Upcoming Changes for Adult Content: Answers to Questions

Quote:
Originally Posted by Valerius Constantine
Just a comment- A "boycott" is a well-organized mass-protest tactic. One person can't boycott by themselves, all one person can do is say "What a *dick*! I'm not spending another dime on that jerk!"

That's what folks are *calling* a boycott. Me, I call it natural consequences of being a troll in a public forum.



Boycott
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A boycott is a form of consumer activism involving the act of voluntarily abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with someone or some other organization as an expression of protest, usually of political reasons.

just thought I would post this since there seems to be a small debate about the word "boycott"

hello everyone this is my first post ever in the sl forums, I have a specific question regarding adult content. Toady I noticed that my keywords of gor, and slave, need to be changed, which is fine, they will be. I own a store where I sell a range of women's clothing, and part of my store is dedicated to selling silks. The silks that I sell have a part of them that are slave papers ( i.e. another avatar can click on the slave papers, and receive a notecard, with specific information about that slave's status etc... there are some adult type questions, such as the "open" status of the slave) . My question is, what do I do here, do I have to move all of these items to the new adult area? Also, if I take out the slave papers, what about the idea of selling silks altogether, is this now an adult activity. Also, if an avatar clicks my silks, they have strip scripts, which will ask for permission to strip, then green chat text comes up once they are taken off, (this is only for attachments of course), the green text in itself is not overtly sexual. Would anyone be able to point me to any other forum user's questions on this topic and/or an answer regarding this topic please If I am in the wrong thread, I apologise in advance, could someone please re-direct me to the correct place, and forgive my noobness.

Blondin,

if you could possibly have the team take a look at the filtered word list as it currently stands it would help. I see several instances where you're gonna have a lot of problems, especially given the history of false positives in keywords.

(for those testing the viewer with these changes, I see what you're saying about how only the words as is are affected, but there is no guarantee that the functionality will remain and I am worried about cases where words have been picked out of others, like loli from lolita or age play from bondage playground)

As it stands, if the incidents of false positives are not fixed this list will have massive effects on many many more content creators than just the adult sector.

I will use myself as an example as to how that list of words will affect mature only businesses:

1. Just this weekend I released a castle build, but because it has a built in dungeon/basement I would not be able to advertise a BUILDING. There are no furnishings in this building, and there is nothing in the build at all which I would question even trying to sell in a PG region, but I would not be able to advertise this building properly and could exclude myself from searches for people who want that room. This word alone can affect the builders, who might occasionally make a build with a dungeon.

2. Erotic - another word that can be used on it's own to describe something that would currently be labeled mature. Shape makers can describe sexy shapes as erotic, and it fits for some clothing as well.

3. Sex - hmmm... SEX bed... SEXy clothing... not up for the move, but now can't describe the product. Or can't describe it the way that makes sense.

Other problems I see in that list if it stays...

(dunno if this group even exists but it is an example) the Escort fan club - for fans of the ford escort, tips and tricks for maintaining your escort. Discuss your car with other enthusiasts.

(theoretical product) Kinky Hair - Tight kinky spiraled hair. Realistic flexi hair.

(breast cancer awareness?) I've seen online at least one "Save the Boobs" campaign for breast cancer awareness.

If the trend with false positives continues then this list of words will cut the throats of content makers who might not have an adult product on the parcel. Not to mention the words that are on there and have fully legitimate uses outside of the adult industry.

Thanks in advance for addressing this concern, since as is even PG content creators like builders could be affected.

~Pho

Welcome. You write and act like a pro. You are in the right thread. If you have luck, a man with the nickname Blondin Linden will pick up your question today. (Monday here in Europe) He promised once, to answer 8 questions a day. The magic number. If he find your question (but he stucks somewhere at page 266 or so) he will run to the team, asking some other censorship-experts about what he should answer. Maybe he will visit you. Then he makes a wise decision in ceasar Augustinus mode. Experience along the thread says: you have a 49% chance to be fine and a 51% chance to be forced to move.

Or vice versa.

