Linden Lab employees have always given the impression that Linden Lab wholeheartedly despises its user base.  It must be the only company I can think of that has long-term, well established customers who openly don’t trust it and don’t expect it to act in a professional manner.  The power of the product is highlighted in that sentence. Second Life’s biggest saving grace is that most of its customers don’t care how unprofessionally it behaves as long as they are able to use it as they want and the rest will not step outside the self-imposed ghetto of the Second Life world of the platform, some second life specific forums and some blogs.  They rarely ever make their displeasure known outside of these properties and are even less likely to bring law enforcement, government or legal pressure to bear.  Linden Lab is a remarkably lucky company in that respect.  It’s even luckier with its product, in that it has even managed to survive the almost constant behaviour of its employees that from the outside looks like they are determined to bring the company into disrepute and damage it.

In the last few days we’ve seen

• The recently employed Counsel for Linden Lab offer a settlement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission for an investigation that has been ongoing since 2007. I would have thought that if due diligence had been undertaken before taking Ms Berry on as General  Counsel they perhaps would have looked elsewhere until this had been resolved.
• A blog post advertising the release of a new type of breedable animal.  The post has been removed from the Second Life website now but not before questions were asked if this post was made because the brand owner is a Linden Lab employee, if the brand paid for this as marketing and Linden Lab didn’t identify it as a paid editorial when it was sent or if it was just a favour being done.  It could be anything of course.  A few years back Linden Lab listed Sion Chickens as a finalist for the Linden Prize. I’ve had to use the SL Universe link because the blog posts are no longer on the Second Life website.  Here’s the description of the prize  – although apparently they no longer award it.  Last year, Linden Lab acknowledged that Sion Chickens improved inworld economic activity.
• Then of course there’s the questions around how they suddenly went from the F rating to an A+ rating at the Californian Better Business Bureau, the uncharitable say it’s because of this:

BBB Accreditation

A BBB Accredited Business since 09/21/2010

BBB has determined that Linden Lab meets BBB accreditation standards, which include a commitment to make a good faith effort to resolve any consumer complaints. BBB Accredited Businesses pay a fee for accreditation review/monitoring and for support of BBB services to the public.

BBB accreditation does not mean that the business’ products or services have been evaluated or endorsed by BBB, or that BBB has made a determination as to the business’ product quality or competency in performing services.

My emphasis of course.

These examples are from the last few days remember.

The BBB accreditation requirements has this little gem

8. Embody Integrity
Approach all business dealings, marketplace transactions and
commitments with integrity.
An accredited business or organization agrees to:
Avoid involvement, by the business or its principals, in activities that reflect unfavorably on, or otherwise adversely affect the public image of BBB or its accredited businesses.

Which brings me onto my final point.

Linden Lab has always taken a consistent position that what some of it’s customers do to their other customers is none of their business, even when the activities were in blatant breach of their ToS. This blind eye is of course subject to the whims of the employees.  Linden Lab also have a history of terminating accounts with no explanation given and no recourse.

Now Second Life does appear to be a haven for people who are not properly socialised and have problems differentiating right and wrong behaviour.  Unfortunately, as I’ve briefly noted in the recent events above, Linden Lab actions also constantly confirm that its employees also suffer this handicap.

The latest storm is around a group of people who at first glance appear to breach copyright and trademarks held by the owners of DC comics. They are a vigilante group who have assumed the mantle of “protectors” of Second Life and in their guise as protectors don the guise of the characters from DC comics. This is not a new group as they have been around since before 2007 and have apparently had regular contact with Linden Lab employees during this time.

The people who are the core members of this group aren’t young people, apparently they are late middle aged men and some have families.

Sadly, Second Life is a product that is appears to be rife with intellectual property theft and Linden Lab refuses to proactively monitor by maintaining that it can only act when the holder of the copyright or trademark contacts them and they refuse to do even barest due diligence when it blatantly crosses their path.  How hard would it be to request documentation confirming a licence is held for those most obvious breaches?  That would require Linden Lab employees to act to protect the good name of the company, something that they have determinedly not done in the past.

