Omega Point

It’s true, the LSL Wiki has returned, now hosted at LSLwiki.com. This is the complete database as it existed on SecondLife.com as of the moment it was taken down. Your logins are all the same. There’s still a couple redirect problems I haven’t cleaned out yet, but it works. I’ll finish fixing that stuff tomorrow. In the meantime, happy LSLing.

Edit: There will be changes and upgrades to the wiki in the near future. Some of this may include porting the database to a more modern wiki engine. I’m certainly not making this decision alone, but I haven’t decided what I want to do yet.

While frequently used to great effect in prose, text is a notoriously poor medium for conveying the emotional metadata humans rely on for face-to-face conversation. How do we know exactly how to interpret someone else’s words, stripped of their emotional context? What was intended as a simple request for information may be taken by one reader as a joke, while another may see it as a personal attack.

The system used by many modern internet users was proposed in the early 1980s by Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist with Carnegie Mellon University. He suggested that users employ a short series of characters, evoking the iconic smiley face, to demonstrate that their words were to be taken lightheartedly: :-)

While at the time, the proposal was viewed by many as somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the smiley quickly caught on, and is as recognizable as the letters “www” today, demonstrating its effectiveness in clarifying human-to-human interaction in text-based communication. In the decades since, internet users have extended the original system by adopting many other emoticons, conveying displeasure, sadness, disgust, exhaustion, and many others, inserting much-needed emotional context to their chat and email conversations.

Just as virtual environments like Second Life are frequently described as updated MUDs or chatrooms, user interactions within them can be similarly enhanced by the use of body language and gestures based on that of real-world humans. Consider the image of an avatar facing another and smiling, looking away disinterestedly, or standing with arms crossed; each conveys a radically different message even when associated with the same text.

But what about cases in which we see avatars’ body language injected into our communications without our explicit permission? There have been countless posts to the Second Life forums by newer users, angry and hurt by the disdainful, superior manner of an established resident, and how they were deliberately ignored.

These new users describe an incident that usually follows a set pattern. They approached a Linden employee or an older resident, usually a fairly high-profile content creator, and greeted them. The established resident turned to face them, looked down their nose, and turned back to what they were doing. In actual fact, this is a client-side avatar animation – when chat is “heard” on the client, avatars appear to turn their heads to face it without any input from the user controlling that avatar.

From the perspective of the Linden or longtime resident, they are unlikely to have even known anyone approached them, as they were busy doing something else: programming, browsing the web, or working on textures, leaving behind a puppet with its strings cut.

This is an example of a “subconscious” message injected to the communications channel. While no information has deliberately been conveyed, to a human observer, a clear message has been sent. The body language of the avatar has effectively spoken for its user. Yet, to the recipient of this message, the avatar is the human. From their perspective, they’ve just been snubbed by some standoffish person who clearly can’t be bothered to even give them the time of day.

Next: Deliberate subconscious filters and their implications.

Due to the recent security issues affecting Second Life, the LSL Wiki will no longer be hosted on the Second Life website I’ll post additional updates here next week when it relocates to its new home at LSLwiki.com.

In the meantime, a few users have a backup available here.

On the Linden Blog, Brent Linden discusses the experimental exploit-reporting system launched in the wake of Cristiano Midnight’s discovery of (and subsequent suspension for publicizing) an exploit in which it was possible for any user to do Very Bad Things.

Under the experimental system, Brent is now paged every time someone used the SL bug report tool (Help > Report Bug) to report a bug flagged with “Exploit”. However, as he notes:

Since introducing the new Exploit hotline to Brent Linden, we’ve gotten 55 bugs marked ‘Exploit’ and only 6 have actually been issues considered exploits.

He goes on to list some of the examples of reports that Linden most definitely does not consider worth waking him up at 3am. Interestingly, a couple seem to actually be the result of honest confusion about a difficult-to-use feature, and not just ignorance on the part of the senders: “It says my parcel is full! 367/367 prims! This is an exploit, right?”

Ezhar Fairlight, Close Personal Friend to the management here at Omega Point, contributed this bit of smartassery:

So what you are saying is that whenever somebody files a bugreport under the category “exploit” you get alerted immediately? Isn’t that exploitable by itself? It leaves you vulnerable to a DoS attack on your sleep and thus your work performance. You should fix that exploit. Shall I file an exploit report about it? :)

Yes, good work, Ezhar. That will undoubtedly be much appreciated.

On the Linden Blog today, Sally Linden writes:

There has lately been much confusion and speculation surrounding the “Residents” statistic on the home page of http://secondlife.com. This post is an effort to clear that up.

