New Third Party Viewer policy changes

Daniel Voyager

Update!

Yesterday afternoon Linden Lab posted some new Third Party Viewer policy changes on the SL Forums which will impact users that use ANY third party viewer to run Second Life. Since the announcement there has been lot’s of mixed views about the new policy change with upset and confusion in some cases.

Here are the new sections of the policy:

2.a.iii : You must not provide any feature that circumvents any privacy protection option made available through a Linden Lab viewer or any Second Life service.

2.i : You must not display any information regarding the computer system, software, or network connection of any other Second Life user.

2.j : You must not include any information regarding the computer system, software, or network connection of the user in any messages sent to other viewers, except when explicitly elected by the user of your viewer.

2.k : You must not provide any feature that alters the shared experience of the virtual world in any way not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer.

Full post here 

Upcoming Phoenix office hour meeting

  • Phoenix Viewer office hour on Tuesday at 2pm SLT
  • (location & live stream will be announced shortly)

Audio meeting 

  • Listen to this audio interview here by Oz Linden and TPV devs.
  • It’s about 1 hour and 45+ minutes long!
Blog coverage and reactions from the SL community

We’ll have to see what happens next.

What are your views about the new TPV changes ?

14 thoughts on “New Third Party Viewer policy changes”

  1. Hiya Daniel, recent visitor to your blog (thank you for the recent like on our blog too).

    I was really interested to hear about this news. Having just spent over four weeks reviewing some of the TPVs I’d be interested to know how they’re going to follow this up, particularly as LL’s own viewer is not a favourite with me.

    Is there something specific that has happened which LL is reacting to? And how far does “shared experience” go? That could mean WindLight settings for all I know.

    They just love to puzzle the heck out of everyone, don’t they?

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  2. Pingback: Viewer för Second Life standardiseras « Prim Team

  5. I like what they are trying to do. They need to take control over that TPV djungle. They are not responsible for earlier mistakes made and V3 is an excellent client.

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    1. Viewer 3 is alright and in some ways it’s better than viewer 1.

      There’s panic and uncertainty at the moment. I think things may be clear next week or so hopefully!

      I still believe there’s alot more for the lab to do with Viewer 3 etc.

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      1. Oh my, V1 feels stone age now =)) Yes of course there are a lot more work to do. They will never be finished. But I like it so far 🙂

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  6. While I fully understand that people don’t always want others to know that they are actually online and therefore LL forbidding this in the future, in my mind some other reasons for this change pop up:

    a) We don’t want people to see how many residents use non-LL viewers, therefore reading out and sharing this information will be forbidden.
    b) We don’t want people to see what could be done with some real creative work to enhance the inworld experience (for example windlight sharing, which still is primitive compared to the Lighshare Technology which is available in opensim), because this would make our own devs look bad and lazy, therefore things like that will be forbidden.

    Lets face it, LL has a really bad track record about viewer technology and innovation. They very seldomly listened and listen to what their paying customers really want and need, and for me this looks more like a cover-up to hide that bad image in the future. “If nobody can see our problems, the problems don’t really exist.”

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  7. Pingback: If it ain’t broke … why fix it? « Prim Perfect

  8. I see this a bit differently than Daniel.

    First the privacy thing is a major concern. Ever since the malware viewer Emerald put in the ability to override privacy settings of others – and this for some reason was kept in Phoenix / Firestorm… its been a point of controversy.

    That the TPVs have been unwilling to self-correct on this for so long means they need to lose some of their autonomy. When self-regulation fails, you lay out the smackdown and let em get hurt. They clearly lacked the ability to be responsible on their own.

    TPVs brought that policing upon themselves.

    That this breaks some scripts is unfortunate – but those can be re-coded to new methods.

    The other elements – especially clause 2k. That’s about being able to change the experience of other people through your viewer. I see that as a pro-active measure for the coming game features that got a preview in Linden Realms. Adding these features in will likely add code that could be cracked and retooled for a hostile purpose. And again the over-riding of privacy settings in the Emerald line shows that some will feel entitled to do this if not told outright that it is forbidden.

    – So this section 2k is in my opinion a measure to prevent us going down the Emerald path -again- in a year, where we end up with a griefer viewer as a populat choice and masses of people demanding Linden Lab not ban it despite the risks it poses to the system.

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  9. i think the Lab did a pretty good job on V3, but still makes so many mistakes that if there are no Tpv’s, Second Life would not sustain for long!
    And again, how some messy politics risk to screw Second Life even more then it is already!
    So i can only ask Tpv developers to think big and think also on Open Sim’s, where Lab does not rule!

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