sim management software/script

Did someone get up on the wrong side of their bed this morning? An uncalled for remark towards someone expressing their opinion in the 'Resident Answers' forum.

I agree that making a direct relation to a well known real life situation is more effective when attempting to convey a idea. I think your analogy is a bit flawed though.

In the real world, those that have to pay property taxes pay it to their government. In SL, the taxes, otherwise known as tier, are paid to our SL government, Linden Lab. I can not think of a situation in RL where an owner is forced to pay their taxes to a third party, who then pays the government. A RL situation that closely resembles this is one between a landlord and a tenant. The landlord charges the tenant more than the taxes (tier) and ideally makes a profit. That is why the landlord must charge more than the government (LL) to make a profit. I can not think of a RL land situation in which a buyer pays the actual cost of the land AND pays all of the fees associated with the expenses PLUS a profit to the original seller. Can you?



I can show you where you can stick your huddle, another totally uncalled for remark. Once again this is the 'Resident Answers' forum, we are ALL entitled to our opinions.

I would suggest you read Impostor's reply in this thread. He brings up some valid points about trust in your SL landlord. In SL anyone who 'sells' you land in their private estate can reclaim it, at anytime, for any or no reason at all. Can you think of a RL sale of any product where this can occur? In RL if someone sells you something, you pay in full, then they take it back for no reason, it is called theft. In SL this is completely acceptable in LL's eyes.

Desmond, I know your well respected in the SL community, I dont doubt for a minute your good intentionsI just dont like unknowledgable people spreading thier ideas of what is and what isnt land ownership as if it was written in stone, Im sure you can understand that.

Lets not forget the OP's original topic about if there was sim management software/script that could manage a sim, I would think that since the OP is well versed with rental boxes that they where looking more for something to collect owners data and organize it to automatically send out bills, violation notices and so forth.

Now for the sake of arguement lets just say rental is rental and ownership is ownership, rental boxes dont work for ownership. If the land is in your name its ownership, be it so vague ownership as it might be, still literally ownership.

I think what Jackson (and I know cause I manage several of Jacksons Sims) was saying is that rental boxes dont work for land deeded to someone, I would think that trhe owner could always just remove the rental box and then you have a paperwork mess, whereas a offsite system is less likely to get gamed in that sense.

One thing I think every sim manager is guilty of at one time or another is being too softhearted and allowing people to slide way way way past thier tier date, I know myself have covered a residents tier for over a month on many occasions. an automated system, though might be more cold and less personable might just be more fair with a set standard for everyone without making exceptions for a few, and unfairly not making the same exceptions for others

Actually, in RL you do pay a 3rd party property taxes, when you close on your home your obligated to pay from 3-12 months property taxes in advance and its held in escrow by your mortage company, they inturn release it to the goverment when its time to. And looking thru your mortgage fees, you will find that you are infact paying for that service, they call it different things but every mortgage company charges fees for that service



Lets not start flaming by telling people wher they can stick anything hmmm? And if that wasnt enough, your posting is just generally policing the forums with no real imput to the OP's topic. .[/QUOTE]



At anytime LL can reclaim land for anyreason they want without notice, justification, or reason, but yet on the mainland thats called ownership, Im just saying you cant call one ownership and call the other rental when infact they are both the same, you'll have to make a determination what they are both called, since LL has promoted the idea of "land ownership" I think that says alot about LL views on the matter

I own my house and pay taxes directly. Though I am not a mortgage expert, my understanding is there is a 'tax service fee' which is a one time fee part of the initial 'underwriting fee', payable when you first close your mortgage. I have never seen that fee exceed $99 USD, for quite large purchases. This is not a recurring fee. In contrast, the 'tax service fee' charged by most LL 'sellers', is substantially higher as a percentage factor vs. RL. I am not at all begrudging the owner's this fee, as it includes alot of labor. Let's just call a spade a spade. For those that carry a mortgage, the lendor actually owns the house until the mortgage is paid off. Fortunately in RL there are laws that protect the consumer from the mortgae company unlawfully taking their house. In SL there are no such laws.



Who started the flames? Pretty funny you bring up policing, as you are basically the thought police with this statement:




This arrogant statement is the only reason I decided to 'waste time' replying to a subject that has been beat to death. You have the nerve to tell me what I can think, and state that having this opinion is 'misinforming people' when in fact, everything I said is true?


