Upcoming Changes for Adult Content: Main Forum Thread

I'll take a copy too if you offer it or pay a reasonable fee, just tell me the info,..

There are in reality 2 kinds of adult content: (Violence-)Porn and Art.

We know what constitutes porn: The mindless display of body parts and sexual activity, or the mindless display of blood and violence, where the motive of the work is just to make money.

Sexuality and violence are on the other hand strong forces in humans, and so a lot of mindful artwork has been created that captures the beauty of human beings and provokes self-insight and public debates around these areas.

There are borderline cases to be sure, but most works falls neatly into one of those categories.

Problems then arises:
I would consider Quentin Tarantino's movie "Pulp Fiction" to be a work of art, but it does contain scenes with lots of blood and gore. Some people will certainly be offended by it.

I would consider Salvador Dali's picture «One Second Before Awakening from a Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate» to be a work of art, but it does contain a drawing of a nude women. Some people may be offended by it.

My nightmare vision of the thoughts that LL is now doing is that every depiction of nudity and violence that may offend someone will be force moved to the red light district, effectively shunning it out of SL because most artists will not like their work to be associated with porn. I have no problem avoiding porn in SL, but I guess I would if I had to search for art exhibitions in the middle of an «adult continent» filled with porn shops.

Another effect this will have is to create a marketplace for porn in SL, actually raising the number of porn-related SIM's and the use of SL as a platform for porn.

So please, even if it makes it harder to enforce: Dont do a syntactic definition of adult content. Make sure artistic impressions are still free to be displayed outside the porn continent.

As an adult entertainment club owner on SL, my biggest concerns are that there will be too many clubs all lumped together on one continent, thereby forcing out some of us due to the over-abundance of clubs. For those of us who provide a safe, entertaining and tasteful way to enjoy adult-oriented fun, this is not a good thing at all. I also feel this takes away from the freedom and fun of SL. Most of us come here to escape the real world and be whoever we want to be for the time we're in world. Why not create a PG continent to appease those who have all of these issues with adult content? Seems to me that would make more sense.

what he said

I have a mixed gallery, upstairs is all art I consider 'safe' and downstairs is what I placed myself under the definition of mature.

However, that is not to say that there isn't the occasional nipple in the 'safe' area. These aren't sexual pieces, just pieces where addition of clothing would have actually detracted from the intended emotions. These are often pieces where I have received a number of nice comments on art sites where explicit content is against the TOS, and even many of my self labeled mature pieces were posted safely to this art site.

Now I have full plans to separate out my adult pieces and move them when the time comes. But too heavy handed restrictions, and some of the pieces that are considered tasteful would end up in the quagmire of 'not porn' but also 'not allowed'.

Art is something that unfortunately will have to be viewed on a case by case basis IMHO, and is LL ready to do so?

Wow, Openlife looks DAMN encouraging right now... 75USD a month for 45,000prim region? Whew, sounds good to me! Much better than the 95USD a month I'm paying for 3750prims. That is going up to 125USD soon. Not that I can afford it now ofcourse, so soon I'll be selling.

Right now, if SL gets even just a little bit worse..
OR
Openlife gets just a little bit better..

I'm switching. Right now is the time to be impressing me LL, otherwise BYE BYE.

Nany, I socialize with my children in real life. They don't need to be on SL until they're old enough to use the web unsupervised. It's the same reason I don't give my child a MySpace page, an AOL Screen Name, or even so much as a WoW toon. SL is not a place for children. Disney and Nickelodeon offer services for that. Buy them Animal Crossing if you want them to have a safe and friendly game. No amount of rule enforcement offers 100% protection on any service, let alone one that is built on the foundation of user-made content. This isn't about us not wanting kids around. This is about ridiculous changes for the purpose of making SL more marketable to corporations. We can expect billboards to go up next. SL Advertising, the wave of the future.

I don't want to be forced to put up personal info about myself.
Will just putting up my debit card info be sufficient?


Also, I can only wonder what impact this will have on alts.
Can you put up the same info for more than one account?

I have to agree with this guy.

QFT.

If I had kids (I don't yet but I have 3 young nieces whom I love dearly) I would talk and socialize with them.. oh I don't know. In my house maybe?

It's like my brother, who used MSN to send me a message from his laptop to me on the desktop ACROSS THE ROOM. Like holy fuck open your damn mouth and talk. At least now, because we don't live together any more, he has a reason to use MSN

If you ask me, the Main Grid is for adults.

