Inhandra

The reason I heard was to offload some traffic to the web server, to help with region performance. Either way, I like the (near?) 1:1 ratio. Takes guesswork out of the equation when I want to upload a new profile pic.

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Innula Zenovka

There could be several good (or not so good) reasons for following a particular course of action, of course.

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Andromeda Rage

That's exactly what I suspected. Plus it's probably a bonus side convenience for them to have the ability to constantly tink around with the profiles format independently of the viewer development itself.

Inhandra

Interests were essentially just redone so we could put in our own, rather than utilizing checkboxes and a single-line text field. It wasn't very nice to look at. So, at least for that, I can say I prefer the new way to the old. It's on the very front, and they're now comma-separated tags that one can click and find others with a similar interest. Unless I missed something along the way, viewers with legacy profiles are not pulling this new data for display to others, and vice versa. If one wants to use legacy profiles I'm fine with that but I wish people would pull data from the new to display in that legacy tab.

I have "Photography (In-World)" as an interest tag, and a Flickr button linked to my profile. Anyone on a legacy-profile cannot see either one of those. My profile even mentions to see my Flickr button, and I got enough questions that I had to specify web profile in parenthesis.

The value of the language section is debatable. We could easily say we only care about the languages we can understand. If their profile is only Spanish along with all their picks, I'm probably not going to try to talk English with them. On the other side of that coin, if their profile is English, I feel confident I can talk with them. I don't think I ever bothered to look at this field or the interest fields back when I was using 1.23 or Emerald, so naturally, I did not miss it when I jumped ship to the then-new V2.

Picks I agree with you, however. I wish the summaries were there on the front rather than just the location, but I tend to consider it an "acceptable loss" considering the entertainment and value I get out of the "main" profile section and the feed. I hope they fix it one day.

I'll also reiterate my previous statement one more time:
I wouldn't really care which method of profile was presented to me as long as they "matched up" content wise, and I'm a full believer of keeping in-line with official or improving upon it. They do not, however, match up. Things new users and I expect are not offered to us.

Cerise

This is closest to the truth. The most digestible sound bite version I have seen:

The less a sim has to do that is not directly related to simulation, the more room it has to handle more avatars etc.

(The actual context of that particular conversation was about some kind of inworld database proposal, but that is their general push.)

Inhandra

As of right now, I can click a profile picture (I'm a derp) of a person using an older viewer in a different aspect ratio and SEE IT IN FULL. It's not broken, it's just condensed for the profile.

You could, however, do much to ease transition as you are the UI itself. Display both ratios in the legacy profile floater. Make it smart, so it can tell which is used. If it's in the old ratio, have a small, gray, unobtrusive blurb somewhere that alerts them that this ratio will not display to others properly. They can then elect for themselves if they want to move to the new default ratio or leave the old one the way it is, but this way they are:

1) No longer ignorant on the situation at large
2) Not seeing some people's profile pic super stretched (Default 1:1).

Kadah Coba

It was 8 "Want to" checkboes with a text field, and 6 "Skills" checkboxes with another text field, plus another text box for language. I don't really care or use the checks or first 2 text fields, but the language field would have been very nice to have been exposed on web profiles as well. The problem was, I think, that LL didn't bother to implement the Interests tab in Viewer 2.0-2.4.
I'll admit its a minor thing, but it still works so I've re-implemented it for FUI-FS.

Dunno about you, but the I put in some things there when they first added it and I started to get spam from LL to friend very, very, very obvious sex-only avatars. What if I want to be friends with slut489257286 Resident?


LL has opted to still not provide access to this data outside of the formatted AJAX overloaded html that is used for viewer them normally. Because of volumes of java script and use of Ajax, its very hard to request the actual content in the tabs without doing so in a java script enabled browser.
All I've been asking for is to simply not wrap the data in java script on the server side and keep a static URL structure to fetch it.


Legacy profile > Web tab = web profile. Exists that way currently on Phoenix, will be the same on FUI-FS.

I seen a whole lot of multilingual people on SL, if I went purely by what language their 510 byte bio is in, I may not be able to tell they also speak my language to some degree which they can describe in the field. Eg. "German, some English"

I had a workaround for defaulting profiles to open the About tab but some changes to web profiles by LL broke it. The work around was possible on any viewer that implemented web profiles with LL's fix to support my-demo.secondlife.com on Aditi.

On our viewers you can use either and, sorta, both at the same time. With FUI-FS, you should be able to view either when ever from the other.
Eventually the only option for legacy profile presentation, if LL never provides an API replacement, will be scrapping web profiles. If that ends up the case, we can add the interests cloud while removing the lost functionality.


