherwise forgotten.
• Designers get extra exposure of their brand and actual work through samples distributed to the stream of shoppers that actually gets to them, never mind that they run away immediately.

Well, it is possible to create a system that has all of the good points and none of the bad, and I’m almost done doing it. It achieves that through being neither gridwide, nor a hunt. The working title is Designer Showcase Network.

Here’s how it works:

1. Designers receive a kit, which contains a few varieties of a billboard to put in their shops, and a copyable dropbox. They put the free sample that they think best represents their design efforts into a box and let it register with the central server.
2. Shoppers see a billboard, and upon clicking it are given the option to subscribe to the network. They are now subscribers in the network.
3. Every morning, (05:00 GMT right now, but that’s immaterial) for every subscriber, the server selects exactly one random designer from the list of registered designers, and commands their dropbox to send the free sample contained therein to that subscriber.
   • A different free sample is selected independently for every subscriber.
   • No subscriber will ever receive the same free sample twice, or, for that matter, get it in any other manner.
   • After M days, where M is the number of designers, every subscriber will have received a sample from every designer.
   • Every day, every designer’s dropbox will send it’s contents to N subscribers, where N depends on the total number of subscribers and a random element. I.e. if there’s 100 designers in the system and 1000 subscribers, every day, every sample will be picked for sending to about 10 subscribers.

It’s a bit more complex than that in practice, because the network offers seven independent ‘channels’ subdivided by type of items (Female Fashion, Male Fashion, House and Garden, Vehicles and Gadgets, Skins and Hair, Animations and Poses, Jewelry and Accessories) and designers active in more than one field can set up more than one dropbox, but that’s the gist of it.

What’s in it for the subscribers?

• You start every morning with news of a new, possibly unknown shop (or several, if you subscribed to more than one channel) to check out, and a sample of what they have to offer, that you can examine before you go there to decide whether it’s worth going there at all.
• You don’t end up with a mountain of inventory to sort and can make your decisions on the new offerings as they come.
• No need to go anywhere or hunt for anything and suffer the lag — the samples will find you all on their own.

What’s in it for the designers?

• Instead of a flock of visitors who come, grab your stuff, lag everything up and don’t buy anything, you will get a small but steady stream of actual clients, (actually, steadily increasing, as more subscribers join) people who have come to your shop on a lead from a free sample that they have already seen, and are far more likely to give your merchandise a fair chance — otherwise they just don’t come. I.e. instead of traffic, this system promotes actual sales, which should have been the point in the first place.
• Your free sample arrives alone, giving the subscriber ample time to think about it seriously rather than consider it among a mountain of other inventory. It will be evaluated on it’s merits alone, which makes those merits more likely to be seen.
• The network doesn’t have to stop or start and can continue into infinity, it is never too late to join it as a designer or subscribe to it. No matter when did you join the network, your chance of being exposed to potential clients is exactly the same as everyone else’s.

In short, everyone’s going to be happy and nobody has to get nailed to anything.

The project progresses nicely, with all the core code complete, I just need to finish debugging and testing it, and writing all the documentation and associated materials.

I hope it goes live by the weekend.

On traffic bots

Linden Research Inc. has finally decided to do something about traffic bots… and despite that I very much dislike traffic bots, I don’t like the decision at all. I will, as usual, make a prediction, so it’s here so that it will be on file when things go wrong. As much as I hate to say ‘I told you so’, this is one of my special knacks, after all.

Let us formulate the original problem.

1. Traffic score is a component of the parcel search ranking.
2. It is in the shop owner’s interest to be higher in search ranking because it should, in theory, drive more people with intent to spend money (and without a clear idea what do they want to spend it on) to their shop.
3. Artificially inflating traffic makes the search system largely unusable unless you’re looking for a known brand name.
4. It is therefore desired that artificial inflation of traffic would no longer happen.

The possible solutions to this problem can be divided into two groups of possible decisions: Restricting the use of bots in one fashion or another, or restricting the effects of traffic score in one fashion or another. The two extreme solutions would be to ban all bots at all, and to remove traffic calculation completely.

