RC Questions

I'm sooooo not commenting on handling bosoms!

However bosom is fine apparently and doesn't trip the adult keyword switch which makes you wonder if it's a devious ploy.

How silly is this again. Closing forum threads but not fixing links in their blog posts.

But as it seems no serious Linden is really interested in reading any comments (and Blondin is obviously not a serious Linden, being part time and with no real powers whatsoever) this is a useless forum anyway.

This gets more silly by the minute, a friend just told me her nice playground was changed from Mature to PG, just in case, by a landlord in angst, my place will probably be nuked because the landlord does not switch to adult and I'm really not in the mood to move again (away from mainland last time because the Lindens are totally useless in doing support on the mainland, now probably into the void...)

So Linden Labs, get a clue, or get a grave and R.I.P....

I am sure the SLapt list is not perfect yet. But short of them *telling* us the filtered words, best we can do is try things and collect our results in one place to share.

The list will need to be re-verified periodically if they don't tell us when they make changes.

Ive managed to get halfway through the dictionary of sexual terms (thru K)

Since I saw Linden staff running around on Nautilus, dressed as tiny mole-avatars, zoophilia and bestiality should be no problem for the Lindens.

Seen from an ethical point of view, we should inform Greenpeace and the WWF to start a campaign against mole-abuse. LL let moles working hard on human buildings and at daylight above the ground. This should be forbidden! It is against the nature and the dignity of moles. It is in fact mole-slavery.

The biggest issue the Lindens should worry about is word of mouth. How this plays out is going to influence their future success (assuming they have any). If they manage to make a lot of current residents very unhappy, then it is pretty safe to say that those residents will tell at least 10 of their friends about their bad experience. This is how Companies are ruined despite how badly they run their business. Enough people get a bad flavor in their mouth and the love afair is over. People may use SL for a while, fizzling out here and there... But when anything close to an alternative comes around, it will be the end. People will grow tired of being treated like children and move on.

Some people are more vocal than others. In the leaving process, the Lindens will have to hope that the people they are losing are not vocal and will simply leave quietly. Since they are not interested in listening to their residents, it is pretty safe to say they will be even less interested in listening to why an ex-resident left in the first place. Since they do not care about retaining customers, they probably assume we will go quietly and just leave. I would not take that kind of gamble with my Company.

(Note: I'm not disputing the following quote. Indeed, Search is horridly flawed for all kinds of reasons--just try to find a legitimate Event among the pages of crap in Event Search. But it got me thinking...)

There's an interesting asymmetry in the part I highlighted. It's easy to describe non-sexual content without using sex-related terms; it's pretty difficult to describe sexual content using only sex-related terms.

That asymmetry isn't limited to Search: most of the activity and content on Ursula will *not* be sexually oriented. That would be true even if it houses only the raunchiest of smut-peddlers, but they'll be joined by folks just liking the idea of being able to maybe someday sell a bit of the nasty, and by other folks who just don't care.

So some Adult land will have Search listings with no Adult content whatsoever, but those listings will only be found by Adult-qualified accounts in viewers set with Adult-enabled Search.

That may seem like a flaw with the plan, but in fact it's not only acceptable collateral damage, it's actually a necessary condition, required to prevent demand for Adult land from overwhelming everything else and making SL appear almost exclusively about extreme sex, instead of the current "2-4%."

With this rigging of Search, the only really practical use of Adult land is extreme sex--a use forbidden on sub-Adult land. So it's not so much about residents being given choices; rather, it's about forcing them to choose.

Well, I think that many of us are in the same boat- suddenly lumped in with the "porn merchants" when we don't think that we should be.

However, I think that the more broken and unworkable the system is, the less likely LL is to actually *enforce* it, or to stand firmly against *changing* it.


The last thing I think we want to do is give them the idea that we think that they're doing any of this *right*.

^V^

Hey! Hey! I'm pretty sure that "rimshot" is a filtered word!