That's pretty much the same thing, its easier to find expertice in running a web service than training a new guy to work on the in-house custom platform. But judging from the fequent outages or poor performance, they haven't worked out that big. I really want to add a viewer function to track and possibly report average load times on web profiles. In my experience, they take 20-45 seconds per page, if they load at all; today alone I've seen 2 separate outages and I this was only checking my own a couple times to grab image sizes

That was likely in reference to moving more services to CAPS (sim host to viewer HTTP communication channel, eg HTTP textures, inventory, names) instead of sim hosted UDP. Web profiles are a completely external service with its auth through OpenID.

Kadah Coba

What viewer? AFAIK, only TPVs had zoom profile image with non-web profiles. These would open up the original image in the texture preview window. On web profiles, you see the resized and sometimes reshaped image from LL's CMS provider, and not the original image nor its original aspect.

How do you propose determining which is supposed to be? Aspect ratio data is not stored in the profile nor the texture, and all textures are square and powers of 2.

Cerise

It is really about all the ancillary services. Search and legacy profiles were in that camp too, and the group mess is one that still needs to be slain. SL was one giant bottleneck out the gate, and they have been paying for it with things that are really hard to separate out from the running system ever since.

Joshua Nightshade

I just want to point out three things:

1) Tonya has repeatedly screamed that it's not really up to her and if "privacy advocates" (sneer sneer) care about it they need to petition LL's JIRA system to get the hole blocked.

2) She's repeatedly stated that despite, for whatever reasons, her apparent inability to have her own opinion and not add shit that is bad even if 99% of the userbase asks for it, her explanations for why it's in Phoenix should — as she says — not be taken for her personal feelings on the features.

3) The aforementioned LL JIRA issue which she pointed everyone to if they cared about stopping the exploit seems to be on track to be fixed by LL, and she's groaning everyone's triumphant happiness over that fact.

Evidently, she was lying re: "I don't want this stuff either you guyyyssss, I just have no choice!!!"

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Inhandra

I've not had any random whispers at all. I whispered one individual to tell them hello because we had a lot in common, and he welcomed me to IM him again sometime after our talk. Any comments about the interests have come after I've come into contact with someone; IE, they saw me near them and IMed me, or spoke of it in local. "So I see you're into x..."

Well that's dumb. They ought to allow some way of getting that data. But, it does inform me of the why of it, so thanks!

I can't recall what viewer folks were using when they asked. I might have all been FS folks, I really don't remember. If there's an easy way for them to pop it open or will be in the future, then that's a good thing. It is unfortunate though that I'd still need to prompt to another floater for them to see the links.

You got me there.

I remember when Hitomi figured out a way like that (or was it you and she borrowed it?) for Starlight to open profiles in About rather than feed. That was neat and I enjoyed it. I kinda wish that was still available, but as I also consider what one says and does in their feed to be as much a part of "who they are" as their about tab, it's still relevant. In other words, if someone sounds like an ass or annoying in their feed, I'll take a pass even if their profile makes them sound like a saint. It has uses. :>

Wasn't there talk of them scrapping the ability of the profile data to be pulled at all save from the web? Did they back down, or was it never really an issue?

How would you be able to add the interests cloud that way, though, and add "lost" functionality? This sounds interesting but I'm not sure what exactly you're talking about or how it's possible.

Admittedly when they first came out they were big, bulky, and slow and I didn't like them either. But honestly, aside from some oddities a couple months ago where I'd get a "Tablet driver needs updating" error followed by the web profiles refusing to load -- no idea, it is linked somehow because as long as I don't get that popup error they would be fine -- they've worked well and have been fast.

...Of course, I'm also on a 50mbit down / 25 up connection, and that might be why I get them fast. Nowhere near the 20-45 second range, at most 2 seconds.

I was actually speaking of the web profiles when I said it had a zoom. Javascript I imagine; it just enlarges the image, and you click its little X to shrink it again. It's there, and not really broken if it's not really clipped, just constrained to the 1:1 until clicked.

When I look at a texture, it will tell me it is x by x pixels. If it is of equal amounts, it's a square. If it's something else, then it would need to be displayed in the prior format. At least, that's all I can come up with off the top of my head. I don't really know how the size or other information about a texture is stored.

Inhandra

I don't see the groaning. Did she un-do them?

Joshua Nightshade

Ha, looks like it. There was one on your "fuck yeah" image which is gone, though the one she left on Innula's post is still there. I saw a disagree on this.

She does seem to enjoy this post though.

Shame, I should have screenshotted if I'd known she was going to get rid of them.

Kadah Coba

"Whispers"?
Here's a pic of one of the spam emails I got from this system. Apparently not all accounts were "chosen" to be tested at with this.


Notice that this apparently sent to one of my alts, which had a completely blank profile at the time.

