Second Life

The  Commerce Team is heads down this week working on more key features and  functionality for the new marketplace.  Below is a list of updates we  made over the last week. 

 

Feature Updates and Bug Fixes for SL Marketplace Beta

• We added a “continue shopping button” when a shopper comes to your detail page from search results
• SL  Marketplace Beta orders now show in your transaction history as “MKT2” -  Xstreet purchases continue to show in your your transaction history as  “MKT”
• You can now use bit.ly urls for links to more information on inworld items
• You can now use bit.ly urls for inworld stores
• We have added the “category tree” to the store landing pages
• Edit link has been moved back to the right in “manage inventory”
• The Carousel on the home page no longer rotates

 

Quick Update on an XstreetSL Issue:

Linden dollars showing on Xstreet or during a purchase as L$NA should be fixed.

 

Distributions Coming to the SL Marketplace Beta

This  week we will be introducing the distributions feature to the  Marketplace Beta, but this feature will function differently than it  does on Xstreet today. The new marketplace will have distributions based  on Percent's and not based on a fixed amount. The existing  distributions on Xstreet will be migrated over and converted to  percents. For more information, please see the Marketplace Wiki.

Be sure to refer to the the Marketplace Wiki for more specific FAQs, updates on features and other Marketplace project information.

We’ll  be reviewing the forums this week, as usual, but will have limited time  to respond during this busy time. In the meantime, the development  team will be watching the Issue Tracker, so as you find bugs, please  file them using the public JIRA, also known as the Issue Tracker. File them as Project: "3. Second Life Website - WEB" and Component: "Marketplace". More info on how to do that. A handy compilation of Marketplace bugs can be found here.

Friendly greetings! It's me, Torley (who?). You've asked and I'm answering! Following the launch of Viewer 2.1, I'm teaching you how to use features both big and small so you can get the most out of the new Viewer. Of particular attention is "Multiple-items on a clothing layer with multi-wearables". Let me show you!

Yes, that's right, you can stack up to 5 (five!) items on a clothing layer in 2.1. This largely reduces the need for workarounds like attaching prim tattoos or that other awkward one where a creator sells a "jacket, shirt, and undershirt" version of a clothing item. My gosh that was awkward, but it's fading into the past.

Some of these tips will be expanded upon in future posts (and embedded with text articles on the wiki help pages) and in some cases, my videos present bugs/shortcomings we're aware of and going to continue building on. ITERATE. In any case, I wanted to let you know that these are up right now, so check them out:

OMG NEW 2.1 STUFF!

• Giving inventory with the Share button - Mis-drag often? Tired of flipping tabs? This is better.
• Multiple items on a clothing layer with multi-wearables - As featured above.
• The sidebar Appearance Editor - Connects some things that were spread apart.
• Undo for accidental outfit changes - A little, good thing to know.
• I previously covered a lot of the everyday usability tweaks in "Nifty user interface tweaks in Viewer 2.1 Alpha" (so some stuff has changed since then, but it's essentially still true). Stuff that makes you go "Aha! Wish I knew that earlier…" is my vanguard.

Not entirely new, but I see this stuff asked about a lot…

Mysteries solved! Practical how-tos! And a couple classics updated for 2.1.

• Eyedropper tool to match textures and colors - Never used this? Worth a try to save time.
• Moving objects like furniture - For beginners, like if you've moved into a Linden Home!
• Saving textures to your hard drive - I see this often on the forums.
• Uploading textures - Same deal here. Remember, Viewer 2.1 removed the inventory's own top menus, so use the gear and + icons at the bottom.
• What "unknown creator" really means - I don't know when we're changing this to make more human sense, but at least you can have some insight into what's going on.

I'm delighted we have embedded videos back on the blog. Yoz Linden and I tested this amidst referencing Scott Pilgrim, which added to the excitement.

*ahem* What often makes great material for a video tutorial is stuff that's much easier to show than tell (removing layers of abstraction). As always, I gratefully accept comments here, and I also started a discussion thread for vidtut requests awhile back.

What's your fave 2.1 feature that isn't getting enough attention and should be better explained?

We  had a small release last week and have been fine-tuning performance in  preparation for our next release. Improving performance is a major  concern of ours and if you haven't yet, please download the latest Viewer. Search performance depends, in part, on Viewer  performance and every Viewer release improves Search performance.

