Followon to adult content threads: technical problems?

Wow.. LL just slammed the door on their new adult continent threads.

I'd like to hear more about actual technical problems that LL would have in implementing this stuff, as they have stated it so far.

NOT asking about issues with them managing it. NOT asking about if people think it's a good idea or not. NOT asking about the technical details of getting age verified via credit cards or paypal, etc. Feel free to start your own threads about that stuff.

Please, no spam or extended digressions..

I don't understand what it is you're looking to discuss. Server specs?

Well, one example that didn't really get talked about is lag.

Places that are very-adult tend to also be very high-traffic. The sim next door to where I live has a club on about 5-6k m2 of land that has keepp the sim full, 24/7, for almost a year and 1/2 straight now.

They _can't_ just move places like that to the new adult continent without totally nuking these places businesses. There's just no way that LL is going to eat an entire sim to host a tiny club, or the dozens (hundreds?) like it. Having such a place actually be limited to the resources porportional to the land owned would pretty much destroy it.

If LL does make an adult continent, the whole place is going to have an insane population density and nothing is going to work there. Even where I call home - a 1/2 sim club - sometimes hits the max avatars. The owner tries to be friendly with the neighbors and gets along with most of them but sometimes she consumes the sim.

LL provides virtually NO tools to let mainland owners control or measure their effect on the sim but they're going to now stuff all these high-traffic places together in a far smaller number of regions..

The "please don't talk about X, Y and Z" in the OP was just an attempt to get a better signal:noise ratio than the LL threads.

Someone who runs a quiet adult toy shop or such could be forced to be next to a free sex club and be at their mercy. That is a good thought.

Meade, the question isn't a technical one, because LL hasn't adopted a technical solution. They're pursuing a procedural solution which consists of:

1. Age verification of people who want access to adult content.

2. Geographic separation fo Adult businesses from PG/Mature areas.

3. Establishing definitions of what constitutes "adult" content.

The first one is partly technical, unless you give up and just say, "check this box affirming that you are 18 or older". There are many problems with "stronger" solutions, including differing laws, user objection, protection of user-provided data, and detection of false/fraudulent data.

The second doesn't work, because a) everywhere is just a teleport away, and b) adult content can be purchased by individual users and brought back for use in PG/Mature areas. (Orgies on the front lawn, anyone?)

The third doesn't work because nobody has EVER been able to agree on this, even within a single culture...let alone the mix of cultures and viewpoints that make up SL.

I agree with Meade about the lag issues and one issue I didn't see raised was the soon to be introduced script limits.

Lots of poseballs and vendors, will it be able to cope in any sort of functional way? Throw in scripted weapons and huds and it could well be a completely unusable continent.

Script limits? On the Mainland/full sims???

When did THIS get announced, and why hasn't it created the same storm of protest?

I heard about script limits on Homestead and OpenSpace sims, but the mainland one is new to me... can anyone give us a reference?

The script limits are for all sims, they're just likely to use Openspaces and Homesteads as Guinea Pigs.

One technical problem that they will have to face, and which they have steadfastly refused to comply with requests for, since the first days of their experimenting with Adult Age Verification, is that we MUST have LSL/Mono commands that allow us to check for age verification (or the new "Adult access OK" status) via scripted objects, such as security orbs. Vending systems and access controls at ALL levels, including door locks, and security systems, must be able to detect and bar access to unverified individuals.

Also, we MUST be able to restrict access to groups based on age verification status - IE, you can't join an "Adult" tagged group unless you meet the new criteria for "Adult Access", either the Aristotle Age Check or payment info on file. (Plus whatever additional methods they deem aceptable, like an in-person visit to their offices...)

The current region checkboxes to require age verification and exclude NPOF are NOT what we need. You can't use those unless you have your sim open as public access, and even then, they only restrict the 2% of your buildable land that is 50M or less above the terrain.

They will also need to find a way to tag all inventory, for the required rating that it can be rezzed in or attached and teleported to. For example, a Dominatrix outfit should not be able to be worn while teleporting to a G/PG area. You should get a warning that you have on clothes or attachments that have not been approved for that restricted area. Likewise, items like rape pose balls and prim genitals should not be able to be rezzed or attached from inventory while in a G/PG rated area. But there is NO way at this time to label all the existing content.

The only suggestion I can offer, is once an avatar's "hardest" allowed rating is defined, such as XXX access, they should have the option of tentatively tagging everything in their inventory at that level, if currently unassigned. Then they should be able to go through their things and select the innocuous Gingham dress, the G-rated Business suit, and other "safe" content and tag it accordingly. Untagged items and items rated harder than the area you are in should not rez or attach. If you intentionally rate your prim genitals as "G-Rated", and get caught wearing them in a G-rated sim, that is an AR offense. Just like taking prohibited items onto an airplane in your carry-on luggage.

Though they may also make a lot more sales from them as neighbours compsred to being in a residential area too.

