Nadine Neddings

It's obvious you're not an SL user, Issac. ;)

If you're implying that the grid lacks population or economic activity, you're uninformed.

Awesome first-round questions, Tateru! Now I know who to pester when I have those nagging virtual *environment* questions! :)

I agree completely with the previous comments made to this post. vBulletin is extremely scalable, and is in use as the de facto standard for high-traffic forums well beyond what SecondLife.com hosts. So the argument that vBulletin is to blame is just hogwash.

The saddest part of this all, is that there are many highly-useful posts in the old archives which will now be lost once and for all. A lot of history from oldbies discussing (and often resolving) first-generation grid issues.

This is one revision I'll be making to my personal News Reader; there are so many "VE's" to cover, and a lot of chaff to sift through along the way.

I hope you, personally, will not be covering ALL of them, Tateru! You need to sleep sometime, woman! ;)

Absolutely; click on the MAP button and you can see instantly where the concentration of users are at, in real-time. Zoom out, and it's immediately apparent that there are common areas where throngs of people flock.

A traditional "population density map" would be ineffectual, however, as few people stick around in a single location long enough to take a census.

mpdivo -- Your post made me smile. I think I'll resort to your response when dealing with those anecdote-toting individuals in the future. Since, clearly, quantifiable, scientific reasoning is well outside the scope of understanding!

I hope this becomes a bestseller! Great exposure for SL too!

This is all wonderful and great, but...until they get their conversion rates up to something even remotely reasonable, they are just going to blow massive amounts of cash on prospects who never become more than one-hour-long tourists.

So much more efficient energy and dollars could be sent towards usability, with more pronounced results. In my humble opinion.

I don't know if I'd agree with a law to require such transparency, but your point regarding LL's comparably candid communication is one we probably should all keep in mind.

The Lab can be very deceptive and masterful (or cumbersome, depending on your view) spin doctors, but at the end of the day they seem to make more of an effort at communication than most service providers do.

Room for improvement exists, absolutely, but they could be a lot worse!

I'm guessing that's a pretty common experience actually. I tend to tell my IM conversation partners "I'm TPing" out of habit, to avoid having to collect those orphaned IMs by email later.

This also happens if someone IMs you when you're logging in but haven't necessarily "arrived" in-world yet.

In any case this deluge of backlogged IMs is frustrating and doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the system! I hope the rumors of IMs being sent to the wrong recipients are unfounded; that could be a true mess.