Bad news of the day: They're thinking of merging the Teen Grid into the main one

2 points here,
1/.yes , I think that is what will bne done, under 18s will be locked to PG areas only.
2/. why the foul language?

And that is the same reasoning that would burn LL in a legal suit.

They allowed the kids onto the adult grid.

Never mind if the kid used false information to appear as an adult to all the checks they can try... much like a group inviting a kid into it as a member (when they falsified being over 1.

They are suddenly liabel legally because there is no inherent seperation of underage users from adults, there is a mix and as such there is no legal protection brought on by seperation.


In effect you would have to treat every avatar as an underaged user, else run the risk of legal issues from bored children and their overportective adults

AS a parent myself and a step in parent for their friends on occasion, I can tell you most kids WILL lie to get access easly to something they percieve as forbidden..... For just the thrill of braging rights...

for teens to merge with the grid it's gonna take a clean grid..
they are wanting to make it about education and things of that nature there will be no room for the other..
they are not going to be looking for ways to mesh mature and pg..
it's not gonna happen because parents won't go for it..
they are looking at the next generation and the people that don't know what was lost..
what you don't know doesn't hurt you..
they will clean up just like yahoo and imuv did..otherwise they won't get those places that are wanting to teach to come here..they will have no part of an sl with mature content..

Blue Linden says this

20th January 2009

“BlueLinden: I will have to argue that many of the adults on main grid are more imature than teens. Teens on TSL turn 18 and move to main grid and a week later IM me to say “OMG BLUE…I thought this was the MATURE grid!!!!”

please consider that teens ARE on the main grid in large numbers….

the teens who are on the teen grid are “the good ones”

I will have to argue that many of the adults on main grid are more imature than teens ;p

“in the past year teens have given LL tons of great feedback on the idea of grid merge”, “it’s come in handy….we’ve gone over all of it here at the Lab and some of the idea are perfect” and finally “it’s just a difficult process and we’ll have to take the time to do it right”.

I’m for a merge, if you hadn’t guessed….but LL would need to make a few significant changes first

there are no official plans to do this….but after years of discussing it with teens and adults I’ve got some strong opinions

Besides this article: http://www.raulcrimson.com/2009/01/20/the-merging-of-the-grids-teen-and-main-all-in-one/ where has LL posted information about this merger?

Looking at teh thouhtful responses from Key, HuntinHippy and Ceera, I take a sad stance on all this. I would love to talk/interact with intelligent teens in this world - I have a huge art collection in sl which contains digital art and real art reproduced in my sl homes/galleries BUT I also have politically provocative and nude art. Parental permission would probably have to be expected.
I am scared of teens pretending to be adult. I (like many of us) use SL for sexual gratification. I do not consider this "creepy" or "sad" but an extension of my human responses to people I am attracted to and a taste of a very real possibility for future generations - a commitment to a "different life-form" whose potential is human in a technological world. SL is safe sex on a different level.
BUT would a teen understand all that? I am not unusual here. I am like so many other people here, but my private life is definitely PRIVATE. In sl it is far more evident to all who surround me. Teens would compromise that.
Many of us have had a similar experience to myself when I say that I have met some very creepy men in my jaunts. I wouldnt want a child of mine to have their sexual experiences in real compromized by some of these wankers (literally). And before people spout off about NOT using sl for sex but purely for building, remember that I was once an escort in sl and many of my "clients" were "sl virgins" who only built models and wrote scripts. Reality cums to sl. Sex is all around us and even teh best of us are tempted. The number of men whose partners were ignorant of their relationships with other avs is considerable. This is NOT a world for a 13 year old girl. Or boy for that matter.
Sadly, keep teens off the maingrid, Lindens, until we (as your financial providers and mainstream population) have worked out our social issues here.
Some of the evangelical "clean up our world so children can play" is really proselytizing and morally hypocritical. I (and many of us) dont want teens here. It was NOT an objective when I first came on and I dont believe this waffle about teens wishing to be with us.

01/19/09 Philip Rosedale Transcript: http://www.metanomics.net/transcript011909

I *can't* make them an owner because I *can't* be a member of the group because while I'm almost 50 years old I'm not age-verified.

And if I don't have to have an adult-only group to let them in, then how do I know they're not a kid? Not only that but I have to trust that none of the other 31 landowners in the sim have made the same mistake.

Privacy for any parcel smaller than a full private sim is meaningless.

They should raise the island prices again? To establish parity with the average amount of tier paid on a mainland sim, those prices would have to go up, not down, because only a tiny percentage of Mainland is owned on anything like a full-sim tier level, and a lot of Mainland tier at any level goes overpaid and under-used.

More to the point: there is *no* protection to an island owner by having age verification turned on. None. It is a fair bet that as many underage people would verify successfully as adults who would even try. IT DOES NOT WORK. AT ALL. So, unless private island owners are going to interview each person on their access list individually, in-person, in RL, they'd face the same threat of false accusations as every other adult on the grid.

You can be sure that the most "adult" islands are the very destination that will draw just the wrong teens. The ones to really be worried about, though, are the islands that stamp themselves PG in hopes of luring kids.

