Upcoming Changes for Adult Content: Main Forum Thread

The Lindens tell us they want to protect residents who don't want to walk into adult content from it, to make their experience better. This is pure nonsense.

Great. Make 3 categories, PG, Mature and Adult and you are done. Those who don't want to see Adult content, don't go there. Those who seek it, find it more easy. Everybody happy, nice service of the Lindens (please for once try to make something new without bugs)and SL will be improved. No Age Verification needed at all.

So please just be honest..you just want to force us in your Age Verification stuff. More people will have payment info on file (the easy way to get verified ) and hopefully buy more Lindens and you get loads private data to mingle with. Seeing the lag and the crashes I experience... you are the ones going to store my private details private.

Besides sex, many play all kind of roleplays that include lots of violence. Vampires, Gor, Bloodlines, to mention some. Slavery is common in many Sims. Would you be so kind to protect me from all this violence by declaring that adult too. I prefer seeing others having sex above seeing them killing each other or turning each other into vampires.

For other parents: Netnanny nicely blocks out SL. As it should, the entire SL is not for kids. Again : No Linden verification needed.

Why not provide those "who demand" that infamous, but almost laughable, predictable experience with their own little sector of the grid and leave the rest of us alone.

Blondin... something I just thought of. You said that people who are required to move to Ursula by LL would not need to pay for a land swap. Is that an open-ended promise, or is that just for an initial period? If it's open ended that would reduce the pressure on people who are (possibly) overreacting and contemplating a premature move.

LL would never have the balls to place a vote at the front of the login screen.......they already know the answer to their question.......it would be a resounding and not even close "NO".....to their proposals.

If this truly were a board with active dialogue, responses would be occurring every few posts or so. Blondin, maybe you are doing the most efficient job you can, I don't know, but the sporadic, simplistic answers are not a replacement for actual back-and-forth debate, which is preferred and the reason boards like this function well. All that happens in the end here is mounting frustration among the writers.

I know about the Discussion Guiding and Controlling Responses tactic too, and it is highly inappropriate with such matters of personal, financial, ethical and highly emotional concern.

I'd consider myself a 'thought-leader' on this overall subject, and I think an announced plan of very specific one-on-one appointments with anyone who wants to seriously debate should be set forth. (you mentioned you wanted to hear from/meet with 'thought-leaders' so I am 'calling your bluff', as they say)

That, and a truly interactive response process on this board would make a huge difference!!!

Regardless of what we say, LL has already decided to make this move and will not change their minds. This is all about money. LL wants RL business to invest in SL. This means the mainland has to be cleaned up. A bank or other non-blue business doesn't not want to own land where their customers can see into a sex park.

Linden Lab need to sell this to residents, some of the reasons for an adult continent are good ones, largely the way Linden Lab have not enforced community standards on land descriptions and adverts.

So instead of forcibly relocating people, Linden Lab should be selling this as the area where you can be more liberal with your keywords and classifieds. Entice people to move there, make it attractive to them.

Linden Lab need to make a sales pitch here, they're failing miserably and spending too much time over definitions. Those who choose to remain where they are need to be told in no uncertain terms that Linden Lab will enforce their existing community standards, you don't need to be graphic with your descriptions to point out what sort of content is on your parcel, on the adult continent you can be and with your advertising pictutres and show in search places images, but mainland you need to be more considerate.

Instead of piddling about on issues like who should stay or go, make it appealing for people to up sticks.

This of course doesn't deal with the estate issue, which needs an answer and needs an answer quickly because estate owners have big decisions to make, estate owners also shouldn't be ignored in terms of relocation packages, the idea that a whole estate will have to be turned adult because an island or even a couple of parcels sell adult content does not sit well.

There's also the issue of what this will do to current mainland pricing, the whole reason Linden Lab haven't been rolling out land has been due to how flat the land market is. Have Linden Lab got any contingency plans on this? Have they even considered this implication?

The same goes for estate land, some adult business' will almost certainly have to leave estate land, especially if it's a choice between turning a whole estate adult or keeping an adult business, what sort of economic stimulus have LL got up their sleeve for this scenario because losing renters in the current RL economic market is not going to be a pretty sight for landlords.

What in the hell does "Mature" mean if not adult in the context of land? Otherwise it just means "old", are all "Mature" regions going to run on the oldest hardware now?