But you have a 99% chance, that your question will be ignored.

Here you have Blondin's Forum posts so far as sampling:

http://www.slapt.me/wiki/index.php/Links_to_Linden_statements_on_Adult_Content

(scroll a bit, his answers are listed in the middle of this wiki page)

Because Blondins empire is big. The whole globe. The sun goes never down there. But since you asked polite, you have a chance. Depends maybe on how his ROM was... (?) ...

You know..., these Lindens are a bit, hmmm..., special...,so to speak...

any kind of "filter" on natural language has this problem. Theres only two ways to implement it.

1: Accept some false negatives in the name of avoiding false positives.

2: Suffer false positives in order to exclude false negatives.

If LL is targeting as limited a percentage of grid content as they say, only 1 is reasonable. Instead they are taking the draconian second approach.

I sent my protest photos to Couldbe Yue. I even have a blindfold on. But nothing else.

This word - for example - could be a problem...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextet

But LL is in general a problem.

"Lab", means in german an enzyme, used to produce cheese, - cheese again is a product, made from cow-boobies content (milk) = adult.

And Linden means in german language: a specific tree, and we have here in Austria and Germany much poems - and prose works wich telling stories about couples making "adult-bang-bang" in the shadows and on the grass around Linden trees...

Language is such a difficult thing...

So seen the vocables Linden and Lab are the first wich need a ban from inworld search.

There's another issue with the filter. It's clearly setting a different (much lower) bar for Adult Content than what is being used as the standard for the land swap.

There must be a single standard for defining PG, Mature and Adult.

When a strip club is turned down for the land swap, how do they defend themselves against an AR when their business is clearly Adult according to the search?

I realize the search and policy are still in development, but this is a glaring discrepancy that must be addressed.

Thank you so much Wynochee!! I will wait patiently, I am sure in time all of this will be clarified, at the end of the day, I don't want my account to suffer because I have somehow contravened the new restrictions. Thank you very much for the link, I will go and have a look through the posts. I agree with you that it is a 50/50 question, however the changes to keywords (gor/slave) is not allowed) may be a good indicator that my items will have to be moved Oh well, such is sl I suppose.

bingo!

the only way to reasonably filter adult-content from non-adult content is by using contextual search, which we aren't given enough characters and strings to take advantage of. There would still be instances of false positives and negatives, but it would then be because a majority of the context of the description caused that, not a single instance of one bad word.

What gets me... I don't even think that whoever came up with this list even understands how draconian it is.

I mean, really...

from synonyms and definitions alone...

fetish also= talisman or amulet
cock also= male bird, an action to be performed prior to discharging a firearm, a valve
pussy also= cat

without contextual based search who's to say that a fetish isn't an amulet for a ritual, that a cock isn't a male bird (for those non-bird people there are some birds where the cock looks drastically different from the hen and a pet seller may need to make that distinction) and the pet seller may be covering all his bases by cross listing the cat as a pussy.

Honestly, if such a list is to be used and implemented as is with no contextual basis, then it is more a disservice to NOT publish the list than it is to publish it. As is I would worry less about adults "gaming" the system by knowing it than I would about non-adult businesses being impacted because a word with completely safe meanings got stirred into the adult pot.

a) Beatiality and not bestiality? Lame LL, lame.
b) It's hard coded into the client and not something on the server? This seems kinda pointless.

yeah, I think they could all use a few years as a retail manager.

It's exactly the sort of retarded nonsense I have seen dot.com after dot.com do, and none are here with viable businesses anymore.

Sort of like when Metacreations sold all their consumer products so they could go off and make spyware plugins as Viewpoint - routinely blocked by all my spyware programs now. While programs like Carrara and Poser are still around, owned by other companies, and their future customers too.

Anyway, I am justifiably worried. Because people don't really fit in boxes, much of the "adult content" problem is because your inventory is portable whereever you go - and when corps early on told the Lab they needed internal standalone Second Life to really deal with the security issues, they were told to go away. NOW they are finally going to do it, but they should have listened to them YEARS ago.