Just released!

You may have already noticed this additional option appear on your in-viewer Search last week. If not, check it out! You now have the option to browse events straight from the Find window in Viewer 2.

Some features of note:

1) Featured
The editorial team at Linden has stumbled across a few events we wanted to bring to your attention, so we've include one of their selections up top. If you have an event worthy of notice, please send in your  suggestions!

2) Choose a date
By  default, you'll see events listed starting with the top of the current  hour. If you're planning ahead, we have a convenient drop-down calendar  for you to choose another date.

Browse by interest
3)  You also have the option to simply select an Event category. We’re looking to expand categories as well and we welcome your suggestions.

Additional fixes included:

• Performance tweaks
• Teleport not triggered for specific locations in viewer search
• Changes to filtered words (Which included this fix WEB-2023)
• Multiple repeat Destination guide entries on web search
• Profiles missing images

Release next week!

The  fix for WEB-2378, finally, is coming along with a number of tweaks to the world pages, like visible html tags, table misalignment, classifieds tracking, and broken group links. Also coming next week, is an updated FAQ with additional information on how Search works, including suggestions for all of you who would like to appear higher in listings for your keywords.

We're working hard to increase the frequency of releases and enable the Search team to deploy when needed in order to fix bugs in a more timely manner. Thanks for your ongoing patience and understanding.

On a related note, thank you to everyone who is talking about Search  publicly, in social media, comments, and in forums everywhere. It's a tremendous resource and we value your input highly. Please keep it up!

In case you were wondering... your Transaction History, found in your Account section on http://secondlife.com, shows "your Linden Dollar (L$) transactions for the previous 30 days". You can filter by date range and export your transactions for  record-keeping purposes.

What do "MKT2" and  "MKT" mean?

Since your transaction history includes Second Life items you've  purchased on the web, "MKT2 Item Purchase" refers to items purchased  from the Second Life Marketplace, which will eventually replace Xstreet (the old marketplace), whose purchased items are shown with "MKT Item Purchase".

To see exactly which items were purchased, go to Marketplace Order History (still in-progress so stuff may be missing) or Xstreet Order History.

Here's an example of what it looks like:

Keep up-to-date with Marketplace & Commerce news!

I've put the above info on a wiki help page. More video tutorials coming this week (Yoz got videos working on the blogs again, yayzerama), stay tuned fellow avatars.

Recently, I posted an update here on our blogs about on Linden Lab’s strategy. I mentioned my desire to hold an inworld meeting for questions before the end of July, and today I’m happy to share some details on how you can participate!

On Friday July 30th, join myself and COO Bob Komin (BK Linden) at 10am SLT/PST at Linden Estate Services for an Inworld meeting with the Residents of Second Life. It was announced this June that I would be returning as interim CEO and I’d like to take this opportunity to address some of the excitement, concerns and questions that have been circulating for the past few weeks. The overall goal is to open up the conversation with the community about our upcoming plans around the development and future of Second Life.

If you would like to attend, please fill out this form with your Second Life name and email address no later than 5pm SLT/PST on Wednesday, July 28th.  Admission to the live event will be decided by a random draw and the winners will be notified on the 29th by either an email or notecard with instructions on how to RSVP. Please keep in mind that the event will be in English and that both myself and Bob will be using SL Voice.

We are attempting to make this event as inclusive as possible so that those who are interested will be able to participate. We have partnered with TreetTV in order to provide live video and audio streaming of the event. In addition, we have asked Virtual Ability Island to provide a transcription of the event so that those with hearing impairments can follow along. You can also submit questions throughout the event to the SL Twitter account. The final 20-30 minutes of the event will be devoted to answering some of those questions.

I'm looking forward to hearing from the community on Friday, and keeping in touch with you as we move forward.

Thanks,

Philip

 

UPDATE: For those who didn’t get drawn in the lottery to attend, you’ll be able to watch, listen, and read the video, audio, and text transcription of the event live as it happens at http://slevents.treet.tv/slmeeting/. Treet.TV will stream the entire event, and Virtual Ability will provide a live text transcription in a dedicated IRC channel on the Treet.TV page.

