Upcoming Changes for Adult Content: Answers to Questions

so, does this mean we're now all comfortable with the fact the LL can and will impose whatever they like because there's a legal imperative?

Can we now go back to talking about the logistics of the move?

If you remember we have 9 days to do it in. I have 3 plots I need to move in that time.. Whilst it's not completely insurmountable as long as I'm prepared to give up everything else during that period, I seriously object to the time frame and the complete lack of goodwill shown by the company in this.

Really, telling us we must move and giving us no help but telling us you're not going to charge us double tier is not a way to improve customer relations (which you may have noticed are not good and haven't been for years).

Having a chat about Ursula itself might not be so bad either.. It has lots of hills and a couple of rivers but no lakes or snowy mountains.. and each sim has a road around it. does this mean that the road belongs to the sim owner or a sim sizes going to be reduced to accommodate linden roads?

how are people going to be notified about the list? Is there a mailing list or something we can put our names on now so we at least will be made aware when you finally make your minds up?

Will there be a buy back scheme for those that don't want to move but can't stay where they are?

Since even LL now realises there's a difference between account and age verification, will the extreme be forced to slap age verified on their parcels despite being on the adult continent?

Stop thinking of this as a knee-jerk reaction.

No one in this thread has explained anything that says "Oh this is why they just 'suddenly' decided to do this".

This decision was in the hopper 1 year ago when the idea was born in a meeting and they decided to run with it. It is not "sudden", it is not a short term knee-jerk.

Surely it has elements of many things said here already, but seeing how this was discussed in a meeting in the LL offices a year ago it says to me that they really do have a plan - sure that plan does include making money and this Adult switch will increase revenues, but from what I know now "that this was decided a year ago", it makes me doubt that short sightedness of the action.

Alexander has not explained anything. 8 weeks old and nothing but speculation and broad generalizations, many of which do not even fit SL.

I think we do Forums on out-of-phase clocks, so this response is likely to get missed just as I missed this question until now. In brief, the idea is that landowners on Mature (or even Adult) sims may want to use the IDV verification to further protect themselves from underage visitors (e.g., not get involved with a 13 year old). This satisfies my puzzlement because I'm only looking for an explanation that's internally consistent (not necessarily something that would actually have value); starting from the assumption that IDV helps discriminate between minors and of-age account holders (which assumption LL must make, at least publicly), then a landowner placing that additional restriction on their parcel would not be a contradiction.

+++While I agree that land speculators will not themselves help with the Adult content migration, I have been operating on the premise that the more Mainland content that moves to Ursula initially, and the more Estate sims that are retagged as Adult from the start, the *better* it will be for everyone--*especially* Adult businesses.

My thinking is that the big hit to Adult businesses will be the relative scarcity of accounts with Adult access at the time of the Great Migration. It seemed to me that the more exclusive the Adult-only sims, the fewer residents will enable Adult access for their accounts. I've even suggested distributing appealing non-Adult content, no-transfer, on exclusively Adult sims, as an incentive for more residents to do whatever it takes to enable Adult access on their accounts.

Maybe that thinking is incorrect. Maybe the viability of Adult businesses would really suffer from dilution of "adult-ness" if too much not-so-Adult content comes along. If we really think that problem outweighs the problem of Adult-accessible accounts, I'd sure like to know; I don't mean to advocate actions that would make this even worse than it already is.

Yep. Look how much time they are taking to think this through - getting feedback - trying to find the best solution for something that is impossible to get 100% satisfactory to everyone - how much time they are taking to make us a nice new continent with a varied landscape and a bit of road structure and everything else that is going on.

Sure. They could roll the dice - but then the law passes and they have maybe 30 days (or maybe 24 hours - who knows?) to "suddenly" fall into compliance with the law. At that point, there would most assuredly be horrible horrible snap decisions made. Plus, since there is no continent for us - all adult items would have to be snapped up from the grid until a spot was ready (and if that didn't happen in a timely manner, the whole of the "Mature" sims would have to come offline at least.

