There's a distinct craziness around the forums this evening, someone is claiming that people will put on a fake display name and take pictures of someone having intimate relations with a pig! I mean come on, seriously, come on!

Then there's all the conspiracy theories that LL want to shutdown Emerald because it's superior to Viewer 2, again, come on! Emerald is a popular viewer and I've seen lots of good reports, but why would Linden Lab want to do away with something their customers like? Something their customers use, something that their customers use whilst paying money to Linden Lab? This is absurd, Emerald may be good viewer, I have never used it enough to form an opinion, but some of their devs have been very naughty.

I know Emerald have announced it's the end of the road, but it's a tad unfair to point the finger at Linden Lab for this.

There are repeated reports around that customer support is getting worse, which is completely unsurprising as there are less staff, doing less hours, providing less support and with one support company apparently losing their contract to provide support, those support folk you do get through to are probably not best pleased, especially if they're losing their jobs, is this professional? No, not at all, is it surprising? No, not at all, it's human nature to be annoyed and grumpy when you're losing your job and it's human nature to get a tad miffed with your customers when you are up to your eyeballs in work and the calls won't stop coming in, some people will show signs of being miffed during this period, ideally this wouldn't happen, but it does happen.

In other news, my parcel that was happily on page one for a keyword yesterday is back to not showing when all three maturity ratings are ticked, even though if I just tick moderate, it scores higher than parcels that do appear in search, so approaching month five of this improved search hey.
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The Lolo Pet Shop should be back in search by tomorrow morning, with WADE1 Jya proclaiming that Sea Linden is "Super Cool" ....

The update was reported over at SL Universe, here.

So a happy ending is approaching, WADE1 is happy, The LOLO Pet Shop should be back in PG search and Sea Linden has been called cool ....I can't ever remember anyone calling Sea Linden cool before! I've had to check this post several times!!!!

So now all Sea has to do is wave her magic wand and keep my parcels in search and I might call her nicer names too, there's too much stick and not enough carrot at Linden Lab, but I'll talk about that another time!

Store owner WADE1 Jya was checking out search for their store, The LOLO Pet shop, when much to their surprise they discovered that the word "LOLO" is now on the naughty word filter list, meaning their store doesn't show in search, as discussed here.

WADE1 Jya is bemused, as are the rest of us, as to why the word the LOLO is now considered a naughty word, with the most likely explanation being that someone mistyped "Loli", which has long been on the ban list.

Other explanations are that Lolo is French slang for boob, but as boob isn't on the naughty word list I can't see this being the answer.

WADE1 Jya is awaiting an explanation from Linden Lab for this bemusing turn of events and if it is deemed the word should be on the naughty filter list, WADE1 faces a complete rebranding and island rename, which won't be cheap in terms of money or labour.

I must be leading a very sheltered life because I can't for the life of me think why Lolo should be on the naughty word filter list, there are things that I've found out about in Second Life, that I'd rather I had never found out about, but I don't think Lolo is going to be one of those, it seems to be a mistake.

The Lolo Pet shop does show up in classifieds, but any use of the word Lolo in search results in a message that you've entered a word that is filtered. WADE1 Jya is rightly annoyed by this turn of events, can anyone help out here? Is Lolo a naughty word?

If you want to visit the pet shop, this is the SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/The%20LOLO/85/186/40

The most breathtaking spin one will ever know has been announced on the official blog.

Customer Support Changes

As  we strengthen our self-service offering, we?ll be making some changes to Customer Support. You may have noticed a few of them already.

    * Concierge support hours are now available at our high-traffic hours which are 8am - Midnight (PST), M-F, and 8am to 8pm (PST) on Saturday and Sunday.
    * We will also be reducing our non-English language support to German, French, Spanish, and Japanese.
    * Finally, we'll be examining all of our support channels and simplifying the  support contact types and issue types we allow for our various account  levels.  We?ve not taken the impact of these changes lightly and want to provide a higher quality support experience balanced with the costs of  deliver those services.
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There has been a lot of discussion about display names, one thing I can't quite fathom about this is that Linden Lab knew about the problems of people being able to use any name they want when Avatars United opened up, it was an early concern there, that's why a verification app was added, and yet a few months on they walk into a bigger storm?

This issue concerns many residents, as can be seen from quotes such as this:

"Display Names = encore plus de problèmes dans SL, déja que le support client n'est pas génial et que les AR n'arrivent pas toujours.. et que les grieffers, harcelleurs et compagnie font leurs lois dans Second Life."

Oh wait, wrong thread! I'll stick to the blog post! Display names have attracted a lot of heated debate, I do have a degree of sympathy with Linden Lab on this issue, in my day job I deal with display names, phone books have more than one person with the same name, so do electoral registers, I have two cousins, and had an uncle and a grandfather with my exact name, one of my cousin's also named his son the same name and my family surname isn't that common.

However, when we get two people at work with the same first and last name, we put a unique identifier of some sort to differentiate them, usually the department in brackets, we've yet to have a case of two people in the same department with the same first and last name but it must happen in some places.
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I've seen a few Jira's regarding the teens coming to the main grid, there are also older Jira requests that right now make a lot more sense than they made when they were raised. One example of this is Jira VWR-7219 - LL Should provide a viewer that allows access only to PG parcels. This was created on 14th May 2008, and seems to have been quite an isnightful suggestion considering recent announcements.

