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

I think it's an extremely sensible idea that if someone is not age verified then their name comes up a different colour.

As to voice, I turned voice off a long time ago now, I might turn it back on to talk to specific friends if they wanted me to - but my partner is rarely in SL, I am generally either talking to him on MSN or via cam when I am in SL. My other close friends are on MSN or Googletalk or Skype or GASP the phone. Voice has applications all right but not for me most of the time, using your own comms outside SL makes you in control and not anyone's business.

Also, if someone has a private home in SL do the ban lines now go up to 1000M? Should also make it possible to turn off the ability to cam in from outside parcels as a setting in the Land Options (as well as the ability to not draw non-Linden content outside your own borders if you so desire.

I think it is at times alil to XXX for us adults not alone kids yea lets teach our kids to have sex with any one any where it is ok sl does it well all hate to brust bubbles parts are like real life but so much is ot !! an do kids need DRAMA hell no so let them have theirs an adults heave theirs we do this to get away an relax no watch what we say an when we say it at times so leave well enough alone all !!!!

To mege the teen one wit the adult one isgiving Sedual predators the green light tp cpme on SL and wll more then likely chase off the Respectable adults. All that will be left is Teenagers and Pedohiles. THATS IT NO ONE ELSE

So ...
Are we all agreed?

YES! Over The Top at dawn!

Or..I guess we could leave it alone until something more substantial is said.

Not quite. It's pretty weird, actually. The "whitelist" banlines (allow by group or individual) go to 50m Above Ground Level. The "blacklist" ones (banning specific individuals) go to 768m AGL. Yeah, AGL, so the absolute height depends on the terrain. See http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-2546 for a proposal to raise it all the way to 4096m.

Another jira of possible interest here is the one for parcel visual muting: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1017.

No I didn't. "but as it stands I doubt anything will happen short term" and I noted the "it's very much 'under discussion". I think back through the issues of SecondLife. Philip or another linden makes a little statement and a month or so later it arrives counter to the issues that the residents have. Opening up the grid to those who didn't have credit cards, the whole age verification system. So, Just you wait.....It will be here.... and there is nothing us pixels can do about it. We have learned over and over our wishes, thoughts matter for naught.

Once upon a time the slogan was;
“Second Life is a 3D online digital world imagined, created and owned by its residents”

now it is.

“Second Life is a 3D online digital world imagined and created by its residents”

What we all need is solid information from LL. I want to know EXACTLY how they plan to handle all possible situations. Legal, technical, precise explanations of Mature and PG parcels-sims-businesses.

And Taff, most of us care about kids and their safety. That has been the underlying point of many of the postings here. One of the main problems discussed here is the lack of oversight or supervision by parents/guardians. My RL boss worked for years at a major chain store and he said most parents bought whatever video/pc game their kid wanted. When he told the parents exactly why the game had the rating it did, most of them just shrugged and bought it anyway. That lack of concern by parents/guardians for content is one reason why he left that job.Common sense doesn't come automatically to every individual.

If LL intends to alter the conditions by which most of us joined SL, then they had better start supplying us with real answers. And it had better be SOON. Or else the rumor mill might well become the latest news story on CNN or one of the major evening news magazine programs.To the detriment of LL's reputation and finances.

Read again : Voice is handled by an external server, the data never hits LL's records because they don't control the software at all.

Logging of voice chat is not a possibility, the short lessons on EVE from some classes takes up eaily 10-15mb with an avg of 1meg per min... now multiply that by sims, and add in personal chats. Now think of the data storage needed per hour.

It is not technically feasible to record and monitor voice chat at all. And since it's such a welcome tech to many, any plans to remove it would be met with even more outrage than the sim pricing changes.

But reread what I keep saying: right now LL has a legal protection bubble, mixing age groups regardless of the steps taken... pops that bubble.





Define PG world wide? In some places violence is non-pg and others it's a bare nipple

The solutions is to make the Teen Grid more acceptable to teachers and educators.

To be honest, A college or Uni should have more than enough hardware and tech to run a couple blade servers for their own open source sims. Meaning they have ultimate control of them. LL could actually make money offering closed grids to them as a host, higher cost... but they can include default library content tailored to the schools.

And yes the restrictions to get onto the teen grid are invasive, for a good damn reason. If they merge grids, the only way to really make it safe for all is to bring the teen grid adult verification to the main grid. Yes, that's right. Default avatars are restricted to hell and back, to get adult verification to enter the mature areas you will need to all but give them a blood & tissue sample.

Dunno, I think we did just fine before it was implemented. Again, I say: you want to speak, use Vent, Teamspeak, or Skype. You have 100% control over who you speak with.
I already knew the problems in trying to store all that voice data. LL made a bad decision to ever add it to the client.

But I see you're not responding to Jade, who suggested just under 18s not be able to use voice chat. Does anybody know if the teen grid has it? I don't have a clue if they use the same client version as us or what :/


From the KB (https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417)
"The PG and Mature ratings mirror those used by many countries' movie and television industries to denote the age-appropriateness of behavior, language and creations within a given area of Second Life.

PG Areas are designated to be free from sexually explicit language or behavior, swearing and other forms of aggressive language, violent behavior and/or imagery, including horror."

I see your point. What they'll need to do is outline specifically what is or isn't allowed in a PG sim. They can't really follow the MPAA or other systems of ratings because they all vary a little bit, and they change over time. It has to be something they have control over.
Example: http://help.deviantart.com/554/
(deviantART uses birth date to differ between under/over 18; under 18s can't see art tagged as mature)

Sigh... what else have you got?