Now, if these middle aged men in tights were just running around with their superhero costumes you could just look at them and laugh and move on.  The problem is they’re not, they’re out of control and dangerous.

Apparently since at least 2007 they’ve been keeping a private wiki detailing all the information they can find on anyone in Second Life they consider to be a griefer, a potential enemy or just because they can.  They trawl through all the social media, forums and go undercover in world to contact people to get as much real life information on them as they can. They note health, residence, real life work, details of their children – any bit of information they can, no matter how irrelevant.  In itself this is certainly borderline stalking behaviour and certainly cannot be considered acceptable, although data mining and aggregation are one of the main ethical issues currently facing online entities and is yet to be resolved.

However as with all these self styled upholders of the law, they’ve overstepped the mark.  It wasn’t enough for them to have their secret stash of information, they then had to step further over the line of acceptable into the truly abhorrent behaviour.  According to reports, not only have they tried to have people sacked from their real life workplaces but more egregiously, one of the number contacted the sister of a dying man they considered to be a griefer under the pretence of being his friend so they could confirm his near demise and then death.  If that isn’t bad enough, they then posted the details on their wiki and their public website.  When you search for the dead man’s name, their web page is very close to the top of the returns.  Not only did the friends and family have to come to terms with the death of their loved one but even now, if they search his name they’ll see this web page documenting it.  Words escape me in describing my revulsion at the sheer insensitivity and deliberate hurt they cause.

To add to the general poisonous unpleasantness of this group, they apparently do charity work inworld.  This charity work apparently also extends to finding the real life details of the children they are purporting to help and documenting on their private wiki their disabilities, illnesses, family information and any other information they can get their hands on.  I’m sure the parents of these children and the charities will be thrilled to hear that.  I wonder if they’ll also contact the parents if the children look like they’re going to die – they’ll say it’s just for completeness you understand.

Does any of this stir any revulsion in the heart of any Linden Lab employee yet?

On top of this (and really it’s almost a minor side note in the great scheme of the sheer awfulness of the behaviour of these people) they’re also IP address mining to do alt matching – just as zFire did with RedZone.

Linden Lab have known about the wiki since it was first leaked in January 2010 and they condone this behaviour through their inaction.  I’ve spent a lot of time in Second Life and I’ve seen behaviours that make me despair of the human race but the actions of this group actually disgust me.  I’m appalled that Linden Lab is so completely disreputable and its employees apparently so completely incapable of identifying ethical behaviour or even understanding just how badly this reflects on them, that they have taken absolutely no action to protect their rapidly diminishing reputation.  Linden Lab employees are determined to ruin the company and honestly, after this I hope they succeed.  Years ago I decided that if a cv from a Linden Lab employee ever came across my desk it would go straight into the bin and nothing I’ve seen since has made me change my mind on that.  I feel sorry for you Rod Humble, you really do have a corporate poison chalice there.

Enough is enough, Linden Lab has to once and for all make it clear to everyone who is data mining and capturing IP addresses (and there are many more out there that I know of) that this practice is unacceptable.  Linden Lab cannot continue to say that it’s none of their business as long as the details are held outside of Second Life and not used inside it.  The complete disregard that Linden Lab has for its customers and its reputation has to stop now.  Everyone involved in this group should have their accounts cancelled – no exceptions.  The ToS allows for these actions and there is nothing to stop Linden Lab doing this – except that they don’t want to.  It’s an entrenched corporate behaviour to leave us exposed to these kinds of people, Linden Lab just can’t help themselves.  From forcing people to blanket accept all cookies from any website and with no way to protect themselves if people use viewer 2 and want to access the inworld search, to allowing the JLU and other groups to flourish, they appear to refuse to see how vulnerable we are.

Words really do fail me.

I don’t know what the reason is for this but given a choice, I know what I’d choose for Linden Lab to spend their resources on and it isn’t squandering them on 4 barely used regions with no artistic merit.

Once I am convinced that this was due to spyware I’ll remove these posts and replace them with a background piece and the actual cause.  At the moment I’m not at a level of comfort to be able to accept the Linden Lab position.

