Office hours

The December office hours for the XStreetSL team now contain the topic for discussion. The freebie roadmap? The listing fees? The clutter? Surely....NO! In a rather surprising move, they've decided to duck these issues and instead we can talk about wishlists and a new Xstreet homepage.

The topic is announced on the official blogrum and states:

"The December Commerce office hours will be on Tuesday December 15th at 10am PT, 4pm PT, and 8pm PT.

Location: Xstreet SL Garden Park - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Xstreet/34/95/22.

Topic: Discuss two upcoming features of XStreet: wishlists, and a new XStreet SL Home Page design.   

We plan to continue holding three sets of office hours on the 3rd Tuesday of each month.

We look forward to seeing you there."

The reason I'm surprised about the Xstreet team ducking the issues at hand is that Lindens generally do face controversy head on. They may often not answer criticism and they may not seem to listen, but they usually face their critics. I can recall meetings at four corners of sims regarding a controversial issue. I can recall Robin facing a protest in the Linden Village with torch waving angry protesters (I can't even remember the issue, it may have been VAT).
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Yesterday evening I attended the Zindra office hour, which turned into the Zindra office half hour because Blondin was busy after his holiday. That's fine, but the half an hour was such a waste of time that it's easy to see why both Linden's and residents question the value of office hours. I can't see myself going to a Zindra office hour again because after several weeks of attending, nothing appears to be happening. There's no point in wasting one's time in the fashion, I've tried here with Zindra but it's clear that Linden Lab don't give a flying fig about the place and are apparently happy to leave their customers to hang out to dry.

This isn't a sleight against Blondin, he simply doesn't have the power or the answers. Those who do have the power and the answers aren't interested, the VP of customer relations won't even meet the customers to hear their concerns.

This isn't unique to Zindra office hours, other office hours are simply a waste of time because of what appears to be Linden Lab's unofficial policy of not listening to their customers. Jack's office hour is only useful for getting some stats from Jack these days, any questions regarding policy are brushed under the carpet. However now that jack has announced that servers will no longer be tied to a class in a blog post here, this week's meeting at the new time of 3pm on Thursday could be interesting, I'll write more about this later. There are office hours that can be productive, but customer service office hours don't appear to be in that arena.
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We have some great Sci Fi type areas in Second Life, Insilico, Blade Runner City and Devils Moon spring immediately to mind, although the latter seems to have sold out and is no longer such a cool sci fi place. When I first signed up I expected more sci fi type locations to be honest.

However one area where we are lacking Sci Fi wise is Red dwarf. The boys from the Dwarf are back on telly in the UK for three new epsidodes this Easter weekend and although the first one wasn't rib ticklingly funny it was getting there. The problem was that the channel Dave then showed some older episodes and you realised the new episode wasn't quite upto speed but there are two more to come.

However this isn't my beef, my beef is rude people. I'm not even talking about people who are directly rude, I can handle that and appreciate someone calling me a dick to my face, I'm talking about the sneaky rude.

There I was at Meta's office hour tonight when I suggested I'd like to know how much money was being traded at my parcels, especially at my mall. I said that I didn't want to know who paid what to whom, just a total figure.

Someone objected, fair enough, they disagreed. I pointed out that Linden Lab publish a total spend and that this isn't uncommon in RL for malls to publish figures but this person did not agree. { Read more }