xstreet alternatives-slapt.me

Test drive 3: slapt.me

Now, people have been raving about this one, so I figured I would go with it next. But I started off less into it, and I'm not entirely sure why. Was it the initial screen before you can go into the site proper? Was it the "look" of it generally? The sign up process continued this slightly...off feeling. Put in a valid email...not your av name. We won't do anything for signing up with that email, go here, say this in local chat out loud on channel 0 (not that it's something that matters really...) and we'll sign you up. The whole thing is just...not the way I want it done, and makes me slightly uncomfortable for reasons I can't put my finger on.

But, then we've got nice shop profiles, yay! Mind you, it's one per avatar, the multi shop thing on meta-life spoiled me, I like that feature. There are split profits- I'm not doing that right now, so I don't know if it applies to all across the board or what (nor will I be looking into that now, as it doesn't apply to me- if it applies to you, check it out!)

Door to door box service, which is "how it should be." Something good about all of them so far- they wait to update so you aren't constantly cycling when adding a group, or changing or whatnot (I've had to change in box perms on a bunch of things before, my xstreet box went postal).


Bad Things:

The category listing box...is too narrow...and I can't SEE the categories to figure out where to list something. /facepalm Now, this is because my browser window isn't maximized, but, even with it, I can't see it all and it will cause more trouble with listings. Generally, the interface is too size dependent and has the sidebars that block it in, and this causes a lot of "wait, what's that supposed to be? Ok, first two letters...what might that spell?"- some even with my browser maximized. My screen may be a laptop screen, but it's large for one of those, so I can see this causing trouble. I could lower my font size to squinty...maybe.

The image file cutoff is _way_ lower, and my first try told me "no sir, this is too big!" Now, this _is_ a fairly large image, but is effectively 1024x1024, not above SL sizes.

I'm not seeing any way to make "bulk" listings easier. I put up with that from xstreet because it was "the" thing, there are alternatives that have it, and that means thumbs down from me. I only listed on onrez until after the takeover and killing of it, and never listed as much on xstreet (in fact, until a month ago, I had very little on xstreet, and only just started listing more with the spotlights).

It strips out HTML (oh, you wanted to link to something there? Too damn bad, you get the links that we tack on to the end of everything, and you'll like it), and ignores BB code, so looks like just text is what you get. This also...does not thrill me. The links there at the bottom of each entry auto generated? That's awesome. But, I want the ability to offer other links, for various reasons. What if this has something to do with a location that only this item has to deal with? And I obsessively link pages to the blog entry for that item- this links to the blog...but not the right page. Now- some people DO have lists. So, there may be a way around some, if not all, of this. But the obvious ways to me are not it.

Collections appear to only apply to in world vendors? Which makes them useless to me.


Good Things:

It's not xstreet? Honestly, it's about on par for clunkiness with xstreet (though it's prettier), unless there is a way I'm not seeing here. You can upload images, unlike meta-life, which continues to make me curse the world for not allowing that. In other words: not a fan, don't know why people are raving so much.

And the searching system doesn't suck- but so far all of them do it way better than xstreet, so that doesn't give it a leg up in this race.


I listed....2 shirts. And gave up. Barring not seeing a LOT of useful features, slapt is not for me.