Attendees will be able to direct questions to Philip and BK via an inworld IM to our moderator, Wallace Linden, and we’ll also be taking questions on Twitter: just direct a Tweet to @secondlife.

For those who were selected to attend, please arrive at the event a few minutes ahead of time and plan to get started at 10am PST. As noted above, Philip and BK will speak for approximately 30 minutes, and the second half of the hour will be devoted to questions, before we wrap up at 11am. We look forward to seeing you inworld!

Thanks,

Wallace

Fall fashion week is right around the corner, and we're looking for a few events to feature that reflect the unique creativity and innovation of our Residents. So if you're holding any fashion shows or other fashion-related events in September, please let us know in the comments below. Tell us what's happening, where and when, who's putting it on, and how to get in touch with you, and provide a link to any related Web pages or product listings, if you can. We'll be using some totally unscientific methods to choose a handful of events to feature on the Destination Guide and in other places, and we expect to see you decked out in your finest come September. See you on the runway!

The Commerce Team brought over 95K products which had Keywords: xxxx or Keyword xxxx.  Images were migrated and any missing products will be showing up shortly.

We are suspending regular data syncs from XstreetSL to the SL Marketplace Beta for the time being. When we are closer to the completion of the SL Marketplace Beta we will announce the next data migration.

Refer to the the Marketplace Wiki for more specific FAQs, updates on features and other Marketplace project information.
As you find Bugs, please file bugs using the public JIRA, also known as the Issue Tracker. File them as Project: "3. Second Life Website - WEB" and Component: "Marketplace".  More info on how to do that. A handy compilation of Marketplace bugs can be found here.

Head over to Second Life music venue The Velvet on Tuesday, July 27, for an advance screening of 'Burning," a film from the band Mogwai and directors Vincent Moon and Nathanael Le Scouarnac, who you can also check out on La Blogotheque. The inworld screening takes place at 12 noon PST, via UStream, and will be followed by Vincent Moon and Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite answering questions submitted by fans. Jump inworld on Tuesday and hang with other Mogwai fans for the screening at The Velvet in Second Life.

Today I’m pleased to announce that Viewer 2 (Version 2.1.0) has left beta to become the official release Viewer for Second Life! As mentioned in previous blog posts, our focus over the past few months has been on improving the stability and performance of the Viewer. After the beta release, the crash rate was far worse than our previous 1.23 Viewer and this is something our engineering teams have worked hard to correct. We’ve been closely monitoring crash rates and other key metrics and carefully tuning our code to provide a much more predictable and stable inworld experience. Over the beta period, we’ve watched crash rates decline steadily and we’re confident this release, Version 2.1.0, will be a great improvement over the previous release.

Version 2.1.0 is not just about stability and performance improvements, we’ve also introduced some great UI and usability enhancements in response to your feedback. Check out the Version 2.1.0 release notes for more detail, but here are some highlights:

• Customize the bottom bar - Right-click on the bottom bar to show/hide the buttons you wish to have displayed.
• Resize the chat bar - Click and drag over the right side of the chat bar to resize the field to your desired width.
• Choose between sliding the world or overlaying it with the Sidebar - Many users didn’t like the squeezing effect that took place on their world view when they opened the Sidebar. In response to that, we’ve added a new preference (under Advanced > Automatic position for: Sidebar” ) that allows you to choose which Sidebar slide behavior you prefer.
• Camera controls clean-up - The pan and orbit controls have been brought back together in one view, so you don’t have to toggle between the two.
• Avatar appearance editing in the Sidebar - You can now edit your outfits and body shape right from the Appearance Tab in the sidebar.

We’ve also introduced a new voice feature - Voice Morphing!

Voice Morphing is a long-requested feature that allows you to change your avatar’s voice to match any number of tones and characteristics. You can change your voice to sound like a robot, furry, monster, or even a different gender! Voice Morphing adds a new dimension to avatar customization, allowing you to be whoever you want to be in Second Life, in both appearance and voice! To learn more, check out the SL Voice Morphing Microsite.

Resources
Download Page
Release Notes
Viewer 2 Forum
Jira
SL Answers
Knowledge Base
Twitter (#slviewer2)

Hi everyone,

I wanted to announce some changes to the event known as Burning Life.  After seven years of support, the Lab has decided to transition the organization and ownership of the event to the official Burning Man team effective immediately.  Burning Life will be renamed BURN 2.0.

