There are alternatives to Firestorm that have all the features for a updated viewer. Singularity is one, another is Cool VL Viewer. Both of which use the V1 interface. Also people need to understand that viewer count would not only be the common viewers (V3, Cool, Singularity, Firestorm, Phoenix, etc) and the different versions of it (many are updated weekly) then you add every different type of viewer which includes bots, text viewers, phone viewers, homemade viewers, etc. Then on top of that the different versions of them that people haven't got around to updating and you can see quite clearly it is not about people not updating to a particular version of a particular viewer. It is all about open source and the diversity that brings. -DB

I don't think that the amount of people following the facebook page proves your theory. Consider that most of the people I know on facebook don't use their real names at all. I would say half or less use their real names. Granted you can get your account banned, but with Google allowing pseudonymous I think it is only a matter of time before Facebook relaxes a little on that point. And Adeon has a excellent point, even with their RL name you don't have their SL name unless it is posted in their Facebook profile somewhere. Therefore your theory is far far from proved. I personally wouldn't use my RL name. For example it gets very confusing if Aunt Jane see a post by a friend of mine with the name John Konbis34 and wonders who that is. You tell them oh that is just a friend on Second life. Then they say "Second Life? Isn't that a sex world?" Or something to that effect. Sadly many of the mainstream media have given this bad impression in the past (I even recall one reporter calling a skin a "sex suit"). And you end up in a long conversation where you may or may not be able to change their mind as to what Second Life really is. I know people that had this exact issue and started running separate facebook accounts as a result.

While I agree that there are many things they *could* do. It is obvious they don't *want* to. My guess is they don't want to expand and slowly let SL fade away while getting what they can from it now. If you remember SL is technically flawed (buggy) in many aspects. Scaling is one of those. If they were to go back to their peak days, I very much doubt the change since then (mesh, physics changes, stacking 4 sims on to the same server etc) would hold up. The grid would be far more unstable than it is now. Group chat is still buggy after all the development time that went into fixing it and there are less people on SL, it would only get worse with more active users. Just imagine every bug magnified by a factor of 10 or 100. In short they don't want to expand or improve, only do what is necessary to keep the system going while they (slowly) move on to other projects. That is the sad truth. I would love to be proven wrong, but I highly doubt that is possible at this point in time.

For those that doubt is not against the terms of service: While there isn't directly anything saying "begging" I would like to point to: 8.2 You will not post or transmit prohibited Content, including any Content that is illegal, harassing or violates any person's rights. (ii) Impersonate any person or entity without their consent, or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation, The above is misrepresentation your affiliation for the purpose of acquiring money. And: 8.3 You agree that you will not post or transmit Content or code that may be harmful, impede other users' functionality, invade other users' privacy, or surreptitiously or negatively impact any system or network. (iii) Use robots or other automated means to increase traffic to any Virtual Land; (iv) Engage in malicious or disruptive conduct that impedes or interferes with other users' normal use of the Service; Now granted the accounts may or may not be increasing traffic, dependent upon the settings in the account. But it is disruptive to be in a store see bots that pester for money and you might leave the location just to get away from it. Hence it is interfering with sales of the store owner. So again, this ultimately against the TOS and I would suggest that everyone report every flatterbot they see, stating what is going on and that it is a violation of TOS. They will take action I think. Especially since the owner has said they are making a lot of money off this scheme.

Last I knew begging was against the TOS. Or did they change that clause? If it is still against the TOS, LL should ban the person, delete all accounts on that reason alone since it is a large operation with clear intent to fraud people. Another aspect is the bots are not placed at locations the bot owner owns personally. But rather stores which is almost certain the owner does not give permission nor want bots at their location hounding their customers for money. I know I sure wouldn't.

Well first see if there is a updated driver for your laptop. I know someone that had this issue and that seems to have fixed the problem. However this was a desktop and you may not be able to use the latest NVIDIA drivers and need to contact Alienware to see if they can or plan to update the drivers available. But another thing you can try: NVIDIA drivers often crash if you let external programs handle color correction in Windows 7. Unfortunately, nVidia defaults to that mode. Set both color-correction options (3D and video) to use NVIDIA's settings. It is possible it's the usual 64-vs-32 bit issues. You cannot use 32-bit plugins with 64-bit software, or vice versa. Either way this might help.

