Upcoming Changes for Adult Content: Geographical Separation of Adult Content

its easy to see what's going on... there is too much sex stuff.

they don't want to stop it, just thin it out... so forcing people to move will make some people quit, thereby thinning it out... they don't want to say they kicked people out, thats bad... they can just making it so damn bad for the people that they quit, then say "not our fault, they just decided to quit." the ones that didnt quit in the move will probably quit later when they force so much sex places to be in a small area on low end servers that its so laggy and unusable no one wants to go... so they'll easily get rid of 75% of the sex stuff without looking like the bad guys.


anyways, I dont really mind being in a pornoville... IF they keep it non-laggy and dont make it second rate... and IF they give me equal size, and closely similar shaped land for free over there with no added cost for moving... even if they don't move my builds over for me and i have to move it myself.. thats ok... as long as i'm not going to be out money trying to sell worthless land to buy extremely overpriced land in a new spot, just so i can do the same thing I've done for years that is now being deemed bad...

*laughs till she passes out, reads again, repeat*
I'm with you on this but it ain't gonna happen. I enjoy adult stuff and likly will get moved. I'll lose my corner flat/water tropical mature plot that boarders a linden void sim that cost me alot of money to get a sub par newbie hill side plot I am sure.

Is any linden willing to speak up how they are gonna concern themselves with relocating us. Is it going to be with care and investment in mind or are we gonna be forced into something we might not like?

I'm sorry, but I just don't buy that there is some epidemic of good, clean people accidently landing in adult areas. In fact, my guess is that the number of complaints of this to LL is roughly equal to the number of people who were caught by spouses/signifcant others in those naughty places - "I didn't mean to go there, I swear! Someone needs to fix this gosh-darn teleporting system!"

No, all the euphemisms about these censorship plans being to "improve Second Life for everyone" smack of being nothing more than a top-down directive to curtail some of the negative press SL gets about its adult activities. Its simply poor business though, as its demonstrated that activity numbers jump everytime one of these "scandals" airs.

If you want to put a good corporate face to SL, then create a G-rated environment as an option for those that truly never want to see mature content. It won't ever be a huge area, but certainly is a niche you can fill, and "clean" people can feel at home.

My suggestion is simply to eliminate the "PG" designation, since in a supposedly 18+ world, "Parental Guidance" is a silly idea. Convert the current checkboard of PG/M sims all to Mature. Make your new "G" continent, so that the content is contiguous between regions there. I'd abandon any talk of instituting an "adult" flag, because having read the FAQ, you all have no clue how to even define "adult" in a way that is consistent with your intentions or the desires of the thousands of adults who are on the grid.

The question isn't whether it's a good idea.

Linden Lab needs to have a "safe place" from mature content to get the corporations and non-profits into Second Life. The corporate and non-profit money is valuable, and more important, leads to good press.

Linden Lab can't afford to drive away the adult content crowd. Not only do they contribute significant revenue (land sales and tier), but they drive the high numbers of users that Linden Lab likes to tout.

The big problem is that Linden Lab didn't implement this from the beginning. The adult content is everywhere now. It's going to be hard to unring that bell.

Developing the actual standards really isn't the hard task, in my opinion. To figure out what the standards should be, start by asking yourself the question: What would I not want my boss to see on my computer at work? We could probably find a lot of consensus answering that question.

The problem is going to be the implementation and enforcement, and that's where we should be pressing Linden Lab for answers. If they couldn't enforce the current low standards, how will they enforce more stringent standards? How draconian are they going to be in dealing with the grey areas? How much money are the residents who invested in adult material going to lose?

I really think we are over-worrying about the content of the actual standards. Especially since I have a hunch that Linden Lab already has decided what the standards are, and asking opinions is a mere customer relations move. The real issue is how are they going to enforce the standards, and who is going to bear the costs of enforcement?

I don't think anybody sane is really arguing with that. It's mostly over how it'll be implemented.