So you think that any random person who can plunk down $1675 USD is as trustworthy as Linden Lab? I do believe that the issues here are a matter of trust and semantics.

Furthermore, I find it amusing that earlier in this thread you stated At this point I figured you were unrelated to the 'purchase' of estate land and were just adimant in your opinions.

Then you state: Yet you have the nerve to call someone else stating their opinions, 'lapdog' ? Funny stuff.

I think there are alot of SL landlords that have added legitimacy to private estate land ownership and 'sales', including Anshe. The longer SL survives and these honest landlords thrive, I think is for the better and add credibility to your opinion of private estate land ownership. Scammers, of course, hurt your ideals.

As far as the OP's topic, I would LOVE to see a completely automated land management system. I look forward to seeing what Jackson creates as this may fill a void that I have needed filled for quite some time.

Section 8 of https://secondlife.com/corporate/billing.php clearly spells out the conditions under which LL will reclaim land, and what happens to the proceeds of seized land.

You'll find no such stipulation in most covenants, where if land is reclaimed, the original purchase price is simply forfeited entirely. If an estate owner legally agrees to refund the difference (amount owed plus a possible fee) then you might have a case. If on the other hand you just reclaim land that was paid for and that you asserted the other resident actually owns and you just pocket both the purchase price and the land then you just committed theft.

Anshe counts all the Dreamland sims as assets, bringing her business' worth to the published $1 million.
She doesn't own the servers, she only owns the virtual land... which was sold to her tenants and who can claim "ownership" over it.
Unless I'm missing something Anshe can't both count the value of the virtual land as her own, and convery ownership to individual tentants. Unless of course it was really a rental in which case she always owns the land and it counts as an asset and all the tenant "owns" is a non-refundable, transferable lease.

Not exactly. Since property taxes are assessed and paid yearly, when ownership is transferred the new owner has to pay the pro-rated amount based on what the previous owner has already paid for that year. Depending on how the mortgage holder set up their financing, there are no payments for property taxes or insurance through the lender UNLESS the borrower chose this option (which is not recommended for obvious reasons.) And yeah, you can bet that if the lender is holding monies in escrow and being responsible for your property taxes & insurance, you are paying for it somehow. The more hand-holding your lender has to do for you, the more they are going to charge you for the privilege, there is no free lunch in the financial sector.

Excellent post.

I think that we are all chiseling away on that big universal stone, and what is written upon it. In twenty years or so perhaps a common law will come to the electronic frontier.

Based not on one person or another's particular view, but the general consensus of what is fair or not. That's simply how it goes as frontiers are civilised.



Mmm... I've considered this issue considerably - some thoughts follow.

I maintain some infrastructure land in each sim, and place my streetlamps &c with the tier payment device near each parcel. They can't be removed from my land, and it's pretty obvious by proximity which one goes with which.

Some pro's and cons to that. One, since I don't use some monolithic rento system back in a clubhouse or whatever, I really have to know what's going on across over 1 million square meters of land. That's nontrivial! Few would choose to do that.

But I think of it this way: I *should* have a pretty good idea how things are going in my sims. By personally seeing what's there with regularity. And knowing everybody personally.

One positive aspect is this: if the email connexion to the grid fails (yet again) the stupid, simple script still works.

Another advantage: back in 2004, there were some fairly serious interruptions of service of the grid as a whole. Now, say that happens again. If the Company stops charging me tier, I should pass that along and not charge residents either.

Scripted objects stop working if the grid is down, and depending how they are scripted, can stop charging during that time. That's how mine work. Of course, I basically 'eat it' whenever the grid is down (update Wednesdays) but I'm budgeted for that, and it saves me the accounting nightmare of calculating and paying downtime compensation by hand for hundreds of people should the grid actually shut down for a few days.




I've struggled with this too, as fairness is pretty important. I have, however, had to give up with an automated 'coded law' approach.

The $L purchasing mechanisms and grid access have simply been too unreliable to hold the average honest person accountable to.

I've had people try to purchase $L in plenty of time via LindeX or whatnot, only to find themselves locked out of LindeX, locked out of their account, or their passwords reset, or the website down... &c &c. The normal person can't wait breathlessly by the website, ready to log in at a moment's notice, and for darn sure they can't get rapid technical support from the Company to fix a borked account they didn't break.

So what happens? I have to charge enough to cover this sort of thing. If someone's playing chicken with their parcel meter frequently, 100% their fault, well, sure they can lose their land.