Well I am not so certain about "No Negative Impact". You see last week on Thursday the SS Galaxy disappeared. All 3 sims full of prims went poof. We went from 32,000+ prims down to 100 or 200 at most in a eye blink. It was very random as to what was left (or at least it looked random to me). The repair required a rollback of all 3 sims. Now keep in mind this is the first time in 5+ years we have ever needed a rollback. Pathfinder was rolled out on Tuesday, and this happened on Thrusday. Might be a coincidence I don't know, but it sure seems suspect to me. Also we were not the only estate affected. Many around the grid were also impacted. The blog post about it is at http://ssgalaxynews.blogspot.com/2012/08/prim-plague-strikes-galaxy.html If you wish to check it out.

Yes the New date is October 1st, 2012 If you log into Marketplace then click the "My Marketplace" at the top of the screen then drop down "Merchant home" it gives this link: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Marketplace-and-Direct-Delivery-Update/m-p/1562745#M25446 Which then says October 1st 2012. Now why they couldn't make that easier to find I don't know. Or perhaps LL will even do a blog post? Seems like that might be a good place to make such very important announcements?

It is odd that I can run SL without issues and Cloud Party I can't even get into the door. And no this computer is not old it is much younger than the laptops they are "testing/designing" on. And I second they need a log in system separate from facebook as many of us don't have "real" accounts on facebook (as they may delete them, they don't take the name in the first place, or just don't want to be assimilated by the facebook borg) and only have "business accounts" to create facebook pages for specific uses.

What I see as the large problem is not that "they don't see" where tech is going but rather have no idea how to (truly) fix SL in the first place. Sure having a SL that works on a variety of platforms might be a help but they don't even know how to fix group notices so they work every time with every member receiving them much less rework other basics so that what you are discussing can be possible. But then again who would want to fire up a full 3d world just to do something simple such as messaging a friend. Sadly I doubt they would. And unless you have a simple and fast client for mobile use and the full blown one for home use, I don't think it would be much of a help. However, aren't there such 3rd party clients already? And has it helped SL that much? I don't think so. Certainly not to the level you seem to think it would be. In fact I know people that talk with me in SL on their phone with a regular basis and it is very slow response time. But yes it does work. Perhaps that might be different if LL actually made the client, but I have my doubts. :)

I agree that LL is trying. I just hope they listen when issues are brought up. It seems to me that one could set the default aspect of objects to be "obstacles" and avoid the whole issue. Of course I am not on the development team and do not know all the details, but it seems this would be a reasonable compromise? And I figured the settings were via could be done via linkset. I could have been more specific in that regard in my original comment. However, there are a great many builds in SL that are not linked at all. And some are old builds with the creator long gone (not that they would want to redo the build even if they were still active). Also something else to keep in mind is that from what I have seen (and understand) actually setting prims to "obstacles" involves using the edit menu. Which unless something has changed (or in PF it is different), if a object/linkset is no mod you can't change such features. This is another possible problem as many purchased builds and objects that are no mod. Unless of course one is allowed by the parcel system to turn off pathfinding. While this would not be the best solution, it would at least allow people that owned land to use older pre-pathfinding builds without causing a lot of computational resources on the sim. It has been a few weeks since my experience with the Beta, so perhaps it has improved. Although from what I am reading elsewhere the default methodology seems to be the same at the moment.

I have some first hand experience with the Pathfinding beta. Long story short we were placed in the beta by accident and the sims went from 1.00 to .50 time dilation (at best). And .20 at worse. If you jumped when you landed normally you hear a "thud" sound. But in this case it sounded like a machine gun going of THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD for several seconds. When we finally figured out what was going on the sims were revered to the normal SL Server. And I figured it was likely due to the different physics engine and when I was jumping I was landing on prims instead of ground. But here is the really interesting part. Afterward we find out that apparently if the prims on your sim are not set to "obstacles" or aka "non moving" they cause lag. So the fix is to *cough* set all your prims to non-moving or "obstacles". Now keep in mind in a empty sim or new build sure no problem. But in a old build who in the world is going to go though and set 12,000+ prims PER SIM to "obstacle"? I can't imagine why LL is not setting that by default? Most objects don't move, some do yes, but not most. And therefore their thinking is totally backwards. I can only imagine they have only been developing on ground instead of on top of builds (which most of us in SL do). If this beta is released with its current methodology I can tell you that a lot of estates are going to close rather than try to go though and fix the mess.

I disagree. Yes many have not left..YET. But that doesn't mean they *wont* eventually get fed up and leave. There is a tipping point. Or as the old saying goes "the straw that broke the camels back". Just look at all the old sims leaving and I don't think many new "great places" are being built to fill in the gap. Certainly not like the old days. SL is shrinking dramatically (I can think of 7 wonderful places off the top of my head that left in the past 3 months alone). If you push too much in bold new directions you may also loose what you have now. I for one know of several that are near the breaking point with the latest grid issues and will likely leave if they don't improve and soon. Keep in mind that sure some people leaving is not a large issue. But when enough of the core good content creators and sim providers get fed up and leave, who is going to stay in the world that is left? As I said there IS a tipping point, and many are very very close to it now. I am not saying that nothing should be done...but certainly balance it and don't think "we have nothing to loose". Because with that mentality you WILL loose the core people paying the big bucks that keeps LL's lights on and it will bring down SL all the faster.

If I may suggest...have you tried going into the V3 preferences/graphics/hardware button uncheck VBO (vertex buffer objects)? This is the number 1 reason for a viewer crash or other odd situations with viewers (if not 1 then the top 3). And by default it is on 99% of the time. It amazes me so many people have never heard of this setting and why LL turns it ON by default still boggles the mind. In my experience it does nothing but create problems.

SLURL's are invaulable for sending links to people in group chat (or personal IM's). If you click on a SLURL inside a IM/Local chat window you will go there without going to the map system. Granted it pulls up another box asking if you want to teleport but not bad. And using landmarks are usually a two click affair anyway. Actually 3 if you are receiving a new one: accept the LM, click on the LM, then teleport confirm/info box. When I find SLRUL's on blogs or such I copy and paste them into local chat then teleport from there. It is easy to do and only take seconds. And who doesn't use cut and paste in SL all the time anyway? I have also been known to bookmark locations in my browser (Firefox) to visit later. I don't use the built in browser. I suspect most people are doing this instead of going to the map website for the simple reason it is one less click to copy and paste the SLURL in IM/local chat rather than use the map site which unless you are using the build in browser tends to launch the LL viewer. Although this can also depend on which viewer you last installed. Anyway since they are not using the map (using it directly inside SL similar to a LM) your web map traffic results are far from conclusive.

This is very disappointing. Personally I see more and more cases of Joe454353232 And why? When you ask them they say "well I tried for over half a hour trying to get a name that it would allow me to use". That proves that their current system doesn't work and people get frustrated so they add a ton of numbers then get in as a result. How many people just give up on the current system? They cite loosing to many new users and the current system works better, but where are all these new users? Shouldn't SL be really growing then? Sadly all I see is it shrinking. And we were growing with the old system.....granted that is not the only reason but it does make one wonder. Why not do this: Have a first name or name and a option to get a last name from a list IF THEY WANT? That gives the best of both worlds truly does it not? And very simple to do. Just have a slight mention on the site "having trouble getting the first name you want? You can try adding a list name by clicking here ----> Seems like a perfect fix to me. But I guess we will never get it and only see longer and longer and longer names where you have absolutely NO CHANCE of ever remembering.

I have to disagree here. There are many people that don't think mesh is the best thing since sliced bread. Don't care for it, or have trouble rendering a room full of mesh clothes. A lot of people are holding on to the older viewer because it just works better for them. To force mesh on everyone and you will loose people. And lets face it, these days can we really afford to loose good people on the grid? The grid is already shrinking a LOT. Do you want to speed that process even more? I sure don't. If mesh is wonderful, and the best thing ever to you, fine, but please keep in mind that is a OPINION. Not fact. Here is a RL example. Some people have a Porche, or a Viper, or a Mercades. But does that mean that someone with a old truck that can still get around is worse? Keep in mind that Sam Walton drove around in a old pick up truck and was one of the richest men in the USA. Why? Because he choose to. It is what was best for HIM. To not respect others and say "you are behind the times, get a upgrade" or look down upon them because of this is to be quite honest...a bit on the petty side. Perhaps you should read the "Miss Manners" column yourself. ;)

