xDancingStarx

I don't even pay attention to the "mod" sign when I buy something because usually everything is mod. I do very rarely run into no-mod items where the no-mod is completely unexpected. I will drop the creator a message to give them the opportunity for an explanation, and it's rare enough that I'm keeping these very few stores in my mind and make sure I don't go there again and never mention them to anyone. Few months ago I bought a mesh garden deco object and I couldn't even resize it because it was no-mod (and no resize menu either), sure it was mentioned on the ad I found out later, but believe me, I will remember you for a long time.

Oh so you're the reason for the roaming bots in SL. And here I thought they were just crawling parcels.

There must be many thousands of dollars sitting in gift cards, especially since the change that gift cards instead of the actual products got discounted, and people were therefore incentivized to buy discounted gift cards. Sure people have no guarantee for how long their cards would be valid, but losing their gift cards of a store with this high reputation would be a blow and make everyone consider twice to purchase a gift card anywhere in the future. PS: And while I can understand that terrible things may happen that totally throw you off and make you lose your mind, I completely understand that and it sucks, but still in this moment you should take a minute and get sufficient information out at a reliable place (this means a group notice in SL, not a facebook account.) And what belongs to this is: 1) for how long (at minimum) will gift cards be redeemable 2) for how long (at minimum) will store credits be redeemable 3) for how long (at minimum) will redeliveries be available 4) for how long the store will be open for anything else isn't even important

That's what I was hinting at in my very first post. "Of course if you listen to support forums then games are flooded with household sharing members since it's always the brother who installed the cheat software on their pc that got them innocently caught." The chance that people are living in the same household (or building and share the same IP) and access SL at the same time is there but it's so extremely small in comparison that it can be neglected. It will create few false positives (NEVER said it's a 100% match) but it is outweighed so ridiculously by the amount of correct matches. And again, I've made this clear many times, you're not able to say that it's a proven alt. But you're able to say that it's an alt with a very high probability. That's why RedZone was an issue. Nobody back then said "oh let's not worry about it, you can't prove anything with an IP".

VPNs are out of question, as are manual attempts to obtain a new IP address, because that's not what the average user does. Nobody obscures an alts IP unless they do something shady, which is not the point here. The point is that nowadays an IP may stay the same for a long period of time. That's the point and that breaks the anonymity. "The typical lease time for ISP’s in the United States is roughly 7 days. However in most instances your router will renegotiate this lease prior to its expiration. During the lease renegotiation, it is very common for the same IP to be reassigned to your router. In fact our research has discovered many homes that have theoretically dynamic IP’s, but have held the same IP for multiple years. Because of this recursive reassignment the typical location targeted by El Toro has held the same IP address for 7 months." https://eltoro.com/how-long-does-an-ip-address-stay-attached-to-a-home-or-business/ "Research has found that many households that have dynamic IP addresses (meaning the IP address is randomly assigned and can change) actually have held the same IP address for multiple years. We have found that the average household targeted by one of our IP Targeting campaigns has had the same IP address for nine months." https://vicimediainc.com/often-ip-addresses-change/ Just 2 random sources I found that are pretty much saying the same that I observe in Europe. Situation would possibly look different if SL had a large mobile viewer crowd. Not the case. The vaaaaaaast majority of cases are home users.

I don't see any arguments in your post, so "believing" is obviously what you're doing. That's totally fine, just believe! That people stick with the same DYNAMIC IP for a long time nowadays compared to the past is a fact. And nobody is going to intentionally obscure their IP identity when they connect with an alt unless they do something shady. The probability to get the IP of another SL user is freaking low. But believe what you want

Times change. Even if you technically have a dynamic IP, nowadays you may stick with it for weeks or months. Years ago you had providers that may have disconnected you every 24h and forced a new IP on you. Nowadays with some providers, even if you have a dynamic IP, you may have to disconnect your modem from the internet for hours in order to obtain a new IP. We're not talking about matching an IP on the internet. We're talking about an IP match of users inside of SL, a complete niche. I'm sorry but we're at 99% here.

An IP match is no 100% proof but what is it? 99%? Close enough. Of course if you listen to support forums then games are flooded with household sharing members since it's always the brother who installed the cheat software on their pc that got them innocently caught.

There is no need of a HUD detection since there are regular vampire attachments worn. The amount of visitors with vampire attachments is insignificant, there would be no visible impact on traffic or "popularity". I don't see the need of banning players with bloodlines attachments since that system requires to ask for permission when biting. This means that you can act/ban once a permission request is reported to you and go with a presumption of innocence otherwise. This isn't the case for other vampire systems though.

This was one reason I found part of the "article" questionable. Everyone who would accuse SL of not having age verification has lost touch with reality in my opinion. As if you'd run into minors in SL all of the time. What a joke. The core and probably majority of the userbase has been in SL for many years and while profiles don't show ages, I strongly refute that running into minors is a common thing in SL. You think running into minors in SL is common? Looking at platforms like Discord or Roblox. Man, if criminals were targeting minors, thinking they'd go for SL instead of one of the platforms that really are full of minors sounds in fact rather like an Agenda to harm SL while disguising as child protectors. A real age verification would definitely kill SL since it would create such a high entry barrier that even less new users would sign up.

I quote from the original post: "Some people are so lost that they never make it out of the landing circle." Of course this already implies that there are no mentors helping the "lost" people. It's not a coincidence that few posts later someone provokingly asks if the mentor program is still running. So no, mentors were already part of the original post (wrongfully IMO since the title suggested that the thread would be about the Community Exhibition)

Providing you only want to discuss "how great every thing is, and perfect, with no problems whatsoever". Since the very first mentioning of the new mentor program there have been people who right out *hated* the fact that there would be new mentors, some characterizing potential new mentors as power hungry selfish people, a program that is deemed to fail. I'm not a mentor so I feel completely free to speak about this. And you could see these posts since the very first thread. It's not about discussing facts or reality, but about certain people pushing their unchangeable opinion that a mentor program is a bad idea. I myself have been calling this out several times in the past because I find it just annoying to read. So no, to me it's not like wanting to suppress discussion, but to prevent this hate campaign.

Please only do this if you are willing to accept the risk of a major backlash. Even if you try to be polite, some people in SL are just not acting rationally. The more outrageous the build/wall is, the higher the chance that this resident does not belong to the "rational" group. They may feel terribly offended by you not appreciating their glorious build/wall and may double down on it. You think this is exaggerated? No, this is reality. If you want to speak with someone about their build and you don't know that person well, do it on an alt to protect yourself.

My point of discussion is that people like you "Aren't the mentor programms running anymore?" "If the new program doesn't work again, skip it" are fighting a war against the welcome hub based on what they see and their interpretations of what they're seeing which is again influenced by what they want to see. My point is that many of the complaints/arguments are unsubstantial because there was no attempt to figure out what's really going on. Better?

No, that's what YOU perceive as the new user experience. How many of those "some" people who were so "lost" that they never made it out of the landing circle have you talked to to actually find out what's going on with them? You actually have no clue what's really going on in these areas. You don't know who is an alt and who is not. Who is a bot and who's not. Who is currently being talked to by a mentor or helper. Who is having network issues and who is not. And this isn't your first negative thread with those kind of "observations" and YOUR interpretations about the welcome area. You could at least start talking to people so we get some more substantial information to discuss next time.