new accounts / available family names

A friend wanted to create a new SL account. He is Italian and lives in Switzerland. Now he has the problem, that not one Italian family name is available. Also not French names. (access via www.secondlife.com/join).

Most of the now available names have German origins. Could it be, that the available account names are now selected by the Internet country-identity (IP). PS: An Italian friend, living in Italy, informed me, that he has many, many Italian names available (access www.secondlife.com/join).

Lastnames are totally random, whenever enough people have used it , its not availible for a long time, and they tend to change every other day or so.

Im in norway and is seem to have same lastnames picks as my friends in UK and US, so i wouldnt know why it would be diffrent depending on where in world you are?, maybe thats new.

You can try slnamewatch to hunt for an active name that might fit.

http://slnamewatch.com/index.php?action=list_records&status_filter=active&sort_order=ASC&order_by=last_name

Different instances of the Join Now servers have different last names available at different times. There are about 1500 last names to choose from even though each page shows only 40.
Use this page to see all the names that are available, in general. Use the links on the page to go directly to to instance of Join Now that has the name you want.
http://www.slnamewatch.com/botlog/last_avail_log.html

If you want to see the list sorted alphabetically instead, use the home page
http://www.slnamewatch.com/index.php?action=list_records&status_filter=active&sort_order=ASC&order_by=last_name

If you find a name there, then go to the first page to see where to find a place that has that name at the moment. If it is not listed, keep trying once every 15 minutes.

Not likely. More likely explanation is that the Linden in charge of name rotation this time around took a small shortcut. Instead of putting the usual amount of thought into the new names to enter in the system, he simply went to a last name registry for a certain real world country, and copy-pasted the last names into the Second Life database.

Hi Adz. Thank you for your advice. I visited your websites and was so able to solve the problem. Thanks also to Victoria and Thili.

What would that certain country be? As I've remarked, and Sue Baskerville has found out, it looks like a list of Jewish names with German origins someone fed into the system-including a dozen variations on the same names....

Hi Rhian

I had the same problem (only this german and jewish names available).

Visit Adz Childs homepage: http://adz.secondlifekid.com/tag/slnamewatch/[/url]. There you read:

" .... LL made an unannounced change to their Join Now page. No longer are all available last names listed in a drop-down ..."

and you will find via Adz Childs homepage also all information how to solve the problem.

Yeah, more WASP names. That's the ticket. No Jews allowed.