Hamlet, Actually SL IS streamed. Not by a third party service that is true. But because your question is a bit deceptive as currently stated it is hard to answer. A better way to ask it would be "would you pay more to have a faster SL connection and more responsive?" Some might say yes, however I tend to agree with Ann, LL should be doing that already for what we pay in high teir fees. And I don't think a 3rd party system is going to help the situation for the simple reason that it is still LL's servers and network at the core and that is likely the problem. Adding another layer is likely not going to improve the situation (unless that layer gets LL to change the framework and system radically). Other games were mentioned, but you see those are 'Games' where the content does not change radically from minute to minute like it does in SL. A 3rd party streaming system will work for those but not SL. It is really comparing apples to oranges. Or saying "would you pay more to have this orange taste like this apple?" A interesting idea but the point is moot regardless.

Hamlet, I understand your seeing "facebook saves the world" idea, but there is more to it than just making something work in a popular location for it to become popular itself (not even mentioning how facebook does not like pseudonyms). I do agree that making the client easier and expanding it to other locations is a good idea, however there are downsides. Some factors that will help: Make the default settings LOW and warn people of this when they log in "your settings have been set low to allow for speed, please open preferences and raise them to see SL at its best". Or something like that. Rather than high as possible and they can hardly move. And another thing turn off Vertex Buffers by default! Most graphics cards run slower NOT faster with this on in my experience. In fact I have yet to find a system that runs well with it ON. And viewers turn them on by default. Other locations that you mentioned that are competing, well why are they doing so well? Sure their client is lower requirement, but more importantly it is cheap or zero cost to have their own "space" as others had mentioned. Also keep in mind that when you "dumb down the client" you also have other issues. For example after LL added a "basic mode" I see people over a year old with just the basic newbie avatars. And they switch between them. There is so much freebie stuff on the grid there is no excuse for that (not to mention there are freebie locations in the top level destinations) other than they don't even know there is a advanced mode . Inventory is hidden in basic mode and they don't realize that there even IS a inventory! If they take a LM, they can't access it, or if someone gives them one, they can only use it once before it disappears into the hidden inventory. Another aspect I think people are finding it too difficult to even create a unique name and they walk around with this HUGE name (joe343434323) and some people look at them..see 'resident' and say hey newbie...even if they are old and possibly a alt. Of course many of them don't ever change their avatar and that is a good example. I have found after basic mode and the elimination of last names that SL has changed dramatically. Many people over a year old still look and act like newbies, where as previously they were only that for a month at most. If people don't act like newbies and are say a under a year old, in general they are old users with new accounts. In summary newbies don't seem to "grow up" like they use to. Or at least it is much less than it use to be. No wonder SL is shrinking..... :(

With the recent comments about IMVU I did some checking. It is a simple chat room system with 3d graphics "tacked on". Sure you can customize your avatar, and buy furniture but it is not a "virtual world". I would call it a "Virtual Chat Room". Everything is "rooms based" in IMVU, and you can't even walk around in said rooms. You can only "hop" or go to specific animation points. Something like if you were right click and sitting from one chair to another in SL. Yes you can make a room look like it is outside (only if you are listed as a creator or buy such a room from another), but again the system is very simple in comparison to SL. I would suggest the reason why IMVU has done well is two fold. First they may have better communications with their user base (I do not know this for a fact since I have not tried to contact the administration), and secondly (and importantly) it is very very simple. There is little to confuse people with. If you look at the most popular games online they are also extremely simple (farmville for example). SL is a very powerful platform, but sadly to many that power and flexibility is just to confusing to them. They do not understand SL as it is totally different than anything else. But a simple chat room with 3d graphics, they can understand that much easier. What needs to be done is better education and a system to teach people better as they enter the world. Right now most Newbies do not know anything upon landing at many locations. They simply use the destinations at the bottom of their screen and ignore any tutorial system. IMUV has a decent teaching system and does rewards for going through it (giving credits). I think LL would have better results if they built in a system that upon going through the tutorial properly they would get a reward. Of course the difficult part is how do they create such a system where a person can't create thousands of accounts just to get the reward. Perhaps preventing the reward from being transferred might work. Perhaps even a special credit on Marketplace that could not be transferred to anyone else. Another example that better education is needed: You find Newbies over 90 days old in the same avatar! I doubt they have even found their way out of Basic mode yet. And in Basic mode you can't access inventory, not even to use a landmark someone gave you (or one took themselves, unless LL has changed that in the latest version).

While I haven't checked the build in question in detail. One possible solution is to link the build, take copies to inventory. Then create a backup file (or possibly more than one if it is too big for one object linking) using a viewer than can do this. I suspect it was all the creators original work and therefore should be straight forward. Then it could be moved to another grid at any point in the future (open sim, etc).

First off @Wayfinder As you may know one system is usually totally different from another. And anything can throw it off from connection, a video card with drivers that SL does not like, wireless issue, connection glitch and on and on the list goes. I will admit that this is a problem and why SL has not gained in large market share. But it does not make us all lindens if we say we do not have said problems. I do have issues at times. SL is not perfect but I rarely have the issue that Hamlet showed. Hence my suggestions to check the various configurations. It is easy to miss something, we all do it at one time or another. And we all know that there are many many many configurations in the computer, connection, and SL itself. Any one of them can cause a issue. I have nothing against honest reporting. Hamlet is only reporting what he saw. We are just trying to point out that there may be something that can resolve it. Also something important that I don't believe has been mentioned (at lest not directly). Viewer 2 now uses HTTP texture fetching. And while this is supposed to be better/faster/more reliable I find it quite the opposite. This in and of itself may be the problem. And if all other issues (bandwidth, packet loss, machine specs, configuration) are eliminated then http texture fetching would be the likely cause. You might try with the same conditions with a 3rd party viewer with http texture fetching turned off (after first having the same repeat issue with viewer 2) or even LL's 1.23 then see if you have the texture problem. @ Vecky Yes that is very true. But part of the issue is creators have increased their texture size. Most textures on clothing are 1024 instead of 512. 512x 512 is plenty but for some reason most creators now think the larger size gives them a advantage. So you have textures that take four times as long to download and takes four times the memory hence requires a better system to get the same performance. So the issue is not likely directly LL in that case. However keep in mind that regard to 40 avatars in a sim back then Mono scripting was not near as prevalent. Now everyone uses it and it is in all scripted attachments. Every time someone new rezes in a sim it slows down due to bugs in the Mono implementation. LL has made improvements with this yes, but it is still not fixed. And they started stacking more sims on the same hardware. This also is likely to blame for the lack in performance. But I think if people didn't use so many scripted attachments (resizing scripts are known sim performance killers) or such high rez textures many of these issues would be far better. So is LL to blame? Yes, but I don't think we can blame them totally for it. The community is also at fault. You don't have these issues in other content creation platforms as the creation is more limited. So what makes SL such a powerful content creation platform also brings it down due to people that don't think about efficiency when creating said content.

Well wireless is not supported by Linden Lab. It hasn't ever been. And if you call LL with a issue (or file a ticket) and you say you are using wireless they will not help. Suprised you don't remember that Hamlet considering you worked there. ;) Now having said that I do use a laptop wirelessly without any issues like that (although normally I use a cable...it is always a bit faster). My next question is how high was your draw distance? The higher your draw the longer it will take especially if the sim is lagging. You might also consider turning off the useless "Search Bar" on the top right of viewer 2 (if you use it). You can do this via the debug under advanced menu. Look for "ShowNetStats" and turn that on. Now you have a great bandwidth and packet loss meter always in view (bandwidth on the right, packet loss on the left). I would make a bet you were getting packet loss. And the first thing to try with that, reboot your router and computer. :) Another thing about packet loss, a sim can be having that issue itself (not that common but it does happen). And a restart fixes the issue 99% of the time. What to keep in mind is if you get packet loss only in a particular sim it is that sim. If you have it everywhere, then it is you. Also how was your network at the time? Did you other computers or devices on the wirless network? Every device added to a wireless router tends to slow it down. Probably not the cause but something to keep in mind. I really doubt the issue was with encryption. Also the changing group trick to rerez avatars has been around for a long time. Now why LL never just added a rerez option for avatars to the pie menu I will never know. Everyone thinks it is a great idea, but it never materializes. Even in the 3rd party viewers.

Yes it would be huge if it was true. If you notice the area under the "you'll be happy to hear that you can set up profiles and groups right now by logging in at the Groups 2.0 homepage." the link goes to Facebook. This is a dead giveaway it is April fools joke. :)