Some time later my main account got invited to take a survey on it.

Obviously I said it was spam and unwelcomed since it's results seemingly didn't have any relevance to anything on my profile.

Previous and current versions of FS have a clickable URL under the name on the 2nd Life tab. Optionally there is a setting in Prefs to make web profiles default. In FUI-FS the web profile is be auto-loaded in the web tab on legacy profiles, the same as in Phoe.

I don't know what she did, its likely the same trick of changing the ProfileURL in debug settings to have #about_tab at the end. I posted this some time ago on the Jira for making About the default tab.

I'm not sure I understand you now. :s

Doing the new interests in a floater would only require making each tag a click-able link. I only mentioned removing the lost functionality at that time in the future when the legacy profile system is dead because there are some legacy profile fields that do not exist in any form on web profiles, eg. legacy interests, classifieds, some pick information, and the avatar's real profile/pick picture textures. I don't know if its possible to get the texture UUIDs for the profile textures and make use of the viewers cache in fetching them.

I rarely look at or use web profiles and when I do its only to test or check something. I have 50mbit symmetric fiber from a tier 2 provider which coincidentally has a peering agreement with one of LL's ISPs, so my hop count to either of LL's data centers is very short. The majority of the time I open a web profile in viewer, the viewers reported load time is 30 seconds average. When I was experimenting with scrapping profile data a couple months ago, I found that the server typically took an odd amount of time to respond to requests. That is when they weren't returning 500 errors. :s

All SL textures are constrained to powers of 2. eg,. 128x128, 256x256, 512x512, and 1024x1024. Web profiles show different pixel sizes because the web server has rescaled the original image first. If your real profile pick is 1024x1024, it will be resized to 72x72 and 600x600, the later only getting displayed in the browser as 300x300.
If you view the same on Phoe or FS, the zoomed image would display as 1024x1024, or what ever the original size was.

Inhandra

That's me getting SL/MUCKs/otherplatforms mixed up. I meant IMs.

I can't recall if I got one of those emails or not. I've gotten a few things from SL, but as long as it doesn't seem to be a billing related I just chunk it. It didn't really bother me though. I got used to family members sending me some pretty trivial emails so spam doesn't really get under my skin anymore, and the bulk of it is taken care of by Gmail automatically anyhow.

Those were what I had troubles with before, and tried to report on it. It wasn't behaving quite right but all I got was some hostility -- not from you, of course -- for even suggesting that the profiles have a particular way that they load in official that wasn't being mirrored in FS.

That sounds neat, actually, and a good way to do it when legacy is default. Kudos!



We'll just move on then. :x

I don't know? All I can report to you is they work very well for me. I can't explain how or why that is, but other than that bizzare tablet thing, they agree with me and I agree with them. I can't imagine it has anything to do with me using a TPV, but I suppose anything is possible.

Speaking on the profile as a whole again for a sec, it's possible that I just like the layout. There's something friendly and colorful about it I suppose, I dunno. Could be the blonde talkin', cause I also tend to be quite picky about viewer skins (the colors they use). So, you can take that however you like or disregard it completely.

Okay, so, if I'm understanding you properly, then there really is no way to make the profiles smart enough to know what format the profiles need to be in. So then it's back to new way vs old way.

All I can provide to you then, is that:

• a negative aspect of the new way is it's technically a smaller canvas
• a negative aspect of it is that people still using a profile pic for the older ratio will complain about their profile pics getting squashed.
• a positive is that it is easier to format an image for a profile (a square is easy, figuring out 2:3rds or 2:4ths or whatever, was a huge pain for me and incidentally the only reliable way I found was to screencap my profile window and size it to the screencap...)
• a positive is that it will match what official and other TPVs based on it use

It would be nice if we were all on the same page as it were, when it comes to profile pic ratios, even if it was the larger ones. But, I don't think anyone's gonna convince LL to go back to the other.

Kadah Coba

IMs = in-world instant messaging.
PMs = possibly what to call the email like messaging system added retentively recently to web profiles.

I would like to point out that I personally find PMs to be annoying less useful than offline IMs. I never seem to be any notifications about PMs despite having the notifications turned on, but failure of notifications being sent has been an ongoing issue with web profiles since they were added.

I got a number of them till I found the option to disable them. That one was the cleanest one of the bunch. I my self don't mind dirty images, but it seems like a bad idea to me for LL to send them to an avatar's inbox. I know profiles are supposed to not be adult rated, but we know how well that works


It will be proper in FUI-FS, I've done it over from scratch. It was likely broken before due to all the hackery that had to go on before to break things out of the sidebar and have more than one of something.

Layout is possibly the number one complaint I've heard. To me they are still very large.