^V^

Actually, it's *more* than they need legally. so stronger verification is even *less* needed that most people think it is

And frankly, I think I have an ideal solution to the adult providers and consumers worried about hooking up with/selling to a kid by accident. Only sell to/hook up with people who are age verified.

THos of us that are satisfied with LL's current regime can do our thing and you feel like you need added protection, knock yourselves out!

^V^

No, just a really *low* opinion of LL's efforts with this plan- It won't work, alienates more customers than it helps, and exposes LL to legal action. Pretty much bad in all ways possible

Exactly, because no *RL* escorts or hookers advertise using "cute" euphemisms that get around advertising laws, or make the "bring the service to the consumer's private residence" business model work out here in the real world, do they?


Not is LL keeps on being as smart as it *has* been about this stuff. they'll never see it coming- they already say that you can *sell* adult items and services on"mature" land as long as you don't *advertise* it using naughty keywords.
That *is* the "adult" standards!


If it is only a "game" then why have you dropped over the $1000 US into it? And did you write any of that off on your taxes as a business expense? Just asking




Of course there will. but once the dust from the class action lawsuits settles, they probably won't have anywhere to play. Kinda hard to host a sim on a repo'd server rack ain't it?

^V^

I'm late joining this discussion. Does anyone know the answers to these questions?

1. How will censoring certain words from search terms make search more predictable? I would have thought the opposite is more likely. Google doesn't use this kind of censorship (does it?) and the google search engine is probably the most predictable and useful there is. Why don't they simply plug into google for their search?

2. Why doesn't LL create a new PG grid for all the business interests they want to attract? Surely this would be better and simpler than forcing present residents to move. After all, for goodness sake, it's only a virtual world. Moving people and putting different people in their place could be done by not moving people and putting different people somewhere else. In real life this could be a major problem, but surely not in a virtual world??

3. Why doesn't LL put some effort into cleaning up the welcome areas for new players? For example what is the point of voice in these areas? They are a very poor introduction if LL is hoping for something that will be attractive to more sensitive members of society. There is bad language in welcome areas and worse things. And yet the new adult content rules seem not to address this. If i were an educator looking to build in SL this would be a really big concern for me. Also for many businesses again it would be a problem and will continue to be so.

Everything about this smells bad. Im no historian and i have from time to time wondered how in the twentieth century the holocaust could have happened and what led to that. This game is a good lesson in understanding how it starts. The ones in power see a bright and wonderful future in which great wealth will be attracted and more wealth will be created. In this wonderful future world everything will be perfect and will be improved constantly by the careful control of the leadership. But there is one problem. The present community doesn't behave in the right way to fit with the vision. To solve this the present community must be moved to a special place so that they will not be easily seen by the important newcomers. The move will be facilitated. The most obviously inappropriate types of people will even be paid and helped to make this move. Eventually the money for moving people will run out. The smaller guys (like me) will then be forced to either change or leave or pay for ourselves to move. For example if i am gay i will have to either pretend not to be gay or i will have to pay money to move to the special gay area which will be made invisible to ordinary people. What is so horrifying about this vision is that it is exactly the vision prevalent in so much of Europe in the mid twentieth century and now discredited in RL. But apparently it is not discredited in SL.

It is almost exactly parallel to the build up to the second world war. The only real difference is that this is a game. However there is a side to this which is not a game too.
In this game we make real friends. Behind every avatar there is a real person. These people meet and talk in a way which is remarkably free.

If SL wasn't a game then the ending is clear. First they discriminate against the extreme cases, then the gays and the jews, then why not the blacks. Why not clear the mainland for white male caucasian people (like me) who always wear decent clothes and never talk about sex or alcohol. Then eventually they will need a special secret force to investigate every corner of their virtual world hunting out those people who still have whipping posts in the cellars or sex beds which simulate something more than the missionary position.