If you want to pull this on us, you might as well restrict SL as a whole to age-verified people. After all, anyone under the legal age should be in the teen grid, am I right?

Face it, LL. Your whole system is screwed up here.

To be honest, while I 100% agree that LL has that inmind. I seriously doubt any corps will invest in SL. If there was reason for them to invest in SL, they would be doing it already. The truth is that SL is so small that there is absolutely no gain. And each time LL does something like this that annoys the userbase of their virtual world, it only gets smaller. If LL wanted to make heaps of money, what they should be doing is instead:

- Offering cheaper land
- Providing better service and support
- Fixing the problems with their system, software and hardware
- Adding better social networking features and technical features for creating better content

If they did that, the userbase of SL would increase from the small amount it is today to probably something 100x or even 1000x bigger. Instead of 80,000 users online, we'd be in the range of 80,000,000 easily! THEN the large corporations would invest in SL! Because why invest to advertise your products in a virtual world that has basically no one in it? (80,000 users online at one time is small really, when you compare it to the 6,500,000,000 "users" "online" in real life.. or half that if you count those asleep as 'offline'. ;3).

That's why they pay to advertise in Google, Youtube, Myspace, Facebook, MSN, Yahoo etc. That's why folks pay to advertise on TV, popular radio stations, big newspapers etc. You advertise in locations where you'll be seen by the most people, otherwise why bother paying the money?

If every man and his dog had a SL account, then the big corps would do the same thing in SL as they did in Myspace and Facebook etc. They would say, "oh, look, people like those websites, and it's hip and cool to have an account on them. Lets be hip and cool and sign up too!".

Each day that LL doesn't do the right thing, they hurt us, and hurt themselves even more. And they are so blinded by greed that they can't even see it. By hurting the adult community, they are shooting themselves in the foot ultimately. If the adult community is what makes you popular, support it! Milk it! Encourage it! Or ask yourself, "What can we do to make SL better that people can do more than just sex in it?".

Exactly. Why should anyone have to prove they are age verified to enter an adults only location in the Main Grid when it's meant to be adults only anyway?

LL has 2 choices, either admit their reasons for doing this are bogus or just admit there is children in their virtual sex land. In either case, they are up ****creek!



... just a thought, maybe that's the reason why LL is doing this? They know this will affect heaps of people, and it's a way of getting most of the userbase to age-verify themselves? Because they have been trying to do that for ages and this is a sure fire way of making people do it. Forcing them to do it inorder to continue doing what they like. It's a good halfway point between making all of SL age-verified anyway.

After this point, most of SL should be age-verified or with payment info on file, so then the group of people who complain should be really small when they make the whole grid age-verified only. This way also it doesn't lose them any business too quickly, because if they sprung a gridwide 'Age verified only!' move on us, then people wouldn't have time to react, and those who couldn't become age verified would have to leave SL. This way it gives those people time and motivation to become age-verified.

So basically, to the 16yo's and 17yo's in SL right now, if you want to stay, LL is giving you a few months warning, so steal those credit cards from your parents now and get verified. This way you underage teens can stay here for now and ask for help from the adults you know too.

I bet this is the reason. To slowly age verify the grid, while keeping as many people as they can, even the ones who are below the age limit if they can.

And about what your kids are able to talk with me? Lacan, Bataille, Wittgenstein? Gotthard Guenther? Boris Groys? Sloterdijk? Bauhaus Architecture? The construction of the Farnsworth House? Euclidian Geometrics? How Hendrix created his guitar-playing-technique? Political issues? Woodstock? The 1968s students revolution? The newest building and scripting tricks? The chances of Croatia to reach EU member status?

Have they anything relevant to say to me poor avatar?

In one word: what should we matured people do, when we stumble over your kids somewhere on the grid? Playing LEGO with them, or tabletennis, or what?

No we will ignore them, because they are a different world.

This is a mature world for reasons, and even when I walk through Vienna, Capital City of Austrija (ever heard of that?, there lives the famous native tribe of beer-drinking and Wiener Schnitzel eating, kind of stomp dancing in short leather pants bajuwarian inspired folks, speaking a weird german dialect, but they also drive the famous yearly multimedia art and design fairy Ars Electronica in Linz, lol), I have no intention or idea to talk to the thousands of kids jumping around there in this 2 million peeps metropole, because kids living for logical reasons in a totaly other self-developement-sphere, in their own, and there is usualy no serious and even no funny communication base given, except they would ask on the fly where the next McDonald is to find (yes,we have this gourmet-thing here too, sadly, thanks for sharing...). Even about fashion is no communication possible.

