Yesterday I received the following offline IM:

The object ‘C.B.T final++’ has sent you a message from Second Life:
Avarege of 4 bullets= (Speed=0) (Energy=0) (Damage=0) (BpS=1.21)
= C.B.T final++ is owned by krilon Arida

I tried to contact the object’s owner to find out why her object was sending me instant messages, which I thought was kind of odd  -especially since this particular IM would seem to be a test of a non-C:SI combat system and it occurred in my store, and my message was ignored.

I don’t take kindly to spam, so I decided to mute the object.  I did not wish to mute the owner in case she ever actually decided to respond, but I don’t need pointless IM’s like this coming unsolicited from people/objects I don’t know.  I knew there was a "Mute Object by Name" feature in Second Life® that would work perfectly for this kind of situation, so I dug through the user interface to find it. 

It wasn’t exactly obvious where to find it at first, since I expected to be able to access it from chat history, but I ended up finding my Mute List and opening it.  There it was, the button to enable this handy-dandy feature, so I clicked it.  Imagine my surprise when it wanted me to hand-type the object’s name…  Okay, I thought, that’s a little inconvenient so I’ll just copy and paste the object’s name from my chat history.  No dice.  You cannot paste into the object name field, you must enter the object’s name by hand, *EXACTLY* the same.  This means all punctuation must match, and the name is case sensitive.  What a pain in the ass.

Whoever designed this feature had a fantastic idea, but fails utterly in the user-friendliness department.  It’s another typical example of how Second Life® has the potential to be a great deal better than it is, and how little thought goes into making the Second Life® client a good user experience.

Sheesh.

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