Maybe because it is a game all sex will be banned. Sex is a big problem for LL because it is vital that both LL and all of us who play in their SL game can protect ourselves from children. We all know that 'adult' side of this game is fun for adults and we also know that we don't want or need children (anyone under 1 to be here. It's vital for all our security that kids who are underage are very strongly discouraged from entering this world. And absolutely essential that adults like me have some reasonable line of defence if we are duped by a kid pretending to be over 18. Certainly from my personal point of view i want nothing to do with underage either in RL or in RP in SL. And i expect no reasonable member of our community does. Unfortunately we know, and so does LL, that any bright 13 year old has the resources and intelligence to verify through any number of the methods proposed by LL. So what is the protection?

There isn't any. And LL's new Ursula continent won't help. Imao it will make things way worse. The only way i can be sure that the people i meet here in SL really are over 18 in RL is by getting to know them: over time the people who stick around on my friend list are obviously over 18 (usually over 40) and that's clear as we share chat about our life experiences.

The ending won't be like the second world war. Probably the game will simply fold up and die. For me the priority is now to make sure the wonderful people i have met through SL will be able to keep in touch some other way. I have met some really remarkable people here and i don't want to lose that. But i think LL's approach to their problem with sex is a horrible mistake reminiscent of naziism and eugenics --- the awful mistakes of the twentieth century.

Hans.

Google uses contextual searches, which would be appropriate. Unfortunately, there is not lot of text in a search listing so it is hard to build context.

This has been suggested since the start of the first thread. The answer is it is "not part of their program goals" (ie, they have a solution and they don't care to hear about a better one).

[Psst .... lookup 'Godwin']

You'll notice that a lot of those who reference the events of last century are from central Europe. They've been down the road in real life and are sensitive to it ever occurring again.

I for one hope they never lose that sensitivity in real life, because guardians are always needed to sound the cautious alarm.

This is where SL demonstrates that while it may not be rl, it is certainly more than a game. Something that LL have never really been able to viscerally understand or even do more than tokenly acknowledge.

LL's detachment from their customers and their lack of understanding of the product they sell is amply demonstrated in this current mess and they *are* behaving more like an autocratic government rather than a company that wants to keep and expand its current userbase.

The holocaust happened because people refused to admit that Mike Godwin didn't invent Godwin's Law.

You had some really good points in the first half of your message, but Holy Mother of Interwebs you should have stopped the message at the end of the previous paragraph.

So under the filter, anyone with Blue tits, coal tits, great tits, crested tits, and Long tail tits,
will all have to fly off to Ursula. While we're on the subject of birds, Shag is a marine bird, a popular dance in the 50's but Having a shag, is UK slang for hetrosexual acts of naughtiness, as is Bang! " Had a really good bang last night" Banger is also slang for sausage, if your still confused.

Jockey's at race meets, can still give their horses head, but they won't be able to take a crop to their ass

Sega could also fall foul of filtering if non english, hits the books (oh there's another one, as I hit it last night, is sexually suggestive) it could be wrong but there was alot of humour at Arsenl football clubs expense, when they play football(soccer) with an italian team while sponsored by sega, as Sega is supposed to be an act a man does when they get sexually excited and have to give themselves a hand *coughs*

Doctors wanting to give advice of certain conditions will now have to refer to certain parts of the body as your ding a ling, or toot toot, or your naughty bits.

Ploughing a womans, valley can still be advertised as activities in adult clubs, as can mass humping, and flicking one off at the wrist,

Its all getting rather silly isn't it.

You can still slap a persons bottom, but you can't grab their ass, but its ok to kiss their donkey, or perhaps not, and your still able to compliment a woman for having a nice pair of mellons.

ohh further adition

Fanny is a old royal navy slang for mess kit, so will they be able to wash their fannies, after each meal or has that word been filtered as well..

yes very silly

Did they change the title of this thread?

Anyone else worried that the first list of flagged words was only a test list to see if the system is working and all the other words everyone has dug up as being adult but safe will suddenly be flagged as well?

I'm just waiting for the day when someone here decides wool-mart is a dirty word

Well it's only natural for every censorship system that the blacklist keeps growing uncontrollably.

Of course, the funny part is, that even though LL refuses to publish the list, people are supposed to make vital decisions about their businesses based on those words...