Just give us some fecking actual technical solutions. No matter how much you "clean-up" the mainland, people are still going to be stuck seeing things they don't want to, when someone plonks the most beautiful building ever made right in front of your damned window.

This is why we NEED technical solutions so people can control what they see. Moving things about is a ridiculous solution, why is Linden Labs so afraid of actually implementing things people want, would benefit from, and aren't insane?

*smiles* Yes, I recall when you appeared on my "front lawn" in the Magenta sim, looking terribly lost and confused. A friend of mine owned about 25% of that mainland sim at the time, and we helped you with what advice we could as you moved to purchase your own land nearby, and to terraform your first bit of land there. It's been too long since we spoke last, and I'll have to invite you over to my castle some day, for a visit.

I can't recall if you were Premium already when we met, but I seem to recall that you upgraded a few weeks later, when you decided you wanted to buy the land near us. But here's some food for thought...

If you had been like most typical newbies, and still no payment info on file, and if you had joined after this Linden proposal is implemented, it is unlikely in the extreme that you would have ever met someone like me when you were new. Because the beds and other adult content that we had on our parcel in Magenta, spread between my household, the land owner's household, and two other households, would certainly have been relocated to the XXX-Only lands. We weren't an "adult business", but we would have certainly moved to XXX land just to ensure that no one bothered us about what we chose to do on our own land, with our select list of guests.

Many of us have been making that suggestion since this whole fiasco started, Maggie. Not once has it been responded to. My inference from this is that the suggestion has been rejected out of hand by the Lindens and that this option has already been removed from the table.

So, any Lindens going to tell me categorically that this inference is incorrect?

However, RL business is much more likely to buy a private island rather than mainland. Indeed, I don't know of any RL business currently or previously in SL which settled on the mainland rather than a private island.

Matthew

Well the Lindens might not want to discuss this publicly or get the opinion of the vaste majority of users but what is stopping us from doing it??

This is still sl afterall, we can all certainly inform members in our groups what Lindens plan to do and how it will effect them and where to go, to read more and where to go to voice an opinion.

If the Lindens don't want to submit this to the members at login etc, then lets do it for them in group noticies.

:: Dictionary: pre·dict (prĭ-dĭkt') pronunciation
:: To state, tell about, or make known in advance, especially on the basis of special knowledge.

What about an entirely different option. Oftentimes when teleports actually work and you can travel from one sim to another, you are hit with a little popup that says "...the sim you are entering is a different..." something or other..we have all seen it at one time or another. It is basically telling you that you have entered a sim that is a different class from the one you just left.

Could the same sort of "warning system" be applied to flag sims or regions or parcels which have Adult content rather than having all of the business owners relocate? That would certainly give a reasonably prudent person ample time to leave the area that they are entering or teleport back to their home sim. Of course, please allow the option for those of us that do not care, or are not so terribly offended by what we might encounter, to turn that option off. If you opt out of the popups, then you are on your own as far as what your precious eyes might be exposed to.

This would certainly be more of a user-friendly way to approach the issue rather than upsetting business owners who have spent vast amounts of time, money, and resources to promote their location in SL, and eliminate loss of clientele, patrons, and visitors.

Another topic I would like addressed - clothing. If someone is wearing "a morally questionable" garment, are they allowed to travel in areas not marked adult, or would they have to change their attire to visit an area?

What about events? If one event out of a hundred events held at a location (private region for example) would consist of 'adult-related material' then must the sim be labeled 'adult' for that event alone or wear the Scarlett letter of Adult all the time?

This discussion was supposed to include violence, but Nobody seems to be talking about it.

So yes LL would like to censor SL to keep you safe from those things

MystressAnna Lovenkraft

I and a number of other people asked about this same situation yesterday evening in this thread, but as of yet I haven't seen any response from LL (or even an acknowledgement that the issue has been raised).

I hate repeating myself, but I'm beginning to think that it is necessary to do so in order to get a response. So I'll ask my question again...

Since any mainland parcel, absent some mechanism for activly restricting people from entry (ban lines, security orb, etc.), is essentially public by definition, what property or attributes of a parcel distingush it as "public" vs. "private" for the basis of needing it to be on the adult contenent?