If I say: "hey look, this dress looks like inspired by Lagerfeld or Chanel", the kid will answer asking: huh? who the f* is Lakkerfield and huh? what means "ipsnired", and what is "channel", hahahaha.

OMG, what shall we do with your kids on a mature platform? Even shopping, exploring, dancing or listening to a concert of the singers Nance Brody or Juel Resistance is totaly impossible with them, because they sing mature lyrics, oh I forgot: adult lyrics!

Can we all agree that "Nany Kayo" is broadly offensive? ... please?.. I think that would be very fitting if Nany was only allowed in the Adults-only region. :3

Supposedly, the purpose of this is to make SL more "predictable" by a user's point of view.

In that regard, I think Mature sims should be moved away from the mainland or at least restricted to their own area on the mainland. And, of course, islands/estates will be left alone.


I don't see where forced age verification helps make it predictable, though. And a rather intrusive verification process at that. I think, at the very most, LL should just put up a warning and non-liability notice (like many adult websites) every time you enter the adult region or an adult island/estate.

As for search, not sure about that one.

You are moving the majority of SL on to one continent, and leaving the rest to a minority. Dose that seam right? 90% of the sims I've seen are mature. So to pacify a small group you are going to move the large group? That's nuts. Why not just make a bible thumper grid all its own for them. It's not like it'll take up much space. I say let the cry babies move, and leave SL to the people who make up most of it's population. One contentment with adult sims will lag worse than SL already dose. If this is the level of intelect behind the Linden Labs I think I might be better off going else where to RP. Bible Thumpers (my term for people who whine when they see stuff they don't like where they shouldn't be) ran RP out of yahoo by killing the privet rooms. The same thing is being done here. I think Linden Labs might be cutting it's nose of to spite it's face.

Kara Bluxome
one pissed off Super Girl

ROFL! Bible thumpers don't need a grid, they are already in another world outside of reality!

Hell the mentally disturbed are RUNNING LL

LL, I can only imagine you'll be doing something similar with your new aqquisitions, OnRez and Xstreet, right?

They could do that forcing simply by making it necessary to be Age Verified or PIOF in order to enter a Mature sim. Then they could add continents that were either wholly PG or wholly Mature.
They could enforce the current rules on PG and Mature content. They would have to do that anyway even if AO happened.

It wouldn't be pretty, but according to Blondin's posts, they simply have not considered the issues involved in moving entire builds to AO, or if they have, they haven't explained it to their representative in this thread. That's just the prims. Lord knows what they think about moving the terrain and landscaping into which the builds might be integrated.


However, I think that the AO solution will go ahead regardless. LL want a world that is sanitised for new freebie residents, with the hot stuff over there behind a barrier.
They are simply setting out in these threads to minimize the damage for current residents that are affected by the change.

They could have headed off a lot of the grief by ceasing to mix PG and Mature sims in the new continents once the question of verification arose. PG adjacent to Mature was always a crazy idea.

MY SENTIMENTS EXACTLY!! (although in my opinion the "non-perfects" run this monkey house.

As the TRUE numbers of SL dwindle and fade OTHER similar grids grow and strengthen (does ANYONE believe those false figures LL puts out about quarterly growth or logged in clients?) For a grid that *claims* over 80k of people there are SHOCKINGLY FEW people around.

I for one WOULD invest once again in a grid that SUPPORTS the clients, NOT ABUSING them as LL has been doing since their collective IQ dropped below 90 and started KILLING OFF all that made SL interesting and active. Until then I am keeping my avatar as UNRegistered, after all, what has that $10 per month done for me after they killed off my businesses by kicking out the building blocks of the SL economy.

Keep the teenagers out, THEY think this is just a GAME anyways so let them KEEP their WoW etc. Adults are attracted to simulations that are more substantial anyways.

Okay, I went ahead and did the Age Verification, and you know what? It doesn't touch the PIOF. So yeah, now I'm upset. The PIOF needs to be removed, or synched up to age verification. One or the other. I'm upset enough that I had to pony up a portion of my SSN, but I'm sure as heck not gonna put my credit card on the block.

i find myself still very much dismayed about this topic. Many reasons...and as much as i try to sound like the others here, very professional, very clarified, point-oriented, i don't think i can do it. I can only say how i feel, let it come out, and hope that someone can make sense of it all.

