Are our efforts noted? Not in your life. Now if I was IBM or Google or eBay or a charitable organization or a tourist authority like the very recent Costa Rica SL project (already in SL’s hot spot blog HA!), we would have been splashed across the SL pages by LL in a flash, shouted to the world that this ‘company’ or ‘organization’ is now found in SL, and here is the exact SLURL too! That entire exercise brings floods of residents to the project regardless its quality or true contribution to SL, as it is the very nature of people to follow LL’s lead when they recommend new places. And this happens every single time an outside organization links to SL in some way or another regardless the shortness of their time in-world.

Bishara barely makes it into any search through the secondlife.com website, and none of our island names show up, even though most of them have been around for months now. Though we do come up somewhere in the SL search itself, using the in-world search has equally become a science of SEO or bust, and since we are artists not coders, and we do not have the funds to pay someone to do the optimization for us we even loose out there too.

So like you my personal considerations of spend in-world is fast changing, and it is currently ONLY the surfing community that keeps me in Second Life, a community largely ignored by Linden Labs any way, despite being one of the most amazing, non-sex focused communities in their world whose assistance to new players are seldom equaled by other communities. Sad that we should see this change at Linden Labs from what the old timers used to say were a bunch of well meaninghippie type programmers who would help you anyway they could to get something off the ground.

What really angers me is if you are based in the US and or you are a resident pre 2007 it seems one call to LL still gets you the discounts on sim tiers every time you complain. ATown Fall almost always has this experience, and has told me time and again, when he complains about the unbelievably bad performance these days he gets a discount on his sim tiers. I try the same and my tickets are not responded to in weeks or even months, and discounts?
HA, never in your life! LL bills me every month regardless their performance.

So, sadly, I agree with your view here, Christophe, though I feel obliged to continue to support the surfing community even though I have no income in RL these days to honestly afford that, but I do so in the hope that LL may come to its senses soon and possibly aid individual non-corporate non-charity funded sim owners who are not just in it for a quick buck, but who are really working at creating long term contributions to Second Life.

I have one exception to the entire complaint against the Lindens here, and that is Torley, only because this is a Linden that still reminds me of what the old timers used to say all the Lindens were about, being there for the resident, giving away free content and free tutorials, and so on and so on, and yes, even visiting residents blogs or web sites to leave a comment or two. I really wish the others would take his lead here and simply refocus from the corporate attitude so many seem now to have developed to one of co-existing with normal residents, people like you and me who put our hard earned capital into SL without the possibility of writing it off to tax like all the corporates would do regardless the success of their projects in-world, or using other people’s donations like charities do to build a presence to ‘focus’ more people on their specific causes. Just for once it would be nice to have someone stand up for the small guy, in RL or SL, just once. If I sound bitter, it’s simply because I am, no excuses!

I don’t appreciate a bit being perceived as a “captive,” taken-for-granted customer. Especially at a time when other, very interesting virtual worlds are about to blossom.

Signed: A sim owner about to sell his sim anyway

The island is found in Second Life, a 3D world on the Internet can be viewed using a special downloadable program. If you have that installed already and you are familiar with the Second Life environment, my apologies. I tend to start from the beginning with everyone

If you open the viewer and log into Second Life, open the SEARCH tool and type in Bishara Island. It will show you the spot on the virtual map and you can teleport to it directly.

One point of interest - though the names there share some similarity to Arabic it is in fact Swahili dirivitives we used to name the islands as my best friends in Africa are Swahili

The correct Swahili pronounciation differs a little from Bishara and should be spelled Bashara, but the ‘i’ sounded better to me and I used Bishara instead, like your name.

Best regards,

Dumi

Hey, and welcome to our blog, Torley. We’ll have to put up that special watermelon statue now instead of the dolphins we used before

Again, SO SORRY for the awkwardness. And thanks for sharing your thoughts. =)