I don't understand.. Linden Labs.. you want to move hundreds of businesses .. force them to move becasue they sell a skin shown nude?? .. wow.. i know this has been mentioned previously.. but why not just create a PG contient and tell all who are offened by so called *adult material* to move? Not only does this sound simplier, but much more logical.

I personally do not want a "Leave it to Beaver" SL. I am not fond of a lot of the *adult content* in sl.. but hey guess what.. i just don't TP to it .. (brillant huh?)

Well..I feel sorry for the people on mainland who will have to move, imagine 4 sexclubs on a mainland sim with 40 avis limit on it.

But my questions is, we have private estates all flagged mature, only residential with public places which also content adult poseballs.

If we keep our estate "mature" can only residents with a verified account go there and if so..what will be with the many residents we have now, who are not verified and dont want to be verified.

I am on a very, very special sim, with 3 ocean sims bordering it. I make the most of the location, capitalizing on the gorgeous views, and the fact that the water is navigable.

How will this transition take place, and what will guarantee that the land location will be of the same quality as current?

In addition, the 12409 prims I have out, I certainly hope would not have to be moved manually.

I agree with all who have said that this is a completely wrongheaded proposal, and that instead new land should not allow adult content.

Anjelie

It looks like everyone had better get used to the idea of age verification and having the really fringe and extreme content segregated. I don't believe this spells the end of SL or anything like that ... that kind of drama and hyperbole is wasted on me. Times change and we either change with them or become extinct. I'll be around SL for a long time to come and I look forward to this change because it means if I "want" to experience the fringe side of SL it'll be there for me (yes I'm age verified and payment info used) but in my day-to-day experience in SL I won't need to be accosted by it out of the blue. Win-Win!

*sighs* You know there was another group who tried to move people who were different in to an area where they wouldn't be seen or heard. These people were called nazis. The place where they moved people to were concentration camps.

This whole snafu is reminding me of just that. You see when you force adult merchants, art galleries (you mentioned adult pictures), and folks who enjoy "adult" content to move to this new continent. You are opening up a can of worms. I have a profitable business in SL. I just moved because the sim I was on was laggy and LL's only response to my pleas for help was for me to "buy an island" I said I had a profitable business... Not that I was rich! So, I moved to another sim and bought the same amount of land.

I DO NOT WANT TO HAVE TO MOVE AGAIN!!!

I do not want to have to pay again for land in some other region because LL's thinks this is a good idea.

My idea. Turn all mainland M sims to adult verified only. And leave us all alone. If that's what you need. If SL is an 18+ game then why all of these mandates. Why not just have a common area. Little place the Lindens create. Make a little amusement park, some rides, and populate it with clowns and people in mouse costumes and then let the n00bs hang out there?

Why uproot, upset, and torment members who make up a good portion of your user base. Sure you might get new users. But more then probably these new users are bots. *laughs* There's more bots then people in SL. Why not just put all these "wonderful" restrictions on the n00bs. In the "official" guide to SL "escort" is listed as a great profession in SL. *laughs* So, why even have a "teen" grid. Why have any of that. Why not just say... Hey, you're not 18 yet... Sorry, you can't join. Why even bother with a teen grid, and then why bother mergining the grids. I had friends (no names) who snuck off the teen grid. I don't know how, I never asked. But they can already get in here. So, who cares?!


Or what we have to ask ourselves now... Did someone file a lawsuit against LL's about seeing a penis and it gave them trauma. I say if people don't have thick skin, a sense of humor, or just can't take the sight of a penis... Then they don't have any place in SL or the Real World for that matter.

Even in the real world... You're going to see and hear things you don't want to hear. It's a part of life. But when LL's puts restrictions on old members in favor of all the "new blood" that's just cutting your own throat. I would rather quit SL all together then to have to move my shop again. I won't do it. SL isn't worth all this hassle and your sims will become ghost towns with all the people who think like I do. That they'd rather leave. So, you'll have new people, but you'll lose a good amount of the old people. And once the old people spread the word on how bad SL is now and how it used to be... You might not have many new people either. Except for those curious to see how bad it is.

*shakes head* Thanks for listening, but as I see more resident comments then LL employee comments I doubt anyone is really listening. More glancing then reading.

