Thanks

There’s a known bug discovered by the Sheep about which Joshua seems sadly unaware, which makes non-transferrable items once sold still flag as “for sale” and therefore forcibly makes them appear in SEARCH.

And many people don’t realize items they casually set to sale for all kinds of reasons not intended to mean they are PUBLICLY for sale are now going to show up.

It’s just amazingly inconsiderate of the Lindens not to mitigate this with a public announcement warning people to take things out of search — or fix the box before releasing it.

If you want an easy way to grab any texture, try typing this into the address bar while logged into AjaxLife:

javascript:new AjaxLife.InventoryDialogs.Texture('00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001','My Texture');
(Yes, there is a texture with that key)

From there you can right click and save as. I’m working on that, but it’s really a rather pointless game to play. The URLs are predictable and obvious too, right now. You can grab over 800 textures without even having to log in, since they’re cached. Yes, I can obfuscate URLs, hide images behind canvases, etc. But that is messy and doesn’t solve the core problem anyway.

If it going to be open as it is now, I could actually be useful for third party web linkage to our own texture inventory for organizational purpose, but it can also be a content protection issue. I would love to know what’s your official stand on that one.

If you tell people how best to achieve results they will pay more attention and relevance will be also improved.

You could provide the list of such high volume inefficient keywords as not recommended and include warnings against deceptive or manipulative behavior, such as landmark spamming, if understand correctly. And to enforce against landmark spam you may want to consider this: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-869

The best way to force people to name their objects: Leave the “Name” box blank when a prim is created, and have it refuse to unfocus the dialog until it’s named. This would, of course, trigger a flood of angry content creators who can’t deal with taking the extra second to name their prims – they could, of course, bypass this using an unofficial viewer that doesn’t bother to check. They may have a point, since they’ll be linked, but I tend to regret not naming individual prims in my more complex objects…

Other than that, just keep building features that are suboptimal when thrown against things like “Object”, “New Script”, “Snapshot”, etc.

As for “alternate viewer modalities”, I’m unclear on what this could involve – but interested none-the-less!

Writing this at 4am because I can’t sleep. Hope it’s coherent!

The fact that many objects don’t have good names is a challenge we’re pondering future work. Filtering out “Object” is a great idea, but beyond that: how do we encourage residents to name their objects?

Having the names appear in search results will help in itself, as it will encourage content creators to name their objects so they are found. But we’re also pondering things like alternate viewer modalities that show more textual data as you wander around SL. We’d love feedback and suggestions.

The new secondlife:// URLs will indeed be handled by an upcoming viewer release that embeds the new search functionality, but we should patch the current RC to make sure it doesn’t crash. (I thought we had, but it must have slipped through the cracks.)