#1 - The one question i have not heard answered throughout all of this, despite it being asked time and time again, is what is the plan about the land. There has been no statement, as far as i can tell, of how the land will be handled. Will we be forced to sell, at lower rates, and buy there? Will we be allowed to exchange land for land? Honestly, in my case, i can't see selling my items off (even if a portion does get labeled "adult", because a majority of my items, and the renters of my Market, cover a variety of items. I would suggest that we have the opportunity to buy a certain amount of land, based on the amount of mainland we currently own, and we have to keep it for x amount of time, before selling it (6 months, maybe), to keep people from buying it at say $1.sqm, and selling it for major profit.

#2 - There still seems to be a lot of controversy over what constitutes "adult". I own a Gorean Market. Most items in mine, and my renter's vendors, are "medieval" in nature. There's a few items that would qualify as BDSM. I believe that according to what is posted, my market would still qualify as a "Mature" tag. Gorean, of course, involves slaves walking around nude. If there is nude, with/without leash, does this still count. And, then how does it pan out, if i have a bed out on display, with sexballs...which, according to the current understanding, would be allowed, because it is a display model only, and Master and slave hop on to test ... and happen to emote one line as a joke to each other (I have seen this, and done this, at other places).

#3 - Theoretically, Gorean establishments (roleplay sims, which mine is technically not, mine is the market, with our house set above the market) are technically not about the sex, but about the relationship and the roleplay (yes, that is a very broad term). If they decide to set up a sim, that does not allow sex in public areas, but a tavern had a skybox that allowed it, plus the privacy of one's own home...how would that pan out. This could also translate to...say, strip clubs. It seems that a strip club would be allowed, but what about strip clubs that allow escort contacts to be made on site (with "dates" being held off-site), or....in a private skybox, but, not as the primary purpose of the club.

#4 - Sim Resources -- right now, a lot of us that have mainland parcels are located on sims that do not have a lot of people on them (or say, in my case, i own 66% of the sim, and am currently waiting for a 4096 to come up for auction). If we get designated as "adult", and are forced to move, that will mean that more active usage will be on these sims. So, i have a fairly low-lag sim (relatively), and if i moved all over, then i would have to share those resources with now fully active stores/activities.

#5 - Assistance to move items over -- It is not that easy to just pick up and move. Nor is it easy to move within a couple of days. There really needs to be some overlap, and/or assistance in the move. There will be difficulties, i.e. someone who built into a mountainside, and is now forced to move to a flat sim.

Basically, what i hear is "bad adult...you must move". Not 100% of the definition of what is adult, nor what is proposed beyond that.

I personally am very scared of what the SL future holds. I wanted to expand. I still am looking for one parcel on this sim to come up for auction (which has been purple for 2 weeks now, almost). But i am scared...what if i buy it, and the next day, am told i have to move my whole setup, lock/stock/barrel, because i am known as a Gorean Market, and OMG, we all know how bad the Goreans are (yes, that comes from my purchasing an ad on SLExchange, then was told i couldn't post my ad on there, because of the implication of Goreans).

I honestly am very leery of SL's future. Sometimes, I do think i should just drop it all, because of stuff like this. It certainly makes me leery of pumping more $L into the economy. I think a lot of people are thinking that right now...why should they put more money into a sinking ship. I have seen the land around me go from about $14/15 per sqm go down to around $4/5 per sqm. Now...it's going to be devalued even more, if there's a forced move/forced segregation.

I really wish i could see more answers. More concrete answers from the Lindens, and not just a nod. The Lindens say 'we want to hear your feedback, your comments"...then, it appears that they don't care about how those existing here feel. This is what i want to hear about, in a nutshell:

1. Solid definitions of "adult", in regards to some of the categories that exist in SL.

2. Land sale/trade/purchase from mainland to adult - plans

3. Assistance to move existing builds from existing mainland to new adult mainland.

4. Script resources.

5. Housing/Building definitions. ((i.e. store that sells sex poseballs, but has a private residence also on the same parcel))

Interesting. The University of Southern California may be interested in knowing what is going on "behind the scenes", so to speak, seeing as how this project is being hosted on their servers, using the institution's credentials in the copyright information, and so on...

My question are:
1.If i own a private Island/estate with publick acsees like a mall or a club or a homerental part, will it be same rules there as in " The Adult grid" ?

2.if i got 6 private owned islands/estates at one spot like added together, will i have to set all same content ( PG-Mature-Adult) or can thay be set different?

Okay, I tried putting in my credentials and it's not matching up. I put it exactly as it shows on my Georgia ID card, or is the "number" I need disguised in that bar code on the back of the card.

--I do NOT want to fork over SSN details!--