The Sex Continent: some thoughts on it

In a political/commercial environment where LL feel the need to move activities to a reservation, I'm inclined that think that situation of fully-clothed avatars *exercising* a sexbed in a store would be too fine an academic point to survive. It's not quite as fine a point as "I did not have sexual relations with that Bot - Lewinsky", but definitely heading in that region.

Just having the bed on view in the first place is probably offensive to whatever is driving this change.

Unless you advertise in store by some means or another the various functions of a particular sexbed, who on earth is going to buy that bed? If those functions are explicit then shouldn't the bed only be for sale on the "adult" continent? If you don't advertise the functions of the bed, then residents won't buy without a test drive, and won't this once more lead the bed to the "adult" continent? Just thoughts.

Is a male furry having sex with female resident in the privacy of their own bedroom "adult"? Applying RL standards (which I think inappropriate in a make believe virtual world), isn't that the clearest case of simulated beastiality imaginable?

Picks for places that people like do tend to last. Many must change, of course, but many do last, and when a place moves, they are all gone - none of them count for the place any more. Of course, they can be built up again over time - a lot of time in many cases - but, since Picks (IBLs) are a major ranking factor, existing higher rankings will tank when places move, and sales will be well down until the Picks are recovered. Store groups could help by asking members to Pick the new place, but many people with Picks are not in groups, and many stores don't have groups.

I've seen it twice with my store. Once I moved sims, and the second time was when I joined a small parcel to the main one - you'll probably remember that. Those were at a time when the All search was quite new and it didn't take too long to get the rankings back (with the first one, I got the rankings for the new store before I removed the orginal store), but it's different now. There will be a lot of ground conceded to places that don't move, such as those on private sims that change to Adult but where the Picks remain intact, and it can take a lot of time to catch up again. It's not just a few handfuls of Picks any more.

I suppose I can now, as there are enough high ranking people who appear to have learned about it.

The All search system (GSA) inadvertantly works against places with a lot of items for sale, if all of those items are set to show in search. For instance, I have about 1000 items for sale but I only set a small number to show in search. If I set them all to show, my rankings would go down. Puppet said that not setting them to show hurts stores, but that's only a little hurt compared to the hurt that would occur, due to lower rankings and fewer people seeing the html pages, if all the items were set to show.

I don't know the reason for it, but I do have two possibilities. (1) In the old days of search engines, each engine had an "ideal page" and the closer a webpage came to it, the better it ranked. Size mattered back then. To my way of thinking, the "ideal page" was eclipsed by links-based systems, but that's only to my way of thinking. The GSA is apparently capable of ranking solely on content, so it may be that something of the "ideal page" is incorporated into it. (2) It could be to do with searchterm density in the page - the bigger the page, the more diluted the searchterm is likely to be.

I haven't done any tests at all, but my feeling is that it's more to do with page size than searchterm (keyword) density.

You may be right. We wait with bated breath.

Incidentally, my bots don't smoke cigars

I'd love to know the percentage of accounts (excluding Bot ones) that have payment on file (or Info on file) and those that were verified through the Aristotle system. If i was a betting man, i'd say less than 10% out of the whole active population...heck i know of a number of business owners who don't have "payment on File" after being here for 2 years.

If the implementation of the "Adult Content" policy leads to that figure rising to say 30% or 40%.....i think LL would view this policy change as a real success......but i wouldn't bet it on reaching those figures.

How do business owners cash out if they are NPOIF?

I had assumed that any effect would come from a single parcel page with many entries for similar product descriptions looking like keyword stuffing to a vanilla web indexing engine.
A parcel page is a strange beast that wouldn't be designed that way for a website. Equivalent 2D websites would have a multi-page hierarchy in which there would be no apparent keyword stuffing in the pages at the top of the tree.

An indexing designed or modified for SL parcel pages should not penalise the logical outcome of a single page being a dump of *everything*, but what is running is most probably the standard GA.

@Brenda. I'd guess that most business owners don't make enough to cash out. Those with places on private sims where tier can be paid in L$ may never need to have PIOF, and those who rent land pay rent in L$ anyway.