Any parent who would accept not just merging but mixing the grids really does not give a damn about their child's welfare.

That doesn't mean that any attempt to "merge the grids" in some meaningful way has to make things worse than they are now. It just means that kids can't be given access to any of adult grid

And that applies to both Mature and PG, unless LL is in a position to guarantee the appropriateness of those PG locations. If they seriously thought they could indemnify themselves (legally, or in the "media court" by delegating that responsibility to landowners and the AR-policing of ordinary, unpaid residents, they'd have to be delusional.

I don't think they intend anything like that at all.

How is it not possible to limit the distance one's free floating camera can move away from their actual AV position? UNcheck the "disable camera restraints" button and you can already experience a perfectly funtional, working hard limit on camera distance. Draw distance and sim data are unaffected and unrelated to this topic as the mature content is "supposed" to be in private and behind walls... so what if junior walks to the edge of my property and can see the outside wall of my house from 30m away. He CAN NOT move his cam through the wall and view the naughty, and that's the point here. The client already knows roughly how far the camera is from your AV... If I could code, then even MY dumb ass could add 1 variable and a conditional IF/THEN statement. Someone smarter could add a sim check of cam position vs. av position. If the distance is greater than 30m in any of the 3 directions, the sim forces the viewer to move the roaming camera to within 30m of the AV's position, or it terminates it's connection to the sim. Done. Someone who's REALLY thinking could tie the ability to cam further than 30m to the SL account database, and make it only available for those over 18. That eliminates any open source work-arounds.

They need to leave the teen sites out of the adult sites. So when the kids atart pretending to be adults, who get prosicuted? We will. leave the adult sites alone.

I doubt it. If anything it will only inflame the situation and possibly incur more lawsuits. The adult grid is an adult grid for a reason, because it has adult content and there are some things on there that no 13 year old should see, to be quite honest.
Merging the teen grid with the adult grid only means that the risk of discovering such nasties is greatly increase and so then is the risk of the parents finding out and thusly, the risk of more lawsuits.

You're ideally placed to comment on the differences between TSL and SL, daniel. When you came into the Adult Grid and I was orientating you with Doc, you said it was a vastly different place. Do you think the merge would be a good idea?

you won't have to worry about camera constraints and some kid looking in because there will be nothing for them to see by that time..
after looking around and doing some reading in a few interviews and articles..the direction is coexist not not separate..
it's pretty clear that something is gonna have to go to move in that direction..
i sure don't see it in the favor of the current adult grid .i see it as the future child and adult grid..
one big happy learning center with none of us bad bad adults around only good wholesome adults..
nothing unsafe for the kiddies..

Not replying for Argent here, but one possible objection is that a third-party viewer is going to get a lot of data outside that 30m envelope, unless the range is clamped so the sim knows never to send that.

Speaking for myself, if that became a hard limit, it would suck so bad I'd quit using SL. When I'm building, I'm almost never within 30m of my cam, unless I'm working on, like, jewelry or something. I'd suppose that teens are the same way.

It would also break an enormous amount of scripted content (including mine).

However, remember the old "parcel-level visual muting" thing that was one popular workaround to the adfarm mess? That capability, automatically applied to teen residents for all unapproved parcels, would help with this specific part of the problem. The third-party viewer thing might still be a problem, unless the sim was really diligent about not sending the muted info, as opposed to flagging it for suppression at the viewer.

There was once a brat of a tyke
Who could not go out and ride his bike
So in SL he started a verbal fight
The land owner banned him alright
So with an AR against the innocent man
Someone life is not worth a slice of ham




Forgive me, I was bored enough to put it that way... and not bored enough to really try hard

Lol Qie.. My edit from above.. cuz I thought of that too afterwards..
"Someone who's REALLY thinking could tie the ability to cam further than 30m (from your actual AV's position) to the SL account database, and make it only available for those over 18. That eliminates any open source work-arounds."

My point was, it's not about receiving or not receiving that data... if something's hidden behind a wall just outside your camera range, you will see a wall, NOT what's behind it. Not to be confusing camera range with draw distance.. 2 totally different things

As long as the kids continue to be forced to wear underwear, the answer is simple: I won't talk to anyone who isn't naked.

Because EVERY "LARGE ENOUGH" OBJECT IN DRAW DISTANCE IS DOWNLOADED TO THE CLIENT, REGARDLESS OF WHERE THE "CAMERA" IS. You don't have to "move the camera" (as seen by the sim) to change where you're looking. It's only convention that makes the camera position, in the client, something the sim knows about. That is why they put the option to ignore the camera constraints in in the first place, because they realized those constraints are meaningless.
If something's behind a wall that's just outside your camera range, you will still be able to see everything behind the wall, because it will still be downloaded to the client.

Why, I oughta......

Oh, there are dozens of technical solutions LL could implement that would solve many of the individual problems here, and they're all things we've been yelling for as long as I've been in SL.

If they haven't implemented them in the past three years, why should I expect them to ever do so?

Does fur count?

This could not be true unless someone has completely lost their mind. I really dont believe even at LL someone could be at such a loss of brain matter, but its good for a joke nothing more.

Depends on where the fur is.

Bang, Zoom!