Zoning PLEASE

I bought some new land, made a beautifull castle, then some dude puts up these ugly red Boxes with a shop etc. PLEASE let us have residential land w/o having to buy/lease an island!

+1

If the goal is to get people into SL and start using it then I think there should be zoning. Get it looking, feeling and running like a city and more people will come. Being able to run a business out of your SL home should be fine as long as it can be done without huge signs and obtrusive objects. For full on business or companies, there should be a 'downtown' type area or zone so that 1., It will keep down the chaos, shops and houses and xxx all intermixed. 2., when people want to go shop, they can go to where the shops are. If you want to look at houses and get ideas for your own or shop for land in the area, you'd be able to do that easier as well.

Tim

The sim chnage so fast tho. what is here now is not tommrow. i use to have one of the largest malls on sl near me now itrs gone. Then again i seen some pretty bad land owners next to me. infact i have one now that is so rudehe would not now matters if it bite him

It's a good idea.... but

not all sim are owned by linden labs. so those who have a sim estate can do whatever they want or simply don't care what goes in as long they got their dough (sweet money).

As near as I can tell, most resident-owned sims (The islands) DO have some manner of zoning, or a general theme/guideline set so you don't have this kind of stuff. Sadly, my home doesn't. I have big ugly pink sign staring at me from my neighbor's yard.

The reason I believe LL has not considered this for the mainland is mostly a matter of manpower. There are three continents now, and they're huge. Watchdogging this kind of stuff in even a small portion of all that land would take a lot of time and frustration out of an already-stressed Liason team. I can't even get them to clean up the Linden highway when I drive the thing for hours at a time and make landmarks to give them, where problems are. With signups set anonymous and idiots running amok, they have their hands full.

With you seen SOUTH I That island(s) are well done! Shaft the owner is a smart and high talented owner.............

I wonder exactly how you'd police this. Deny "Buy" and "Pay" actions on objects in a residential zone? Surely the Lindens themselves have better things to do than to check everything on a Sim to make sure it's residential. Then what do you do about residents who do annoying things that aren't commercial? How do you "zone" virtual space with very few physical rules? Maximum heights for buildings? What is a building? How do you distinguish a building from a vehicle? What about people who want skyhomes? There's infinite numbers of questions you can ask to this and get very little answers from.

The only zoning that would work is to remove payment options from objects. Beyond that, things like advertising and annoying neighbors will always exist and cannot be programmatically prevented.

I just wanted to reply to this thread/bump it up because the lack of searching really exposes what I feel is a major problem. It seems to me that while the SL mainland is ostensibly a contiguous landmass, in reality, it's the search function and teleport that ties areas together. Each little parcel is like a banana-anarchy that, in many cases, unfavorably influences adjacent parcels, and detracts from the richness of the virtual environment. Case in point, the multitude of camping areas/clubs seem to have a detrimental effect on surrounding areas, while the disjointness of shopping areas affects browsing much more difficult. For that and a multitude of other reasons, I think encouraging more cohesion is a good thing.

Anyway, I had a much longer (and more cleverly worded) post written up that inexplicably disappeared, so here's the meat of my idea for a first step towards zoning, and I trust that the implications are obvious.

Have residential and commercial zoning areas with the following properties:

Residential areas have guest traffic limits, but cost less to maintain. Residences are much less resource intensive and deserve to be treated as such. (I like the idea of having more privacy here too (in the form of inside-only visibility areas, although I can't justify not having those in all lots.)

Commercial areas cost more to maintain, and are allowed to purchase additional sim resources (e.g. full-sim resources for 1/4 sim space), but cannot have blanket bans on people entering the area. Commercial spaces are thus explicitly more public than residences, and tend to take up more resources as well.

What happens if someone starts up a store on "residential" land?

I'm sure atleast one of the neighbors would report them.

Zoning is one of the main advantages to buying or renting on private islands, e.g. Azure Islands, Dreamland, etc. The mainland is a free for all, which either you like or not, but zoning is one of the main things private island developers are selling.

Plus, generally it's cheaper than the mainland too.

Nothing would stop anyone from starting a store on residential land. However, if they get enough customers, traffic would get too high and some sort of sanction would automatically be applied (e.g. not allowing people into the parcel, limitation to X people at once etc.) Lack of traffic space for customers to browse etc should act as a deterrent to opening a shop in residential zones.I suppose you could run a small corner store type thing, but you couldn't have a camping area or a big hair shop.




Zoning doesn't detract from the private islands. The zoning benefit of a private island would be that the owner gets to control the zoning rules, whereas on the mainland, Governor Linden does.

I think you miss my point though.

As it stands now, the private island (really private continents) owners already create and enforce zoning rules. That already is one of the big things they do and is one of the main attractions currently for buying or renting from them. What you describe as how zoning would work is precisely what some of the private continents already do.

It would be difficult I would think to set up an acceptable zoning scheme for the mainland that wouldn't require a lot of LL intervention. LL simply doesn't have the resources for that, it wouldn't scale at all. It's actually already a problem on some of the private continents, but eventually, they'll clean up violations.

If anyone wants to live and/or set up shops in zoned areas, you don't have far to look, just check out the private continents. OTOH, if you want complete freedom, the mainland is your playground.

