Kitely Forums

Why cant we have a list of friends that are online on the log on page?

Hi Scurvy,

In order for us system to be able to know who your friends are you fist need to be logged into the system. The only time you see the viewer grid login page is before you are logged in. This means that our system can't know who your friends are before you actually log in and at that point you no longer see the viewer grid login page.

At the website, even something like how many people are online would be helpful. And settle a debate I'm having as to which grids have the most actual people.

Hi Ada,

We see little point in showing the number of people who are logged in when the great majority of them are inside private or access-restricted worlds. When people can't find them on the publicly-accessible worlds they'll just say we're making up numbers, so we might as well not show any.

There is at least one popular grid that constantly has 50 bots logged in and adds those bots to the logged in user count it displays on its viewer login page. This grid discusses this publicly (it's not something it's hiding), yet most people who will look at that grid's viewer login page will think there are significantly more people logged in than there really are. I consider that type of practice to be worse than not showing any logged in user counts or showing numbers that don't match what people can find in the worlds they can actually visit

To play the Dwagon's advocate:

There is another reason to show concurrency: it allows us to view the general popularity of Kitely. Why is this important to residents and users? Because it lets us know when we may need to put forth a bit more effort to help the grid acquire new interest and new members.

Yes, we should perhaps be doing this all the time... but in truth that's not our job. Kitely is a business, and it's up to the business (not the customers) to market their product. Yet grids have a unique loyalty factor that makes some customers desire to help promote the grid. We are more encouraged to do so when we can see the numbers. It makes us feel like more of the inner workings.

Transparency. That is a concept that is recognized by many businesses as a healthy thing. No, one does not count bots and NPCs. (They might as well count animesh while they're at it, eh?) That is a pretty lame practice. But we're not trying to compare ourselves with other grids. We're wanting to track our own growth.

Wanting to know the concurrency isn't about trying to find people online; it's about gauging the trend line health of the grid. In the early days of SL it was very encouraging to see the full grid stats right on the Viewer Splash page. (When those stats dropped like a rock, LL stopped displaying them, stating they were "unnecessary". That was pretty transparent too.) But curiosity about overall grid activity holds true with Kitely. It's the same reason worlds have visitor counters at their Welcome Centers; we want to know the relative usage of the world... and in turn Kitely itself. We already know it's a lot. We simply want to see how much of a lot, at what times of the day. This is also important information for those wanting to plan events. At what time of the day are the most users online?

Transparency.

.

Ada Radius wrote: Fri Feb 19, 2021 5:52 pm At the website, even something like how many people are online would be helpful. And settle a debate I'm having as to which grids have the most actual people.

I agree "how many people are online" is a valuable figure. But with respect, which grids have the most people is (in my opinion) a pointless debate. It doesn't matter which grid has the "most people". It's impossible to know... because of alts.

It's similar to asking which grid has the most regions. That was somewhat valid prior to VARS, when every single region had an owner. But when one owner can host 64 regions... how many total regions a grid has becomes somewhat a moot point. There's also the matter of how many of those regions are purchased by customers, and how many are owned by the grid itself. That can be quite a diverse percentage.

Comparing one grid to another really is irrelevant. It's an ego competition. The real questions are: How healthy is the grid overall? Is it profitable? Is it stable? Is it likely to be around 10 years from now?

We have seen grids with a lot of regions and a lot of users disappear practically overnight (some of them literally overnight, without a word). On the other hand we've seen grids with relatively few users that have been online forever. Which is the "better grid"?

Second Life has the greatest concurrency of any grid... but I personally refuse to live or create anything there any more. Opensim has spoiled me with its vastly expanded building tools and parameters. Why should I suffer with limited prim size and link limits in SL, or deal with low-prim count regions... when I have no link limits and more prims than I can possibly use on Opensim?

Is comparing one grid to another by user count relevant? I worked in computer statistics and analysis most of my life. One can tell whether a set of statistics is valid or basic poodoo. The grid stats we see every so often on Hypergrid Business strike me as pretty near useless... except that they indicate the overall activity of Opensim as a whole. (Example: one of the "highest rated" grids on the survey had about 25 regions. Seriously?)

So it doesn't really matter to me how many users a grid supposedly has (how many of those are alts? How many are bots?). It doesn't really matter to me how many "regions" they have or how many "square kilometers" a grid has. That's fun information to know, but the only validity those figures have in my mind are in watching the trendline changes on one singular grid to see how it performs over time. That's why I like to see those stats on individual grids.

But "Which has more users, Kitely, OSgrid, DigiWorldz or Discovery? Makes no difference to me. Apples and oranges.

.

Hi Snoots,

We've been reporting our monthly stat to Hypergrid Business ever since we launched and you can find historic information on that site that includes our monthly active user count (of people who were actually inworld, not including the much larger number of people who just visited or bought from our marketplace). You can also find these stats (updated daily) on this page: https://www.kitely.com/grid_info

We've had some experience with presenting live stats where people see that there are X people inside a world and by the time that they enter it the number is different (due to page refresh rate and the time it takes people to start up their viewer and log into a world). We ended up having to deal with people claiming the stats were inaccurate or fraudulent. The net effect was negative for our business so we decided to stop displaying them.

As you said, it's a business decision whether we display those stats or not and it's been our experience that it's best not to display them. People who want to spread misinformation about our service will do so regardless of what stats we display. Those that value our service do so regardless of how many people use it in worlds that they can't visit themselves. You can get an idea of how many people use our consumer offering using the stats in the aforementioned page.

Thank you! That's what I needed. Yes, Unique Visitors is better than numbers inworld, some of which are NPC's, I assume.

Ilan Tochner wrote: Fri Feb 19, 2021 7:52 pm Hi Snoots,

We've been reporting our monthly stat to Hypergrid Business ever since we launched and you can find historic information on that site that includes our monthly active user count (of people who were actually inworld, not including the much larger number of people who just visited or bought from our marketplace). You can also find these stats (updated daily) on this page: https://www.kitely.com/grid_info

Hi Ada,

We don't include NPCs in our stats. The numbers we report are the number of Kitely users that have gone inworld in the past 30 days.

I do not see any of my friends online from other worlds.
I know they are on line, I can still chat with them.
It just does not show in the friends listing as on line.
It use to work. What has changed? Will it be fixed?
thanks