Market Place 2014-2

Shug Maitland has an article up pointing to Why moving a shop to Marketplace ‘hurts’ the SL economy. She prefers to shop in-world, where she can see what she is buying and demo it. I suspect many of us have similar preferences.

She uses the Market Place as an index and search engine for Second Life. In-world search sucks so badly we have little choice. That says something when we consider how bad the Market Place search is. I often end up using Google via a manual search command like: site:marketplace.secondlife.com gesture vendor 

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Second Life News 2014-2

Recently we have seen a number of people complaining about getting disconnected, repeatedly. No one has determined if it is an SL problem or just problems local to the users being disconnected.

Viewers

The main release SL Viewer today is: 3.6.12-284506. I expect that to change this week.

The RC viewers are now:

We have more project viewers this week:

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Avatar Evolution

There is an interesting thread over on SLUniverse. Imagin Illyar started Avatar Evolution and posted images of her avatar from 2008 to 2013. It is an interesting progression. Others have joined in and are doing the same. Join in: Avatar Evolution

Real & Second Life Tidbits

Direct Messages

More blogs are noticing that Messages sent from My.SecondLife.com (Direct Messages) are not working. See: Second and Real Life Tidbits 2014. We have no clue from the Lab that the feature will or won’t return at some point.

It should be easy and possible to block non-resident users from using the web site’s message feature. If that is the problem, then I expect to see the feature return. I suspect the problem is how to block and limit residents that are spamming. If that is the problem, we may see the permanent removal of the feature. But, it shouldn’t be all that hard to limit messages sent. So, I have hope the feature will return.

Virus

Honour has a post Protecting My Second Life From the Tricksters with some great images of a Japanese-themed sim: Yokai. Honour is on about the ransom-ware thing called CyrptoLocker. A piece of malware that has been prevalent in Europe for some time and that came to the USA in late 2013. To learn more about it see: Virus Warning. This is a devious bit of malware best protected against by a good backup strategy with the backups being separated from your computer. If the CryptoLocker Trojan can find a file on your system, usb and network drives included, it will encrypt them. 

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Second and Real Life Tidbits 2014

It is early in the year and not much is happening at Linden Lab. I see the SL-blogosphere covering all sorts of things. Even the Subscrib-O-matic’s seem to be sending out old stuff. So, I’m skimming news and watching for anything interesting in between playing with Blender and Avastar. A few of the things I think are interesting:

Inara has a post up about Profile feeds direct messaging: Lab confirms “turned off”. If you have used the web site My.SecondLife.com  to send IM’s, you won’t be able to do that anymore. Peter Gray of Linden Lab confirmed to Inara the feature has been turned off due to spammers.

Honour Mcmillan has posted and article asking for volunteers to help with her primary focus in of creating and growing a corps of LEA Volunteers. For details and the type of volunteers needed see: Calling for Volunteers in Second Life

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