As we shift our focus to usability, the basics of running Second Life and ultimately, doing less better, we thought this was a good opportunity to take a project that has run pretty well since it’s inception and return it to the community who inspired it.  Over the years Burning Life has shown us again and again how creative and innovative Second Life Residents are.  From music and performance, to intricate installations and the occasional snail ride, Burning Life has been a joy and a surprise to experience, and I feel confident that this legacy will live on as BURN 2.0 continues to be organized and run by a coalition of passionate Residents.

For general information and communication, the BURN 2.0 team will use the SL group BurningMan 2.0.  Members of previous Burning Life groups will be encouraged to join the new official group.

Finally, http://www.burn2.org will be the website for news and information about this unique community event.

Thanks,

Philip

Questions like "Which computer should I buy for Second Life?" and "What graphics card should I upgrade to?" are at the heart of Resident curiosity — I also see requests for more specifics than the System Requirements, since there's still a sea of choices to pick from. While I wish there was a single configuration that would make a delightful copy-and-paste answer, like cars and shoes and other goods through which you express yourself, we need to focus on what's right for you: what else are you doing with your computer? What's your budget? And so on.

Inspired by the most recent forum thread I've seen on this topic, I've started a wiki help page which is designed to be, like so many other help pages before it, (1) an easy place to look for compiled info and (2) updated over time as technology updates. It does take time to become familiar with the possibilities, so be patient with yourself and don't be intimidated amidst all the model numbers.

What I've written here draws both from Linden canon and Resident experiences, with a dash of my own personal experiences (which I'm most qualified to share firsthand). I should emphasize I'm an avid dealhunter (and have written for other renowned blogs on the topic), so cost-conscious questions like "How much does a computer that runs Second Life well cost?" are thoughtfully addressed with realistic expectations. In addition, handy links to industry-acclaimed sources are provided for further research.

Also in recognition of this, these are by no means final answers: as Second Life grows, computers keep getting faster yet cheaper, bandwidth becomes more ample, and our virtual world becomes easier to access. This goes hand-in-hand with what our founder and CEO Philip wrote the other day. So whether you're looking for help deciding on a new computer for Second Life or consider yourself savvy at picking parts and want to impart advice, please see and add to:

Which computer should I buy for Second Life? help page

There's also an on-wiki discussion page to share your experiences. Alternatively, you can make comments on this post, which is also linked to from the page. Keep the knowledge flowing!

CODA: I've been eyeing a new Windows computer to run Second Life (which makes it my fourth Windows PC focused on SL) and a forthcoming indulgent pleasure, Deus Ex: Human Revolution. (The first DX is one of the main inspirations that got me into SL.) Upon receiving my next PC, as I have before, I hope to openly share what I got, how much I got it for, and lessons learned — so if your wishes are like mine, you can adapt that to fit your computer-buying adventures.

Hi Everyone,

It's been just over 3 weeks now since my return as  CEO, and I think I've gotten up to speed enough to begin communicating  with you in a useful way.   This post is an update on what we are doing,  and also to announce an in-world meeting where I'll extend on the  thoughts in this post, as well as answer as many question as possible.    Beyond the contents of this message and meeting, I hope to revitalize a  frank and timely exchange between the company and the Second Life  community.  You can expect additional posts from us in the coming weeks  expanding these focus areas to more specific projects.  This is a time  of great change for us:  a downsizing and restructuring of the company, a  change in executive leadership, and big changes to our strategic  planning and directions.

When I spoke at the seventh-birthday celebration, I said how we  needed to 'tear down the walls' that broadly keep more people from  getting into and using Second Life.  We have created together (both  Linden Lab and the many of you who create content and experiences) an  amazing shared experience which at it's best is a breathtaking social,  creative, educational, and entrepreneurial platform.  But we've gotten  ahead of ourselves.  We still have a lot of hard work to do to make this  experience accessible to a majority of people.  At a very high level,  we're slowing down work that we think we've started too early or in the  wrong order, and refocusing our team and projects on improving the basic  features which impact all users and which are essential to the  operation of Second Life.  Additionally we will focus on faster  iteration with more input from the community, as well as greatly growing  the virtual marketplace.

