Upcoming Changes for Adult Content: Geographical Separation of Adult Content

another thought on the geographical separation that I don't seem to recall being addressed...

what about clearly non-private areas with build/rez enabled? they might not be listed in search but might not fall under private either.

Right now anybody with a sex wallet, ring or other wearable that rezzes pose balls, or heck they might have a set of pose balls themselves could rez and go at it in plain view? Some of those items even have more 'extreme' animations built in.

Empty sim, pretty place, object worn that rezzes pose balls... those items have to exist for a reason and it's not so that they can use them in their home with a bed right there. How is it gonna work when the landowner who allows build suddenly gets AR'd by some 'offended' person for some random people rezzing naughty poses and goin at it on their land?

Or the landowners who have build but not auto-return and then may not be able to log for some time? They might not even be aware that something that breaks these new rules is on their land, but will the object simply be removed, the landowner warned, the object owner warned?

These are just some concerns that simply relocating the businesses won't solve....

As a landlord, if my tenant is running an adult business do I get a free parcel swap on their behalf?

Feeling pretty sick about these changes that are plainly going to happen whether we want them to or not, I slept on the whole question of WHY they didn't simply decide to create a G Continent — because for all of yesterday it simply made no sense. I think I have the answer.

It is really all being driven by the desire to get the U.S. colleges into SL, including the conservative Southern born again colleges. It is not so much about other businesses. It is the U.S. colleges that are driving this. Suppose they created a G Continent of sanitized builds and next to no shopping. Then they would have to say to the colleges "Hey come in to Sl and you can safely enjoy 2% of the total grid. But you can't safely go into the other 98%." A public relations disaster.

But if they sanitize all of the mature builds and sims and then move the edgy stuff to a distant ghetto they can say to the colleges, "Come in and enjoy 98% of SL. Shop, pray, hell, do whatever your Disnyfied, priggish little hearts desire — and the other 2% you need never encounter and don't even need to know what goes on there." And all the colleges say, "Thank you, now it is safe for us to bring our tender little charges into SL".

The trouble with this scenario is that it relies on US, the people who built and made and create within SL, NOT all simply moving to the Adult areas and getting on with our lives, leaving the PG/Mature (and what a joke that term has become!) sims to turn into pixellated ghost towns of crummy builds and non-creative loiterers. When everything becomes Adult then SL will wish they had simply created a G continent to begin with. Because with this move they have created so much ill-will in the creative community (and let's face it 98% of SL is creative sexual role play) that I suspect this is the beginning of the end for LL.

I don't agree with the US bashing here, these servers are located in the US and have been allowing pixellated jollies for quite some time, whilst there are some puritanical Americans, there are also people with puritanical attitudes in Europe too.

This isn't about puritans in America at all, what it's about still hasn't been made absolutely clear but I strongly suspect it's stage one of merging the grids and despite LL's denials, it's one of the only reasons that makes an adult continent a more sensible idea than a G-rated continent and personally I still think they should go for an adult continent and no adult content at all continent because that provides real choice.

They also need to look at moving PG sims to a continent of their own, maybe that is a solution too although it would have the same annoying factor of making people move, having a PG parcel next to a mature parcel makes your PG status meaningless.

1 User totally agrees here and i think with LL dropping this as a bombshell it causes the smokescreen they require and takes the heat away from the obvious planning to merge the teen grid with this grid. But with all the confusion and replies it has generated the facts get lost

I'm sort of curious why they are doing this with such a half measure. If LL finally wants to start doing some sort of zoning management with the mainland after not bothering for all these years, why not do it right? Lord knows even if this works, some people are not going to want their PG sims bordering on Mature sims. Why not entire continents for each 'rating'.
A pg continent, a 'mature' continent and an 'adult' continent, maybe even going further and zoning the continents for commercial and residential(I suppose for sl there would have to be new classifications devised:Residential, Commercial, Entertainment, RP ect?). Put in the time and hard work, let people sign up and go down the queue swapping parcels m3 for m3. Yes, it would be a huge PITA and a lot of work, but I suspect it would save alot of work in the future.