As a mainland sim owner (well, all but 2048 of my sim, anyway), I run a mixed use sim. We have shopping, everything from a 5 linden store to couture and punk wear, we have art galleries, we have fishing and a cutting garden for plants, and yes, we have a large BDSM club. My understanding is that my BDSM club would have to move, but not my other enterprises. I do NOT want to sell off part of my land in order to move, I've worked HARD over the past year to ACQUIRE the sim I am in, up to and including purchasing a large portion of it at auction at greatly inflated prices. I am NOT interested in purchasing MORE land in another sim to maintain my "adult" facilities seperate from my other enterprises, thereby driving me into a whole other tier range. Does my entire mixed use sim pick up and move to the adult areas, thereby greatly reducing the number of poential visitors to my stores, or do we simply close an 18 month old club with over 4000 members? Is there no way to simply flag a PARCEL within a sim as Adult?

/me looks at her bingo card.

Has anybody shouted 'class action' or 'bait & switch' yet??

Someone got Godwinned earlier but I'm not sure it was a leigitmate claim, that one was!

After being a member for something like 4 years (other AV's), I essentially stopped paying tier and left SL for about a year and a half, because idiocy like this new "censorship" policy. Still no answer on whether people with adult content/business are going to be forced to pick up everything they've made and literally invested in to move somewhere else? What are the consequences if they don't?

It's the tyranny of the minority.

There are some constructive suggestions others have mentioned:

Creating a PG continent. Not the other way around. I see this suggested about fifty times in this thread. Any response to this? Even a, "Hmmm...we'll think about it and get back to you." it seems pretty reasonable. Why wouldn't you do it that way?

The same goes for people's worries about how they'll be reimbursed for their land/moved/resettled? Once again, not hard to just give an answer or say,"We're working on it."

Have people tag themselves in their profile so they don't need to be "subjected" to adult content.

I tongue-in-cheek recommend creating a PG continent that consists of absolutely flat land with only the default avatars allowed and perhaps the creating/buying/selling of plain wooden boxes. No unicorns as their meaning can be misconstrued.

That said, I still appreciate many LL employees hard work, I just don't like management's oftentimes ill-considered fiats.

In reality, I think that if LL has to implement this new policy, don't make people move, have very few to no consequences and zero enforcement. Roll out your policy, announce it with great fanfare and actually change nothing. All talk and no action is the key. That way you get the best of both worlds; a PR talking point to the puritanical minority and letting people live their SL's as they see fit.

Good point ... there has to be a land SWAP, not a forced relocation at market prices.

Perhaps make TWO new small continents, one squeaky clean and the other feelthy dirty. With a few land swaps and consolidations to free up some of the empty sims to move to the new continents, you should be able to get the Disneylandians all moved out of the vile mainland and perhaps some of the more bizarre sex clubs out of the "M" areas.

Anyone who stays apparently isn't bothered by the mix.

Certainly an understandable move (although I doubt that sexual content is the ONLY thing keeping businesses away from SL and other social networks). Understandable, but, LL already is not doing an effective job of policing content and handling issues like ad farming, publicly accessible user profiles that don't meet content standards, etc. The main grid is already so big and so complex that they can't control what's there. Which is why the proposal of a restricted area that could be more effectively LL policed (AND user policed, since people would be voluntarily moving there specifically BECAUSE they wanted an adult-content-free environ) is so much more resource-friendly, and implementable, than the current proposal is. You could have a much higher likelihood of being able to walk your bosses around the content-restricted sims without incident since they would be proudly owned and lovingly built by people who wanted to be there. Run it as a test area; if there really are numerous complaints and high consumer demand for adult-content-free areas, they will quickly fill up and become popular and might in fact become quite a profitable and positive enterprise for LL which could be expanded and grown if indeed it proves successful. Meanwhile, users on the other parts of the grid are equally satisfied at having not been moved and disrupted. Win/win!

Amen, Shockwave: no offense to Blondin, but if I was his/her supervisor I'd be in his/her office saying SHUT UP OMG SHUT UP SHUT UP. Things are being posted by Blondin that are in direct contradiction (IMO) to the current TOS and FAQ on the website. Which should we believe?