The thing is, fairly few people choose to do violent activities on their own land, unless they have set up a combat sim or a combat arena. Violence, unlike sex, is not somethning one associates norminally with their home. So there's a lot less discussion of violent content than about sexual content, which many of us see as a pervasive element in this adults-only virtual world. And while the initial offered definitions did target extreme violence, they were much more broad in tagging virtually all erotic content.

I just wish LL would at least TRY to come up with a new set of ratings that describe, accurately, this "2% to 4%" of residents or content that they insist is all that will be affected.

Intent.

Feel free to repost this in your groups

Planned Changes to SL and Adult Areas

SL is planning to make changes to the grid and Adult Content.

This effects us all but the Lindens have to date decided that the discussion needs to be kept quiet as do the changes, including the requirment for payment info to access adult areas.

Every member deserves the right know what they plan so feel free to go to :

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/blog/2009/03/12/upcoming-changes-for-adult-content

Want to comment?

/352/01/312352/1.html

I'm total with you on that. I have been working on nothing but that since last Thursday

MystressAnna Lovenkraft

I understand Linden Labs and why they want to do this, to make SL more "main stream" for people who may not want to see or have there definition of life altered in a virtual world.

And truly it is hard to hold a business meeting when a naked avatar may just appear on the table in front of you, or people walking to the meeting in sl get asked if they want a three way or a five way.

At the same time i see the concerns of those who have been in SL, invested RL money into there avatars, there land, and there SL experience.

My hope is the meetings will be broadcast in-world, and maybe linked to video's so a lot of the questions existing customers have can be answered by watching these meetings, and know who wants what. It gets pretty frustrating in RL when a few scream till laws are passed that effect all. Hopefully this will not be the case in our SL lives.

Though i also think the creation of a mainland "business park" would be a very big attractant to the RL businesses as much if not more than the modifying of the rest of the sims. Give them a region where they may conduct there business in a clean business environment but also allow them to enjoy sl as is, and vice versa. Censor those entering the region for adult content and proper business TOS.

I personally would love sl to evolve to the point where i could meet with someone from my bank if i have issue's, or meet with an representative of the government if i have concerns. or maybe walk into a sl bank and get a rl loan.

Gary

We, and LL, keep saying and thinking this. But mainland is the SMALLEST part of SL. According to the last numbers I saw, mainland is about 5,000 sims, and private estates are about 20,000 sims. Mainland is only one-fifth of SL!

As others have said, businesses and educational institutions won't want mainland anyway. They will want private islands (which is where the ones who ARE here now are located). This gives them a bit more of the control they must have to make SL worthwhile for them.

This will not affect how much sex n' violence people on these estates see. The ONLY thing it will affect (or so LL hopes) is the public's *perception* of Second Life. They are trying to clean up their reputation by "doing something" about the Terrible Smut Problem in Second Life.

I don't think LL gives a hoot whether this new policy will actually *be effective*. They just want something they can put in a press release.

First Gary, it has to evolve to the point where you can get actual responses from the Lindens already in world. If nobody can find them when everything is going to pot, what makes you think you'll ever be able to find your GEICO lizard and report a RL car accident?

I'd actually like to see insurance adjusters in world. Just upload the pics and show them as prims in the office, and the adjuster lizard files the claim, just like over the phone but much faster. But if I have to choose between my friends who are being marched to the Ghetto by goosestepping LL employees and a cute extension of the insurance company, I'll hang with my friends. I'm here to have fun - not support LL's dreams of business development. They aren't giving a fig about our dreams, so why should I care about theirs?

Wow, this got long in a hurry.

@Argent & Briana: ...Huh?

You are extremley clueless at times with your assumptions. For the record, there are lots that work as strippers, pole dancers, security and even DJ'ng...in what are deemed Adult clubs....without having to add hookers and what have you.....they work there because in most instances they don't have "payment on file".Their income from these jobs pays for their land rentals, clothing, AV bits & bobs, purchasing of furniture etc etc.........if you were in the Land rental business you'd know that.....I guess you're not!
That's a lot of money being recycled back into both the Land economy and Content Economy which was originally generated from working in the Adult sector. No one can place an exact figure on that total value......but its one that can't be ignore.
I suggest you look at the classifieds section on this website....under "Employment" some time /118/1.html
Failing that why not visit a few Adult clubs and see how many are employed there with NPIOF