Without knowing how local payments work, what data is required and if you need to access the Dragonfish site to do this rather than via the Second Life web pages (and there’s no way I’m going to test it out), my problems with blindly accepting Linden Lab’s position are:

• If an email address is used for Second Life only, the last time it was probably entered anywhere was when the email account on the Second Life website was updated – assuming people pull their emails down to an email client or it will be used to log into the mail provider if accessed via the web.  Although, web access does increase the chance that spyware could capture it.
• Those who have identified the spam emails claim their machines are spyware free.  Although none have yet said if they run scheduled checks and if they’ve reviewed the logs down the last few months to see if anything has been picked up.
• If it is spyware, then I would expect their non Second Life accounts to be receiving spam as well, I doubt there is anyone who only uses their second life email address, yet I’ve not seen any reports of this.
• Whilst there is a chance that somehow this spyware is clever and targetted enough to only recognise second life accounts and wait until it has the card holder name from a transaction against a Second Life account to send the data to the data collector to enable the email to be sent out, I wouldn’t consider it likely.

I’m still not convinced this can be brushed aside as user carelessness and I would certainly be asking Dragonfish to explain. As Linden Lab are so publicly committed to protecting our data, I would have expected them to contact those who are currently claiming that spyware is not the cause of this to ask them for the emails, to check their logs to see if any spyware has been removed in the last few months and to ask them where they use the email addresses in question. Just brushing this aside as user carelessness without even going through the motions of due diligence doesn’t impress me. Just saying “contact us” in what looks like a peripherally relevant post isn’t what I would expect of a company who is so committed to protecting our data and believes in good customer relations but of course the only recent Linden Lab employee who publicly demonstrated that commitment and understanding of the basics recently ceased working for the company.

Linden Lab are extremely lucky with their user base, the user base is extremely tolerant of errors, it’s extremely rare that people ever exercise their right to complain to external authorities and they’re easily distracted.  Given another week this will have passed from most memories and this will have been just another blip on the horizon.

However, since I’m not feeling enough confidence in the Lab over this, I’ll stick to avoiding local payments and keep these posts here.

and I changed the theme of this blog to make it easier to read.

FJ Linden responded in the form thread (post 31) and said

01-06-2011 05:26 PM

I say that it’s about time that Linden Lab employed some people who have business experience.

Which was promptly rebuffed (post 34) by one of those affected.

         Reply to FJ Linden – view message

01-06-2011 06:58 PM

1) I received these spam-emails to 3 addresses used for SL. 2 of these are ONLY used for SL. And NONE of my other email-addresses received these spam-emails and I have dozens of addresses. One for each account on some website or other. As I said NONE of these other email-addresses received the spam. It is highly unlikely (though admittedly not impossible) for a spyware to randomly get just 3 addresses that are known to SL and none of the others. If my math is correct then the statistical probability for this is about 0.3%. (8 out of my total of 50-60 email-addresses are known to SL)

2) I know how to take care of my computer-security. I have 20+ years of experience as an IT-professional (programmer and webserver-administrator). NEVER in all those years have I had a virus/spyware on my computers. I use Firefox with Noscript-plugin to keep Java, Javascript and Flash disabled for almost all websites except trustworthy ones. BTW: Stop putting Javascript on s3.amazonaws.com as it forces me to enable Javascript for all of amazonaws.com. This is a security-hole waiting to be exploited. I already posted about this over a year ago when you first started doing this.

3) The fact that the advertised sites don’t belong to LL or some partner of LL doesn’t prove anything. Only a very, VERY stupid spammer would make it that easy for you.

4) We are not just talking about email-addresses here. We are also talking about RL-data associated with the email-addresses. In my case the spammer knew my RL-firstname. In one case reported by someone else it was the combination of an email-address used ONLY for SL and the full RL-name of the credit-card holder used for that account which was NOT identical with the user’s RL-name. I don’t see how any spyware could connect these two pieces of information.

In conclusion: Linden Lab, KEEP LOOKING!!! You are leaking this information *somewhere*.

