Darrius Gothly has an article out: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. The article is about 4,500 words. I covers the events that have been happening with the Direct Delivery and the received Items folder. If you have been following my topic Second Life Market Place you know all but the latest events. Here I’ll  give you a synopsis of Darrius’ article, which is a pretty good read. It avoids being classed as a rant IMO and I think provides a detailed summary and analysis.

The Problems

If you have been Second Life for some time you know the problems the Commerce Team is attempting to fix. The biggest of which is failed delivery of Market Place purchased items, scripted Give-Inventory items, and person to person gifts. All of which tend to fail when the recipient is off-line.

There is also the problem of Where-did-it-go when trying to find newly received items. Is it in Objects or My Inventory or someplace else? I suspect new Second Life users get annoyingly confused as older users get annoyed.

Solution

The Lab’s solution is to change from a system that uses the Magic Box, which is a collection of scripts in-world, and the out-of-world web service, we know it as the Market Place, to something a bit more direct.

As it is now a merchant has to load a Magic Box with their goodies. The Magic Box has to tell the Market Place about the goodies. A customer buys a goodie then the web site must tell the Magic Box to deliver the goodie. If the one receiving the item is off line and their IM’s are capped, having reached an imposed limit that cuts off deliveries which I’ve never understood, then the delivery fails.

I think the idea is to get the system to work so the merchant sends goodies to the Market Place. Actually the system will add the goodie’s UUID to the Market Place (MP) database of goodies for sale. When a customer makes a purchase the item’s UUID will be copied from the MP database to the customer’s inventory, which simply adds the UUID of the goodie to whatever database holds all the data about your inventory. No Magic Boxes or handshakes between in-world and out-world services. Much cleaner.

The other part of the solution is to provide a Received Inventory of Received Items folder so it would be easy to find new purchases. As Darrius describes it problems started as the Lindens involved got the idea this folder would be good for all items received to arrive in. But think about that.

When we rez something and do whatever we do with it then take it back into inventory, it goes back to the place we took it form. The first Beta of how Received Items (RI) works would have the TAKE landing items in RI. Then we would have to move them to the right place in inventory. Annoyingly making more work for people. That caused a bunch of blow back for the Lab.

The other idea was to have Returned Items go to RI… It is so easy to use the Lost and Found folder and keep it nearly empty, if not completely empty. It is a wonderfully simple solution for things that get lost and later are returned. Many of us thought the change to using RI in this case was a really bad idea. Many said so.

The Current Plan

The current proposal can be seen here: Proposed Use of received Items Folder. Pretty well hidden.

This is much better. The Take/Take Copy only changes a minor bit. Only the ‘copy’ will go to RI. A TAKE will behave as it has, going into the folder it came from, which makes it easy to clean up duplicates.

Lost and Found will still get lost items that are returned. However, a new feature is the addition of an alerting IM (Instant Message). I wonder if it can be capped out?

Direct Delivery (DD) items purchased from the MP will arrive in RI. (aren’t the acronyms fun? 🙄  ) Whether it is a gift or a purchase you made, it will arrive in RI.

All items sent from an in-world script, think subscribe-O-matic, will also arrive in RI. An alerting IM will be sent to the recipient.

Foreseen Problem

Many people figure with the RI receiving all the goodies it will become unmanageable. So, the plan is to move the RI to its own floater (panel). In other worlds take it out of Inventory and give it its own panel/window.

We can search the new RI and may be sort and filter it.

To encourage some organization and avoid confusion, it will not be possible to rez things from RI. They will have to be moved to Inventory. I assume the same it true for wearing things too.

Dragging things from RI is permitted. Dragging things to RI is not.

There is also a plan to have a Right-Click-Menu. When clicking an object in RI you will have three choices;

• Move to <asset type> folder
• Move to Objects folder
• Delete

The first will display the asset type of the object selected… if you right-click a notecard, the first item will appear as Move to notecard folder. If it is a script, then to script and so on.

Missing…

Darrius feels a few of more features for RI would be good.

• Newly arrived items should appear in italics.
• RI should be able to be sorted by arrival date. I use that sort as a default for my Inventory.
• Block or Ignore sender. One shouldn’t be able to block MP, but blocking others would be handy.
• Darrius think throttling llGiveInventory() to 50 items per minute would be a good idea.

That last one could get Darrius burned at the stake. We have plenty of drama over the Give-Inventory Throttle already. Just remember. If the Lab fixes deliveries so they are reliable, the throttle is pretty much a non-issue for legitimate use cases.