Second Life

Linden Lab Doesn’t Want Your Friends

I’ve tried to refer friends to Second Life, but its been a while since I thought about how doing so might generate a few Lindens to buy some new shoes or whatever. But to one Second Life Resident, the quiet disabling of the refer-a-friend fee is cause for protest, saying that “the Linden Lab software responsible for tracking friend referrals stopped working one year ago, today. As far as I know, Linden Lab has not publicly addressed the issue.”

For Adz, the issue is about more than the Lab making a policy change and not communicating it. It’s about the disabling of a platform feature that helped to defray costs for his SLNameWatch service - a program that tracks what avatar names are being selected by new users, and that allows you to target a preferred last name if you’re registering a new account:

“I’m slightly in the hole, here, going by cash alone. Before the refer-a-friend system stopped working a year ago, I received dozens of calling cards per week (You can see a blurred out picture of a volume of calling cards in my inventory, here) Occasionally, these accounts would upgrade to premium. The bonuses associated with the upgrade went a long way to offset costs and were a great motivation for me to invest more into the site.

Then, it stopped. LL launched a new registration portal, and my best guess is that the developers neglected to include the referal id handler. This affects referral urls, slurls with referral ids, and postcards.”

Adz encourages Residents to vote on the JIRA on the issue and to give WorkingOnIt Linden a kick in the behind.

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