Teens on the Main Grid: pre-emptive discussions

keep your penis in your inventory and you will have nothing to worry about!

Give me time to sell up sensibly and find my tenants a new home. I don't want kids on my land, this is not a suitable environment for kids.

Sooner or later it will be.

... at least that's what I'm afraid of

I wonder what parents who signed their children up on the Teen Grid with the understanding it would be a safe, teen only environment think about the idea.

They should be livid about merging the grids.

Right now, if someone lied to get on the adult grid, and they are actually under 18 years old, then they are clearly in the wrong, and don't have a leg to stand on if they make false accusations. It would be like a 13 year old complaining about getting thrown out of a bar "for being Chinese". They shouldn't have been in the bar in the first place, regardless of race.

If they allowed 13 to 17 year olds onto the main grid, with the current lack of access controls, lack of valid age verification, and the complete inability to prevent someone outside your parcel from viewing and even to some degree participating in what is going on "behind closed doors", it will be a suicidal nightmare. I will not, as the parent of a 13 year old girl, allow her to have an account on the main grid, no matter what LL does with their current proposal. And unless they fix ALL the privacy concerns people have voiced over the past 5 years, then I will not remain here for any purposes other than to sell textures and to build for others. All my social activities, and my quarter sim of land, will go bye bye. I refuse to accept the legal liabilities that LL will heap on our heads if they allow 13 to 17 year olds on the main grid. I refuse to risk getting sued because some pissed off parent finds out her little darling was watchng XXX activities in my bedroom, even though it was without my consent or permission. And since I can't verify in any way what sort of proof of age, IF ANY, a stranger has presented or not, I would have to prohibit virtually all guests from coming to my home, or would have to prohibit all adult activities on my property. Social activity simply would cease.

To get me to accept 13 to 17 year olds here, they would have to make major and significant changes in how SL operates. They would have to implement, effectively, privacy procedures that have been asked for over many years, and which they have proven themselves incapable of comig up with even a token effort at resolving. I believe in LL's ability to perform the following miracles about as much s I believe in my own ability to hit the Moon with a BB fired from a slingshot. In otherwords, zero probablilty of it happening. Among those issues are:

1: Age Verification that works in all countries. Sorry, payment Info on file isn't age verification. A 13 year old can get a verified PayPal account or a bank credit card and can have valid payment information. So their current proposal for restricting access to "Adult" commercial content is not age verified at all.

2: Ability to detect via scripts a resident's status as "Verified age 18+", and to completely ban from a parcel or a sim, at ALL altitudes, anyone who fails that age check.

3: Ability to limit membership in groups, requiring that a member must have a valid "Verified age 18+" status to be a member of the group.

4: Ability to restrict access to a sim or region to only "Verified age 18+" residents, WITHOUT sacrificing the other access controls that are currently available for non-Public sims and regions. I should not have to open my sim to all strangers (make it Public Access) to get a "Verified age 18+" restriction to work.

5: Ability to tell, *at a glance*, in Text Chat, IM or on visually looking at them, if a resident has "Verified age 18+", "Verified age 13-17", or "unverified age" status. Those not verified as 18+ should have an unmistakable warning flag. Like bright red chat text or IM text, and a neon red border around their name and group tag, over their heads.

6: Ability to completely and totally prohibit any visual, auditory or other feedback from a pre-determined volume of space, except by approved individuals or groups allowed access to that space. In other words, the ability to prevent ANY data from a bedroom, skybox or any other "private or adult space" from being transmitted to any individual not explicitly aproved to access that space. The Privacy Pocket proposal, designating a layer of several hundred meters below the 4096 M build height limit is one response to this, but I would insist that this ability be available to landowners at ALL altitudes. I should just as easily be able to define a restricted area covering my beach.

Yes they should be. The whole idea is morally reprehensible.

My discussion with Blue today outlined the idea that, if a merge were to happen, there would be a large amount of work to be done, not only to protect the teens but to protect the adults as well. I don't think we would have to deal with a merge happening using the systems as they currently stand.

Well, at least Blue seems to have a clue here! I can't honestly say that about any of the executive-level Lindens stirring this rank pot!

I think it's going to happen, it would be great for many people to be able tointeract with their kids in SL, in a mutal area. But I also think there is a ned for Adult free and Kid free areas too and possibly Adult "Near anything goes " areas.
Possibly the whole mainland will open to kids most of it's content is PG anyway. If kids buy stuff I don't mind them in my shopping centre, but there may also be a rise in griefing too, though keds accounts should be verified in some way by an adult account.

