ADD JOIN GROUP BUTTON & GROUP BENEFITS TO MP STOREFRONTS
Glovercali Resident
I think it would be great visibility for store owners to have a "Join Group" button (and added group benefits) on their MP storefront. This way, store owners can offer group discounts, coupons, sales, and other rewards to loyal/new customers who shop their MP, while at the same time growing their group/business because of the added visibility. This would tremendously help new and established store owners grow!
It can be implemented by checking to see if a customer buying from said MP store is in the group.
- If they are not in the group, they see regular prices, also the button to "Join Group".
- If they are, they see discounted group prices. Maybe a grayed-out - strikeout of the original price and next to it a discounted group price in blue or an aesthetically pleasing color, also maybe the "Join Group" button on the storefront is also grayed out.
We all have seen on other shopping sites that this is implemented through VIP memberships or subscriptions, think this would help SecondLife as well.
Please vote-up if you think this would help!
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Rheia Silvercloud
My apologies, but I feel I must point out a valid, logical, sane reason why this should not be done - bots. Often, bots will come in pre-scripted to read the open groups in an avatar's profile and then auto-join free groups so as to spam them, often with false MP links and various account theft methods.
While this of course wouldn't be stopped by NOT having the MP provide group join links, it would, instead, prevent a massive tide of such bots from flooding hundreds of group chats in rapid succession, spewing their payload before getting kicked/banned/reported/muted. If the MP were to provide easy access to group join links, someone would rapidly write a simple script to trawl MP pages for exactly this, make a file of them, and have a small army of bots join to the maximum and spew payloads everywhere, all without having to go through the "trouble" of scanning open groups on an avatar's profile. The fact they could prep this without even logging in would make it that much more difficult to stop, since there would be little to no chance to see, note, or realize this is a bot standing there scanning merrily away.
Whilst I most definitely agree with you on the convenience of such a link setup, its' very ease of exploitability makes me think it is ill-advsed. Or, to put it bluntly and a bit overly-cynically, "this is why we can't have nice things".
AlettaMondragon Resident
Rheia Silvercloud Well said, first I was thinking what a nice idea, then it struck me how much it would be exploited and fortunately your comment was already here! :)
Glovercali Resident
Rheia Silvercloud That makes sense, maybe just offer group benefits, by linking MP to the storefront's inworld group. That way we could still offer group discounts and sales through our online MP. The customer would just be forced to join inworld group but could shop our MP stores using their group discount.
Rheia Silvercloud
Glovercali Resident A related idea which struck me as I gave this thought is to add in to the API for the web site a check to see if the user is in the group, preferably through some method which relies upon checking through an unrelated, server-side-only call not revealed to the end user, to confirm group membership at the Linden level. Ideally, this mechanism would be entirely internal, and only return a yes/no binary. If yes, then the discount would be applied. Logic says somehow hash this with existing user UUID and maybe some other authorization method to minimize spoofing. This way the only thing that might get revealed is a yes/no. While it is possible this could be exploited on the MP-side to spoof group discounts, it would at best minimize the chances of mass bot attacks.