Logically from the information given by one of those affected, the explanation given by the Linden Lab representative can not have occurred unless the Second Life payment site has spyware embedded in it.  One email was sent to an email address that apparently has only been used as the contact point between Linden Lab and the Second Life account holder, had not used elsewhere and the spam email had the card holder’s name, not the account holder.  The card holder is someone else and therefore the only place the matching of these two pieces of data could occur is Dragonfish.  The fact that card holder names are being used should have triggered alarm bells in Linden Lab.

The most likely scenarios are:

• Corruption.  The data has been accessed and removed by an unauthorised person/s  working for Dragonfish and has been sold on to other gaming sites for personal profit.

I feel this is the most likely scenario but only Dragonfish can confirm this by checking who has access to the data.

The other possible scenarios are:

• The emails came from other Dragonfish companies.  This means that Dragonfish is using the data without the knowledge or consent of those affected and in breach of the EU data protection laws.  Financial information (card holder name at a minimum) should never be used this way.
• Dragonfish is selling the data on to other gaming sites.  Again this is a breach of EU data protection laws.  Financial information (card holder name at a minimum) should never be used this way.

~~~

~~~

Here are the relevant links to make a formal complaint

Apparently Dragonfish/Cassava Enterprises (the parent company) passes at least the card holder name and the email address to other gambling sites, this has been confirmed by people who have received spam email for gambling sites to email addresses that are only used for Second Life purposes*.  More worrying is that card holder names are also being passed, this claim was made by someone who received a spam email to the Second Life account used by the account holder yet addressed to the card holder name which was someone who had allowed them to use the card to make payment to Linden Lab*.

Added to this was the extremely poor method of verifying a card holder.  All reputable payment processing organisations use the card verification plugin provided by the credit card company (think “Verified by Visa” and the rest) but not Dragonfish, they send emails with the following text* before they even use the security provided by the card companies. This of course is unnecessary as the card company is best placed to verify the card, so the question arises as to why this effort is being spent on obtaining copies of the card.

(*to view links marked * you need a Second Life account and be logged into the forum.)

Operations Department – Second Life to me

show details 2:48 PM (2 hours ago)

Dear Resident,

I am Paramjit B. from the Operations Department at Cassava Enterprises (Gibraltar) Ltd. I am contacting you with regards to your Linden Lab account with username “(name redacted)“.

As part of our continued efforts to provide confidence and security for all of our members, we will always seek to verify the ownership of any credit cards used to make a deposit. As such your account may experience enhanced security steps at deposit stage, including processing through Verified By Visa or Mastercard Secure.

To process your deposits without this requirement and in order to become a fully verified customer, please send us the following documentation –

-  A photocopy of your credit card ending # 0479 (front & back)
-  A photocopy of your national identity document such as an ID card, Passport or Driver’s License

These documents can be sent to us by you uploading them through the link:

http://secondlife.com/my/account/billing-verification

Please copy and paste the above address directly to your web browser. You will then be prompted to enter your username and password. You will then be guided through a simple process to upload the requested documentation.

Please note that to ensure the security of your documents we have implemented powerful security policies, rules and technical measures to protect the financial security of our Residents. However, please make sure that you block the middle 8 numbers of any credit/debit card uploaded and also block the CVV (3 digit code) on the back of such cards.

If you have any further queries with regards to our requests please review first our Frequently Asked Questions, located on the “Contact Us” tab of the website. Here you will find all the information on why we routinely request documents, how it is possible to send these documents, and the type of documents that we will accept. All these questions and more are answered by typing in the relevant key words to the Frequently Asked Questions search option.

Many thanks for your continued patience and co-operation in this matter.

Regards
Paramjit B.
Payment Operations
Second Life

I did smile wryly at the claim they have “powerful security policies” but then ask you to remove some of the card details and in breach of best practice for financial services, they provide a link to the web page to upload the documents.

Neither Linden Lab nor Dragonfish have ever provided details of their customer data handling procedures.  If you ever send sensitive documents like this to Linden Lab you have no idea what becomes of them, for example;

• who has access to the data? (apparently everyone by the look of it),
• if the information is printed out, how is it disposed of?

