SL Events Calendar/ Posting Changes

Second Life's Event Calendar hasn't aged gracefully - built to accommodate a population a quarter the size of SL's current community, the calendar has become a nearly unreadable mess open to abuse, spam, and misuse.

The SL Event Calendar launched last night addresses many of the old calendar's failings by instituting more controls over how, when, and by whom Events are posted. The most obvious change is the move to limiting the number of events that may be posted each day per Resident and per parcel to five. The goal of this limit is to make the SL Event Calendar more useful by reducing the amount of multi-posting and non-event posting the currently clogs the calendar and makes it hard to find actual events.

A side effect of the five-per-parcel event limit is the new requirement that only parcel owners or group members can post an event; we couldn't allow other Residents to use up your event quota. You are able to select from all of the parcels over 512m2 that you own or are owned by a group you belong to.

These are small adjustments, but they do result in a rather big change in the way that the SL community uses the Event Calendar. The old calendar simply no longer served its function effectively; our hope is that the revised calendar will result in more carefully considered event posting and a less cluttered, more usable calendar.

Let us know what works for you and what doesn't; we'll continue to evaluate the effectiveness of the new calendar and use your feedback to generate more improvements. If you have particular suggestions and concerns, you may wish to discuss this in the Event Discussion Forum and/or email us at [email]events@secondlife.com[/email].

A few more clarifications as they have become available:

- Your parcels are listed (for selection only) as "Name of Parcel" followed by its landing point. Both can be changed by going in-world and right clicking the parcel to select About Land > General. Events store their own coordinates, so if you change your landing point, be sure to edit the event.

- Once posted, they will continue to display as "Simulator Name" followed by the coordinates. This is also intentional.

- We are planning to add land to which you belong on the access list, as selectable parcels.

- We are planning to add public event venues as selectable parcels, so you do not have to own land just to host events.

We have now added to the list of locations that you can post events from:

1. Private estates whose access lists include you.

2. A growing list of Linden-owned public venues that you can host events at.

I'd like to apologize for the delay at introducing these. Thanks for your patience so far.

We are still open to additional changes, and your continued feedback is both welcome and valued, as you can see.