Banning all bots at all is obviously unacceptable for multiple reasons. Bots are the only answer to the deficiencies of Second Life technology, and have numerous industrial uses — without bots, importing objects from external software would be such pain that it would never be practical, bots are the only way to perform numerous things that a script is not allowed to do but an avatar is, and in general, using a bot just to inflate traffic is just like using a stack of microscopes as a counterweight of a trebuchet. Moreover, it is impossible to readily distinguish a bot from a customized client, and it is, in fact, possible to hack up the standard client in such a way that it is still indistinguishable from the server side, but is programmable to perform actions, which would make it a bot by definition.

Removing traffic completely is not so unacceptable at all — after all, Google ranks pages without any regard for how often they’re read and it somehow works. It uses other values, notably, the number of times the pages are referred to, but this is not, by any means, equivalent to avatar dwell traffic.

Yet they chose a middle ground, and that middle ground does not solve the problem, imposes extra work on Lindens (don’t they have enough to do?) and creates extra problems. How?

1. The announcement says that Lindens will be monitoring prospective bot farmers themselves. Extra work for Lindens.
2. Other uses of bots which are explicitly allowed by the new policy, namely, shop mannequins, are permitted and cannot be readily distinguished from traffic botting.
3. Before traffic bots there was camping, which is not prohibited by this policy. Traffic bots that are being paid ridiculously low rates are not readily distinguished from campers either.
4. The incentive to inflate traffic is still there, and ways to do it will still be found, since inflating traffic has not been made ‘physically’ impossible.

Campers, in general, are a worse drain on sim resources than bots, due to being better dressed and out in the open, they require numerous scripts to handle them and hundreds of small transactions to pay them. Every underhanded technique to get people to camp that was previously not effective enough compared to bots will be pulled out of the closet, and we can expect much worse atrocities and grievances — for example, I don’t think a camper can (or will) AR when they haven’t been paid for camping, as Linden Research Inc. will not enforce contracts between residents at all. The very first thing shop owners will do, since it doesn’t require too much effort, is dressing up their bots as mannequins and putting them in full view of the shoppers. The shops that do use mannequins legitimately (Edelweiss with it’s L$600 maid dresses does have a good reason to employ mannequins, that’s the best way to show off that the outfit is worth the price, quite high by Japanese standards) will suffer, too.

Meanwhile, there are other intermediate solutions that do not involve such potential for abuse and so much manual work to enforce. There definitely is a way to create a traffic calculation that requires so much research to game it with bots that such gaming is too impractical to attempt. For example…

1. Traffic awarded to the parcel by the avatar is equal to 0 until the time spent on the parcel reaches a value X.
2. Traffic awarded to the parcel by the avatar becomes negative if the avatar spent more than Y minutes.
3. Traffic is calculated not daily but weekly.
4. If an avatar visited the parcel multiple times during the accounting period, only Z of their visits are counted, and which Z visits are picked and how is kept secret.

This works more or less like this: Assuming that you posess a bot, if you let it hang around the parcel forever, your traffic will go down. If you try to find out the value of Y so that your bots flicker in and out of the parcel, it will take quite a few weeks of experiments even if you have a good guess of what Y is. Just flickering bots in and out and hoping for the best is just as likely to destroy your traffic score as it is likely to increase it. If the values of X, Y and Z are not constant, but depend on something that changes over time, multiple times during the accounting period — for example, the current online count at the moment the avatar entered the parcel — discovering them and the way they change over time will require many months of expensive rigorous experimentation. And if someone does discover it, you can tweak the formula and leave them in the dirt.

Sure, it’s a more complex to code, but code is written once, while manual enforcement takes manpower forever. While there would still be an incentive to have high traffic, gaming it with bots or campers would become impossible and parcel owners would just have to try making their parcel interesting and hope for the best.

Oh, the announcement also mentions landbots. Despite what some people think, the text actually implies that the land bots will not be forbidden, they will merely stop working because the ability to purchase a parcel inworld will be removed and parcels will only be bought through a web interface.

So the land bots will give way to web land bots which can be far less resource-hungry, cheaper to run and readily available even for those who could not get their way through the labyrinthine documentation to libsecondlife/libopenmetaverse.

Way to go, gentlemen. Where’s the sarcasm tag when you need it?…