This is a concern as Linden Lab has had data security breaches in the past which they never advise their customers of.  Those we do know about range from the wholesale breach of the database in 2006 which resulting in everyone being advised to change their password to last year when accounts were compromised but only those affected were notified when they tried to access their account and the doubts (now realised with this Dragonfish leak) about their commitment to protecting their customer data, giving Linden Lab your data is a risky business and on the balance of probabilities, sending them copies of your ID is foolhardy.

It’s been 8 months since full payment options were available to Second Life users.  Apparently Dragonfish are having problems delivering the solution.  If Linden Lab were any one else, the fact that their new supplier of services had effectively stopped some overseas customers paying them would have been a big deal.  Linden Lab appear to be fine with it and apart from reinstating PayPal payments last week after some pressure and bad publicity due to people losing their regions and accounts due to LL not providing a mechanism for their customers to pay them.  This project seems to continue to meander along with a possible release date of this month, yet as usual the Beta deployment isn’t even what would normally be considered Alpha, let alone deployed for customer use due to the sensitive nature of the transactions.

Will I use local payments when it’s finally released?  No.  If I ever have to add new payment details and Dragonfish is the only choice then I won’t be doing it. There’s nothing I need in Second Life that would make me provide my details a site that cannot keep the financial data secure.

How will you know if your data has been compromised?

You can’t really, if you live outside the United States and in particular Europe and have recently used Linden Lab’s local payment option (new accounts apparently were forced to join the beta test for this, for the rest it was “voluntary”), it is very likely that you have had your credit card details compromised.   There will be a couple of indicators that arouse your suspicions.

• You should have received spam emails from gambling sites.  Although, if you use a provider such as gmail, yahoo or hotmail you may not have received them as the spam filters
• You may see unusual transactions on your card statements

What you can do

• Check your spam folder to see if you’ve received any spam emails from gambling sites
• You should check your card statements, and
• Consider making a complaint to you local data protection commissioner.

Here is the link to the European Data Protection authorities: http://www.dataprotection.ie/ViewDoc.asp?fn=%2Fdocuments%2Feuropean%2F6f.htm&CatID=37&m=i

Here’s the UK one: http://www.ico.gov.uk/complaints/data_protection.aspx

How do I know if my problem is a data protection problem?

You might have a data protection problem if any of the following apply to you:

• You have been denied any of your rights, including your right to see the personal information an organisation holds about you.
• Personal information about you is used, held or disclosed:
• unfairly
• for a reason that is not the one it was collected for, or
• without proper security.
• Personal information about you is:
• inadequate, irrelevant or excessive
• inaccurate or out of date, or
• kept for longer than is necessary.

I’ve highlighted the relevant reasons for the complaint.

Dragonfish has a UK office, you may like to also lodge a formal complaint with them.

Dragonfish UK

20 Thayer Street
London
UK
W1U 2DD

As always, carefully think about the information you provide to Linden Lab.  The risk of it being accessed by unauthorised people appears to be continuous and real.

The deal is classic marketing for all the wrong reasons.

For a start, it isn’t aimed at the user base in general.  The aim is to get current users to either like it on Facebook or to friend on Twitter – if you don’t want to do either then you miss out.  Bad luck for those who would prefer an email in your inbox or even to join an inworld group and get the group notice.  They do claim there’s a weekly email that will go out as well, but I’m betting it will happen well after the event, as usual only go to a subset of users and probably will say something like..  ”see what you missed??  Give yet more data to Facebook that we don’t even get to see and as a bonus to us, show the rest of the Facebook universe that the 100,000 odd likes we have on our page weren’t actually bought in the same way others buy backlinks for their web sites.”  OK. paraphrasing here but certainly having to like the Facebook page or friend them on twitter has absolutely nothing to do with binding users a little more strongly to the platform and everything to do with cheap marketing and demonstrating just how unsuitable Second Life is for people who like social media. It’s certainly not aimed at those who don’t use the marketplace because of course the deal isn’t available inworld.

