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

Not everybody is in SL for the pixel sex. I would try out other virtual worlds if they had even a smidgen of the creative potential that SL's tools allow :/

I really hope they can make this happen. I'd even put up with having to start from scratch ^^

As for Furcadia, despite its limitations it really is the only example I can come up with that allows for as much creativity. It may be only a tiny little graphic but you can still do a lot with those pixels. Imaginative text fills in the gaps.
Though honestly if there was a more recent, more modern example to compare with I'd probably be enjoying myself there instead of wasting my time arguing here. 8D

They do have that second grid: the teen grid, and all adults on it jump through backgroudn checks and other verifications out the rear.

And quite a bit of sl's other content is objectionable to many as being worse than PG (violence, so it'd be paintball instead of combat sims...)

I agree with that. Kids constantly look for ways to be "older" on the internet, they always think they're missing out on something & they get into a crazy amount of trouble. Most of the most disturbing crap I have ever seen online, was shown to me by teenagers over the years...usually high school kids who found something like "goatse" & spread it to as many people as possible because they think it's so amazing that this stuff exists & is so easy to find. Horny underaged, repressed teenagers will no doubt be trying to get jobs as "escorts", doing RP as hookers...slaves, etc

The only thing that might keep the damage level relatively low for established Residents of the main grid, is the fact that the number of kids is a lot smaller than the "mature" user base. I have seen a few users graduate to the adult grid & they all say how much fuller it is population-wise.

For the few people who get suckered into legal problems & maybe jail time by playing doctor with people who they failed to verify were over...well short of asking for a driver's license...how can you know if some people are 17 or 22? I've seen high school kids up here in Chicago who looked like they were 25. Lucky for me, I don't do sex in SL. That keeps me away from so many potential problems lol

The thing is as long as LL does the adult grid as it currently is : you have the legal protection of them being carded at the door, and verified as well as possible with technology as it is. For them to file a complaint, well they bypassed the restrictions to get in there. So yes there will be a looking into, but they can and should get burned for fraud and false accusations. It's like trying to sue a warehouse owner and a worker because you went in past the no trespassing and barbwire fences... and faked an accident involving the pallets.

I think it's a bad idea to merge or making it a 'safe' for minors. A child predator can easily get on here & be deceptive towards young thirteen year olds. Also a 13 year old can lie about their age & say their a 23 year old adult. LL needs to keep both grids seperate & come up with a better solution..then the one they came up with.

I would agree to everyone on this forum & the best way to keep them 'safe' is by leaving things the way they are. If LL wants to bring kids together with their parents. Couldn't they just let the parents sign in & have some sort of proof that they're related to each other?

It's just going cause problems & make even more issues for all of us. But, to me..The parents would probably like to have some place to go to away from their kids. I've never been the one who tries to get close to my parents in a online game. Like secondlife..for example. We all need to protest on this subject & spread the word!

Lets forget that in most states some issues would still make you liable - a deliberate death trap for instance seems to come up every so often, when someone decides to tripwire shotguns to protect property or similar. More relevant to LL and SL and some of us (not me, he says - my place is PG) - the person is hurt and in the course of the investigation it is revealed that your place is a fire hazard and under code, with some dubious stuff in the basement by community standards. You win the case, but have a choice of spending several million to come up to code, or closing down and selling out.

Some person playing out a fantasy runs a bdsm place, maybe only for a few weeks and maybe non-commercial. They get sued, names are revealed in the press. They win for reasons you and a lot of people gave, but they, and LL, now have a real problem, unless we all think that the press won't take this and run with it every time a related issue comes up or you think that there aren't politicians enough out there to use it, straw bill or not.

You know, when an adult sues as an adult that, gasp, they stumbled over pornography, it won't have legs because everyone thinks, well, what was the person searching for. Like the musician that insisted he was only doing research - the focus ends up on the searcher. But a parent sues because of a child being precocious, the child gets a pass for being a child and the parent can be as self-righteous as they want to be. And the focus will be on SL, LL, and the person playing in SL with no real intent of anything.