Here are some more details on the current state of that planning  process:

Inside the Lab, we've been using the expression 'back to  basics', to capture refocusing our efforts to re-examine, repair, and  where necessary, re-design the basic experiences and systems that are at  the core of the Second Life experience.   First on the list should be a  big attack on lag and crashes, clearly things that very negatively  impact all users.  We are looking at 'lag' broadly to encompass things  like chat failures and delays, frame rates, and scene and object loading  delays.  Beyond performance and crashes, wherever possible we will make  the basic user experiences (like getting clothes on, communicating, or  your first few sessions as a new user) faster, easier, and more fun.

Next,  we've been looking at how we need to more rapidly improve and innovate  Second Life to re-capture and sustain the technology leadership position  that got us to where we are today, and is vital to scaling the virtual  world experience to maturity.  In creating Second Life, we've solved  some very hard problems across a number of different areas, and few  people have been able to copy us.  We need to get back to being the  first to invent and deliver the solutions that evolve virtual worlds -  we are still at the very beginning of a huge market.  That's a lot of  different work, but in the short term you can expect to see greatly  shortened release cycles across all our systems and a focus on rapid  iteration with lots of community feedback as a first result of those  efforts.   The other key short term goal is to very rapidly make Viewer  2.x the best and most widely-used Second Life viewer.  We are unifying  efforts across the lab to make this viewer both the best-performing and  the most functionally capable for all different users, as well as  hopefully becoming the underlying codebase for lots of  third party  development.

We've also identified the virtual content (both goods and  services) marketplace as a key longer-term area of focus as well as the  key metric for our collective success.  There are 10's of thousands of  entrepreneurs, creators, and merchants working together inside Second  Life that have already created what is easily the world's largest market  for virtual items and experiences, with around $600M expected in total  volume in 2010.   We're going to redirect efforts to improve and grow  that market as quickly as possible.  Making content and experience  creators more successful is what ultimately drives the growth of Second  Life.   Optimizing from end-to-end the process of searching for, trying,  buying, and using virtual goods will be our first focus here.

We will make every effort to deliver visible and continuous  improvements in these three areas over the remainder of the year.  The  shift to shorter cycles with smaller deliverables  should allow better  community involvement and feedback.  We will make our changes, develop  code, and discuss plans in the open.  Before the end of July, we will  also hold an in-world gathering where we can  talk more about these  plans and take questions. More details about how  we can best  get a big group together and talking will be coming in  another post.

As a final note, I would note that we are not planning to change  Second Life to exclude any categories of users.  Our restructuring  messaging around 'consumers' and 'web' versions of Second Life seemed to  mistakenly suggest to some that we plan to more narrowly focus the  experience on a specific demographic or use model.  We aren't.  We are  reducing efforts across the board that in our opinion are being done in  the wrong order, but those resources will re-focus on creating a single  effective system that is better for all categories of user.  We believe  we first need to improve and complete the core experiences that drive  Second Life, before we dive into how to customize it for different  markets.

In closing, I'd like to thank the SL community,  and in particular  those people who sent me the many heart-warming email messages of  support that I've received since returning.  They have been both a  direct contribution to these plans, and also a way to keep a smile on my  face in these tough but exciting times.  If you have thoughts about  Second Life that you want to share with me, please keep those emails  coming.  I can't say that I can read or respond to everything, but I  have gotten great value from many of the well-written thoughts I've  received.

So the new support system is in place; and thus there's a slightly different method of asking the DPW for help.

• go to www.secondlife.com
• choose "login" (upper right corner of web page)
• login! This brings you to the Dashboard page
• Help > Submit a Ticket
• choose Land and Region for most DPW issues
• choose Linden Lab owner parcel issues
• fill in the other entries that appear
• Submit!

You can see your recently-submitted cases by visiting the Second Life Support Center and clicking on My Support History on the top of the screen.

Actually, other issues can be brought up through this process; for example, requests to buy abandoned land parcels. We sort out the requests to various support lists based on what you fill in.

The main things the DPW gets asked to do:   improving the terrain on abandoned land; fixing broken content on Linden-owned land; improving the parcel settings on Linden-owned land; adding content to Linden-owned land; encroachment (either by Linden content, or onto Linden-owned land) ...

