Upcoming Changes for Adult Content: Answers to Questions

No, it's not just you; I have repeatedly harped on it as one of the big issues in the mix. It is a very important issue to ALL landowners, even non-Adult Mature-rated landowners.

The land market is still in the crapper from oversupply from last year. We thought it was going to recover, but with the RL economy, the OpenSpace (past and present) issues, and now this, I think L$1/sqm is a reasonable target price for Mature mainland.

Unfortunately they have said any decisions about not being banned to Linden Land are purely up to the investigating Linden. You could be fine one day, change nada on your land, another linden responds to an AR, and find that they think you should be adult.

Hey All,

I deleted the SL Wiki page about the Adult Key Words. I just wanted to give you a heads up. The list was incorrect anyway so we decided to take it down.

Okay, Is anyone still behind the idea that this is not censorship?

We need another forum to stay in touch...they will shut this down soon.
Someone post where we can all meet up.

Gee, never saw that coming.

Hey All,

I deleted the SL Wiki page about the Adult Key Words. I just wanted to give you a heads up. The list was incorrect anyway so we decided to take it down.

If you plan on using Adult words in your ads / search, 1) the place / event will need to be on an adult region and 2) only verified accounts will be able to search and find those key words.



The cushion should be advertised using non adult words



Gor would be considered adult.

The list in the SL Wiki is compiled by residents, not Linden Lab.

Linden Lab has not made their official list of filtered words public.

Hey All,

I deleted the SL Wiki page about the Adult Key Words. I just wanted to give you a heads up. The list was incorrect anyway so we decided to take it down.

Originally Posted by Tcko Cazalet
We need another forum to stay in touch...they will shut this down soon.
Someone post where we can all meet up.

Why?

Why?

Blondin said that LL (rightly or wrongly) would not be publishing the list of adult keywords. Their reasoning (rightly or wrongly) was to stop people from "gaming the system". Residents then went ahead and started a Wiki page on LINDEN'S SERVERS to document that very thing.

Now LL remove the page and you are all surprised and indignant?

*rolls eyes* You REALLY didn't see that one coming?

There seems to be a broad consensus in favor of the goal of separating some level of "adult" content from everything else. Some posters have stated support for the policy as proposed.

Are the rest of us--the ones who see merit in separation but oppose the proposed policy--are we just being bitchy? Are we falling into Voltaire's trap of the perfect being the enemy of the good?

I don't think so. I think there is plenty enough that's glaringly broken about this policy that the only responsible response is active opposition. Papering over its fatal flaws is not supporting Linden Lab and (most emphatically) not advancing the intended goals of such separation. It is dooming the entire endeavor to failure.

I don't want to rehash everything all over again, but there's one illustrative interchange:



So here's the deal: There are over 20 unique unresolved public jiras about how broken IDV age verification is (both the verification process and the behavior of the in-world restriction). One aspect of that brokenness is the fact that the system as a whole has an unacceptably high "miss" rate: too many people get access to restricted material who shouldn't, both because of flaws in-world and because it's really easy to verify falsely.

Do we know what percentage of current IDV-verified accounts are bogus? Of course not. And if we did, it would mean nothing because IDV-verification is almost completely abandoned by residents because it just doesn't work, so there's no current incentive to falsely verify.

So now comes Payment Info as an alternative way to get adult verified (presumably to address another fatal flaw with IDV: high false alarms--too many people who should be able to verify just can't). But Payment Info is even easier than IDV to fake; any credit card will do--and minors increasingly have their own credit cards, so they won't even have to pilfer Mommy's purse.

Do we know what percentage of current PIOF/PIU Residents are under-age? Of course not. There's very little use of payment info for parcel restrictions (or any other purpose, really), so there's no current incentive to falsely verify.

The miss rate of the resulting test--the logical OR of two predicates both with high miss rates--is the *sum* of those miss rates. If Little Johnny can't get in with one, it's a sure bet that he'll try with the other.

And now for the first time Little Johnny will have occasion to actually try.

So, are we really just being bitchy, pointing out this and other problems, and insisting that the policy isn't an acceptable approach to addressing its stated goals? I really, really don't think so.

+++

Probably most everybody here has read about "#AmazonFail" (see, e.g., http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/14/guest-post-why-amazon-didnt-just-have-a-glitch). I see the proposed Search filters as an almost certain trigger of some similar PR disaster ahead for Second Life and Linden Lab. It's hypothetical now, but give G-Team a few weeks to tinker with the filters in response to AR volume, and I just think it's inevitable. So, then, a question for a Linden:

What specific processes are being introduced as part of this policy to prevent "#LindenFail"?

Excuse me? When did the "most extreme content" idea go out the window? Oh yeah, back when the first draft definitions were published, and when the second, even more restrictive set clarified LL's intentions.

Look, Blondie..."Gor" is NOT extreme content, in and of itself. Bits of it are, yes.

Not saying this about you or anyone in particular but some of the big names seem to be hoping that this change will destroy all the small fry competition and leave them and a few other large operations as some kind of quasi monopoly over the adult industry in SL.

Much like how each estate pricing change wipes out the little guys and leaves the big estates to mop up their ex-customers and buy their dumped sims.

Once LL feel that enough discussion has been had on this subject, this thread wlil be shut down, I imagine.

Since RA is barely moderated, and since a lot of this discussion would better fit RA, I would imagine that would be the easiest place to continue.

AN APPEAL TO CLASSIFY NON-SEXUAL PONYPLAY AS MATURE AND TO ALLOW FRILLY FILLY FARM TO REMAIN ON A MATURE MAINLAND SIM

<snip>

-- Button Wright, Stable Mistress of Frilly Filly Farm

I agree with you Lindal. Based on what little I know of Gor, I find this decision to make anything Gor-related Adult content highly odd.

They have a different model of how a society is run - it's a fantasy world. The fact that some (including me) find it a bit degrading and tasteless doesn't make it Adult. When sex happens I don't think it's any more or less than what happens in non-Gor places, and the same rules could apply (i.e. not in public places, but what they do in the privacy of their own castles is up to them).

I really think LL should re-examine this decision.

In my opinion people aren't talking enough about the effect printing 300 mainland sims and evicting all adult businesses will have on the land market. Probably it's only really very important to the few of us who are big into land.

You don't get it, do you? For the "prude Americans" a simple "Yes I am 18, let me in" is all you need to access even sites that show RL pr0n material. It is governments like yours who force the hardest forms of age verification on people who just want to see some pixel bumping (or even ban some forms of pixel bumping completely). If you don't like age verification and sex bans you should rather want "to keep the prude Germans out of SL" (and for yourself - you better move to the US ASAP).

'Stable Mistress of Frilly Filly Farm'

'mistress' may fall foul of the BDSM category before we get close to the frilly bit...


Quote from web
'The kid-centric online game Club Penguin (acquired by Disney last year) adds 500-1000 words a day to its list of forbidden chat-words in an effort to keep things clean. Wanna bet that kids come up with 2000-4000 new variant spellings a day?
Merrifield also thinks that there is an over-reliance on technology that ignores the human element, which is why they've decided to devote two-thirds of the company's staff to positions such as safety moderators and customer service.
"We know the limits of technology, even though I would put our filtering software up against anybody's, especially because of that human element - we're adding 500 to 1000 words every day to the filters, simply because of slang that works its way into the language.'

If kiddie site experts are having trouble what hope SL?

Makes sense.
True, though I can see people abusing this form of communication.