Day: January 5, 2018

A couple of days ago, I was curious and I did a search for “Sansar” in YouTube and (aside from all the videos from and about India), I came across this interesting and well-produced review of Sansar (warning: some NSFW language).

Published on Dec. 16th, 2017, and already pulling in over 17,000 views, this YouTube video does get a few key facts wrong (for one thing, it makes it sound like IBM still has a large number of SL sims operating, which is wrong by about six years). The speaker also said that there were 20,000 experiences, which is way off from the current count of about 830.

The video creator, Rogue Shadow VR, found Sansar to be a lonely place; he only encountered one other avatar in all the experiences he visited (and from all the scenes he edited into this video, he visited quite a few). He had a common complaint: the inability to see how many avatars were currently in the experiences on the Sansar Atlas.

Overall, though, he had some good things to say about Sansar. He did think the platform needed more work, but it had some good potential. I found it an interesting video to watch, a relative “outsider’s” perspective on Sansar compared to all the viewpoints of those of us who breathe, eat, and sleep Sansar 😉 .

UPDATE Jan. 6th: Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab, has said this on the official Sansar Discord channel:

Indicating what experiences have people in them and sorting the Atlas by most to least populated is coming real soon. Remember, we’ve been in creator beta, [we’re] just now starting to focus on things that will build audience, first retention and engagement and then acquisition.

There’s a lot of useful information and tips that are being exchanged by creators (builders, scripters, animators, avatar fashion designers, etc.) in the official Sansar Discord channels. Sometimes, it can be difficult to find something that somebody said a few days or a few weeks ago on Discord. Valuable information can be lost.

In order to address that difficulty, and make it easier for Sansar creators to help each other, Idrid has built a wiki on a website called Fandom, called the Sansar Creators Tips Wiki. A wiki is, quite simply, a website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users. (The best-known and most famous example of a wiki is, of course, Wikipedia, the phenomenally successful and increasingly authoritative Internet encyclopedia, with over 5.5 million articles in English alone, not to mention countless other languages!)

Idrid explains the purpose of the newly-created Sansar Creators Tips Wiki as follows:

The team behind Sansar have provided us with some great ways to share tips and hints for content creation, the aim of this Wiki is to get it all into one place so we can search it and find things we need much easier.

Discord channels and our In-World communications are revealing a wealth of information on how best to build and create in Sansar. This is an attempt to get it all in one searchable location.

This wiki is not officially authorized by or affiliated with Sansar nor the company Linden Labs. All image and post copyright remains with the content creator. Posters are requested to give credit and ensure permission has been obtained for all material not owned by the page author posted on this wiki.

(I’m not sure, but I seem to remember Jenn, Sansar’s Community Manager for Linden Lab, mention that LL was thinking about setting up a wiki as well. So we may have both an official and an unofficial wiki, just as we currently do for Discord!)

I think this is a great idea, and I support it wholeheartedly. So, let’s start transferring some of our accumulated knowledge—from both the official and unofficial Sansar Discord channels—into this new wiki!

There seems to be some confusion in the official Sansar Discord channel about the best way to report software bugs to Linden Lab. Here is the recommended procedure, which I had outlined in a blogpost back in August:

First, the best way to report a bug is to create a new post in the Bug Reports section of the community forums. In order to do this, you need to have a user account on the Sansar web site, and you need to be logged in to your user account.  If you do not have a user account yet, you will need to create your account here at this URL: https://login.sansar.com/register.

If you do not have (or do not wish) to create a Sansar user account, there is a second way to report a bug.  Jenn told me you can also just send an email to help@sansar.com. She said that it’s much better to submit a bug report to the forums, because that way, other users can join in and up-vote an item if they are experiencing the same issue as you. How do you up-vote an item?  Simple.  See the little up arrow next to an existing bug report?  (You have to click on the individual title of each bug report to see this.  Here’s an example of what an individual bug report looks like.)

If you click that little up arrow, you can “vote up” that bug report (in other words, say “me too!”).  It also works for Feature Requests.  It’s much easier to share that information around internally with Sansar team members who aren’t in the support system, Torley says.

Torley also says:

And though it seems obvious, you may want to include that (1) solid reproductions (steps to make it happen) of a bug are super valuable and (2) whenever possible, post videos and screenshots. A lot gets lost in words.