That's just ridiculous. Yes they want educationals, but they can be placed on their own areas, where they can control who is there and what goes on. Besides, colleges will never bring in the kind of coin LL is after. The santization sweep is to pave the way for the big brand companies to return. They know we won't buy any inworld items they try to sell.They want to ue SL as the place to market and sell their RL garbage to us. Perhpas even on XStreet. Why were adfarmers cleared out in the past year? Not becuase we asked for it, LL doesn't care what we want. That ad space will be sold to a new group of people, who will pay infinitely more than any adfarmer's tier. Expect to see the newe ad spam at a mainland sim near you. Who knows, maybe even tailor made for you. Thanks to data mining aka identity verification, LL's advertisers will be able to target all sorts of ads for you as you move from sim to sim, or maybe in your viewer, or chat/IM window.

I do also agree a Grid merge is the plan, no matter what they say. teens are big tagets of marketers, and some entire families will come into SL, maximizing the marketing potential.

I understand the line of thinking in a broad sense. Sure we don't want someone who is patently offended by certain whatever to stumble across it accidentaly. Maybe this LL plan is or is not the best way to deal with it, plenty of discussions going on here reguarding those merits. One thing I wonder about though is how it does not appear that any thought has been given to the fact that a majority of the people that bought Mature land to begin with would in fact want to move to the 'New Really Mature' land. People bought Mature for the most part because it is the least restricted land. They may not want to put up an escort operation today, but many people buy based on the fact that if they ever wanted to, they are not restricted from doing so.

What you will end up with in in Gomorrah (please oh please can we name the new continent that!!) is an exact copy of what you already have in the mainland with the exception of there will not be any PG sims.

Example:
Jimmy the TV seller will want to buy and set up in Gomorrah because while 96% of his items are not 'sinful' he does have a couple of systems that allow you to purchase explicit movies and he has those on display in his store in a seperate well labeled area. He still feels that to avoid issues and to be in compliance...Gomorrah is the best option in land for him. Besides that Jimmy also knows 40% of his total sales come from his explicit systems, so he needs to be looking ahead for a time when he might want to convert his store over to explicit systems only.

The overall effect of people buying the most unrestricted land available wheather they actually need to make use of the total unrestrictedness of it at the time or not will result in a majority of landowners, buisneses, and people, basing themselves in Gomorrah. Then, if I want to find the best primshoes I have to turn on the 'search Gomorrah also ' option because it just so happens that the shoes I want are made by someone who also makes other great sculpted avatar attachments (yes I am talking about bodyparts). So you still have the same exact thing you have now.. if someone wants to find something of use for the most part... they have to have 'enable mature' clicked in search because most noteable vendors are in mature regions and those vendors chose to be in a mature region for a reason.. the same reasons that if you offer some 'extra mature' land they will choose it. People don't always choose mature land for the explicit reasons of needing it, they choose it because it is the most unrestricted option available.

Those easily offended people will still not like SL, because just like now if you say to them, stay in PG if you don't want to see X things, the problem is - some of the things they WANT to see are only in mature regions and that means they have to venture out and possibly see 'bad stuff' too.

LL I really think you are misidentifying the root problem here. The problem is that PG is not where the majority of users want to be, and that is different than saying the majority of users want to see or be involved in overtly explicit materials or activities. Your problem is how to make PG areas more desirable, it is how to you convince Jimmy the TV salesguy that it would be profitable for him to open a branch of his store in a PG area and sell only his non explicit systems there, how do you convince that sculptiemaker to open up a branch shop in the PG area and only sell the shoes they make in it and not the bodyparts.

As long as the offerings in PG areas are sparse it will always be a problem of those easily offended people having to click that extra unrestricted option if they want to experiance the richness that SL offers.

I sell alot of adult oriented items. I also have some items that are popular that would not be considered explicitly adult. It however would not be profitable for me to open up a shop in a PG area selling only those items in it. I have never gotten a single request of -
*DingDing* 'Hi I saw an item of yours in a PG area I was in earlier, I would like to purchase it, but I see from your ad that your store also has explicit items in it and is in a mature region. I prefer not to see these things, is there any way you could sell me that item I liked directly so that I don't have to come into your store to buy it?'
I don't ever get that request because that is not what the user base of SL is like. You can however belive if I start getting that request a few times, I will start looking at opening a non-explicit branch of my shop in a PG area.

When it comes down to it SL is used by the same people that use the internet, and there are very few things on the internet that people will pay for, and we all know what one of the primary things people will pay for on the internet is. PG is fine and good for those that want it, but the last time I looked, Facebook can't even sell adspace at a penny a click with success.