Errrm, so what happens if someone does try doing this - or ends up in a G/PG area during logon as their target region was not available? Would they appear naked then?

Matthew

:0 good thread, already tickling a number of significant ishes: traffic condensation; cross-sim performance; non-estate script monitoring tools; re-emphasis of 'pg/mature' and now with the addition of the 'adult' designation; inventory/object-to-land perms and lsl hooks... oh my!! :0

p.s. i'd already started planning out some sorta 'contigency plan' for all the teen/maingrid merger rumors... i take it as all just setting up some sort of standard to help delineate the three basic 'levels' for tender sensibilities. i'll work at what i can to make 'pg/mature' compliant, but the 'mature/age-verified' bridge is a bit more questionable... i'd like to know that the current tools would assure me that this would work.

for example, in my main store, one end of the deck is 'adult'; a portion of the rest 'mature', matching the sim - much of my content is pg in presentation, at least. i'd love to be able to just set the 'adult/age-verified' objects to just such, and then let those visitors, at whatever verification level they are at, see what is and is not in their 'approved rating.' instead of ham-stringing some sorta 'beyond tp-limit' elevated store for my land, just for all the 'exposed genetalia' those naughty skins show ;0 ...

if we're going all-out, why not tackle the darned perm subsystem again, if 'once and for all' with this idea, and maybe a handful of other worthy additions?? visual muting/filtering, for pg/mature/age-verified, once and for all; then all grief complaints otherwise are as plain and valid as the noonday sun... :0

i think. counter-argue at will please...

No, hopefully they would be redirected to an Adult or Mature location, the same way that hopefully Sammy Teenybopper, who is unverified, would get re-routed to a G-rated sim, and not get dropped in Pornotopia's red light district welcome area.

Probably the same process as what happens if you walk through a shopping centre in a Dominatrix outfit in RL and it depends a lot on the coverage of the outfit I guess. If you were naked then someone in SL might AR you, in RL someone would probably call the cops, in some countries they might just shoot you.
To detect what an avatar is wearing is acceptable or not means flagging all SL content and unecessary comlications, what to replace removed items with, or are you just a Ruth or cloud, if they had done that from day 1 then fine, a bit late now. Or perhaps if you could set a flag on your viewer so you appeared as a default avatar (yours or Linden Labs) to the unverified anywhere.
And really it's just a matter of approriate behaviour, if people don't do so ignore them, walking around as a creature of horror or dominatrix is not the same thing as setting up a free BDSM club next to a childrens playground.
You've already seen the uproar from geographical seperation, imagine if they did content too?

Yes, there will be a high concentration of clubs in a sim as compare to now. Imagine 16 clubs in a sim. LL is repeating the same error they made in Openspace sim. This time round LL will be the estate owner.

This is LL's karma. Good luck to those who have to settle in the new continent.

Various technical issues:

i) moving large or multi owner builds - if LL really want to deliver on their promise to make it easy for merchants to move to the new continent, they will have to provide some tool or system for easily transporting complex builds. Such tools would actually be pretty useful for many people generally. I suspect however the LL solution will be that merchants have to rebuild from scratch

ii) handling broken landmarks and picks - this isn't just about existing customers not being able to find the store, or lost customers since a pick or landmark no longer works, but since picks and landmarks also determine search ranking, this also has a detrimental effect of a store's search ranking

iii) there was discussion whether picks to adult related places could appear in a profile's picks since a profile is meant to be PG. Banning them entirely from the profile would be a major issue for search, however turning a blind eye makes a mockery of LL's determination that an unverified account should not see any "unexpected" adult content. So clearly, the software needs to be modified not to show adult picks if the person viewing the profile is unverified

iv) there was an indication (I think), that key word filtering would be used to flag content as adult. It isn't clear that this is workable. Let us take the work "sex". If this is filtered as a word, they it will mark a location dealing with "sex discrimination" as adult, but not a location advertising "sexdolls" etc. If they just look for the string s-e-x anywhere within words, then they'll be marking sextons, sextets and sextuplets as adult, and these are just the problems with one word in one language (english).

v) at the moment you cannot mark a pricate region as verified adults only, if that region is restricted to group access. Suppose you have an adult theme region but to access it you have to join a group (which is open enrollment but requires an enrollment fee). LL need to make the adult access settings independent of group access settings. Also they need to add the ability to retrict group membership to verified adults

vi) if during logon the place you are trying to logon to is unavailable, the place you end up may not reflect the maturity level (PG, Mature, Adult) of the place you were expecting to be. If your attire reflected where you logged out from, and were expecting to log back in to, it may not be suitable for where you randomly appear. Redirected logons should be more intelligent about chosing a region of the same maturity level as the target region.

Matthew

Apart from in RL you don't get randomly dumped into a shopping centre just because the place you were expecting to be was unavailable.

Matthew