So all they are really doing is punishing their current customers because they can't get the needs right for the ones who don't want to be, for whatever reason. That strikes me as stupid.

Haha Elanthius, well done - you just beat me to it on the first point (even if you did leave out an 's')! Took me too long to trawl through all the posts I hadn't read!

Excuse me, I didn't read all comment. So, I'm not sure there's anyone ask 'bout this, but i'd like to ask about when this version will be update. How the oversea users can verify ourself, like i'm in asia? What kind of document would u like to verify? How can u read that documents when it's local language?

Thank for answering in advance.

My bad, they're both filtered. I didn't search for bestiality. It's updated now.

As was noted earlier, the list is incomplete.

well, I dunno... by now I think its mostly about selling Ursula land and continuing to beat that dead mainland horse.

So if you want to sell ursula land, I guess you don't want to give all that much away for free, cos that's less you can auction off to the gullible. Far nicer to just coerce people to go buy overpriced new land to replace their perfectly fine land they had before.

And mind this is still the same problem for people on estate land, because the rules are set up where it is impossible to use the covenant to regulate content anymore.

Havea feeling from Blondin's neive mind set to this industry that they would not care either way. I have offered my unque personal experiance in the building and running of a real life gentalmens clubs. but I guess I was over qualified for thier meetings. would I have an opinion against thier very much so nto as to the age verify thing in general in rl I have to check ID's or have staff check them at the door I am not held liable if someone uses a false id and it appears to my staff to be legal. at least in my home state this is handled via courts system and once it is proven to be a false Id the case against me is dropped. Now we prove it by video camera set to view and record the ID. this is saved for 90 days then the tape is reused. totally within the law and if by chance (not likely by design of the doorways) someon walkng by the door should see some titties it is a no harm no fowl rule by cops that have taken many complaints from the puritanes that have attact this industy for many years. It is how the label of orositution got put on dancers in the general public. and here in wolrd if your caming through someone wall then maybe any AR should be filed against them not the business running a dance club or any other style of mature content. Or if they really want to just cover their ass pick up on the same rating system that has been upheld by law and forget all this petty nonsense of trying to define words that you never look up in the first place.

I don't think that's how it works. As I understand it, the filters are enforced on the server depending on the viewer's stated preference for getting Adult material, the account's Adult-qualified status, and some server-side switches. For now, to maintain compatibility with existing viewers and to keep operating without the new Adult-content policy in force, pre-1.23 viewers see what they've always seen. When the new policy comes into effect, pre-1.23 viewers will only be sent what the account is qualified to see. Then, sometime later, pre-1.23 viewers will only see non-Adult stuff, regardless of what the account is qualified to see, because those earlier viewers are unable to supply the user-specified preference for receiving Adult content.

Or something like that.

Best way to conquer silly decisions made higher up is through civil disobedience. You can read about it for example here:
http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html

I do of course mean official american moral values, should maybe have made that more clear. But is it not always like that? The policies you rally against are never the policies of so called "common people" but the policies of the official side of society. And american official policies have grown more puritan, more narrow minded moralistic and more arrogantly disregarding any other ways of thinking over the years, most of us would agree on that. It has nothing to do with what the actual people of the USA thinks. I have never implied that, nor would I want to.

Hi Mula, welcome to the forum

Nothing has been confirmed yet by Linden Lab, although it look as if the new viewer will be put in place around July, once it has been tested.

As far as we know, you will be considered to be verified if you have Payment Info on File, or Payment Info Used (i.e. you have given your credit card or Paypal details to LL). You won't necessarily be required to do anything more than this, and the system won't come into force until the new viewer is in place.

There's a person called Blondin Linden who works for LL and has been posting in this forum. If you search for his posts, it might give you a better idea of what has been discussed so far. However, we're all waiting for some firm guidelines from LL!

Just saw the list of filtered words the first time on that wiki.

Beside the fact that the most of them have no meaning in my language (german), they are even translated a joke.

Most of them are the first words I learned, hehehe. Kids all around the world twittering and chirping these words in all languages all day long on their playgrounds and on the streets. But beside that, these words are also part of some worldclass literature - and not only Bukowsky is meant.