Corps and educational entities do not want to pay for internet either.. not like you are thinking they will. Corps want cheap effective adspace, they do not want to set up a second 'website'(sim) that can only accomodate 40 people at a time. They already have a website that can have hundreds of people at a time on it. They don't want to 'roleplay' a meeting with a quirky, new, and unstable program. They already have live videoconferancing worldwide and can tell when the sales manager in Toledo is lying to them because they can see it on his face. Educational facilities want to run their own servers, their own IT, their own java chat controlled easily moderated webclasses that can accomodate more than 40 people, that can be connected to and used by PCs with even extremely low system specs.

Rolling the teen grid in... the overall majority of SL users don't want teens on the maingrid, don't want them having the abilty to come into their stores their land or anywhere near them for that matter. I am not saying teens are bad or wont spend money or anything of the sort, just saying a huge majority of current users don't want them. Wheather that is a valid way to feel or not I am not discussing or expressing a view on.

Rolling the TG into the maingrid when most current users don't want them is then a way to increase the overall appeal of SL in order to bring in a different kind of user. That somehow seems a little... well... exploitive of teens. What is that ad campaign going to look like - !!!SecondLife.. NOW WITH TEENS!!!

Those opionins on the Corp, Educational and TeenGrid rumors aside, I still think that Gomorrah will end up no different than what you pretty much already have. Simple fact of the matter is.. if offered three choices - Highly Restricted Land, Semi Restricted Land, or Non Restricted Land. Most adults that play SL or are interested in it are going to choose and use Non Restricted land.

I think we'd get a good feel for how accurate that 2-4 number is if they would tell us if the other 96-98% included stuff like Linden roads, ocean sims and help islands.

All I can say is that your account is just silly, and, since you like the word, ridiculous — there is no reason to think that big companies are being offered any kind of deal at all. There is no evidence for this whatsoever. There will be no teen grid merger either, for the simple reason that the legal liabilities will be too heavy. But there are already colleges that are being warned by their lawyers that the students who are brought here better not see anything that their parents might object to. Because it is the colleges that will be sued. And the college lawyers are passing this message on to LL management. This is known from other threads here.

This is all about reducing liability — not increasing it. SL is being sanitized not for corporations, but because students are being invited in and are then left to wander about. What they see has to be predictably bland and non-sexual. (That is why the word 'predictable' keeps getting thrown about by the Lindens.)

The key point you miss is that Gomorrah will only be accessible by verified/PIOF accounts and so only some 10% of SL residents will be able to go there.

You'll /have/ to open a store in PG land because there won't be enough people capable of visiting the new ghetto to form a viable customer base.

(Originally Posted by Aeon Snook
Well, not necessarily.

This first wave of political correctness targets only mature content merchants and event providers i.e. those who wish to advertise. So in fact Jizztown could to some extent end up as 16 sq.m. parcels with answering services, inviting guests to drop by their Mainland (M) private home for a bit of mature attention, which according to the LL would still be entirely legal.

Can you imagine trying to police that?
)
.......................................

I already started doing this 2 days ago when this broke. my main main account is buying lots left and right, I LOVE those 16sqm.
adapt or die

A Ghetto is exactly what this is going to turn into! I suppose now LL is in the business of becoming a totalitarian state concerned with regulating and separating portions of the populace it feels are "offensive" or "inappropriate". More and more the mainland is going to feel like living in the Union of Soviet Socialist Lindens... I'm going to need to start buying red flags.

I think this is a key part of the strategy to make sure everyone doesn't just go Adult: make verifying an account a little invasive and you will stop a large portion of SL from being willing to do it. That is the only way of preventing the Mature regions from collapsing altogether. But the problem is: the non verified people have very little reason to be here at all then. Sure, they can dance at the Apollo Gardens, but then what?

Nope, this is all just suicide on LL's part.

The Teen grid will merge with the main grid its just a matter of time a lot of Lindens are fully in support of it and if you do a bit of research you will see the facts as stated by LL, some people just cant see the woods for the trees lol

PS: I am that sure the 2 grids (Teen and SL) will merge that i will pay to a RL charity of your choice if the grids do not merge within 24 months 50,000L$ if they do merge you will pay the same sum to a RL charity of my choice let me know if u accept the bet and i will arrange an exchange of details with you

THIS!

I think there will be more people than 10% willing to go at least PIOF, and they mentioned there may even be other options besides that and the IDverif. There is a large percentage of N-PIOF accounts that are alts of a PIOF account and get their funds from that account. It won't be any big deal for most of these people to PIOF their alts, they just haven't because they haven't needed to.

