Can you help me?

[Katie Reve]

I'm returning to Second Life after a break (nearly 10 yrs!) with renewed curiosity.

I am struggling to find my feet so I'd appreciate any guidance you can offer. There isn't anyone around anymore who I knew before.

I ran a project a few years ago and was gifted some land. I don't know how to manage the allocation or my group anymore.

Can anyone help me? 

Here are some blog posts about the project and my time in SL - https://pcmcreative.wordpress.com/category/second-life/

I can't wait to hear about your adventures and I hope to meet new people.

[Prokofy Neva]

Hi, welcome back!

Do you mean putting land into groups?

First make sure you have purchased the level of tier you want for the total amount of and you have. On secondlife.com look for the land management area which has a list of tier levels with radio buttons. For English speakers in the US, it's here.

Check the one you want (e.g. 4096) that will give you that level, plus the free 512. Look at this carefully because the biggest flaw of this system is that it can automatically tier you up beyond a level you don't want to be paying, and leave you stuck with that bill for 30 days, even if you only held that level of land for one minute. Hugely annoying.

In Mainland groups, you will get a 10% tier bonus, so you can purchase less minus the bonus, but that isn't practical sometimes, and it might make sense to leave the bonus to buy prim land some day or put elsewhere on another sim in another group.

Make a group with yourself and one or two alts -- even friends you trust are not a good idea for a land group. Just make a new alt and hold the group. This costs $100 and you do it by following directions on the user panel: right click on yourself to get Groups; go up to the upper right and click on the plus sign; select New Group and make your main owner; go and get the other alt in by sending him an invitation as owner.

You now have the option to buy a piece of land as an individual with that tier, or as a group, where the tier bonus will work to your favour, and where you can put other people in the group to be either equal partners with you, or to take on various functions -- they could be co-managers with owner status; they could be officers with only management status who can't sell land; they could be customers who have the right to put prims on the land, and so on. It's a complex and confusing tree of decisions but you can get through it FIRST by deciding what kind of corporation and functions you want THEN picking the group roles and abilities (powers) to match them.

If you opted to make group land, which I view as essential for Mainland rental management, now you proceed as follows.

On the group menu, go to Land and type in whatever land you are putting in, say 4096. Click save to put it into the group. If something isn't working here, it's because you did not position the radio button on that level -- go back on the secondlife.com page, check your work, resave the page, and relog your avatar to kick it all in.

Then inworld, right-click on the land and on the first page of the About Land menu under your name, check the boxes "Allow Deed to Group" and "Owner Makes Contribution with Deed" on the land you have as a sole owner. Doing only one of these will not send that piece of land into the group, and generate error messages that "you do not have enough land credits". Land credits=tier, and the Lindens have ensured confusion for generations by even using this term, rather than tier throughout. So make sure you ALSO clicked "makes contribution" that shoots your tier into the group along with the land. Remember land and tier are two different things. Tier covers land; tier can only be available for some other land when it is freed from the first land through sale or gift or abandonment or leaving of a Linden Home.

So now: Press DEED. That puts it into the group.

Then adjust your memberships and roles for features, and make sure no stranger or person you can't trust has "sell land" as ability except you, who is paying the tier.

Remember not to sell land through the group as the income distributes equally to all members and you lose revenue that way unless it's to your alts.

Trying to take, say three 512s and group them always seems hard, but just keep your wits about you, and do one at a time, adding the necessary tier as you go.

Again, be careful not to overtier yourself because the system automatically pushes you to the next level and forces you to pay the higher level of tier even if you did this for only one second as a mistake.

Pay attention to screens that say "You have enough tier" or red alerts saying "You do not have enough land credits to cover". Again, remember land credits = tier.

That's about what I can think of. I have a tutorial in world with a map and avatars illustrating this if you want to see it.

I still haven't ironed all the bugs out of it so you can beta test it. Start by number 1 and click on each item as you go counter-clockwise and read the talk in chat.

 

Edited January 19, 2018 by Prokofy Neva

[Katie Reve]

On 19/01/2018 at 8:34 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

Do you mean putting land into groups?

Oh, Prokofy I am so out of my depth right now!

Thank you so much for your detailed and considered response.

