Possible Gotchas

One of the questions the Lab has to ask is: how might this be used for griefing? The opinion is that if only the VLM creator can change the VLM’s they make, griefing should not be a problem. A merchant with a shop has no reason to send you anywhere but to the location of their shop. Doing anything else would cost them sales.

Personal VLM’s to your home or to clubs that are not as indicated by the face value of the VLM will likely only ever get used once. Then I’m not going to trust VLM’s from you ever again. Plus the VLM creator making it no mode should me they are the only one that can change it, thus they are the one to get AR’s (Abuse Report).

Provided all the directional information is server side, viewers could not be programmed to hack the VLM’s.

So, at first look it seems like a minimal risk. Obviously some dimwit that has more technical ability than social skill will figure out a way. The griefer-exploits-patches cycle will continue to escalate. But, it doesn’t seem VLM’s will be that great a problem.

Duplicate Names

In RL there are no duplicate domain names. As close as one gets is something like Nalates.com and Nalates.net, but they are different. So, how will VLM names be handled?

You may already know that everything in SL is described to the computers by using an UUID. So, while the carbon based users may get confused by duplicate names, the silicon users won’t. So, we could allow duplicates and not affect the system operationally. However, the carbon based life forms would likely combust or not.

In the JIRA, Toysoldier gets into using duplicates. A number of clubs could use their own VLM labeled ‘Best Club in SL.’ Each VLM would send the user of the VLM to the correct club because the UUID of each VLM would be different. So, just has having a jillion prims named Object is not a problem, so too have duplicate names on VLM would not be a problem.

This could present some challenges for Second Life Search, but it already sucks. So, that is a non-issue for me.

By allowing the name to be flexible, we can rename any VLM we get to whatever we want that makes sense to us. So, ‘Best Club in SL’ might get changed to: Go Here for Hot Hunks of He-Men.

 VLM Possibilities

One big reason for using VLM’s is merchants could put VLM’s in their product packages. No matter if they move their store/shop, the VLM can be changed ONCE and all the copies would point to the new location. So, a merchant with 6,000 products all with VLM’s would make only one change for all 6,000 VLM’s.

Hunt’s would be a much simpler process. One could make a series of VLM’s; VLM1, VLM2, VLM3, etc. Those could be provided to the participating sponsors of the hunt. If in the middle of the hunt the region VLM2 leads to disappears, the hunt manager can easily change VLM1 to point to the region containing VLM3. I’m not sure how well that will work with the search hints, but I can think of a way or two to handle hints for that scenario.

I also think it will make managing LM’s much easier. I thin out my LM’s every now and then. The problem is when a shop does move, I have to figure out which LM points to the current shop and keep the right one. It can be a pain. That problem would go away.

We might see niche markets for VLM based services. As Andrew suggested, Sally’s Pick of The Week VLM. Once you have it, you never have to get another copy. Each week it would just take you some place new.

Alternate locations

There is a thing in the computer world called load balancing. If you think about how many people are using Google, you’ll probably understand that a single computer cannot take care of all the searches being requested. The servers are handling something like over 100,000 plus requests per second. Busy computers.

The DNS system uses what is called Round Robin balancing. When one requests the address of Google they are given an IP Address. The next requester is given another and different IP Address to another server at Google. The people at Google figure out how many servers they need online to handle the load and build a list of those servers and feed it to DNS (that is a bit of over simplifying). They send people to all the different servers so individual servers do not overload.

The same idea is being considered for VLM’s. We may be able to add fall back locations to VLM’s. If a shop owner or an event like Hair Fair has multiple regions available, visitors can be sent to various regions depending on the population in the regions listed. Or even in one shop one could use various locations to keep new arrivals from landing on the previous person’s head. It would be great for events.

Cost?

We buy domain names. We are not sure if there will or won’t be a cost for VLM’s. We have no idea what the Lab will decide. If there were some annual cost, it could keep the system cleaned out. But, the selling of VLM’s might be more work than it’s worth to the Lab. An annual change fee might work better. Of course the typical person will want it for free. The enlightened free market people will understand the reason for a cost. The entitlement folks will rant and hate if it is not given to them for free. So, we’ll likely see some drama.

The Lab has been in the mode of figuring out the cost of features and relating that cost to the load it puts on their system. So, I expect some reasonable cost to be assigned/charged.

What happens to LM’s?

Actually nothing changes for LM’s. They would work as they always did and be a simple static link to a specific location. VLM’s would be an additional type of asset we could use or ignore.

Summary

This is one of the best ideas I’ve heard this year. Toysoldier Thor has written about the idea on his blog: VLM’s (Virtual LandMarks) – A Missing Must-Have for SecondLife. He provides a technically more accurate description than my simplifications here. I suspect he intended for the Lindens to read it. However, most of the description is easily understood English, not geek speak.

At the top of the article is the JIRA Number. Please do NOT discuss the feature there. All the ‘I like it too’ posts just clutter the JIRA and put off the Lindens. Use the JIRA to add user cases and additional features or purposes for the subject feature request.

A ‘user case’ is a statement like: I would use VLM’s to… User cases influence the Lindens and help promote a feature request to a higher priority.

To discuss the features described in the JIRA and ask questions visit the Forum threads where those discussions are taking place.

• Virtual LandMarks – My Proposed Idea to LL – Thread in the Merchant’s Forum.
• New Feature Proposal: VIRTUAL LANDMARKS – Thread in Second Life Server. Reading through the thread one can get an idea of how things have developed and what is needed to put together a proposal to the Lab for consideration. All those people that have put in ideas and feel they have never been considered could learn why.

You can also see how Toysoldier’s idea has grown and expanded. Add your information and wishes to the discussion.

I think this is a great idea. Participate in the discussion and Click WATCH in the JIRA.