Makes sense. Just make enough to fund SL.

XStreet offers a currancy exchange that allows you to cash out thru PayPal mass pay. You don't need payment info on file with LL to use it, you just need a PayPal account.

A lot of businesses just make enough to cover their tiers and use the excess as SL play money....plus could transfer money out to Onrez and Xstreet sites and cash out that way....say to Paypal. Paypal details would regisitered to those sites....but not on SL account....silly i know! If you have paypal a/c on those 3rd party sites, you might as well tie it to your SL account too. Each have their own reasons i guess

PS i cashed out for the first year and half via SLEX...its only in the last year i have been using SL website to do that.

I doubt that LL has any control over it, and it's just another reason why the GSA isn't suitable for the All search.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "any effect" in the first paragraph, but it should be remembered that the GSA is designed for internal use and probably does not expect, or account for, the sort of search engine spam that web engines expect. For instance, I've seen pages full of gross keyword stuffing that rank very highly because of it, among other factors.

Now that SL owns Xstreet, that may very well change in the future.

Yeah....i was almost tempted to write "in the old days"......lol

I had another thought if I were a sex content creator, i would consider making many of the items "Transfer"....that way you could get verified customers coming into "Adult Land" and buying on behalf of others that are "non-verified"....things like sex animations,dildos,penises, bdsm racks and benches, other female attachments.

This "black economy" would be huge and really fly

Just a suggestion:
a lot of adult businesses are in skyboxes, so why not put a height restriction on non verified accounts. If you not verified as an adult make the ceiling 3,000m. That way all the adult stuff could be at 3,500 to 4,000m and there would be no way to access it or even easily cam into it. The mainland at ground and low level could stay the same and there would be no need to displace residents to a new continent.

You mean like by setting the draw distance to 4096 in the debug settings?

Don't you feel that banishing anyone with Adult classified stuff up above a certain height is doing a similar thing as banishing them from the mainland? The accusations of censorship and not allowing people to do what they want in the Mature sim would still get thrown around.

What it also does, unfortunately, is any businesses or clubs that are currently at that height that aren't mature are either going to have to move or they won't be available to anyone that doesn't satisfy the "Adult" requirements.

Back for a moment to where the line will be drawn for scripted furniture etc, with people testing them or not...

I have the strong impression (no real evidence to back it up, unfortunately) that this cleansing is going to be mostly about visual impressions, i.e., Our Benefactors don't want the mainland full of things that at a glance make the place look like a sexual playground, especially to the uninitiated. Sexually charged search terms are unambiguous, so they'll have to go. Likewise stores that for one reason or another feature representations of RL or avatar sex, or titillating nudity. But furniture with innocent pink and blue balls on them? Pink and blue balls are innocuous, and all over the place for sitting on. They don't become Adult until they have naked avatars on them going at it. Hence Blondin's comment (his naive goof about "trying on prim genitals" aside). They are treating Adult content on mainland like they treated advertising - get rid of the most blatant of it, so at a glance the mainland suddenly looks like a whole lot nicer place than it was.

If I'm right, where this hits someone like me is in my box art. All my animations are sold in non-scripted boxes on the wall, adorned with pictures in the style of my forum sig (faux charcoal drawings of figures who are clearly nude even though there aren't any visible "bits", for folks who can't see the pic). I can count on one hand the number of truly erotic animation sets I have on display, and the positions are very clear on the boxes, but I'm curious in the extreme what will finally be said about graphical representations and such, and whether stylized "artsy" nudity will be too much in and of itself, or whether there's a line that must not be crossed despite being artsy vs. realistic. I can probably survive as I've been doing without "sex" and such in my key words, so that's to consider later. As well as whether I'm wrong and I'll need to remove the erotic stuff just on the principle of it, box art and key words aside.

In the meantime though I think people running borderline shops with a strong interest in *not* moving, for one reason or another, would do well to think about how they are displaying their products and what impression is made by their storefront art. Just in case the Adult line is drawn in such a way that it makes a difference.

