Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Object Permissions Need A Gift Option

Here I am in my new AfterHours Collection - Batgirl by Lourdes Laysan (SLurl) costume. It is well made and at just L$200 I think it is also a great deal. Yes, I am Batgirl! But I wanted to buy it as a gift. The texture on the vendor prim did not show any permissions information and peeking at its contents was equally fruitless. It turns out that some items were No Transfer which, in this case, means No Gift. Sure, I would have bought one for me anyway, but if I want to give it to someone like I would Real Life clothes, I can't do it.

Sure, I could contact the maker and ask to have it sent as a gift, but her profile indicates that she is on a sabbatical. Her Xstreet store front does not have this item, so while that might is an option -- albeit less attractive than being able to hand my friend a gift box -- for some items from that store, it is not for this one. Besides, many merchants mark up items on XStreet to cover the commission fees.

What we really need is an overhaul of the permissions system. Everything should be transferable just like in Real Life. Since that would raise havoc with the other system permission Copy, a creative form of Transfer needs to be found. I propose a Gift Upon Purchase option. It would have been great to be able to right click on the vendor prim, choose Buy as Gift rather than just Buy, and then be prompted for a name for delivery. Some vendor systems allow this, but for many reasons merchants prefer to use non-scripted prims so having the gift option built into the fabric of the Second Life viewer/servers would be best.

3 comments:

Peter Stindberg said...

You might want to look at this JIRA: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-2622

Uccie Poultry said...

Thanks for reminding me about that suggestion in the JIRA. That might certainly help, but I still like the idea of a Buy As Gift option. Since XStreet is being integrated into SL it would probably be easy to make everything marked for sale in-world automatically appear on XStreet and thus be giftable. Maybe we'd also get L$0 items giftable, too.

Unknown said...

Lourdes Here :) Using the new google search sandbox and I happened upon this post. I too, totally agree that there needs to be a buy as gift option in the permissions system, but I'm not sure that's going to happen, on the other hand you've convinced me to giftbox the outfit in question as well. Please drop me a message in world and I'll be happy to send you a free giftbox version as soon as I am in and able :)