SL Notecards Are Fail, Instant Message/E-mail Me Instead

Please don't send extended messages as SL-based notecards to my inventory anymore, because I can't reliably get them. I have lost more story ideas and event notices that originated as notecards delivered to me by some well-meaning Resident, which were subsequently misplaced during some asset management chaos, or just as bad, dropped unfindable into the laggy morass of several thousand items already accreted in my inventory. (My apologies!)  Second Life is great for many things, but at the moment, object management, especially text-based objects, is not one of them. Instead, send me a short IM message, which has the advantage of going into my e-mail, if I'm offline. Or do it old school, and send me an actual e-mail directly: hamlet at secondlife dot com.  Mahalo!

Comments

[Ann Otoole]

Hate to break it to you but that send to offline email option turns itself off now. So you have to check it all the time and even then some will get lost. There is nothing stable about Secondlife anymore. All these issues began in the last few weeks. More sinister is logged chat and IMs are randomly erased by the client now. (has been going on a while as some folks found out the hard way) So you need to back those up daily or at least weekly.

Or use a non LL viewer that is more stable.

Backups are a safer bet though.

Or put your real email address in your profile and send people to real email services that are reliable to communicate outside of SL.

[Hamlet Au]

Yeah I've lost a few offline-sent IMs, now that you mention it. Still, it's definitely much less fail than notecards. Even less fail, yes, e-mail. :)

[Peter Stindberg]

Wow, you are single handedly breaking one of the biggest mantras of SL: don't IM - send notecard! Hardly any profile of a SL businessperson (in the widest possible sense of business) that does not show these lines...

I have never heard of notecards to be failing, but I am sure you might be among the top 50 notecard receivers in SL so probably they do when coming in huge amounts.

For my part, I have my email address listed in my profile and encourage people to use it.

[Galatea Gynoid]

"Wow, you are single handedly breaking one of the biggest mantras of SL: don't IM - send notecard! Hardly any profile of a SL businessperson (in the widest possible sense of business) that does not show these lines..."

Actually, quite a few don't. I always tell people the same thing: IM me. If I'm not on, it goes to my email. Even if IM's are capped, it still goes to email. I think there's a lot of people under the impression that they don't, but in fact they do.

LL did go through a patch last year where their release candidate viewers were messing up your preferences, turning off those checkmarks in the manner Ann suggests, but that hasn't happened in a while. I habitually check after installing a new version of the client anyway, since it still messes up my graphics prefs, but IM to email has always been more reliable than sending notecards.

I suspect the only reason you see as many people as you do saying in their profile to send notecards is due to two things: first, some prefer not to have their IMs sent to email, so they are actually affected by the cap. Second, a lot of SL businesspeople are extremely gullible and just believe whatever rumor goes around. They say send a notecard because that's the "common wisdom", just like they have things spamming "!quit" at you when you enter the store, even though this does nothing to prevent copybots. (Which, nine time out of ten, wouldn't have been able to copy any items in their store anyway, because it's all in vendor panels, but they've been told the magical powers of copybot will steal their stuff even if it's in a vendor, and they believe it, as well as believe that the magic "!quit" snake-oil will prevent it.) The moral is, if a thousand SL avatars have it in their profile, it tells you nothing about how true it may or may not be. Just because it's a bad idea doesn't mean it won't become common wisdom/accepted practice on the Grid.

[Hamlet Au]

I'd be somewhat more inclined to open notecards if I didn't have to wait for several thousand items to get processed, then have to slowly scroll up and down my lagtastic inventory as if my mouse were covered in molasses.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Hamlet, the "Recent Items" tab in the inventory window is the fashionista savior. I keep the time option on it set for a week or so, or is it a month. Anyway, it's better for finding recent notecards than using main inventory.

I personally consider sending notecards slightly more trustworthy than offline IM's, which sometimes fail for me.

[Tateru Nino]

IM's are partially reliable for me - but direct email is about the only method that manages adequate reliability. Notecards? Definitely not. They get lost. They get sent with permissions set so that they can't be read, and more. If you sent it via a notecard, statistically the odds of me having seen it are low.

[Mitch Wagner]

Thanks for the informative discussion.

I second the endorsement of using the "Recent Items" tab to find new incoming notecards. The "Recent Items" tab contains everything you've received since you logged in in the current session. The only time that fails to target a new notecard is if you crash or are forced to log out before you get a chance to check that tab. In that case, when you next log in, use the inventory filter controls and set them to show you everything you received in the past day.

Those two tricks make finding recent notecards easy. Well,relatively easy. As easy as anything ever is in SL.

Notecards are the default means for me to send asynchronous messages in SL. I'm not very fond of that, but it seems to be the custom in-world, so I go along with it. (As Robert A. Heinlein said, when the natives are rubbing blue mud in their navels, you should rub blue mud in yours too.)

When I'm not inworld, I prefer e-mail or flat-Internet IM (Skype, AIM, etc.) But most people don't go along with that, even if you put it in your profile.

Notecards are particularly bad when you're trying to have an asynchronous discussion with two or more people, like pinning down the time for a meeting.

LL needs to make it easier for residents to communicate via e-mail.

Profiles should have a clear indicator that says whether a person is online or offline. "Offer Teleport" works that way -- when a resident is offline,the "Offer Teleport" button on their profile is grayed out. But I've found it to be not 100% reliable.

When trying to send an IM to someone who's offline, once you hit the "Enter" to send the message, you should get a dialogue box: "User is offline. Would you like to send an e-mail?"

If you say yes, you'll get a window that allows you to compose an email, with a proper subject line, text, and ability to attach notecards.

Upon signup, residents are assigned an e-mail address with Webmail access, which they have the option of forwarding to any other account they want. Indeed, they should be encouraged to forward the e-mail.

[Hamlet Au]

I do use the Recent Items tab, but it often doesn't seem to display my, well, recent items. What is worse, to even *get* to that tab, I have to open my inventory, which launched the lagtastic fail I'm trying to avoid in the first friggin place.

[Ciaran Laval]

I get offline im's when I'm online so I'm pretty sure they work!

Notecards tend to go straight to my inventory when my im's are capped, I don't see the keep or decline message but they're in my inventory when I look. Of course the only reason I know to check for said notecard is because I received an offline im to my email about it!

[Mitch Wagner]

Hamlet - Ah. Yes, if you have a lot of items in inventory that's going to be a problem. I only have 1,800 myself, so it's not a huge deal. However, now that I'm getting more involved in SL again, I expect that'll change.

[QueenKellee Kuu]

How can you have such a lagtastic inventory, Hamlet? You never change clothes!! :D

Do you clear cache on every log out or something?

Anyhow, I'm curious about if capped IMs actually do make it to email, I'm going to test that one....

[Ren Austinmer]

For me capped IMs do make it to email. So do group notices, group invites, inventory offer messages, and objects that IM you. I've always had offline IM to email enabled and haven't had failures.

I like how you can reply to an IM through email, though that sometimes there are glitches. Especially if the IM is a few days old.

[Tateru Nino]

Capped IMs and group notices still make it to email - assuming they make it to your agent at all, that is.

Online or offline, IMs and emails aren't exactly guaranteed.

[Tateru Nino]

Err. IMs and group notices, I meant of course.