</rambling on too much coffee>

That would be fixed with http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-2390 - you just wouldn't set your parcel to require PIOF.

Yes, NPIOF could still see across into your neighbors who didn't want NPIOF in there, but they couldn't go in, and since you can set your draw distance to 4096 in debug settings they don't need to fly up to your skybox to see into it anyway.

That's why we really need http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-205 - a privacy pocket in the sky...

But they are not stopping people from viewing unacceptable content (avatars) that are standing on their own parcel, and certainly not inside of walls. And how is that content any different at all from the content being relegated to the Porno Life continent?

The only way that the desired kind of control can be enforced is to restrict people to their own sims that are policed by their own people. If someone leaves Sanitary Island in the Sterile Sea, and TPs over to another unaffiliated sim or the mainland, all bets are off. If they stay on their (group's) home turf, they will enjoy the rules and strictures that the home turf owners choose to enforce.

Surely LL simply cannot police the grid.

This entire proposal for Porno World seems pointless to me, for any reason they've given and any I can imagine. The best I can figure is that it's an attempt at managing image, by acknowledging that there is porn, but claiming to have addressed it in some way that would satisfy the target audience. Sort of a "Porn discovered in SL...Issue RESOLVED" sort of approach to things, if that seems familiar.

Well, yes.
What they want is a situation in which nobody will be *surprised* by finding themselves TPing/ walking/flying into an extreme sex/violence parcel.

Bonking behind closed doors in non-Adult will be OK.
Anyone who claimed to be shocked and disgusted by seeing bonking in a private house might be advised not to be a peeping tom.
If someone does a search for Pony Farm and does not indicate that they want Adult content included in the results, they should expect to find cute little horsies.
If someone is just wandering around, they should not expect to encounter extreme sex/violence out on public display unless they are in the Adult continent.

It's the 'surprise' element that seems to be a problem.
If a journalist or a Joe Public claims shock-horror at seeing naughty bits in public, they have less to beef about if they had to go explicitly to a place where that sort of content is expected to be on public display.

The requested URL /newreply.php was not found on this server.

(although the above obviously got through)
Wonder what's wrong.

Good evening and welcome to our BBC special report.

Tonight we go inside the online world of Second Life,
a 3D virtual simulation of "your world, your imagination".
The residents here create the look of their "Avatars",
and they design and build all the scenery and things
that you see here.

Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life, assures us
that "adult content" has been relegated to a special continent
in this world, and if you're really looking for that, you'll have
to deliberately teleport there to see it.

But look what we found just walking around in the regular
"mainland" where adults, and even underage persons, are
deposited and spend most of their time.

While Second Life may look tame, a glance around this quiet
neighborhood reveals the seedy underbelly...some say it's the
"real" Second Life that Linden Lab would rather you not see....

(hot babes, sleezy babes, princess hookers, milling around infohubs...)
(people cuddling and fondling on poseballs in the park)
(furries cuddling (?) in the park)
(nude people wandering around in their M-parcel yards)
(avatar with strange marks on her skin, not sure what they are)
(people bonking behind "closed doors"
(Star Trek nerds dressed like Kirk & Spock playing with lightsabres)
(wild orgy party with stripper ponygirls behind "closed doors"
(don't know what this guy is doing exactly; don't want to know...)

--------
Oh yeah, this is going to be REAL effective...

After letting it all marinate in my head I have come to the conclusion that I am fine with it.

When I first learned the difference between PG and Mature i never went back to PG again, even now i generally avoid it unless at specific events, art galleries and such. I cannot wait until an all Adult continent comes online because for one reason I will once again have a reason to remember sim names.

Adult sims will be ok in my book.

We are considering selling our sim and grabbing up some Adult property when it comes online if the prices are not ludicrous.

I personally do not think 253 sims (if Ursusla is to be the continent) is enough land - I think something on the order of 700 sims would be enough to sate the initial demand and stop land barons from buying it all up and reselling it at stupidly high prices.