Last month I asked readers to vote on a simple feature or feature tweak that would greatly improve the Second Life experience overall, and here's the striking results: By a pretty wide margin, the plurality (almost 31%) called for making all SL viewers (including third party viewers) mesh capable. (Idea first proposed in this thread by Shockwave Yareach.) Personally, I'm pretty surprised: When mesh was first introduced, there were a lot of valid SL user concerns that mesh would hurt the economy, increase the technical spec requirements, and so on. Now, however, a significant percent want to obligate all SLers to have a mesh-capable viewer.

I sympathize with the desire to end a balkanized user experience where only some can see mesh, but I do think such a feature could be quite disruptive. "I have been trying to use mesh viewers for quite a while now," as reader Moni Duettmann wrote during the survey, "but none has worked properly yet. So should Linden really follow this 'suggestion', it would mean banning me from SL entirely." One possible solution: