Upcoming Changes for Adult Content: Main Forum Thread

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/blog/2009/03/25/follow-up-adult-content-changes

http://www.sl-newspaper.com/mains.htm Click on the Main News button, top left.

This is just the 1st wave.....wait till the entire SL community learns that LL sold them down the river!! Then the sh!t will truely hit the fan!

I still have NOT had a concern I asked last week adressesd(and has been echoed by others).

Asking Point blank: If I restart my animations business doing only PG animations for Gay men, will I have to uproot my shop in a few weeks and move to the adult continent purely because my target clientell is Gay? (And I will have Gay in the description/search criteria)

There is real FEAR out there that non hetro couples will be subject to ARs for simply cuddling together on a couch because someone finds non hetero behavior offensive!

I'd like to know how age verification is going to work in this new proposed SL when it doesn't work now.

I am an age verified resident, yesterday I tried to teleport to a region that requires age verification (to do a scavenger hunt - not for anything "seedy" and I was told I needed to be age verified and denied access.

I promptly entered a support ticket about it and was told my account was clearly age verified in their system, that LL unverified me and reverified me and to clear my cache and relog which I did and I still can not access the land. So how is this going to function on a larger scale when it doesn't work now on a small scale.

LL needs to fix the things that are already wonky instead of creating new things they won't be able to function properly.

It doesn't work, it has never worked as far as I'm aware.

DEAR GOD, THANKYOU!!

Finally someone gets it! IT'S NOT REAL!

That's why we have REAL LIFE and SECOND LIFE. The key difference is, one is REAL and the other is COMPLETELY FAKE. It's all pixels, it's all just textures, 3d objects etc etc.

Q: Don't like what you see?
A: Teleport somewhere else

Q: Still don't like what you see?
A: Buy land of your own and decide what you have there

Q: STILL don't like what you see?
A: Leave SL!

Nobody is forced to play Grand Theft Auto, nobody is forced to watch voilent movies at the movie threate. You don't want to see something adult rated, don't go to an adult virtual world! Want something designed for teens? Go to the teen grid.

Considering how much of that solution provider meeting was based around merging the teen grid you'd have thought that might have got a mention.

Well the blog post doesn't say much and the definitions are just plain silly and unworkable but at least it's an update.

"1) Enforcement
2) Definitions
3) Scope
4) Business Impact
5) Impact on Private Estates
6) Why not a PG Continent?
7) Personal Information / 3rd Party partners" They missed the biggest one.

" WHY?!?"

Considering these people, came in under your tos and rules and obeyed them. Bought houses, rented land, bought millions of lindens in inventory between them, hell i know many that run businesses. I would think it is in Linden Labs, best interest to grand father them all as verified.

I would think that would also get a lot fo the oposition to the other parts of the annouced changes gone.

Mind you, change the adult rating to sim level from estate and you would have a really happy group. then you just need to cncentrate on what to do about the mainland situation

Well.. Define 'work'! It will 'work' better in that more people will be 'verified' by way of having credit card info on file.

As somebody who actually did do the real age verification thing, I find this bordering on insulting. The old system worked so badly that they're going to make it even lamer so more people will be 'verified.'

/me wrote a script to check the status of people who visit her land. Scripts can't tell if somebody has age verified because, 2 years later, LSL still doesn't allow land owners to see that info..



About 2 hours worth of watching my place. I figure I'm going to lose 1/2 my traffic, easy, once they force adults who want to access adult stuff to 'prove' they're adult. :\

...This is just.....just......

I don't even know what to do anymore. I'll just cry on a corner and weep about this. *Cries*

How can LL not see this? Can a Linden please respond to a post like this? For these people who have been affected so poorly, can you please honestly post a reply to Jocario and say, "Oh, we're doing this to give you more choice". Can you please do that for me? Or was all that just a lie?

I was talking about the age verification on parcels Sindy, I've always seen Jira entries and forum posts from people having trouble getting that access control to work. This is possibly why they're not even entertaining the idea of parcel level access controls on this.

*Edit* Ok I think it's way too late for me, I see what you were saying now */edit*

I'm age verified too, I found it insulting that I had to verify in the first place to be honest, they'd taken enough money from me by that stage in tier and island payments that they should have accepted I was old enough to be using their service automatically.

regarding this, posted on the LL blogs:
https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/blog/2009/03/25/follow-up-adult-content-changes
"What we've learned so far:
Nearly all your questions revolve around the following subjects and while we don't have all the answers yet, we're committed to answering them before this program launches.
1) Enforcement
2) Definitions
3) Scope
4) Business Impact
5) Impact on Private Estates
6) Why not a PG Continent?
7) Personal Information / 3rd Party partners"

.... my question is why is Displacement and Segregation not listed on the 'questions list'?

Let's not forget

"9) Just who the heck has asked for this?"

Hear hear!

Darn it folks, we are all built to the same blueprints, in RL from the DNA and in SL from the base mesh.. I'm a guy in both worlds and I am not ashamed of my body. In RL I've walked past naked women without a stitch of clothing on myself and it WASNT a sexual context so I didnt care. Not a twitch. I can look at a naked member of the opposite sex and appreciate their beauty without needing to jump their bones for some stupid gratification or justification of my own gender identity. For those of you that cant and need me and the rest of the folks like me to get out of your playground, thats fine by me. I dont want you around me or mine anyway. You clearly havent evolved enough for adult society. Puritanism went out in the 17th century CE but you're back before there was any difference between us and chimpanzees.

Rant over, sorry for the digression.

Well no. But everyone is becoming desperate on the new rule. :C I myself need to sacrifice my membership in SL and never ever use it due to the new rule about the sim involving PG, Mature and Adult Contents. Also I got no more reason why I must cry in RL due to this, like how am I supposed to continue using SL without verifying myself or not going to the Mature and Adult Sims?

Well it's complicated and yet....heartbreaking.

And if that goes wrong enough, any baby wich tries to move from uterus-interior, through the *beep*-tunnel to reach the next world-sphere (globe), will have to be adult-verified in front of being born, otherwise it will not be allowed to use the *beep*-tunnel to get some fresh air and a life. Additional it has to be fully dressed before appearing in hospitals environment, or what?.

I mean...- I tell here no secret: in age of 9 months to have physical tight full body-contact with the female *beep*-tunnel is, hm, how to say? Very adult, isn't it?

Later in life is that absolute impossible to be with full body...ah, stop thinking...

And then we have total physical contact to the milk-*beep* for months, if not for years, but we have to verify...later...to see on what we hanged for years to get some milk while we were not verified to do that, in our first months and years on earth...

We're all gone through this. And then, when we are 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years old, someone shows up and gives order to verify, in case we could see a drawen computer-pixel-pic of the *beep* tunnel or the *beep* tunnel related beep*-tunnel-traveler on a male cartoon and the milk-*beep* on female avatars.

This is all so paradox and not normal and totaly crazy and let me say it: stupid !, that I go now and bang my head against a wall, until I reach this interesting level of stupidness too.

Just to be able to understand it...

In response to:
https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/blog/2009/03/25/follow-up-adult-content-changes



Criticism: You provided the area for feedback, but have up to this date still failed to inform the overwhelming majority of Residents in-world and have resolutely continued to make your information inaccessible (to date) to non-English speaking Residents.



Criticism: 'Engaging'? I'm trying to be as polite and respectful as possible by responding to that by saying, HARDLY!



So what about the Residents that are still unaware of the changes? How can you justify this?



Fine - but if you're not going to be transparent about who exactly and why you have chosen, many Residents are going to be very, very critical. 'Everyone'? How are you planning to provide this information to everyone? On the SL blog? If so.. inform 'everyone' in-world (and I mean every single Resident account, via email and/or an in-world notice) about the policy change.




You have clearly chosen to ignore many Residents' views, opinions, questions, suggestions and challenges - primarily on the basic principle of 'Why?' (your reasons for implementing this absurd policy change, to date, on the whole, have been blown out of the water, IMHO). So this list is problematic and flawed. Intelligent people (often those who are also engaged in the business and education sectors in RL) are telling you here in the forums quite clearly: THIS IS A BAD IDEA.



I personally will be limiting my in-world spend to a minimum and will now direct my resources at weakening your plan where possible.

Disappointed and angry.

*Cheers, LOL!*

Couldn't put it any better myself XD

(1) The fate of our alts
(2) The stigma of age verification
(3) Search terms and ratings
(4) Linden Labs and residents

(1) The fate of our alts

Linden Labs specifically authorizes an essentially unlimited number of free accounts per person. Assuming that they want us to make use of the feature, I have created many alt accounts. This gives me great flexibility in selecting an identity that matches my mood and interests in activities and people whenever I log on. (And if you look up this alt you'll see that it's very new, but other alts of mine have been on SL for over a year.)

For example, some of my alts play different races and classes, with different temperaments and inclinations, in different role-playing sims. Likewise, some of my alts play different races and sexes and seek out different experiences in sexually-oriented sims.

My alts spend money on weapons and other things, of course. If I only had one identity, I would not spend nearly as much as I do now.

Now LL has decided to move 95% of my activities into a ghetto, and to require me to verify my age with some third party provider. If I decide to stay in SL, will I be able to age-verify all of my alts at once, in some reasonably efficient manner?