 

The group I own has 1,744m land I also have a small strip that has been gifted to me since creating the group which is using part of my personal allowance.

If I up my land credits will that allowance be applied to the group?

Your answer is very thorough - I'm a little baffled but my awakening SL brain will remember eventually I hope.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

I did this long explanation in part as a draft of a tutorial I'm working on trying to get this in place at the infohub where I have these sorts of stands to learn things in the "second level" of Second Life after orientation, i.e. land, business, griefing response, etc.

I'd have to see what you mean exactly in-world, and what you mean "part of my personal allowance" -- i.e. if you mean "the 512 they give you with premium for free" (which isn't really free, it's just included in the cost of the account" or "a piece of land of X meters I don't have grouped."

If you have 512 free and clear as a premium account, you can just type it into the box on the "land" tab of the "about land" menu and press save and push it in to be available. Sometimes lag can make it seem not to work; sometimes a misunderstanding about HOW it works seems to make it not work.

If your "personal allowance" is already attached to a Linden Home parcel, some other group, or some other piece of land, it is taken, and therefore "not free to use" even if "in your account". You'd have to leave the Linden Home, or sell that first/other land, or leave that other group, to have that 512 pop out and be "free" now to apply to your next venture.

This may be obvious, but it is so confusing for people because they are never really told that tier is what you put ON land and PAY for land, but is a separate stream, not the land itself. Tier and land are separate. The Lindens confuse this even further by starting to call tier "land credit" although it is nothing you borrow, not related to your credit card, just a chit that appears inworld as a function of paying a premium account and getting 512 "credits', like bottles you return from recycling, to use inworld on land. So "tier" paid at a level which generates "land credits" to cover land can't be tied up on a piece of land or other group and be available to do something else. That's the issue with tier. The next usage larger than that parcel will jack up your tier on the web page, and you will have to pay more. This can happen when you didn't intend to do that. So you need to plan and keep your wits about you -- I'm writing this just in general, not to you individually.

So you cannot take your individually owned land as a single avatar, and mix and match that with your group land thinking it "applies" because it does not. That is, it applies under your full tier allotment, but your individually owned land can't help the group.

To make it count to the group, you have to group it -- check off "set to group" then "make contribution" -- to have the tier that covers that land go INTO the group to cover it because it can't be left behind, it will only generate error messages and then press "deed" to make it happen.

And it is at this juncture where the error messages keep happening, not only for awakening baffled brains but for people who have done this hundreds of times and even Lindens.

While I am always trying to replicate this to try to see why it goes wrong, really the best way to deal with this final step is to have the tier you need to cover that little part of "your own" land or somebody's "individual avatar land" *already in the group*. That means you need a "float" -- you must have extra land (maybe just a 512 credit/tier) to cover these situations, or you must figure out how someone can temporarily put 512 into the group that won't jack up their tier -- it's annoying.

That is, if you check off "contribution with deed" and "deed" both, why doesn't the contribution attached to your land you are deeding to the group fly into the group along with the land? It should, in theory. It doesn't. I'm sure greater minds than mind can explain the underlining coding issues here.
Perhaps it has to do with the fact that even while sailing into the group, that tier attached to that land isn't really "there" -- it's still back at the ranch. And the group can't accept land "from the ranch" when it has nothing available to accept it *with* in real-time, inside its group state, which has not yet accepted that covered land. 

So four cowboys with premium accounts and 512 individually-owned parcels should be able to meet at four corners, each with a 512 parcel, click "set to a group" (to a new common group) and then  "make contribution with deed" and "deed" all at once, and all 4 pieces should enter the group without error messages, then make one big parcel with all of them as owners/officers, all of them with premiums covering the parcels in the group, and no need for a 5th person with a 512.

But it doesn't work that way. Maybe due to lag, to people not having reset their pages to reflect payments they made; maybe it's because of some not taking land off invididuals to put in the group, etc. etc. There are variables. But it is a common snag. And as far as I can tell it is rooted in the fact that "make contribution with deed" does not work as intended or perceived. It only kicks in afterwards once the parcel is accepted into the group with another floater to have covered. Comments/corrections welcome. After you try it yourself in world.