Artificial Boy

((

I made this SLNameWatch Donation Kiosk in May, but I haven’t posted an announcement until now. I don’t regret working many hours on this project one bit, and I will probably work many more. I am having fun and learning alot about C# and libsecondlife that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise — much more than I signed up for, LOL. That is reward enough for now. I’m not about to give details about the maintenance costs of the SLNameWatch webserver and census robot, or claim that your financial support is desperately needed to keep it running — not yet, at least.

(If you are familiar with php+mysql web hosting costs and the hardware requirements for a libsecondlife bot, you can probably make a pretty accurate guess at my recurring costs.) Any “fictional currency” you “donate” goes directly to me to offset hours worked. I cannot guarantee that your donations will directly help make SLNameWatch better, but they will help my motivation. You can visit this kiosk (SLurl) if you use or have used SLNameWatch and are dying to show a token of your appreciation for my extensive human labor on this project so far. This kiosk is currently the only way you can donate Linden Dollars™ to SLNameWatch.com. The kiosk is located in the first-continent region of Milu (67, 47, 28). It is next to a Linden Road. In-world, you can also search Places for “slnamewatch” and teleport there.

Moving on, what the heck am I going to do with all these calling cards? As of 2008-07-12, eight hundred seventy (870) users have signed up for Second Life® accounts using SLNameWatch’s Join Now Page Catalog, a.k.a. the Get The Last Name You Want page since 2008-03-17 when I first started taking advantage of the refer-a-friend program. I have a calling card for each one, and though I thank each and every one of you, these calling cards are really cluttering up my main account’s inventory. The inventory system does not offer a way to archive them, or transfer them to an alt. I could use an alt account for all subsequent referrals. I’ll probably make that change soon. The child avatar thing can throw some people off a bit, so I will probably change the referral code to link to an account with an adult-av profile. The drawback is I almost certainly will not be online under this alt to answer the occasional first-day questions. The last thing I want to say today is that I’m interested to know more about what makes visitors interested in SLNameWatch.com, and what features they like or do not like, and what they would like to see more of. Are the usage counts interesting to you, or are you mostly here for the Join Now instance tracking feature? I think one way to gather this information is to start a forum on the slnamewatch.com website. Users will be invited to discuss possible features so that I can gauge a level of interest in them, and best make use of my time and energy.

I hope the forum will be a good place to assemble feature requests, bugs, suggestions, and success stories. Additionally, it might be a place to discuss outside forces, such as looming changes to Linden policy regarding last names. A change in last name policy has threatened to make SLNameWatch obsolete since before I even created it! Yet, this change in last name policy hasn’t happened so far… its been over year. I digress. Expect an announcement soon about a new forum in my little corner of SL™ where dreadfully boring things such as this can be discussed. YAY!

Take care and thank you all for using SLNameWatch!

-Big Adz ))