Thanks Argent, well i'll be the first to admit i am probably quite naive in this internet world but i have read up about Godwin's law now it is being drawn to my attention.

Still, glad that you thought there was some value to the first part of my scribbling.

Hans.

What is the purpose of this list anyway?
It seems to only consist of English words which is odd for a game that invites players internationally. Also why don't they publish it? I can't see any point in it being secret. To me it seems wrong.

Now im not going to draw any more analogies with nazis or hitler because i know all you wise people out there have warned me i am falling into a common trap: but c/mon LL isn't this about simple plain censorship?

Hans.

PS or maybe only English words have been tested. The list of words that are not flagged also seems to consist of mainly English words......

They are not publishing it because they plan on continuing the same lack of enforcement they have with the current policies. They are relying on technology to keep things in order.

And how will technology help them keep anything in order?

Hans.

Kara, thanks for the tip!!
Now i have to admit i feel a little bit silly.
But still, we live and learn.

It doesn't really alter the fact that LL is employing an aggressive censorship strategy which imao is doomed to fail.

Hans.

I learned along the discussion, that it is difficult, to compare LL's behavior with the Nazis. But often I did it too, for some reasons. And I pointed also on Maoism, Stalinism, Apartheid, etc. to be not too much one sided.

It is about the principles. Or about global common political techniques of ressentiment-management. They are everywhere the same. In case of LL it is maybe wise, to be an historical archeaologist in US-Americas own history of ressentiment-management wich they used along their short but even bloody history too: they are even experts in building ghettos, camps, reservations, slavery, killing masses of natives, blacks, attacks on specific lifestyles, torture (waterboarding and such) any sort of bigotary, censorship and oppression and even arbitrarily wars whenever a fitting chance seems to appear to start one.

So, after 4-6 weeks I learned to be careful in future to not walk again and again into the trap of this stupid so called "Godwin's law" - wich is stupid (Godwin's law), because the mechanisms of disrespect are everywhere the same and causing everywhere the same results, no matter in wich country or on wich continent or in wich culture. Think on conflicts in Africa with millions of dead bodies because of ressentiments. (Hutu/Tutsi conflict in Ruanda, for example, ~one million dead bodies) The only difference to all this crap is, that the Nazi's brought it to a kind of bureaucratical and industrial perfection in killing people. But the US can be shhhhh, because the light...(metaphoric) they brought to Nagasaki and Hiroshima is industrial perfection too: one flash and a city is done...this was effective...

So maybe try to point on their own history in creating ressentiments against whatever and whomever. Show them (LL) the mirror!

But back to business: what LL does, without any sensibility is, to plan a way to establish ressentiment-management into a customer driven and customer developed artificial way of life, based on many individual and cultural backgrounds and the most of them are more relaxed than the american management of LL. But LL takes SL serious. LL talks about the human condition in all old and also in the newest announcements. Mark Kingdon likes that word: human condition...it appears in nearly all of his newer announcements and blog entries.

We are in the year 2009. But mans history is older. The old greeks were not so prudish. And thousands of cultures were not so prudish.

The technics with wich we deal here are modern high tech instruments. But the moral wich LL is trying to install is older than old, or, if you like, newer than new, because along history I cannot recognize ad hoc in wich culture such strict restriction were established before. Beside all known taboo-zones of different cultures, we see here in SL now new dimensions of prudery in front.

LL talked at the beginning also about violence. But this is wiped from the table. Violence is ok for them. Guns and tanks and bombs are legal. Soldier avatars, full equiped with all murder-instruments of the world are ok for LL. The results too.

Any explosion cult too.

That is what they like: bang, boom, crash. Look how LL started to develope SL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C48Bpy0BwGA

Much shooting and bang, bang, bang - just to create landscapes or to deconstruct buildings.

This is typical...and stupid enough.

But never show them a nipple. Never! It makes them angry, sad, shocked and ill.

We are keeping a list on our independent wiki which people are updating as they test them. Yes we could be giving LL the list but the main aim is for people to make informed choices and to show just how stupid this list is getting