They Listened
Darrius points out and I will too, that the Commerce team listened and made changes based on resident advice. While they did not make it any easier to provide feedback, they did at least listen. Don’t go all weak kneed and faint. They didn’t listen to everything. But, do any of us?
RLV
It did not occur to me, because I seldom use RLV (RLV is usually used to mean Restrained Love Viewer features), that this system could break some RLV features. Since the features are all viewer side as is moving things around in inventory, it will be possible for RLV to program around the change for their needs.
People have seen this one coming and tested that it in fact does break RLV in the Beta. Kitty Barnett is the mover and shaker for most implementations of RLV features, AFAIK. Kitty has a JIRA in on the problem. See JIRA SVC-7748 – Accepting task inventory ignores the supplied destination folder. Be sure to click WATCH to give some weight to the JIRA.
The JIRA is a growing list of legitimate use cases. Check it. If you have a use case that is not there add it. Remember. The JIRA is not a discussion forum. Adding opinion and ‘me-too’ just burns up Linden time as they wade through none constructive chatter. I would rather they be coding changes than reading a load of ‘me-too’ posts. The Watch and Vote buttons are for ‘me-too.’ Rants and insults in the JIRA are counterproductive and waste time too.
The current Give-Inventory function allows one to specify which folder and ‘accepted’ item should end up in. There are two proposed solutions to the problem. One is to have things go to RI when the user is off-line. When online the item would respect the Give-Inventory specification.
The other is to use the specification no matter whether the user is on or off line. The off-line part is not really necessary for RLV. So the previous solution may be better.
Summary
The Market Place, Search, and Direct Delivery/Receive Inventory are the source for a huge amount of user dissatisfaction. DD and RI seem to be getting close to release. Several things are now pressing on the Lab to complete DD/RI.
The True Online Status and privacy issues have been much of the commotion in discussing the recent Third Party Viewer Policy changes because of failed deliveries, thus the need to know when someone is online before attempting a delivery to have a better chance of it succeeding.
Also, this whole delivery thing has to be having an effect on new users. I think that would show in the Lab’s research. – In the Interview, OZ spoke about the usability studies, research, the questionnaires they send to new users and more.
The Lab seems to be moving slowly in the commerce area. They also seem to be very ignorant of how residents actually use the MP or how business works in general. They are programmers, not users or business people. So, we will always deal with this problem. But, we seem to be making some headway and improving communication. The Lab’s side is improving. I’m not so sure of the communities side. See: Rebuttal to Second Life Failing.
Update: According to Tateru Nino in Poll: Second Life’s new Received Items folder feature. Love or loathe? [UPDATED] the feature is going to place all items in the Received Items folder, contrary to the revised document the Lab released. If Tateru is correct and Receive Items is released with all received items going into the folder, I expect considerable blow back. There could be some confusion over which implementation of the DD/RI features we will have when they are released. See: New feature: ALL ITEMS received go into one folder called “Received Items” – This is a couple of week old thread. Darrius’ article was published today. I’m guessing his information is more up to date.
UPDATE: I went to a Le Tigre sandbox. Using the new 3.2.1 (250772) and there is no RI folder. Magnum was rolled back, but Blue Steel and Le Tigre have the InventoryAPI maintenance project running. I would think that would have the test code if it had made it to the RC’s.
UPDATE: I looked at the project viewers, Direct Delivery viewers are dated 2/29, so they are a couple of weeks behind. All the links for a project viewer lead to the same Alternate Viewers page. Discussion on the forum is a couple of weeks old too. The JIRA item SVC-7748 is active. Most people still fail to realize the JIRA is not for discussion. Whatever, we seem to have no way to know what the latest plan is for the RI folder. I’ll go woth Darrius and wait to see what happens.
See the new article: Receive Items Folder – Update II