If there is some kinky adult material around.. enough people will do what they need to do to access it to make it viable. That has been the story since the dawn of man.

I'll give it some thought! I am pretty sure that it won't happen in that time frame, that it could only happen when the risks are lower than the rewards. (What would those rewards be btw? — no one has mentioned one yet.) So I think you are wrong, but maybe I am just being too optimistic!

So yes, in a few days i will decide whether this will be a bet worth taking!

(So much for gambling having been made illegal!)

Ahh, but of course, that does indeed make perfect sense..!

So in the ultimate marketing exercise, "The 2nd-Class Citizens" i.e.

Mainland homeowners (PG)
Mainland homeowners (Adult)
Mainland Adult providers

would obviously be so much easier to pinpoint and address by marketers for maximum effect.

And the VIP-class Citizens, as in Private Island Owners (and their tenants) might already be paying for the privilege not to be approached by means of their higher tiers.

This is utter nonsense! All the adults in SL have to rearrange their lives to cater to, what surely must be, a prudish minority. It would be easier to set up a continent for those that don't like SL as it is. Forcing residents to pack up, sell their land (at a loss), buy new land and set up their homes and businesses again is unreasonable. If Linden Labs pulls this off then I'm out of here.

That's kind of what they originally had.

And all those students wandering about are potential customers of Nike, McDonald's,Toyota, etc. How do you think LL will keep the prim lights burning, through honorariums?

Being silly and ridiculous is what SL is all about for me. That's why the changes coming are not ones that I like seeing.

I suspect they will have to allow more than 5 avatars on a single payment information to make that work. I know roleplayers with two or three dozen accounts. Though many of them would be able to reduce those to five if they could merge their inventories and edit their avatar names.

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-4867
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-151
...

I doubt I'm the only one, but where one of my two adult places are has nearly 3800 meters of donated to group land. If I am forced to move I will either a) Lose this AND the 800 or so prims that come with this, (likely effectively killing the place, 800 prims to shave will have an enormous impact) or b) Have to HOPE wherever I move has land available, and round up all 9 land donors, doing it all over again, costing me even MORE money for the land, and time and hassle for the donors.

The other place, well, some of it isn't even mine, it was built for me and the maker didn't seem to find the time to sell it all to me. Does LL have plans to be able to move a place made of thousands of items in one piece, regardless of the ownership of the items? If not, I will have to replace those unowned items, AGAIN costing me money.

This whole idea was thought of much much too late unless LL has plans to compensate people for their individual concerns.

Jill Winger, Cumfor't Zone and Stepford owner

LOL then drop me a notecard in game and post the answer here. I have just based this on many months forecasting what is going to happen next as thats a hobby of mine, remnants of recently ended Military career, where it was part of my daily life there, old habits die hard for me.

LL is aware that there are under age people on the grid and yes they move them 99% of the time when they know, i say 99% as i do know of one lad who was a contributor to these forums and a great coder and mature 17 year old, he sadly died just after he reached 18 though. I think personally a lot of teens do act a lot more mature than some adults here i feel at times. Also maybe the teens don't want to come here with all us stuffy older folks and they will have their own riots.

So i feel that if certain measures are taken by LL then they will merge sooner rather than later, in fact somewhere in the forums a couple of months ago i posted comments from Blue Linden on this subject from a blog/Twitter type thing he participated in, he is a keen supporter for it.

Personally as i run an adult business both in SL and in RL i think controls are needed i just hate the way LL treats us all like idiots as there are some very intelligent people that inhabit SL with far more brains than at LL, but they never seek real customer contact with these matters but just pay lip service to us all lol This should have been done long ago and not now when the population is so large. Trouble is SL develops on the fly and LL has a forecasting department that frankly can't see further than the coffee machine in the office and the past track records of some of the suits when you read about them well lets say some would be better engaged flipping burgers

Over the years LL have made some monumental screw ups, people leave and people adapt and the die hards like me and many others just continue as LL has us over a barrel as it is the best game out there at present and they know that and i have a lot of good friends here from over the years.

Its just a shame they don't listen to the customers but SL is not the same place of the past when you saw Lindens and they had time time for you, when a busy night on the grid was a couple of thousand, but growth is good and change can be good, just a shame LL suits don't know how to introduce change in a manner that engages us all, instead of pitting people against people.

On the gambling we will just have to be quiet then we may not get a ban lol