For abuse and other violations of the Terms of Service, please file an abuse report. The DPW also has an office hour every Friday at 3 pm SLT, in the Shamon region.

Unfortunately I won't be able to make my usual Thursday office hour slot today - apologies to those that normally attend. As we did the last time I had to cancel, we'll also notify the Concierge Information Group inworld and put a sign at the inworld office on Linden Estate Services region.

Normal service resumed next Thursday so hope to see you then.

We're back with another installment of 1.40.4.  We have fixes for the  inventory and performance issues that caused the rollback of 1.40.2.   After learning a nice lesson from last roll, we will be having a full  length (and then some) pilot to ensure that this one sticks .

Here's the schedule:

• 2010-07-20, Tuesday, 7a: 20% pilot[1] roll
• 2010-07-28, Wednesday, 7a: Rolling Restart for the rest of  the grid

As always, if your region is down more than 30 minutes on the day of a  roll, post here and I will look into it.

Please direct all discsusion to the aptly named Discussion Page.

[1] Pilot regions:  https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Agni_Pilot_Regions
Note that 20% of simulators means that we will pick regions that   opt-in via that wiki page, and other random regions to  get 20% of the grid.

As we make strides towards integrating the web shopping experience with the in-Viewer one — check out the Second Life Marketplace Beta for more on that (and you may gotten an email recently) — certain classic questions keep coming up. This is essential knowledge if you're a content creator, because it helps customers buy your stuff easier! And wouldn't you want to do that?

In any case, one of the classic questions is: "Should I sell my inworld Second Life creations as Original, Copy, or Contents?" That really depends on how the object is presented and what you intend to do. Out of sheer practicality, I've started a guide on the matter with one of those virtual world-famous video tutorials, clearly illustrating the differences between these three options to help you decide.

Come know! Original! Copy! Contents! Transform into Voltron or something!

 

Badass boxes courtesy of those NOTsoBAD dudes.

Yesterday, we released the third beta of Second Life Viewer 2.1. (To learn more about the Viewer 2.1, read our alpha blog post and the last Viewer 2.1 beta post.) We’ve been hard at work to significantly improve both the stability and performance of this Viewer. But we need more Residents to try it out to help us get it ready for prime time. That’s where you come in.

Now that the beta of Viewer 2.1 is more stable than your current viewer -- Viewer 2.0 -- we invite you to download the beta, send us crash reports, report any bugs that you run into, and let us know what what you like and what we need to work on in the Viewer 2 Forum.

And remember, Viewer 2.1 is full of cool features that enable you to:

• Easily share media
• Customize the bottom bar
• Resize the chat bar
• Choose between sliding the world or overlaying it with the Sidebar
• Control your camera more easily
• And morph your inworld voice!

So download the third beta of Viewer 2.1 today and let us know what you think on Twitter using #slviewer2.

Windows | Mac | Linux
Release Notes

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Following  on from the previous blog post discussing the work we're doing to fix search - today we're happy to announce the full release of our fixes and improvements.

Perhaps the most important part of today's release is the fix for the bug that was causing some parcels  to be dropped from the search index The fix involved replacing legacy components of the Search system which has had the added benefit of  greatly improving the speed at which the Search index gets updated. In other words, changes you make will be reflected by Search much more rapidly! This new system also brings us the increased dependability and consistency we need for Search.

Index Generation

Until this week, updates could take 72-96 hours to fully propagate in Search.

This meant that new parcels and regions would take a while to  show up in Search and merchants editing their search listings were not  able to monitor their changes in a timely fashion. By comparison the new  system updates in under 12 hours! (Plus, we plan to cut that in half in the upcoming weeks!)

Spam

Also in  this release are improved methods to deal with Search spam, starting  with keyword stuffing (using large numbers of words, often the same or very similar and often not related to the location itself). You should  therefore notice that fewer of the top ranking results will look like  they were written solely to game the rankings. Increasingly, if you add  excessive numbers of keywords this may count against your ranking. Try  to use fewer and more accurate keywords, including key phrases, to  increase your relevance. If you would like to refresh your memory on  best practices, please read our guidelines.