Keep in mind too - once this all happens, there is no law yet. This means the rules and how they enforce things and everything else can be somewhat fluid. If an oversight is made, if a rule turns out to be a bad one - there is time (and ability) to adjust it a bit once we see how this all plays out in reality. It's great that everyone speculates about what "might" happen - it helps the Lindens figure out means of handling that situation if it does occur. And it's great that they have lawyers looking at the legislation and saying, "This could go this way, this way, or this way," and be prepared for those scenarios. By separating us off into regions that don't affect the entire grid - their eggs aren't all in one basket, so to speak (Happy Easter!), and adjustments - if legally necessary - can be made to a much smaller subset of the grid and grid users.

So, I guess the point here is... all the people who are saying that LL is making snap judgments here and that they really aren't thinking this through... ummmm. imagine the alternative and then stop accusing and start talking about what really matters - how we can all do this so it has the least impact on us, our customers, and Secondlife in general.

SL is no different to any other aspect of the world at large, it is just another media. From a sociological perspective it may be different to most but no other way. As technology advances, so the implications of use become apparent and society has to decide how best it fits. Stem cell research is a good example of this.

but I digress.

The bottom line is that LL can do what they want, when they want and how they want. It's a business and a privately held business at that. It's not a country or community. There is no democracy here, they don't owe us any explanation. All the whining, tears and tantrums in the world won't change that.

If they were a serious, legitimate company then they would have handled this differently. They're not and they haven't.

As a customer, I want to ensure that the move goes smoothly from my perspective. We know what their track record is like so I'm guessing that this will fall into the appalling end of the spectrum. However, it doesn't stop me trying to get as much information out of them as I can to try and mitigate the impact of this new policy.

It galls me to say this (as I have always found it an offensive statement) but if you don't like what they're doing, leave. That is the only way you can effect change with LL, they are incapable of reason, transparency or any kind of real acknowledgement of the concerns of their customer base.

Hit them in the only area they really care about - profitability. They make around $6 million a month in tier fees alone.

Otherwise, you're forced like the rest of us to try and make this implementation go smoothly.

I agree, they have not acted legitimate at all with all the deception over the years.

Saying they have no intention of doing "A" all the while laying the ground work precisely for such action. Like they did bringing biz into SL and like they are doing with Adult content and this leadon into merging grids.

I agree there totally i do hope that this will happen as it will clearly be better for all. As i have always said I am not against this move, even as one affected as we will just change things around and re-model wherever needed, change is not always a bad thing and in the long term this could be better for adult business as SL becomes known that it has a purely adult red light area so to speak



I think thats a great idea and just suggested that to the wife and she thinks she will apply that to her shop as it will move there as well as its part of the main sim of ours. Thanks for the idea



I don't think it is at all the wrong thinking and i am sure that long term we will see a shift from the now mainland to the adult area perhaps outstripping the current mainland as people eventually want to move to be able to be an adult. Which could in turn generate more land as LL has to roll out new Sims for auction as it becomes popular, which would in theory imo keep the land prices of the new land down, although the current mainland may shrink further and land prices there drop as people migrate. But to me the base line is adapt or die, harsh but just the way i see it here.

Perhaps this will be what happens, who knows

They also have right on their doorstep some of the smartest, sharpest thinkers in two hemispheres, whose collective input, properly sought, would surely have been invaluable. Instead, they go about things in the usual cack-handed way, apparently not learning from experience and diving head-first into getting many of their customers offside again.

This is a side issue, but there's a lot of "magical thinking" about the OpenSpace problem.

You can't stuff 300 megabytes of code in a 200 megabyte bag. They should have accepted the problem was over-promising what you could do in a 200 megabyte bag, yes, but it's not a performance problem they could fix without reducing the capability of OpenSpaces one way or another.

I'm talking about some legislation that says that animations that an ordinary person would not distinguish from reality have to be treated as reality. Not "more realistic", but "realistic enough that an ordinary person would treat them as real".

