People are reporting more occurrences of Beggar Bots hitting their groups. BUG-40546 – Group Chat Spam Bots. People are asking if they should be reported. The ToS is fuzzy on the topic. In general begging is not a violation of the ToS. Spamming is. So, we see varied opinions on whether to report or not.
Whirly Trapping a Beggar Bot
The apparent consensus among those in the know keeping up with such things is: REPORT ‘EM. The Lindens are working at closing and banning accounts of the spammers.
Group managers have the Eject and Ban tool. Some do not realize it has been upgraded. Originally it did not terminate the current chat session. So, E & B didn’t immediately shut them up. Now it does. (SVC-32)
Oz Linden reviewed the status of viewer development. He pointed out that the Visual Outfit Browser (VOB) is now in the main release version of the Linden made SL Viewer.
They updated the VLC RC and Bento RC viewers with VOB.
✧◦ Waldelfen ◦✧
Both RC viewers are doing well in the crash rate stats. Oz expects the VLC version to release to main viewer in week 39. That will leave the Bento RC as the only RC. Seems like the pipeline is emptying out…
Oz pointed out the Lab did block a few old viewer versions. Saying, ‘Only a few thousand users…’ would be affected. That number can sound bad. But, as a percent of SL users it is way small, likely way less than 1%.
October is almost here. Halloween is near. The Highlight’s page in Featured News is listing lots of Halloween oriented places. Soon there will be rotting virtual pumpkins all over Second Life™. Oh… wait… even more scary, those evil pumpkins never die. Check the Featured News and the Destination Guide often as new places will be … Read more
Thursday about noon the Lab announced some of the things that will be changing in Second Life™ viewers. We know viewers will change. But, never exactly what change is coming. See: Important Viewer Evolution Update.
Most of the changes mentioned, we know about.
Dark and Red
The viewer’s built in web browser is changing over to Chromium Embedded Frame work. So, it is basically a new browser, like Firefox or Chrome. This affects lots of things inside the viewer, search, profiles, etc. Most importantly it is part of the frame changing how streaming media is handled. There is an RC version of this change on the Alternate Viewers Page.
The avatars are changing and the RC version of the Project Bento Viewer is out, also on the Alt Viewer page.
We haven’t had much news coming out of these meetings. This week’s meeting was more informative. See the previous article on Forced Sit. We also heard about BUG-37692 – llRezObject() and llRezAtRoot() peroidically stop responding unless you’re an estate manager. This bug breaks existing content. If you are having a problem with it, you have … Read more
Yeah… sit down and be quite… probably a sentiment many of us feel in this political season in the USA. However, this new feature will only be a help in Second Life™. It is a new feature in the Linden Scripting Language (LSL), something I haven’t gotten to write about in some time.
A cute little butt to represent a new sit command? I suppose…
Rider Linden was at the Beta Server user group meeting Thursday to let us know what’s in the works. It seems the Lindens are expanding the Advanced Experience Tools feature of Second Life. The idea of Forced Sit seems an odd feature to me, but the oddity comes from the name. Several people have a use for it and I rename it and describe it below. It is about way more than just sitting.
Rider says there will be some new functions that only work within Experience enabled scripts. You can get the full details of what is being envisioned in a Google Doc: Espeon: Forced Sits. (see WARNING below) Overview:
With the advent of Experiences Keys we would like to be able to allow scripts being run as part of an experience to force an avatar to sit in a particular location. This feature will be useful in an adventure game scenario where an avatar is forced to sit in a trap so that it may sync its animations with the avatar, or in an amphitheater or classroom situation where a presenter wishes for all the other participants to remain seated. This document replaces the previous Scripted Sits document.
We will add at least one new LSL script function that will force an avatar to sit on a particular prim and make adjustments to the existing llUnSit() function to perform the counter action.
I’ll use an example from the game Obduction™, made by the people that made Myst™. They use this type of ‘forced sit’ in every game they have written. In Obduction there is a rail mounted car-type-machine you click on to ride/drive. Once you click a script takes over. It has the avatar open the car, enter, and sit. I believe this is what is being added to SL scripting, LSL – Linden Scripting Language.