So, the usage of the alphabet is now restricted by an average and small US-company?

Wow!

If one is firm in history...

People - just a few examples of many - like Mozart, van Berlichingen and the evangelic reformist Martin Luther who initiated somewhere around the year 1500 the evangelic protestantism, - all were not really stupid people -, used much, much, much more harder and more rough and explicite words in their official and inofficial correspondences and their daily language.

Evidences for that are to see at any serious university library and in average bookshops, if one is interested.

So Linden Lab walks on thin ice again, in any meaning.

I was grown up as a child from a germans 1968's kind of hippie - and students-freedom and democracy-movements couple. You know: this anti-authority thing wich was and is more or less present in germany from 68 on, maybe a bit more balanced now, but not too much conservative. It is still common sense, that the youth should know what is going on, to not run into traps later in life.

In my school, teachers used a specific book from the german author Guenther Amendt, called: "the Sexfront" for education about sexuality, when I was 12 around, 26 years ago. This book was often updated until today and is famous in our days too. It is a serious author, book is explicite pictured...and explains, beside all romantic aspects plus medicine aspects even all these words/lifestyles in a non hysterical tone, for kids and young people - so that they have a non prude and non-fear start into their first experiences in life.

Then we have here additional an ethnologist, Hans Peter Duerr, who researched in a famous triple edition work about human sexuality from all beginnings on even the language part of eros.

This all and all sorts of human behavior related to human bodies/emotions/attractions/phantasies/lifestyles/nature and the basic functions of eros is just normal.

Easy.

No drama.

Common.

Any healthy mind can come again only to one final conclusion: the Lindens acting as a totalitary regime where business is starting a battle against the human condition and against many cultural grown up basics of any developed society in the modern world.

This hits the human essentials of being self-responsible, free, adult and creative.

So, I am ok with any sort of resistance we start against this bigot fake-moralism.

And one single man, tries to tell us here all few days - in his famous 7 and a half so called answers, written to the whole globe..., what *he* thinks what is from his private view and what is from *LL's* private view allowed and what not?

Are we in a comedy here?

Such an idiotism!

We should fight against that with all possible strength!

04-24-2009, 08:38 PM


Need?

Need??

First this program forces people to move to a place where a large part of the residents isn't allowed. But then there isn't enough room for everyone. So the people who are turned down (the majority?) are forced to hide search-words which are crucial for making Second Life® a more predictable experience. All that restriction, force and chaos for the noble cause of choice and predictability ...

Blondin, are you so blind to arguments against this policy, that you can't see the meaning of your very own words? In that case your tunnelvision makes this conversation a rather pointless affair.

=======

I was directed here by senior LL employees for discussion, and rightly so. This forum is the only suitable location for such a large discussion. But Blondin, you have brought no arguments, no counter-arguments. You've answered some questions, yes, but along the way it only became more clear this plan can't succeed, while it will seriously hurt the vast majority of residents.

So I will take this back to the more knowledgeable Lindens, who don't read this forum, because they are far too busy actually improving Second Life. I will tell them this plan is like smashing a chinese vase, brushing the pieces into two piles, and claim you have two chinese vases.

It's best to think constructive. I happen to believe there are workable alternatives, approved by the userbase, and achieving the goals.

I am keeping a list at the wiki in my sig line as well so feel free to add any there also

Content filtering in google is not done merely on keywords. Google also takes into account the context of that word on the web page, surrounding words, how many other "adult" words are on that webpage. The "adult" rating of pages that page links to, and is linked from, etc. before judging a particular page adult.

I've no problem with filtering per se, however, filtering on keywords only is well known *NOT* to work.

Unfortunately for LL the amount of text which can be fitted into a description field, the lack of structure or formatting and the lack of ability to include links to other places in land description etc. make the sort of content filtering techniques that do work such as those that Google use impossible to implement successfully.

Like many aspects of this whole fiasco, I agree with what LL is trying to do, but don't believe their implementation will work.


Matthew