Improvements and Fixes List

More improvements include:

    ◦    Improve search listing page generation

     ◦   Increase crawl update speed and reliability

    ◦    Remove picks data

    ◦    Increase search index size

    ◦    Adjust column headers for events

    ◦    Exclude parcels for  private sale in general search

    ◦    Activate arrow keys for  browsing Viewer results

Bug fixes include:

    ◦    Results  appearing with "None" text

    ◦    Eliminate misleading result  count estimates

    ◦    Re-index groups missing from Search

     ◦   Eliminate English spelling suggestions for non-English users.

     ◦   Encode special characters in V2 results

 

More Improvements ahead

We've had reports that the current  maturity filter does not prevent all adult content from being shown only  to Residents who've asked for adult content. Our next projects include  ensuring that the maturity filters work the way our Residents expect  them to, across search results, classifieds, and events. We have also  heard from people who would like to be able to browse certain types of  content and restrict their search to specific collections before they  search. Although we don't like the idea of showing empty Search pages to  Searchers, we love the idea of having browsable collection options  available to everyone who launches Search. So, we'll be designing and testing options for that, too!

 

Please note: that during this first release of the new system, it could take up to 48 hours for the index to be fully populated.

We intended to have a Search release incorporating a number of improvements in June. We did have one, sort of. During the release, we became aware, both internally and through Jira, that we had another scenario to take into consideration. So, we made the decision to roll back the release. Since then, we have fixed the Jira issue, dealt with the performance implications, and made some high-value additions to the release.

Our main focus for this next release is getting rid of our legacy Search system, one that has been patched, updated, and added to for years.  We're replacing it with a new, faster, more dependable way of generating the Search indices. In short, it will be significantly improved. In addition, we wanted to tackle the two main issues we highlighted in the last post. Namely, a significant bug that caused us to drop parcels and secondary information that was causing bad Search results. It's this second point I'd like to expand on a bit here, before our next release is out.

The Association Problem
When I first joined the lab in December, I was made aware of a report from a resident land owner whose region was somehow associated with the word "Nazi" in Search. There were no WWII role-playing events and no German history groups associated with his land, so he was justifiably unhappy about this. After investigating thoroughly, we narrowed it down to a picks problem. Some Residents, a literary group inworld, who had chosen his place as a pick had phrases like "grammar nazi" in their profiles. We contacted the 2-3 Residents about the issue and asked them to change their descriptions or delete this particular pick. Unfortunately this didn't solve the problem because the GSA had "learned" that his region had something to do with Nazis. It took our GSA6 upgrade and fresh Search indices for this problem to finally go away. This is one of many examples; we've heard from several Residents citing their own favourite examples of this issue.

More Picks Issues
Aside from these accidental association issues, we have three main other issues with the picks data in Search. First, some enterprising individuals have actually created businesses based on paying people to influence Search with picks.  Second, Residents have been using picks to highlight those they care about, their friends and family in Second Life, rather than just places.  I think it's nice to call out your important relationships in a public way, it's just not good data for Search. Third, places frequently come and go in Second Life and many picks are outdated. There are those who like to keep a pick of a former favourite spot as a memory, but often, people simply don't realize that their pick isn't accurate. In either case, it's more bad data from the search perspective.

These cases add to the problem of using picks data in Search and chasing the consequences of these issues as they come up is a time-consuming pursuit that doesn't actually address the core issue. Though we think picks can be valuable information on important inworld spaces, right now, picks are a problem in Search.

We'll continue to test different and better ways of using picks information, but for now, starting with this upcoming release, picks are no longer included in Search relevancy. They will still be visible in resident profiles in the viewer, but they won't affect Search until we find a better way to use that information and add value to Search. We do appreciate the value of picks, but when we do include them again we want to be sure it adds to the relevancy rather than making it worse.

I look forward to writing more this week about the rest of the improvements included in the upcoming release!

Last time I covered something quite misanthropic in nature, so this time I'm gonna do the opposite and show you how to use EMOTES to express yourself when socializing.

While communication is an essential part of the Second Life experience, even though there's voice chat, you may prefer to show how you feel in text chat. That's cool, because /me , /shout , and /whisper are pretty much self-explanatory ways to do what they — ahem — say. By using them in natural conversation, you can add greater dynamic range, entertain your friends, and have more fun. And who doesn't like fun? (That's a rhetorical question.)

Check out a video and tips on using these emotes!

 

I guarantee your conversations will never be the same again.