Yeah and we all believe what jack says lol and blue Linden says some very interesting things here and i quote a few http://www.plurk.com/p/dhn9i







































and so on and so forth so will it happen who knows but i bet it will

I don't think it's a good idea at all. I won't get into why because basically everyone has already. Bad idea LL badddd idea. To bring up old news remember the child AV crisis from about a year or so ago? Magnify that by 10,000 atleast. And as far as age verification yada yada yada. Theres a way around EVERYTHING. Baaaaaaaaad idea. Imo teens(no offense kiddos) belong nowhere near SL. I forsee manyyyyyy issues. But ofcourse I'm betting it's a done deal in LL's mind. More freedom=more money X how many teens will now come to SL. Again, no offense kiddos but SL has grown into quite a "interesting" world from it's original roots.

Sex isnt the only way to get into trouble. Financial pitfalls for parents whose teens start to add to their tiers could be a more real nightmare.
Yes, I agree with some that not having sex in sl is one lifestyle some of us abide with BUT I am not sure how many teens would get too excited by scripting bubblegum.
No - they will be out to satisfy raging hormones. People, I was when I was a teen! I was sent to a catholic boarding school to calm me down (it didnt work). Teens wont ditz around. Ban them!

Couldnt agree more. And then the moldable minds of the young ones. Big issues coming if it pulls through. I'll put money on that. I almost wish LL would come up with a resident voting system for things of this nature *thinks of the things she has saw in SL over the years* bad idea, forget I said that xD

A vote is a brilliant idea. I wish I had thought of that.

SL Used to have a feature where Residents could propose features and issues they would like LL to work on, and vote to support their most important issues. LL took it down when it became clear that they were ignoring these votes, just like they ignore most of the resident feedback in the forums. It was making them look bad, to have reasonable requests and well-reasoned arguments for their implementation, and LL more often than not ignoring the clamor.

Most other VWs or games (eg, WoW, Roblox, IMVU, etc..) have teens and adults interacting together. Some don't even require them to be teens. Typical policies they enforce are along the lines of "an adult has to create the account and agree that they're responsible for their child"; "an adult may not pretend to be younger with intent to be accepted into children's social groups", etc. And certainly, people will play sex in these games - it may not be graphical, but anyone can emote or chat anything. (The only game that is an exception to THAT rule - not even allowing free emotes or chat - is Disney's Toontown Online.)

So there is a lot of protecting the service provider against the parents, but no real issues (or cases) of other users being sued for injecting sexual content into the service. So the fear about false allegations of chat behaviour is probably a little overblown - although it is a concern, again AFAIK there is no test case either way.

I think more the issue on SL is with the builder or manager of an area or island being deemed to be a "service provider" and thus responsible (in the same way that, say, Blizzard would be) if an underage user sees sexual content on their land.

That said, I would not be surprised, given that "M is a marketing guy", if he didn't intend to remove sex from the world. At the moment SL is in a sort of awkward position, because it can't blatantly advertise itself as sex (and thus get into the lucrative porn advertising networks) but at the same time it has a strong reputation as being associated with it, and it's fairly visible in-world, so it can't confidently target many other markets for the fear of running into a middle manager who will look down his/her nose at it. So I would think he might be getting ready to take that risk. And as an even longer shot, I dare say Second Lfe may be changing its name at some point.

Sex is not the only way to get in trouble, but it is the only way to get a Felony that will last you the rest of your life as you have to register as a sex offender and your name appears on websites when people search their neighborhoods for felonies & sex offenders.

Imagine the rage of some parent if they find out their 14 year old has been exchanging pics/caming and cybering with some 40 year old on the long term? People are going to have to really govern themselves well, and i doubt that is possible since so many people love for things to be censored for them by the controlling authority instead of exercising their own self control, restraint, proper parental involvement, etc..

The pervs who log in to SL just for a wank job are going to have a field day.

I can see it now: "My child became a Gorean in SL from the age of 13 to 17, and now she has moved out in RL to go live with her 55 year old Master she met there."

In some places it doesn't take a conviction... simply an arrest/charges and you're in the database as a possible offender

Far more dangerous is that by even going to court, you have probably already lost your job, your family, and all your friends.

There was a documented case in the UK where a suspected paedophile was arrested, and during the arrest, one of the arresting officers asked the suspect's wife, "Did you ever suspect that he might be a paedophile?". He turned out to be innocent, but I'm not aware that the officer was ever charged with libel.

The state I live in currently, it's like that. Also have to register yourself as a sex offender I believe if convicted. And if you move to another state I'm pretty sure you need to re-register.

As I said earlier in the thread, it just takes an accusation , no matter how unfounded, to ruin a person's life.