But if someone sends me a notecard 3 days before lot expiry saying they can't purchase $L, have tried various venues, have a perfect record beforehand for over a year, and are desperate... sure, I'll give them a reasonable amount of time to sort things out. That's fairness which can't be accomplished by any automated system quite yet.

I was asking for a script to manage a land/sim business.

Can we go back on topic please.

Thanks

Zoha, to the best of my knowledge there is nothing availible if your talking about managing land thats is deeded to the buyers, while many rental boxes work quite well with rentals...
I'm about a month out of having a reliable system, and will be promoting it in a hosting package $10 USD per month for a website, $15-$20 per month for each sim managed. Website will be pretty much state of the art CMS style website with RSS feeds, Banner rotation.. all that. Backend controls will be designed to work with SL, including owners lists, group lists, resident account access, peak land holdings, etc. Will also include land scanners that speak with the website, a inworld ATM to transfer funds from SL to website account, and "magic box" like objects inworld to automatically send out reminders, late notices, violation notices, general information...etc

Any Estate Owner knows that there is a limit on how much one person can handle themselves, and how much it costs to have someone professionally manage a group of sims for them, and how unreliable (hint Abby) they can be at times, Im hoping htat a automated system will be a revolution in sim management

Its nice to know there are still idea thefts out there, as I as the one who originally mentioned the idea to several people, and well suddenly now there all scrambling to do my idea. *coughs*

Anyway now there are several systems on the way....

Right now Im working about 5 diffent projects, a short term one, that could help you, it allows a person to visually see the sims layout as it was scanned by a bot it gets the parcel and group infomation..

It wouldnt manage it for you but it would help manage your land for you.

in the long term, im working a complete management solution that handles everything from sim rules to ejecting a tendent.

If you have specifics you wanted scripted I'd suggest contacting Redux Dengaku. She is the best pro scriptor I have ever come across in second life.

Huh Zor? Idea theft?I been working on this for over a month. without any idea stealing. Arent you one of the late coming landbot owners.. I bet you didnt get that Idea from anyone else lol.. anyway, theres alot of probelms to getting a working automated system. And if you release your webside information then you pretty much give away any kind of rights to your code. The trouble is figure out how to get the management service out to sim owners without giving away your webside code so iots not just a SL script you have to deal with, but inventing a website whole backend that is designed to work within the SL sim management scope.

I would love a sim wide tracker that tracks who visits, where they go, how long they are there and keeps a list. (I own the sims in question btw).

Is that possible?

You never "own" anything. House, clothes, watches, nothing... In the end you die.

Everything in RL is a rental too; just like SL.

I think the real issue with ownership in SL is that people apply what they know as ownership in RL to SL which, isnt going to work, in the SL enviroment LL has made thier own version of ownership. ad you cannot apply real life ownership rules to a virtual world

Aye, that's a fact. To be honest, I don't think I could pay *anyone* enough to handle some of the icky stuff that comes up from time to time.


Absolutely possible. But why? Are you having a specific problem? I can see some downsides to collecting that information, though being transparent that you would or do collect it is probably important to most people.

You might run into some disclosure law issues or service term issues; I'm not entirely sure.

PLEASE: Can we stay ON topic !!!


We are looking for a sim management tool.

Id say sim wide user tracking is the last thing id implement in a sim at the moment.
Id rather have a camping location or a active large scale club in the sim, both would take up about as much resources as a large tracking system, except they give back to the community .. at least in a way.

One of my active projects is redoing a sim wide tracking system, coupleing it with several other applications.. but no matter what I do it will be horrably ineffecent use of resources, as it has to actively look for users, with a limited sight distance, requiring there to be 20+ scanners or so to get a complete coverage.
But i have some additional tricks up my sleeve for it.

As a sim owner, i dont think tracking would have disclosure issues as long as you only track the name and the locations they went to, now if you begin tracking what they say and who there with, then you would problems get in to problems.

Without chat text you wouldnt be able to tell what they where doing, you might beable to guess, but it wouldn't be 'for sure'. Take 2 people sitting next to each other. They could be doing 'Adult Play' or playing chess or just talking, and you wouldn't know besides the fact that they where next to each other.


-- And we are on topic, this is stuff about sim management and sim management tools, in theory and in development. If you would of read some of these posts you would know that something along what you are asking for is the next wave, 'Self Managed Sims', but there is a huge jump from whats done now to the next generation, most of it still exists only in theory.