Good points. I'll have to bring this up for discussion later and possibly see about polling on it.
Currently FS uses a mixed set of aspect ratios (v1's and v2's). There is no point in continuing to use any of v2's since those are completely dead now. Web profiles would be the "official" standard, but the v1 ones are still what the large majority of SL sees and would be accustomed to.

Beezle Warburton

Can I put in a vote for 4:3 (ish).

{eta, removed the bit about auto-detect since uploaded images get forced to powers of 2}

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Kadah Coba

If I get a poll for it, I'll want to stick it on the login page.

Joshua Nightshade

"I'm a slut."

DoctorZen

Chris Brown's new girlfriend made the list, too!

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"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." — Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Elysium Hynes

An the also included nudists i see.

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I have a blog with stuffs in it Sium
You can also check my Flickr or my Pinterest for event covering.

Inhandra

I went to bed, and between listening to someone snore next to me and my brain flying around the room at 200mph over what to reply, I had a hard time falling asleep. I came up with something insightful, something stupid, and then something worth posting, but now that I'm sitting here with caffiene in one hand, I can't really remember it.

Okay, well, I'm not at all sure why you dived into this along with an explanation about which is what. I want to think that you're now assuming I'm ignorant all because I flipped into 1998 mode, or being snarky at me because I'm not seeing things eye to eye with you. I'm fully aware of the difference between IMs and PMs, and as I said before, I meant IMs. PMs have their time and place, but since you bring up notifications: they notify just fine, but only if you're online. It's more than likely operating under the assumption that, if you're using official and someone sends you a PM while you've been away, you WILL see that you have it the first time you either check your feed or look at someone else's profile. That big orange circle with a number in it over the envelope is hard to miss. The system doesn't take into account people that are not using official profiles, and by LL's view, "Why should it?" If they thought otherwise, you'd be able to easier pull the interest tag cloud along with other elements.

I'm not really surprised. So, you can take my previous statements and apply them to the knowledge that everyone doesn't share the same opinion.

Okay, here's where I'm certain the bulk of my night-time thoughts went.

Polling is an idea, but I already know the outcome. Feel free to correct me at any point my assumptions are wrong, but afterwards I'll provide a small suggestion if you do go on ahead and poll anyway.

Assumptions: 1) People using Firestorm are mostly those coming from V1s and using it in Phoenix-mode. 2) People operating FS in Phoenix-mode want it to look like what they're familiar with.
These are fair, right? Those assumptions lead me to believe the overwhelming vote, if you put it anywhere as bluntly as "Hey, do you guys want the new ratio or the old?" will result in a landslide for the old. In fact, I bet the majority of them will knee-jerk the response without really looking at the pros and cons, because they'd feel that their legacy-viewer like way of Second life is threatened.

If you want a real answer, one thought out, I'd recommend you present it in terms of vanity. Because, let's face it, lots and lots of people care what their avatar and profile look like to other people.

So, the revised idea I had went more along like this:

Example:

• Right now, your profile looks squished to some users.
• You also might have noticed some other profiles look stretched.

This can be fixed by moving to the official ratio for profile images. It would also have a benefit of being easier to make a profile image for. However, the image would not be as wide as it is now.

Would you rather use this new ratio or the old one?

Lord

Just curious, why are we continuuing to post Firestorm feature arguments in the Zen Viewer thread again ?

Inhandra

Because this is SLU?

Relevant post: Zen Viewer

Kadah Coba

I was merely confused and not insinuating anything. Initially I thought you meant PMs, it made sense in the context of the first post but I never heard the term "whisper" used in regards to SL for anything other than local, thus were my confusion started. Sorry if I seemed like I was trying to be insulting, I wasn't, I'm just not good with words.

I only mentioned notifications for venting, I had a number of unproductive discussions over them sometime ago with Fredrik about how they would constantly either not send the email ones or never send the online ones. I've never seen the new message number for PMs on any of the accounts I tested back then, for me it would only show for the other forms of notification. Currently I do not know if those issues I saw were fixed, I don't get any activity on my web profile these days, I think the novelty wore off for everyone on my "friends" list.


I was referring to the people that have complained about them to me, but I have heard some people saying they like web profiles.

The first question should really be "Do you use FS or plan to in the future?" since it sorta maters what the intended audience would like to expect.
It would have to worded in a way that favors 1:1 since LL has determined it as what they would like the standard to be, but I'm only guessing since they still haven't updated that to their Limits documentation. Currently it says it should be 1:0.99. Personally I would use the results from this (at the moment) fictional poll as a factor in any decision.
Keep in mind that I'm only speaking speculatively right now, I need to take this up with the rest of the team. Unlike other TPVs (like Emerald), a single person can't just add or change something important only because they wanted to.

Because someone attached one of these to the thread?