One reason the separation of the grids is needed. The legal protection of "nobody underage is supposed to be on the adult grid, and as soon as we are notified we remove them immediately till they can verify the account as belonging to an adult"

I am probably very biased about this... I played on teen second life for over two years, and transfered here last March. It has made the biggest difference in my SL (in a positive way). I ran a business on tsl for years (now Dernier Cri). It's hard to explain how horribly frustrated I was on tsl, and how many times I was going to quit and create an adult account instead.

I wasn't just some horny teenager that wanted to "make believe" I was adult so I could peruse my dreams of becoming a SL prostitute (most illegal teens ARE NOT here for that side of SL... I know many.) While I was on tsl, I mostly wanted to be creative and run my business.. and in no way does TSL provide the same kinds of opportunities to business owners, or creators as they have here. (not remotely)
Like many other teen business owners, it made the main grid look much more desirable.. So now teens who just wanted a piece of SLs community/economy are creating phony accounts that give them access to parts of SL they never wanted to experience..

I'm definitely not saying that LL should just whip the grids together the way they are now (now that would be a big issue)... and I don't believe that they have any intentions of doing that. But if LL took baby steps to let teens on a few of the fundamental and appropriate aspects of second life (commerce? Official events? a couple safe controlled sims teen friends/family members could meet on?) far less teens would be deserting their teen accounts to make adult ones... because many of the reasons for them to do so would be gone.

It would be a complicated job, but I think LL should continue working at it if anything.. The teen grid is very very small (far less than 1000 players online at a time). Moving them around and changing things is definitely do-able at this point.

I said ages ago that LL will need to spin off the adult content, to a separate company (or at least a separate brand) if they're going to have any hope of succeeding in the business market that they seem to want. So from a business perspective, something has got to give.

But that aside, the paranoia here is insane. If people in RL had half the paranoia, we'd have no school teachers, no coaches or scout leaders, no priests. Why would anyone consider such a job, at lousy or no pay, living in constant fear that some random juvenile would set them up with a false accusation? The risk these people take far exceeds any risk that people in SL face:

Coach: I called him up to tell him that he was off the team if he missed practice
Junior: He called me up and told me I was off the team if I didn't have sex with him

Unlike SL, Junior can prove that a voice conversation actually took place. Unlike SL, Junior can prove that Coach knew that Junior was underage. Unlike SL, Junior can prove that Coach has ample opportunities to meet face-to-face.

But the last I checked, we still had Little League, Pop Warner, and local kids soccer teams. Are the coaches foolish, ignorant, or simply risk-takers? Or are the people here being absurdly paranoid? I'd think the latter.

hey i'm not paranoid!
You all stop looking at me!!
i see you over there..
hey what was that!!
hehehehe

How many sex clubs and escort services operate at Little Leage fields and Pop Warner football games?

The environment is completely different, and the comparison not relevant.

We also have schools having to call the cops to come get a 5 year old because the staff didn't want to risk a lawsuit for touching the brat when she was violently disrupting class.

We have people getting arrested because they are dating a 16yr old that sent them a nude picture of herself on a cell phone. And now both are going to be registered sex offenders for child pornography.

It's the fact that right now, you are more or less guilty of the crime if it involves kids till proven otherwise.

You have to be super careful of your actions, which is why schools and recreation has the simple rule : no child alone with an adult unless there are windows/observation measures to CYOA

In the UK, there is a persistent shortage of male schoolteachers, because sex related allegations are seen as more likely to stick to them.

You may be right, Kidd, but there is this -- unlike SL, the coach knows the person he's dealing with is underage (without having to read a profile), so has a chance to modify his behavior. Most of the scenarios people are talking about here seem to involve inadvertently creating a semblance of bad behavior.

And, unlike SL, the chance of running into a journalist looking to CREATE a story about abuse is quite low in RL. And, unlike RL, in SL a journalist doesn't need to work with an actual child or actor to make the story.

As I said above, I am more concerned for SL overall than for day-to-day impact on any one person's SL. I do think that if LL does not do this in such a way that minors can have safe access to SL services WHILE adults are protected from false accusations of abuse, then there's a very real possibility of a grid merge creating a press debacle with long-term impact on SL's uptake.

And, frankly, unless there is still some sequestering of minors, I don't see any way to keep both populations safe.
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