(2) The stigma of age verification

Age verification for the purpose of accessing specific content is troubling because, as someone above posted, it is not like providing your personal information to buy a hamburger. If you are age verified, you have provided information specifically to access certain content, and you may not want that fact made public. I certainly would not.

Making age verification a requirement for all accounts would at least de-stigmatize it.

(3) Search terms and ratings

Proposal:
(a) everyone rates their profiles, groups, land, etc. (whatever searchable content they have), and can change the rating at will;
(b) searches have a "but not [rating]" function; and
(c) there is a method for residents to flag ratings they disagree with.

Ratings should be as simple as X for no one under 18 admitted and G for everything else. Having owners rate their own content removes LL from having to figure out search terms that would find "breast cancer" but not "breast bondage", or vice versa. The fewer the ratings, the better, for ease of administration and execution all around. This is not the movies, where ratings are heavily integrated into complex demographic marketing. Rather, ratings here just serve the purpose of keeping underaged residents from accessing certain content at all.

A search could be "club but not X" or "club but not G". The first search would get only clubs for dancing, socializing, networking, etc. The second would get only clubs for sex, BDSM, etc. Suppose the club has both dancing and sex (I am under the impression that LL thinks that's unusual in SL). It would rate itself X. It doesn't want anyone under 18 anyway.

The "but not" could be defaulted to "but not X" so as not to offend anyone who might fail to choose which types of content to search. (Those of us searching for X will certainly figure out how to find it.)

Any content not rated after a certain date would be defaulted to X, and the owner could change it.

Whenever content is flagged, the owner is notified and an abuse report is generated. The owner can change the rating or not. If the owner does not change the rating after some stated and fairly short period of time, the abuse report people review the content, communicate with the flagger(s) and owner about it, and make a decision to change or not change the rating. If the abuse report people change the rating, the owner can change it back after some period of time.

Will this proposal lead to essentially all content being voluntarily rated X? If so, would that be a bad thing? People who only want to see G content can always come in an create it.

(4) Linden Labs and residents

LL's high handed "here's what we are doing whether you like it or not" is pretty depressing, but certainly not surprising, even from what I have seen in just over a year. Their relationship to free accounts is like that of the owner of a bar to his or her patrons. The owner can do whatever he or she wants to change the bar, as long as he or she does not violate applicable law. LL's relationship to premium accounts is somewhere between a car rental company to its customers and a commercial landlord and its tenant. That is, it has to abide by the contract between it and its residents as well as applicable law.

Blondin, if by ‘Adult’ LL means ‘Extreme’, then please say ‘Extreme’. At least this would go some small way to giving people an idea of where you perceive the boundary to be. I still don’t think you’ll come within a gnat’s whisker of getting consensus on definitions, though.

At least Mose's had a burning bush and 10 commandments to give out, we don't even get a log in message about this !
I Agree with the Prof, this does warrant an email to ALL residents, and I feel sorry for the non English speaking ones !

With PG and Mature sim classifications this all seems unneccessary and will hurt businesses as once this goes thru many customers may not find their shops anymore because the landmarks they had are now garbage. Many shops have been in their locations for YEARS and now to keep their locations they will have to drop what for many is their best selling items?
What has made SL so attractive to me has been the openness, ease of getting where you wanted, etc. but i guess due to some (reportedly a vocal minority and the media) that user-friendliness is going away.

wonder how many businesses are just gonna close up shop and cancel their premium user status because of this.

I'm interested in the extreme in the final answer to this particular question, especially bearing in mind earlier comments in another thread that animations and animated devices (also adult attachments, although that is not my business) are not in and of themselves Adult but that may change once a customer jumps on one to try it out, possibly depending on the context and the particulars of the customer's behavior.

I've gone to some length to keep my animation shop "classy" for lack of a better word, and not the type of place that suggests nudity and overtly sexual behavior are welcome. Additionally only 10% of my animations are intended for Adult behaviors. To my knowledge nobody has ever got naked in my shop or otherwise displayed overtly sexual behavior (admittedly that's not saying a whole lot since I'm not logged in 24/7 and I certainly don't spend all my SL time keeping an eye on my store).

Am I going to still be held accountable for that one time a pair of morons decides to get naked and get busy in my shop, on one of my displays, in front of an AR-happy passerby? Am I going to be forced to move in anticipation that something like what I describe might happen some day? Assuming I end up having a choice, and choose to stay on the existing mainland, am I opening myself up to AR griefing by people arranging such a situation expressly for the purpose of taking pics to submit with an AR? Or is it really and truly going to be the avatars themselves who will be held accountable as long as I have clearly not done anything on my parcel to invite or encourage Adult behavior?