The legislation doesn't say "realistic enough to engender passion", because plain old text does that. Look at what Fandom gets passionate about. Doctor Who. Sailor Moon. Lensman. Captain Nemo. Kitsch, cartoons, and pulp fiction.

It's about punishing law-abiding people without preventing the lawbreaking that it's supposed to stop.

Seriously. Having to lie to get in isn't going to stop the malefactor, it's just going to restrict those of good will.

Would you run a red light even if it was 3AM, and there was nobody else on the road for miles? It's the normal mature socially conscious people who wouldn't that are the ones this matters to.

We're not really comfortable with it...

Follow-up question for Blondin (unless it's been answered and I missed it). Will every parcel be assigned at once, and everyone will have 9 days to move everything, or will this be done in stages, giving owners of multiple parcels ample time to get everything moved and in place?

So, I got tired of waiting for the transcripts to turn up for the Educators' and Merchants' Brown Bag meetings and decided to listen. I've only had time so far to listen to the first part of the Educators' recording, but two things stood out.

Firstly, Claudia asked educators to introduce themselves in chat with their RL names, the area of education they were working in, and whether they were working with the teen grid.

Secondly, JP's overview of the proposed changes started with a description of land designations - and here I provide a word-for-word transcript. After explaining that landowners will be required to label their land adult, mature or PG, JP said:

“...and we’re also going to create a separate PG designation which is going to be an option for anyone that wants what you’d think of as a truly clean somewhat more maybe isolated experience so that they don’t have to associate if they don’t want to with any other sort of y’know gameplay that goes on that might not be adult but might appear in that sort of mid-range category of region designations.”

"Separate PG designation"?? News to me! Anyone else pick up on this?

After talking about verification (more about that in a separate post), search changes and the creation of Ursula, JP went on to say (transcript again - yes, it was a labour of something - not sure you could call it 'love'):

“it’ll create a healthy layer of assurance that kids - minors - are not going to get into regions and parcels that have real adult activity y’know going on in them, and you’ve probably read about some of the stuff we’re seeing already; that stuff that we don’t want kids to get into and they’re places that frankly, the owners of that land and the operators of those businesses don’t want kids to be in so we think that’s a win/win. And finally, by creating this PG designation, we - we pave the way to other potential use cases, other ways to um y’know set educators or other y’know groupings of PG activity apart, whether y’know that means in search, or conceptually, or some other way. We don’t know exactly where that’s going to head, but we think it’s a good idea to begin that discussion where we see PG clean experience that may have y’know special uses in Second Life and - and ah, y’know, of particular interest to some people.”

Make of that what you will. I know the conclusion I draw.

Well it goes back to the broadly offensive blog posts of almost two years ago, the intent was the same and they weren't suddenly announced, they'd have been discussing it for a while before blogging.

This isn't a sudden decision but it is a decision that hasn't been prepared with proper forethought, the way they had to pull the initial FAQ's exemplified that very clearly.

1. The law in question does not apply to computer generated images. It is not relevant to Second Life.

2. Even if it did, the adult content policy would not bring LL into compliance with it.

The adult content policy has nothing to do with USC 2257. That line of discussion is not relevant to this thread.

Yeah I thought they might be talking about creating a PG continent but I just think he means that PG will still be PG.

By the way, in his outline of land designation, JP described anywhere that there was "virtual sex going on" (his words) as falling into the 'adult category'. May just be loose talk, but it casts doubt again on personal property.

On verification, he had this to say (word-for-word transcript coming up):

"The second part, ah, second component of the initiative is going to be an adult verification or age verification method where anybody that wants to get IN to the adult regions is going to have to go through either our - the age verification solution that we’ve been using for some time on a voluntary basis, or have a payment method on file, and if we could think of any other credible way to have sort of a proxy for age verification although we know it’s not infallible we would put that in place as well."

No shooting the messenger, please!