I tend to think that it's the freedom to do those things without looking over their shoulder that's important enough to leave over for many people, whether they actually do those things or not. It's not really that odd when you consider that the adult freedoms some partake in here might be a huge part of why they're still here. For others, it may not be a major part of their SL, but still important enough to them that losing it would hamper or cripple their experience here. I know for a fact that if MY SL was whittled down by all this to nothing more than PG appearances and sanitary discussions, I'd probably consider leaving too. No way am I dressing up like Barney so I can still dance the stripper pole and earn tips lol.

This. The atmosphere that allows(ed) sexually explicit material is one that fosters edgy creativity of all sort, and that is the very thing that keeps SL ahead of all the others so far, coupled with it's economy. People decry slippery slope arguments, but this can set the precedent. What will be the next idea of form of expression that will be deemed unsuitable for general consumption? A sanitized, family friendly SL is merely RL v2. No need for it when you have the real McCoy.

QFT

Teens on the main grid also means teens here on the forums...

Well...that may be a wash actually......

Would certainly explain why LL would want to go to a Yahoo-Answers type blog format and ditch the forums as we know it.

Many of us expressed how we feel about kids on the grid last summer in this thread
/327/9d/269580/1.html


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I thought we already had an adult world where teens are not allowed.

Frankly, the new segregation of Adult content seems to be the way around the worst of this: if you want to interact with "adults", move to Adult land. It's completely true that this affords no more protection from minors than the current grid, but it's pretty much what we have now, and after a merger, it will be the only way to keep it.

True, but it's not really any worse than the current ease with which teens can lie to access the Main Grid. That is to say, the Adult areas will be about the same as the whole Main Grid now.
Multiple good things in that: a.) script detection of verified age; b.) parcel access restriction based on verified age; c.) parcel restrictions to all heights (we don't even have that for explicit bans now); d.) full sim restrictions based on verified age (as with Adult sims).
Yes. Of course, at the moment, we can't even ban individuals from open group membership. (Groups are just not working; they're a messy compromise among too many intended uses, serving none of them properly--and as a social or business platform, SL suffers as a result.)
So, that's what we'll get with the Adult areas, right? Or am I missing something?
Maybe, but I'd settle for just script detection and a profile flag. I guess for *almost* all occasions I'd prefer to think of them as just other SL residents, and would kinda hope they'd try to behave that way, both of which seem incompatible with Scarlet Letter labeling.
Good, but I think a bit orthogonal to the Teen debate: it would be valuable right now on the unmerged grid. Maybe merging would add to the value, but only on land Teens could otherwise access, or to put it another way: if teens can be completely excluded from parcels and sims at all heights, reserving some heights for them to access is nice, but an alternative is to buy for mixed use another non-Adult Mainland parcel or space on a private island.

Quite separately: I think it's an unwarranted assumption that a merged grid would attract the same caliber of Teen residents as those currently in Teen Second Life. I can't predict if they'd be worse or better, less or more mature, dumber or smarter, but I know there's little reason to think they'd be the same.

No. I was opposed to even making payment verification detectable in a script or showing up in profile, and I'm glad to see that there's only been occasional stupid "we're gonna kickban unverifieds" scriptage... but there IS some. If they ARE going to go ahead with Adultopia and Teenlandia, we won't need ANY of that in Adultopia because EVERYONE will be paid up, as they were on the whole grid before June 2006.

And parcel restrictions need to be replaced with some kind of real privacy scheme.

Well, I dunno. If verification status *is* in the Profile, it should be accessible to scripts directly, rather than the obvious bandwidth-wasting workaround; if it's *not* in the Profile, people had goddamn well better do anything even remotely "adult" only on Adult land. (Which is perfectly fine with me if they do; but backsliders there will hurt everybody, including those who had the presence of mind to move to Adult when they could.)

The parcel access restriction thing is admittedly a bit independent of grid merger, but yes, for simple "whitelist" access restrictions, no obvious reason not to just replace it with privacy controls (I do think, however, there would remain reasons for explicit blacklist bans).

If they merge the grids, that's a given whether verification status is in the profile or not... given that someone can cam into you from a couple of sims away.

You know, my idea back when they lifted the building capablities to 4000 meters was to incorporate into the new viewer a simple restiction to that new 'airspace' for PIOF only accounts. At that time it would have made absolutely no difference to 99% of the population and would have completely eliminated the need for a whole bunch of new land glutting the market.

How simple would that have been? Adult verified only access over say 3000 meters with a good 500 meter buffer in between? No one would have had to move, no one would have to be forced into the sex ghettos and business could have gone on as usual.

Or was that just too simple and easy for LL to consider?

If I'm paying for the service and the land, I should be able to build on it, even if it is a schtinking shex club. I'm not a fan of this idea at all.

Thats a very good idea actually.....one of the better ones being suggested.

Yes, *THIS* absolutely THIS. Even though I"m not 'on the stripper pole' the point remains the same.