The way it works for content creators is simple, in exchange for your item being publicised in this supposed email, on twitter and on Facebook (via a link only, not even a pic by the look of it) you must reduce your price by 50% for the 24hr period as well as write the copy for the ad and provide the pics (with Linden Lab then making any modifications they see fit without your subsequent approval) and on top of the 50% reduction you must give half of each sale price to Linden Lab. The benefit is brand awareness, (in theory) at least 4 times the number of sales you would otherwise have had on the item and possibly some repeat custom later on.  As the businesses who have used Groupon type sites have discovered lately, the last one is rare but they do have people who will continually take advantage of the loss leaders – which means that the marketing is not value for money.

and the really sad thing?  It amply demonstrates that when everything is said and done that Linden Lab’s values are shoddy as ever and they still haven’t learnt basic PR and customer communication.  I’m beyond tired of Linden Lab positioning Second Life as something even less worthy than being the Wal-Mart of virtual worlds. Always cheap, always seeking to exploit its content creators in particular and its userbase in general and always appearing to go out of its way to not deliver anything that we’d recognise as a benefit.  If it goes well? Well, that’s not happened in Second Life. If it’s gone badly? Well, blame the users as that’s what we asked for.  It’s funny that I don’t ever remember asking for each deliverable to be a shoddy piece of shit but there you go, some of us must have.

I despair when I see Linden Lab demonstrating such a lack of understanding of, or confidence in, their product that they can only position Second life as a more immersive You Tube, or dress up your Barbie doll and do lifestyle of the rich and famous in 10 minutes. Linden Lab certainly has become more sophisticated in exploiting its userbase.  It really does leave a sour taste in the mouth.

As a little ray of light though..  Here’s a screenshot of the comments so far.  Of the 33 Likes for the post, 12 of them are liking various comments pointing out how unseemly the Dash Deal is and only one out of the 9 comments is positive.

I bet Linden Lab will be glad when the likes of me finally gives up on Second Life completely.  It must be so irritating having people who remember when there were more usable features and still hold out hope that one day Linden Lab will actually see us as customers to be cherished rather than a resource to be disregarded, except when useful.

TMJ: We don’t want this to be entirely one-sided. What are we – as users and customers – not asking you about that you’d nevertheless like us to hear?

I will read the comments to this interview, what I would most like to know is this: In 2 years time what would you most like to be doing in Second Life, and how would you like to be doing it? The answers to that question would be very helpful indeed.

Here’s mine.

• Stop using mainland as a test server – spend the money and the time creating a proper test environment
• Make support actually do what they are supposed to – the frontline chat works adequately but the support tickets processing sucks. Processing tickets may not be sexxxy to your employees but it helps to keep around the people paying their wages.
• Fix inworld search. Just admit GSA6 was a bad decision and move on.
• Fix the marketplace. It’s borderline unusable for merchants and customers don’t fare much better. 
• If you have a policy, actually implement it.  A tough one I know but pretty well every other organisation manages it. 
• Fix the maturity ratings issues.  If someone only wants to search in one rating they should only see returns that are: 

1. relevant
2. on parcels with that rating

currently it does neither for listings or classifieds.

and the only bit of advice I’m going to give…

Understand the difference between social media and virtual worlds.  Second Life has always been cruelly deficient in social media tools – much to its detriment.  The current social media tools out there don’t cut it for what your current customer base want and need.  So, don’t be afraid to look at the current tools and take the best bits to create a version we will use inworld and revisit Avatars United in that light.

Then just before Christmas I realised just how much I was neglecting it and I thought I should get back into it, so I went back to the workroom and started building.  Since then I’ve surveyed my *cough* empire and was shocked at the reality of how Linden Lab are implementing their objective of streamlining their world.

