Socially|Mundane

Four years on the grid and I can count failed "customer support" from in-world creators on one hand. And in those cases, it always was a case of "AWOL" where no response to my inquiry was ever received. Of course, I've dealt with my share of rude, crude creators, but as a rule of thumb, I've always received excellent support from practically any creator when I needed it.

I am willing to share my simple recipe for success in the scenario of needing creator support. When I say creator support, I am referring to those times when you need to contact the creator of something you have purchased in-world. These scenarios include, but obviously are not limited to:

• Failed deliveries on purchases
• Wrong permissions from those advertised
• Missing portions of a "package"
• Something does not operate as expected
• Something becomes broken
• Something becomes lost

Before I go into the "best practices" for obtaining creator support, I'd like to pass a quick message to the creators themselves:

Viewer 2 is wonderful for the Second Life uninitiated. However, it also is a disaster for those of us experienced with second Life for more than a month with the "classic" viewer. Linden Lab had announced open-sourcing the Second Life viewer in 2006, there is now a smorgasbord of "official Linden Lab Second Life Viewer" alternatives.

Among all the current third-party viewers there is no question that the Emerald Viewer by Modular Systems is the best known, most popular and most actively in-use non-Linden Lab viewer on the Second Life grid. I like Emerald, but I have some reservations about it, which if you'll indulge me, I will explain below. I promise to do my best at keeping pithy about it all.

The short answer: most popular does not translate into "best".

Kill it before it multiplies! That's what Linden Lab should do. But they can't. They have championed it too hard. So they will allow it to whither away as Terri Sheivo was, except as quietly as possible.

"Download Viewer 2.1 Alpha Now! Sound Like Donald Duck!" (Or whatever).

That has been the Message Of The Day for some time now as you go through the logon process into the Second Life grid. This MOTD is worrisome to me. Not so much all by itself, considering the ramifications of pushing Alpha-phase (ALPHA!) software to a mass population who can barely understand the operation of release version software. But rather in the "between the lines" message I suspect is being sent along. If you aren't seeing that message, allow me to highlight it for you...