I got through page 5...and i had to stop and post, because some questions really hit me....

I own 66% of a sim, and am always working on more. I run a gorean marketplace, which of course would be placed under these terms of "adult". which would eliminate those people who come to browse, because of the furniture itself....

#1 - would i have to buy on the adult sim, or would i get moved over?

#2 - would my land get moved over same shape, or would i have to totally rebuild?

#3 - would the lindens move it, or would I? trying to move practically a whole sim over would not be fun.

#4 - what will be done about the increase of scripts? Yes, there's a variety of people on a sim now. Homes, clubs, and businesses. Technically, it spreads the scripts/etc out, where some of the parcels use more, because of the nature of the business/setup...if it's a home that uses a lot of BDSM equipment, same thing. Now...lump these together in one sim, you now have clubs/etc that are used to alts/bots, and the scripts that run their businesses/etc increased.

#5 - what will be done about the advertising/etc...right now, i have a certain placement/etc, when a place moves...it can take a WHILE to build back up. so we are talking about a loss of time, to move, a loss of time to seperate out areas...so the move has the potential to really mess with the finances of the people, not only splitting up adult/non-adult items, splurge shopping, and also in terms of where to set up, having to maintain 2 shops (in my case, at least)...so, now we have been cut in customer base, but not in expectation of the LL for us to continue to pay for the same amount of land.

funny, I always thought "mature" DID mean "adult". perhaps we need "family", then "pg" then "mature"...leave it the same as it was, and add to the bottom, instead of the top?

The definition of explicitly sexual content in the FAQ includes public nudity, and I haven't seen anything here to the contrary.

Well, if that's where L chooses to draw the line, then I can easily see chunks of virtually every M sim on the mainland being abandoned. Because the distinction UP TO NOW between PG and M has been pretty much "PG means you keep your pants on in public".

/me adds a poll on moving existing adult stuff to the new continent vs leaving it open to PG people at .

If someone has to buy new land and sell the land they currently have... land that is now less valuable than it was before... then people will be forced to delete content.

And making people teleport from one sim to another, instead of teleporting from ground level to 4096 meters, is definitely forcing a change in people's behaviour. Particularly on weekends.

I've asked about the definition of Adult content in the other thread. So here I'll just ask this: is Linden Labs going to subsidize people's moves?

Just in case you missed it, from the definitions thread:

Of course, NONE of this would be the least bit necessary if residents simply had the ability to define one or more specific volume of space, be it their bedroom, their parcel, or their outdoor sex park, anywhere in the buildable space of their parcel, or encompassing teh entire parcel, such that NO ONE who is not on an "approved access list" or "Approved access group" or even "Age verified" could in any way see or interact with the content of that volume of space, without being permitted inside that area. And you can't enter that enclosed volume unless you're an approved individual, or in the approved group(s), or perhaps "age verified"

If a closed door on someone's sex club or bedroom or kinky sex dungeon would actually prevent strangers from camming in or otherwise intruding, if all a stranger could see was a black cube or an empty space in that area, then none of this would be an issue.

Who cares if you have a bordello next door, if it's all indoors and the walls are soundproof and opaque from the outside? Who cares if their neighbor has a kinky sex toy in their bedroom, IF YOU CAN"T SEE IT WITHOUT BEING INVITED TO DO SO?

Oh, and guess what? The idea would also appeal to Corporate clients, who could finally have a secure meeting room without having to buy an entire private Island sim and lock it down as non-Public.

I am with Shockwave! What a load of old codswallop! Confine the children! Not the grownups! Ghettoize the infants! Put up a big chainlink fence & keep them inside it. Code so that no unverified person can even enter a Mature sim. That is the solution.

It's idiocy. Sheer idiocy. I wonder if the Lindens even have a clue how much of their revenue derives from the activities they now plan to wrinkle their noses at. Well, it they implement these changes, as stated, they will soon discover it... right off the bottom line. And it WILL hurt.