• I’ve discovered that search inworld has been optimised once more, in fact they’ve optimised it so much that some of my smaller stores can never be returned in search.  So I’ve taken them out of search, cancelled the classifieds and am in the process of removing them and selling the land.
• I’ve rediscovered that one of my larger parcels still doesn’t appear in search.  That classified is quite expensive but I’m almost at the stage of pulling the plug on both the parcel listing and the classified. The parcel listing drives traffic more than the classified.  LL won’t refund me for all the money wasted so far and I got tired of live chat telling me to tweak it/wait for the latest update/give it a few more days. 9 months is more than enough time to fix it and they haven’t so I can only assume they don’t want that business.
• I’m on a version of the rc server code and I’m tired of people IMing me to say that they have an account stuck on the region/haven’t received their purchase from one of my vendors.  I’m also tired of the rolling restarts that seem to be endemic at the moment on that poxy rc.  Do you think I can find out how to get off it?  live help could only suggest I put a ticket in to ask, which of course Linden Lab have promptly ignored.
• Inworld search is so poorly built that it isn’t even capable of keeping the returns filtered by maturity rating, add that to their inability to get some listings to actually show in search at all and to apply their relevance weightings in a manner that a reasonable person would consider logical. The only thing you can say is that it ticks the fail box.
• Then there’s the marketplace.  The merchant back end is still at fag packet prototype level and the relevance function is once more embarrassingly bad.  I finally relisted all the items that were corrupted by the migration but now each time I make a change they lose their relevance position and of course don’t have the old xsl data which looks like it is used in the relevance calculation.  

Despite this I spent the last week considering expanding as I’ve run out of prims at the mainstore and need a new full prim region and a couple of homesteads. 

So I did some pros and cons – here’s the list:

Pros

• I can keep releasing items. 
• I can make the store more visually attractive and easier for shoppers to find what they are looking for.

Cons

• I’ll be paying an extra $545 per month on top of the purchase price and there’s no guarantee I’ll see a commensurate increase in sales.  
• I can’t divide the regions into parcels as smaller regions are penalised in search, so it makes it pointless to try to cleanly target different markets
• There’s no guarantee Linden Lab won’t stop tinkering with inworld search or the marketplace.  Last year I found out how much of my sales depend on visibility in search and in the marketplace.  I was pretty shocked at the percentage.  The risk of a recurrence of search failing to deliver relevant results is high and the amount of effort required to keep on top of their latest changes via reverse engineering (because God forbid they ever tell us what they’ve done) and then adapt to the change before they change it again is too time consuming for no real return.
• Concurrency and demand for Lindens is reducing.  Less money and less people means less opportunity for sales.
• I can’t even be assured that I’ll appear in search.

Now, I really do want to expand, despite the list.  So I went to the land page and there was a button that offered me a human to chat to about it.  

Want Help?

Land specialists can answer
your questions.*

Chat Now

*(Available Wed-Friday 8am-6pm Pacific Time)

As you can see, they’re only available a few days a week but my luck was in as I was looking at the page as these humans were supposedly there.  So I clicked the link, thinking that just maybe the human would say something that might give me the confidence to go ahead and buy – a discount would have been nice but I’ve in SL so long that I know better than that – but I wanted to try – even if they would offer something like actual attention to my tickets and resolution to the search issues I may encounter would have been enough.

Anyway, I clicked on the link and it came back “page not found”.

Sums it up really

So, here’s what I’ve done.

• I’ve cancelled the parcel listings and the classifieds for the smaller plots that are no longer returned in search. 
• I’m going to close them and sell the land. I toyed with buying a 1/4 sim on mainland as a sop but the fact they’re all RC is enough to put me off that.
• I’m not going to expand – Once I can no longer remove prims to make way for the new releases that will be it.

Which means..

• LL have lost at least $6540 usd plus sinks per year (I was planning on converting the new homesteads to full prims later in the year as part of the growth plan, which would have uppped the overall take – assuming they could do something as simple as upgrading them)
• I’ve gained many hours in my day as I don’t have to spend all that time setting up the new regions
• and soon I won’t have to worry about creating anything as there’ll be no room to put it

Pretty well any other B2C outfit would have been all over me at the thought of generating that kind of income, then there’s Linden Lab.  I suppose Linden Lab think they’re creating the new paradigm for self-confessed successful online businesses that in reality are struggling –  Don’t provide service, look amateur, deliver  a shoddy product, pretend the customer doesn’t exist when they ask for help via the support they supposedly pay for and better still, ignore the key drivers for your business and make it as hard as possible for your users to use your service.

Why do they do this?  Are they really so ignorant of the underlying drivers for their world?