Private Sim Ownership Questions

I apologize if this is in the wrong forum or I have missed somewhere this was explained. A group of us are considering getting a private island. I understand that the island can only be owned by an individual (and I can understand why LL does not want to deal with group disputes). I also understand that there are certain functions that can only be accessed by the owner. As things are now, it seems the only option to allow multiple people to manage a sim is to make an alt solely for the purpose of owning islands - which of course leaves everyone having access to all functions, and puts the owner at risk of someone misusing the account. Am I missing another option for this? We would like to set it up so that the owner going out of town does not mean land cannot be managed. I realize 1.12 will bring changes to groups that improve land management, but it sounds like there are still issues that would force multiple people to have access to the owner account, like subdividing land under 1.12.

Can anyone who owns a private sim and/or has experimented with one on the preview grid advise me in this?

As a sim owner you can assign 'Estate Managers' that have almost all the powers of the owner of the sim, save for a few, which are not needed for the day to day management of the sim.

If you have other questions feel free to IM me ingame

I believe one of those powers is the ability to restart the sim which is a daily management tool. The other is the ability to save and impose RAW files which is not a daily need.

Do the new toold include group banking to the point that lindens can be billed from stated member accounts monthly and paid to the owner's account for ready conversion into tie^h^h^h the monthly payment? Now that will be cool.

There must be a single person responsible for paying the island fee, and they're listed as the owner of the island. However, you can deed the land on islands to groups for others to use.



You can simply deed the entire island to a group. Officers of the group will then have the same powers (like returning objects) that they would normally have on a mainland parcel they owned. The only difference is that there's no group tier cost and the owner can reclaim the land at any time ("reclaim" replaces the "abandon" land option).

You can also make them Estate Managers, which gives them the ability to alter region-wide settings such as changing terrain textures, banning people from the area, etc. It does not allow them to delete/return/terraform on parcels they don't own, though! (Not even the island Owner can do that - once a parcel is deeded to group, if the island Owner leaves the group it's treated as no longer their land - although they can reclaim it.) Yes, this is a pest for island Owners who may have already been leaving head-shaped imprints on the 15 group ceiling..

The only things an Owner can do that an Estate Manager can't are a) choosing other Estate Managers, and b) uploading and downloading raw terrain.

Get an island with your friends, it's fun.

What does regularly restarting the sim achieve?

As Dnel said: The owner of a sim (there can be only one in his or her RL identity) can designate other residents as Estate Managers. Estate Managers have nearly all powers the owner has.

The only relevant exception is, that an Estate Manager can not uploads and downloads of terrain RAWs.

@Yumi: Restarting the sim (which any Estate Manager can do) is usually the first attempt to cure heavy lag on a sim. (Old sysadmin saying: A little reboot once in a while can do wonders.)

Ah, okay.. I must admit I find that button really, really scary. I wish we could checkpoint and revert a whole sim's contents, like you can with land (but I suppose that would take far too much disk space at LL..)

Heh. I mean one of the first things I did when I got a sim was "mash the button" ie restart the sim. So anybody you let become an estate manager is gonna want to mash the button....but once they have done it and got it out of their system it should all be good.

Making the island group land with autoreturn on is wonderful, people can't leave trash and nobody can secretly build sky castles that suck down your prim count.

Actually, regularly restarting an island sim isn't that smart. They don't always come up after a restart, in which case a gridmonkey has to do it manually. What this can achieve is to piss off LL if you make a habit of it.

Saying that, it's a handy tool in problem situations if all else fails.

Thank you all for your replies. It sounds like the best option is to make an alt to hold the island then. It will still be one person's billing and such, but that's fine and it allows for all island functions to be available to a trusted backup. It sounds like several people could be given estate manager permissions, and then just have a backup person or two on the holding account. I've run into a situation with a friend of mine where the island owner is not available for a few weeks, so no land on the sim can be rented during this time, because the owner needs to redeed it. That's not a situation in which I want to leave people.

Restarting a sim daily is totally useless and shouldn't be done.

In the help for "Restart Region" it states quite clearly "Restarting the sim does not fix most performance issues and should usually be used only when directed". I think the restarted process isn't even guaranteed to come back up on the same server so it's possible you might even end up in a worse position than you started in.

Wait until next Wednesday - V1.12 I think is adding a lot of things related to this.

Restarting a sim actually fixed some performance problems twice in the last week for us. Doing it "daily" does not make much sense.

So far (through maybe a few dozen restarts for different reasons in the last four months) I have never experienced the case where a sim did not come up again ... Can anybody tell me from personal experience, when and how this happened?

It is not a question of disk space but of integrity. A sim is not island (pun intended).

Just imagine someone buying a lot of expensive (transferrable) stuff, bringing it to a private sim and setting a checkpoint. Now this someone sets all this stuff for sale at half its original price. Should sell well!

After everything is sold, the sim is rolled back to the checkpoint ...

Rollbacks only make sense for the grid as a whole. And - as the grid is connected to the web at large through several shops and the LindeX - even this is complicated or impossible in most cases without infringing on someones rights.