I don't think so Ciaran (that is, I don't think he only means that PG will still be PG) - he very explicitly says "a separate PG designation", implying an extra layer of PG - something that's more PG than PG, if you will. I mean, how could you have a really squeaky clean PG next to Mature parcels on mainland?

Words are always problematic though, I know, so I need to listen to the rest of the tape to see if there's further mention.

Teen Grid merger anyone? maybe not now but as i have said i reckon within 2 years, as the teen grid and main grid are not really separate even now, just a system of flags as i understand so maybe with a new improved flagging system as time goes on its certainly feasible.

Thanks Waterstar for posting the transcript's salient points

NP - when I have time, I'll work my way through the rest of it. I'm such a glutton for punishment - must be my masochistic streak!

Yup I listened to it but I've seen nothing further from LL to suggest he did mean a different continent or grid, he may have worded it badly or maybe they're hiding something from us.

When I first heard it I was going to post here but I was awaiting the transcript. Since then Blondin has posted that a PG continent doesn't fit in with their goals of this policy. I disagree about that, as you point out mature sims next to PG sims will remain a problem and now is the ideal time to address that.

The direction they're taking is pretty clear, y'know.

I wonder whether the ultimate goal isn't to move Mature-with-sex, if you like, to the new continent as it grows, and eventually flag the existing mainland PG. All the Mature folk not having sex would simply be re-branded PG, and the ultra-PGs could have their own little spot somewhere up in Corsica or something.

Not logical, of course, but it would fit nicely with LL's unnecessarily convoluted modus operandi, don't you think?

it seems all that's really left to say is that we have horrible communication with LL on how this is going to work, the specifics of what's going to change.

i'd suggest instead of a forced move for adult content, a sort of voucher system could work possibly, say you own a beach front property on a sim that's considered adult, will you wind up losing that desirable piece of real estate for the first overpopulated space on a random sim that happens to free up, it would be nice if people could choose to remove the adult content from their parcel temporarily and have the move delayed if the land they'd be getting is a festering stinkhole in the middle of three brothels and half of jim bob's combat sim.

also, what about profiles?
mine for instance features a picture of an adult male cheetah being happily naked and erect, will i be barred from any random place i happen to teleport to that isn't labeled adults only?
is there some way LL is planning to keep content beyond that which is rezzed out of the hands of children without utterly destroying the content be it a profile or something similar?

back to land before i end this :

will the sims of the adult content continent be spaced out enough that you're not constantly worrying about whether or not the sim owner disabled object entry from jim bob's combat sim next door, or will i be randomly seeing jim bob's fireworks display shooting across the sky?

will each sim be entirely boxed in - that is bordered (counting diagonally) by 8 other sims for the most part?

being in the middle of four is often bad enough, eight is like trying to crawl through new york rush hour traffic on your hands and knees more often than not.

how many sims (even approximately) will we see being added?
how many of those will be created specifically for the ones forcibly moved?
if a sim or parcel owner decides they'd rather sell the current land and buy replacement land on the adult content will there be available land in a reasonable timeframe or will there be mostly only enough land for the planned moves unless you're shelling out for a brand new sim?

i'd like to add in closing, i bear no hostility towards LL in any way about these changes, i've been age verified for quite some time and the only land i own most likely won't be affected, i am however worried about how the execution of these changes will affect most users, i am however hopefull that communication with the community back and forth from LL will be good and provide new information as soon as possible.

How is requiring ID punishing law abiding people? If that counts as punishment, law abiding people are punished in all sorts of ways every day. If nothing else, we have to cover policing costs through taxation.



I live in a fairly large city. It is usually not possible be sure that there is noone else on the road for miles here, and where it is possible there is usually no need for a stop light in the first place. So the answer is no, I do not run stoplights at 3 am, because I do not assume there are no other drivers on the road. Such an assumption would be a rationalization on my part. Yes that means that people stop at stoplights 'unneccessarily' (i.e. when no other cars are there), but that is deemed a reasonable precaution and I do not know of anyone who thinks of it as 'punishment.'