She goes on to say:

…there was an internal conversation about the number we were reporting, what the Residents thought it represented, and how we could be more transparent. The number that is currently on our home page is a time-weighted average between “total number of signups ever” and “total number of logged in users over the last 60 days”. As of right now, those numbers are 493,563 and 225,028.

And most usefully:

We plan to change the home page to display those two numbers separately. At that time the current “Residents” number will be removed. This change should take place sometime next week.

I’d really be interested in seeing the total number of successful unique logins in the previous 24 hours as well. We’ll see what the response is.

Part 1: International Users

Two months ago, Second Life creator Linden Lab removed the credit card requirement from the account creation process, allowing users without a credit card to join SL for the first time. While the move was met with alarm and opposition among many members of the SL community, it was part of an ongoing plan to open access to Second Life, a plan which has been opposed by many vocal residents at nearly every step of the way, their outrage then forgotten as the next phase has been unveiled.

In a blog post shortly after the initial announcement, Community VP Robin Linden attempted to explain Linden Lab’s position, rationale and intended security measures, addressing the general opinion among the Second Life forums’ users. Forums being what they are, she was likely only partly successful in getting this message across to Second Life’s vocal minority.

Regardless of resident opposition, the policy was changed, and registration was opened up to everyone. With broadband. And a fast computer. And adequate manual dexterity. And who could communicate in English to some degree. So while perhaps not the vast majority that the most optimistic people predicted, it was certainly about to become more accessible to users outside Canada, the US, Australia and the UK, thus fitting in with Linden’s plans to expand Second Life’s user base into Asia and Europe.

So, after two months of open registration, has Linden Lab’s plan been successful? Obviously, with Japanese and Korean job postings on Linden Lab’s employment page, and the recent move to an XML-based client UI –allowing for the simple production of translated clients– we can assume that the “Open SL” master plan is not yet completed.

But what has transpired in the interim? According to Chromal Brodsky’s Second Life Population Statistics site, the number of total accounts has jumped sharply since registrations were made free in April, and mandatory account verification was removed in June, with over 370,000 accounts registered as of this writing. However, as Chromal’s site indicates, the growth of peak concurrent logins over the last year is barely even perceptible as a curve.

We can interpret this discrepancy in several ways, all of which are likely involved to varying degrees:

• That far more alt accounts are being made and not used concurrently with the existing resident’s main account.
• That peak concurrent logins have been largely unchanged, due to the demographics of Second Life’s user base. This means the number only reflects peak logins for North Americans. While anecdotal observations indicate Europeans and South Americans are now joining SL in vastly increased numbers, Chromal’s graphs don’t currently indicate whether or not there are more unique logins per day, nor whether logins are higher at typically peak hours for users from other time zones.
• More users are creating accounts, but are not able to run the client.
• More users are successfully creating accounts, but do not use SL as frequently as typical active users do. This may be due to several factors:
• Users who may not otherwise have cared enough to try SL are joining, but use SL more casually.
• Non-English-speaking users create accounts, but do not find enough people that speak their language to interact with to make them want to stay as long.
• New residents percieve SL’s value as being lower. If someone pays $10 for an account, they will likely think of it differently than if they give a credit card number, or than if they do neither. This behavior may also be due to the sunk cost fallacy: if the $10 registration cost can be viewed as an investment, someone may still want to use SL to “get their money’s worth”. They may be less willing to do this if the account hasn’t actually cost them anything.

Hard data aside, what anecdotal evidence is there to support an increase in the number of international users?

As a longtime member of the Second Life Mentor group, I’ve taught classes, answered questions, mostly about scripting, and generally been subject to much Mentor group IM spam. Since the removal of credit card verification, I’ve noticed a huge increase in the number of requests for assistance on Help Island, the “wading pool” SL newbies can use to get their bearings for a few minutes or a few days before taking the plunge to the big kid pool of the mainland. These are now mostly requests for translators who speak Spanish, Turkish, Russian, or a dozen other languages.

While obviously I’m not privy to the specific numbers, the fact that the bulk of Mentor IM seems now to be requests for multilingual mentors effectively demonstrates that the removal of credit card verification has succeeded in at least one of its goals, and one I wholeheartedly support.

Update, August 7, 6:15 PM: Chromal has graciously provided all available data from the past 13 months, and notes that while the peak concurrency rate has risen from 2127 in June 2005 to 8357 in August 2006, the minimum concurrency rate has risen from 647 to 3671 in that same period.

The maximum number of concurrent logins is 3.93 times higher than it was 13 months ago, while the minimum is now 5.67 times higher. Interesting stuff.

Next…
Verified Accounts and Trust Metrics Part 2: What Went Wrong?