Why are people quoting an out of data NZone article from 2003?

Recently it has come to the attention of userbase, an article about SL on NZone (linky). I have been in SL a long time, when the article was first cited, I thought "I bet that is from before the Teen Grid was around." Then I got distracted by life. The NZone article in question was pulished in 2003. You can check this fact by looking at the headers returned by the server for the sceen shots (the all have 2003 dates). None of the places pictured now exist in the form they were in the pictures.

I recognize picture #9, which is in Darkwood (when I joined they still had that hideous green ground texture in the town square). You will note the proliferation of "Vote!" machines. These were a precursor to dwell. In most of the pictures av's are just standing around; this is because user animation support had not been added to the client yet (v1.4); the crappy looking dancing is the built in client dance animations.

Picture #2 is the Linden mansion. If you go and visit it now (assuming they didn't just demolish it out right), you will notice that there are parts of it missing. These parts have been missing for years. They are not missing from the picture.

Lastly the most conclusive bit of evidence, the acticle can be found in the Internet Archive going back as far as July 2004; the teen grid did not open until February 2005.
Internet Archive
History Wiki - Teen Grid

So... Why are people quoting such an out of date article?
When it was written the teen grid idea hadn't occurred to LL.

And, of course, this quote from Cory regarding a strategic alliance with NVIDIA:

We've come a long way.

I have seen many of the same pictures. I first saw them in this Slate article I read back in May 2003. Right after I read that article, I downloaded the beta client and joined SL.

The path Linden Labs are now taking must be part of a bigger road map so i think personally its as apt today as it was then, why not have a grid thats for all ages? It is gonna be the next internet and its been said that SL wants to expand to more ares, so it makes sense when looking at the bigger picture

Just my opinion

I wouldn't necessarily mind teens being on the grid if we had better tools in place to keep minors and such away from what we could get in trouble for.

With the current tools, never in a million years!

I agree 110% with you on that and to me it seems a logical conclusion to what we have here a parallel to RL so that whole families can interact here etc. when it will happen, well thats down to the dev's to give us these tools to use but will it happen? Im pretty sure it will

Currently LL knows allowing teens in the main grid is impossible, but at the time of the interview they had not explored that avenue (they decided to avoid it by just making SL 18+). Any interview from that time reflects their naiveté on this issue; this naiveté should not be built upon. When you take a comment that old on the issue of teens in SL, and then apply it to the current situation, you are taking it out of context.

Just remember they have been promising us Havok2 for three years. LL is prone to err. You shouldn't expect all that is printed to be true or the way things are now.

I would differ to agree I genuinely think that eventually the grids will be as one, and just as the internet is a mix of good and bad so will be here as it becomes the 3D internet, why should it not be in LLs interests to grow as needed and i personally believe that LL's will eventually allow teens on the grid, of course with controls for us to use. I do believe a lot of teens out there are capable of interacting in an adult enviroment given the correct controls for us as responsible adults to use. We are all responsible for our own actions here and in RL.

Better to have them here and controlled than on the grid anyway due to the ease of sign ups, creating havock as the ones that will, do, no pun intended

I just felt that it was a logical progression eventually and i will stand by that as more and more families join here and use this platform to interact whilst apart in RL, we are all going to be given better tools they promise to self govern, so Teens on the grid is not going to be a big suprise for me and i believe that many will enhance SL, as its going to be thier future platform and i dont think that most want to ruin SL but thats just my opinion

Strife, I may be wrong but im sure we can dig this thread up from the archives when it happens and you can donate 1000L$ to the shelter, as will i if it doesnt happen, i will then donate 1000L$ to a noob friendly place in SL that u choose

When I wrote my last post,
I wrote a second part to it,
which I deleted. I guess it is needed,
I will recreated it as best i can.

There are some questions that aren't being asked, who's answers have direct bearing on teens in the main grid.

For starters:
Q: Why is there a Teen Grid?
A: Because of the child protection laws. LL is legally liable if they do not put forward a good faith effort to protect minors who use their service.

Q: What is entailed in protecting minors in the Teen Grid?
A: Mature content removal and removal of unauthorized adults when found (possible chat log monitoring, but this i have no information on).

Most of the sims in SL are mature sims. PG & Mature sims in the mainland form a patchwork. Moving mainland sims is impossible (screw up the land), changing the ratings is impossible (change land values); this would force Teen users to teleport almost everywhere; even on the mainland & excluding them from the majority of sims. The vast majority of shops in SL are in Mature sims, which they would not have access to. There is a curtain amount of mature content in PG sims, which would have to be expunged; which is time consuming. Teen-Adult interactions would have to be heavily monitored, policed & restricted. Then there is the issue of how do you keep mature content in mature sims; it's not like content has a "Mature" flag. More over there is no incentive to enable it even if it existed. What exactly defines "Mature" a low cut shirt might be considered mature, or even a short skirt. It's all very subjective, and this level of subjectivity would not be an easy adjustment for the users of SL.

In the end you would have two classes of users, Teens, who would have less status then Unverified Accounts, and Adult. Adult accounts would have unfettered access; Teen accounts would be highly restricted.

Sure SL may become more like the internet but much of the internet is also segregated by age as well.

When creating rules, it is easy to do so with a small group of people and then grow the group; as you do, fine tune the rules.

Uhhh. how is "much of the internet" "segregated by age"? I don't know of hardly any places which have any kind of enforced segregation based on age. ogrish.com? rotten.com? Definitely two places which you don't want to see kids, but kids can go there if they can type a URL.

How many pages have sections like "You must be 18/21 to enter"?

How many of those actually enforce said "segregation" beyond a simple "Yes/No" button click? Would it be so easy that a minor could simply answer "yes" to the store clerk when purchasing pornography magazines, you'd find a lot more of them under little Johnny's bed.

Simply put, segregation without effective enforcement isn't such.

To answer your question, not nearly as many as you would think. The two I cited are two examples (though ogrish.com seems to have mutated into something else recently, which has SOME Yes/No access restrictions now).

I think the purpose is to lessen the liklihood of being sued, not to keep people out.

Oh, believe me, I understand the concept. That was really my point; they really aren't making much of an effort to really "segregate" users based on age, even less so now. They are heading towards the internet model of an "honor system", rather than an actual age-segregated world, as they have had in the past.

They don't want the job of enforcement. Their job is to get out of the societal management service business, and just become your friendly neighborhood ISP. Interactions between residents will be left to the discretion of the residents, as will the responsibility for enforcing things like ratings and access to adult content.