Several years ago, Second Life residents were limited to only 25 groups they can join. Joining groups were necessary for many things, getting access to a parcel or a region, getting permissions to terraform land or modify objects, getting notices about events or new products or store discounts, or even just freebies from a vendor. Eventually, Second Life increased the allowed number of groups to 42, which is still not enough for some residents.
To capture users who don’t want to use up their group slots, a few scripters have created “subscribos", which are objects that residents touch to be added to a mailing list, which is stored in some database off-world (i.e., Google Sheets).
Similar techniques have been used for scripted vendors, which are in-world objects that sell merchandise. Vendors can be created without scripts; however, scripts can track what customers have bought in-world, so that they could be automatically sent updates to the product.
This also allows merchants to review their sales without having to do much bookkeeping. Inworld transactions in Linden dollars (the inworld currency) are kept on the Second Life database for only about a month. Then they are deleted forever. So, scripted vendors eliminate the worry that the record of a sales transaction is lost, just because the merchant was stranded for a few months on a remote tropical island with no internet access.
One of several subscribo brands in the SL Marketplace.
The DNN Subscribo is a basic subscribo, that uses Liquid Content™™ to store customer information as content items. You can customize the content type and the LSL script to store additional information, such as account age, display name, and location.
This product can also be expanded into an inworld vendor that is a sales and customer tracking system to manage customers more efficiently. For example, a sales and customer tracking system can help you automatically send updates or notices to customers who purchased a specific item, or recommend related items in your inworld store based on past purchases. With DNN Liquid Content™™, you can also create web pages that are customized for the user who touches an inworld object with a script that loads a URL. To the right you'll notice our user, DiaNNa (username:dnndianna), inside Second Life with a completed subscribo.
Head over to GitHub for the full tutorial and begin adding a whole new dimension to your (second) life!