The only way to implement this would be to make everything inside your parcel invisible. I think it would be a lot less disruptive to implement parcel "basements", with underground objects only visible to people in the same parcel and only accessible to people in a separate "private area" access list, so you could have a public, visible build as well.

read the last paragraph.

The only way for the merge to work is: verification processes as used in the teen grid.

Meaning the stringent rl data requirments to get into the teen grid will have to be used.

Meaning an end to alts, bots.

All accounts treated as restricted/banned till they are finally verified to a real person and linked in the database to that person.

The stringent limits and harsh penalties of the teen grid would have to be applied to the main grid.

There will be no more fun playground unless you have all your data on file: fingerprints, etc...

edit:

And they would have to prosecute to the full extent of the law anyone trying to bypass those restrictions regardless of age.

If they do, Linden Labs legally has to take it seriously, whether they're "entitled to" AR or not. That means involving the *real* authorities.

You know, we're making this all much more complicated than it is, and envisioning scenarios that just *cannot* play out.

LL simply has to retain a strong barrier keeping random adults from interacting with teens. They sure as hell can't let me buy land in a PG area and by that easy step gain access to teens. They can "merge grids," whatever that comes to mean, but they cannot do it in a way that just turns the kids into easy prey; they could as well just hand over their company to the first litigant. Whatever we think of LL, we have no reason to think that their counsel is that stupid.

So the existing Mainland clearly will not be part of the merger, but they also can't let just any PG private island declare itself "teen friendly." They will have to vet any application from educational institutions, etc., to prove that they can legitimately vouch for any adults who will ever appear on that sim. It will not be left up to the individual account, but to institutions that can demonstrate hefty liability coverage and are willing to indemnify LL for anything bad that might happen on that sim.

As others have mentioned, there remains a huge amount of technical work, too, to make sure that teens on the Main Grid cannot communicate nor exchange assets with others outside approved sims, unless those others are themselves vetted.

The only other possible way for this to work is for parents, as part of signing up their teens, also sign away all rights to litigate no matter what happens--but I doubt such an agreement would hold up in court, even if there were parents so uncaring as to sign.

WHen I first heard about this my first thought was new continents of heavily covenanted, themed mainland selling for huge prices to teens. My GOd I am getting cynical in my old age.

Very reasonably put. But it relies on LL being able to do something 100% right.

Good luck with that.

Okay, you first. And if I'm not there, start without me.

Ooww.. ears...
and yes I've heard of rezzing. That doesnt mean you can "see everything behind the wall", only that it's within draw distance and the viewer has received the 3d data. It doesn't matter if SL renders those hidden objects or not because Object -> Object occlusion prevents VIEWING of those hidden objects from that point of view. If all points of view have an occluding object (wall) between it and the target, you cannot view the target at all from ANY angle, reguardless if it's rendered or not.
The "camera" is nothing more than a POV with a global x,y,z location, which is seperate from the AV's global x,y,z location. If zooming in on something and moving the camera away from its AV can be seen on the minimap (which it is) then the sim is aware of BOTH AV and POV global locations simultaneously. If it's aware of their positions then it is indeed possible to limit how far one can get from the other.

If someone wants to nullify an occluding object by turning off its rendering from the rendering sub-menu then they can, but anyone thinking what's left of SL after they do that is good for a peep show then they probably need electro-shock therapy instead of an AR anyway.

But object-object occlusion happens in the client, not the server. All the data about all the objects is still downloaded to and can be rendered by the client. There is nothing the server can do to prevent a modified client from moving the avatar's point of view independently of the camera position it sends to the server. The only way to implement privacy is to do it at the server, to be able to state "information on these objects will not be sent to anyone not on this parcel". The only way to do THAT is for the parcel to be a full private sim.

Nah, just realistic. That was pretty much my first thought to when I read this.

Well I live with a computer game designer, his take on it is "that's lazy coding - they could implement that if they wanted to, easily". I don't much care who sees what I do (OH NOES SHE IS SITTING ON A SOFA AND SHE IS TYPING!!!" but I would like the ability not to see other people's crap.

What, doing all the object-object occlusion on the server? You want MORE server side lag?

A computer game designer doesn't have to deal with builds created by absolute novices. A computer game designer would create a separate region for each building, so that the inside of the building was not even theoretically visible to the outside. I've been asking the Lindens for tools that let us create builds like that for three years, but the whole 1:1 relationship between objects and virtual space is deeply embedded in the Linden Labs psyche and even minimal concessions to non-linear geometry, like llTeleportAgent (let alone real portals) get killed.

I was just thinking to myself as I pondered this topic (and this is somethign I do have some concrete knowledge of) - but every teenager in most developed countries has access to fashion magazines, muchmusic, mtv, teh whole range of offerings in UK, etc. And truly, what sl offers is pretty tame in comparison. Parents should be more concerned with teh barrage of real ads, temptations and lifestyles (all "bread and butter" for teh lieks of me) than what a rather cartoony world has to offer.
Maybe we exaggerate our own sodom and gomorrah image.
Maybe.
Mind you, I am NOT apologizing for the real world of advertizing and temptations - Teens have money and teens liek to spend it.

Are you speaking as a parent or as a teenager with concrete knowledge and when was the last time you lived in the UK.

Sky News does a better job of that.