I think I understand your point quite well. However, I'm only half interested in the problems of the owners. The other half of what I'd like to see is explorer-oriented, specifically a way to encourage the growth of somewhat more coherent communities on the mainland. This is the "richness of the virtual environment" that I'm interested in. I don't expect that my little proposal will stop someone from having a log cabin next to a coconut tree, but it would most certainly stop the nightclub-in-the-suburbs phenomenon.

I think the problem is that zoning wouldn't really help that much with a lot of problems people talk about.

Yes, it's a pain having a big, noisy, laggy nightclub right next to your house, but is it really any better having one right next to your shop?

It's also a pain having a bunch of ugly cubes next to your house, but some of them aren't just griefers, they're new - and new builders have to learn somewhere.

Estate managers don't just do zoning, they do complete planning, which is probably far too much for LL to be expected to do, especially in the situation where they have an onus to let everyone who wants to buy land do so (which island owners don't).

(Oh, and in my country IRL there are lots of bars in the suburbs.)

One thing to consider about zoning "mainland" or linden controlled land...is the fact most of it is already sold and inhabited...

So if LL was to implement zoning on their sponsored land it would have to start with new sims, which would not help the "mainland". Sure they could implement a grandfather clause type thing, example: Gama is now a residential zone, all existing advertising businesses and clubs may exist until sold or whatever, the new owner or the next build has to abide by the new zone. Again that's an example of how to manage the zoning without seizing land and making people shuffle around.

It would work possibly in the long run, but I would rather LL concentrate on other things right now.

And why should you care, if the store is inconspicuous or blends in to the surroundings. Also, people need to have a look at any First Land area and see the kinds of bizzarre things people create that are more obnoxious than any store.

I'll also note that there's a bloke who's advertising "zoned" land on the mainland, and charging a premium for it. The buyers are going to be in for a shock if they think that means anything.

I don't know, I'd like to see more sims like Boardman and like Shermerville was supposed to be, but even the Lindens seem to have found this too hard to police...

What is really terrible is when you finally find that nice plot of land in a peaceful sim and log in one day to find a casino with 30 zombie campers next door lagging the sim down. That is what needs to be stopped. Not to mention they also try to sell the land at extortion level prices, so you either have to pay an outrageous amount to get rid of them or sell your land for very cheap. Mainland is nothing but a ghetto anymore because of the lack of zoning.

I tend to agree that it won' t be possible to zone already-inhabited mainland, but I think two do-able features would solve much of the the mainland problem:

One, allocate avatar, script &ct. resources proportionately to land ownership in sim. If somebody wants to use the entire avatar capacity of a sim, they should have to own the whole sim.

Two, either make it impossible to create tiny parcels, or reduce their prim allowance to zero. Land griefers we will always have with us, but I want them to be paying significant tier for their malicious acts. Even if existing small parcels are grandfathered, this would help a whole lot.

I'm committed to staying on the mainland -- once physical harm is out of the equation, I like a level of anarchy -- but it means I live in fear of these two types of DoS attack. I don't believe LL intended their world to work this way, and I hope and expect that they'll do something or other about it eventually.

That is an excellent idea! There should be an avatar/resource limit based on the size of the parcel.

I certainly can't take credit for the idea, it's been suggested, featured, voted &ct. in many forums. I just happen to agree with it as a workable alternative to the idea of zoning, which apart from its other issues, I've heard several Lindens say that they flatly don't intend to do.

Not sure which prop you voted for but this was the one i found - Prop: 2178.

Hopefully anyone else who thinks this would help will go and vote.

This has come up several times here, but I don't think it's workable. The problem is that the SL servers seem to have been designed on the basis that they could not run every parcel at full tilt, so not every parcel will be in use all of the time. For example, a sim only supports 40 avatars which is far less than the number of potential 512 parcels on the sim. If you partition avatars/resources according to parcel size, then you can wind up with problems. For example if someone extends their parcel a bit to get their scripts to run faster, or to have more avatars, they will be very angry if they do not actually get the extra speed or extra avatar slots, but to ensure everyone who did so did get them there would have to be enough to go around for everyone and if that was the case the problem wouldn't arise in the first place.

I've had several exchanges with Lindens about this, and it's definitely on the table.

For the problem Yumi brings up... designing quotas to allow for moderate overcommitment is a common design in systems that are normally undercommitted but respond poorly to near-maximum usage. The limits could be set up in a tiered fashion:

Sim <= 50% capacity - no per-parcel limits.
Sim <= 75% capacity - parcels less than 1/4 sim limited to 50% of the sim quota.
Sim above 75% capacity - parcels limited based on amount of the sim with the same owner:
* 1/2 of the sim or more - 100% of the sim quota
* 1/4 of the sim or more - 75% of the sim quota
* 1/8 of the sim or more - 50% of the sim quota
* Less than 1/8 sim - 25% of the sim quota.

What would stop somebody splitting their lag-inducing nightclub into tiny pieces owned by different partners/alts, each able to handle 25% of the sim quota and thereby allowing them to max out the sim without owning anything like the whole thing? And how do you count the owner of group-owned land?