The premise here is that content, or even avatars, that aren't flagged as PG, aren't rendered. The comments in opposition to this proposal look rather amusing now:

"We already have a teen grid for this. Plenty of non-PG stuff happens in PG areas, so setting up a "PG-only" viewer would probably just give people false expectations."

"Minors are not allowed on the main grid, so what's the point?"

Then we have the newly created Jira SVC-6242 - Modify SERVER code on M and A sims so no textures or prim data get sent to GENERAL users.

This has a similar premise to the older Jira, content and land that isn't PG simply isn't rendered, I'm not sure how simple a solution this is but the concept certainly has merit, it would deal with the camming issue, it would also leave holes in the map, but holes or dead ends, which is worse?

Another older Jira, that was closed because the Jira isn't an area to discuss policy decisions apparently, is Jira MISC-2976 - Teen and Adult Grid merge must not happen!
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Philip Linden has spoken and recommend that due to recent issues with the emerald viewer, people use an alternative viewer, although Emerald hasn't been  blocked from accessing Second Life yet, this seems like a big old storm brewing.

On the blog post, Philip says "If you have been using the Emerald viewer, for now we would encourage you to consider either one of the Linden Lab viewers, or an alternative third-party viewer."

I haven't really been following this story, I've been playing WoW instead, but there does appear to have been a denial of service attack, there does appear to be malicious code at play and someone does appear to have been a very naughty boy or girl.

I've never got into the Emerald viewer, I didn't like the double password login when I first tried it out, although I've been assured that was nothing to worry about, even the promise of jiggly boobs hasn't been able to tempt me to really get into the emerald viewer.

However this seems like bad news all round, Philip hasn't closed the door on Emerald, he says:
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Ok this is going to be a largely pictoral post where I share with you some of the weird and wonderful guests and performers we've had at The City of Dee over the last couple of months, yes Ciaran does hire entertainment, yes Ciaran does like entertainment, no Ciaran doesn't spend all day writing letters from "angry of Dee" to Linden Lab!

Every couple of weeks an elf, a potter and a pirate walk into my tavern .....no this isn't a joke, they hold out their hands and tell me they've booked live entertainment for The City of Dee and eye my pouch of gold.,.,.,well not really, they're very well organised and have an entertainment fund and they bring to my sim and the community there a wide and varied set of entertainment to brighten up our Saturday evenings.

We've had some great guests and performers, including a blues singer bFlat Unplugged wowing the pirates, a belly dancing entertainer/DJ Jen "The Dealer" Noel wowing elves, demon DJ Jo Heartsdale wowing everyone, techno DJ Beatz Solano changing his set completely to go all medieval and piratey on us, live singers Lefty Delwood and Belle Reynaud impressing everyone with a mixture of covers and original tunes, they all sound really good to me....I must admit here that I am artistically and musically challenged, but really, these guys sound good to me and others tell me they're awesome.

So I'll share some pictures and names with you and I recommend all of these guys for your entertainment needs and if I could remember all the names of the acts we've had I'd recommend them too, we haven't had a bad DJ or live act at all so far, touch wood!

Recent highlights have included bFlat Unplugged giving us some blues at a Pirate's day gig:
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I had reason today to contact concierge support, this was the first time I realised they'd cut it back. Concierge live chat is now available Monday - Friday 8am - Midnight and 8am - 8pm at the weekends.

Now whereas this is good coverage, it used to be 24/7 and quite frankly, it should still be 24/7. There I was with a rather important issue that I wanted to get resolved quickly and concierge live chat wasn't open, so I had to go down the ticket route.

The end result was that when live chat opened I contacted them, waiting longer than usual to connect to an agent, I got hold of someone after a short, but as I said longer than usual, wait. The result was that the problem was dealt with in a prompt and professional fashion.

Five hours after this, after being sent a survey by Linden Lab I remembered that I'd opened a support ticket and went to close it, the status was new, meaning it hadn't been looked at, so the options between live chat and the support ticket system aren't much of an option, the ticket system will not get prompt service.

Now it's only eight hours a day they're unavailable, but it's still eight hours of having a region down or a griefing issue, or something bad happening, at the weekends it's twelve hours without these important services. Support is a key factor for any business, cutting back on your support is never a good sign that all is healthy in the garden.

Whereas I still think concierge live chat is a very good service, it's now an excellent service when it's open, whereas before, well it was always open, it's a shame that one of Second Life's finest features has taken a backwards step, of course there are costs to having an excellent support service, but when you are providing an excellent level of support you really should try and maintain that status.

I'm trying to avoid speaking too much on this grid merger because it's annoying, but credit where it's due. Linden Lab have recognised and closed a potential loophole in the system, if a kid gets payment info on file they'll still be flagged as a kid, they won't be account verified and able to teleport to adult land.

This is important because many kids don't have their own credit cards, they'll be aking their parents to provide those details, so it's an important step to recognise this could potentially make a kid account verified.

There's a long way to go still before this move will have the right protections to make it sensible, but this step does mean it's one step closer to being a safer environment, many steps to go mind you.