AyelaNewLife

This needs to stop.

I'm not really convinced by the story that someone had remote or physical access to this person's PC/phone/primary email, and then decided to ignore the actual bank accounts or paypal accounts or anything that actually matters but instead spent lindens on Second Life escorts. If an explanation sounds absurd, it's because it is. Proper 2FA (ie not a code sent to your email) would have most likely prevented this. That's standard practice for any kind of game or service where there's an issue with contested account ownership. Lock the thing down ASAP, then take time to fix the damage and return control to only the rightful owner.

I thought of the question while doing a sort-through of my appliers folder earlier, but was based on some incorrect assumptions as to how BoM functioned. I've now highlighted the appliers with system tattoo versions, to make things easier when this goes live. I'm not exactly confident in Maitreya providing a BoM-compatible version of the body, given that they still don't provide a tattoo onion layer for the hands or feet, just a single glove/sock layer with all the wonderful alpha overlap glitches that comes with it; but there's no point in speculating. I'll just keep everything I need to in order to be future-proof, and wait until the dust settles

Thanks for you answer; it made me realise that my (admittedly very superficial) understanding of BoM was badly wrong. Time to actually read through this mess and try things out; although I'm already pretty sure BoM will not fix my layer problem. Edit: Okay I've read every single post in this thread and I lost a little more faith in humanity.

Hijacking the feedback thread for a quick question: If an applier I have contains system tattoo versions as well as Omega or body/head specific applier HUDs, as a general rule, which should I be using when BoM goes live? Is there (typically) a difference?

I ran out of steam after sorting my clothing folder out. Okay, almost all of my clothing folder, I was too lazy to finish off my KC Couture folder, as I have piles and piles of shoes I've picked up on sale, but everything else is sorted. And the effect has been amazing, it's so much easier to find stuff now, and I've found myself wearing pieces I didn't even know I owned because they were buried before. This actually was worth the effort! I've moved on to my Body Parts folder, which includes all my appliers, and got that done in bits over the last couple of days. I broke it down like this: Originally I had the Appliers and Hairs folders nested inside a master folder, but it seemed like that was creating a pointless click, this is still a manageable list. Same subfolder naming scheme as before, so Creator - What it is - Colour. I only shaved off like 500 elements with this sortout, but it's so much easier to find stuff now, which was the main goal My Animations folder makes me cry. Maybe next week

Ugh. Sorry you had to go through with that. There's a few Monopoly Millionaires around. It's not helped by the massive oversupply of female photographers and models, but that's no excuse for him acting like that.

I've found there's two types when it comes to that: Trophy walls, where it's just relatively low effort pics of him on actual sex balls with various women. Count me out! Actual photographers, who take genuinely erotic artwork, using static poses. Some of this type are great friends of mine. Depressingly, I can usually tell how skilled an "erotic photographer" is without even seeing his Flickr, just by how he treats me and other women. That toxic attitude bleeds into every part of a person's life, including any hobbies they might have.

Context: I don't block anyone ever. I always want to know exactly what people say to me, even if it's abusive. I'll "soft-mute" people by refusing to acknowledge their existence, all the time, just not actually using the block mechanic. It means I can occasionally choose to respond, if I'm in need of entertainment. It bore fruit again; an exceptionally generic male fashion blogger/photographer that uses his work as a way to try and sleep with women forgot that my middle name wasn't gullible, so tried his luck for the 29th time: It takes a special kind of arrogance to not bother with trying to chat me up or even directly ask for sex, but to just assume that I'd be down and it was a matter of scheduling. Bonus points for coupling that arrogance with utter illiteracy (and yes English is his first language, he's just a moron). Also can anyone translate that last line? I haven't got a clue, I don't speak moron.

There isn't any coherent thinking behind it. If you leave a security feature as optional, you will have a pretty low uptake over that feature. But even if only a few percentage points of active accounts use 2FA, that's still better than having no one with 2FA; and that few percentage points of raw account numbers will cover a much larger portion of the total owned Lindens, as anyone with any kind of SL business that matters will use 2FA. The account security we have now doesn't get degraded in any way by slapping an optional 2FA on the top, it is still a clear net gain with no disadvantage to those that choose not to use it. There's no reason to oppose it.

The bold bit is the crucial part here; password reuse is the #1 cause of "hacked" accounts of any kind. Educational PSA: https://haveibeenpwned.com/ is a great way to check to see if your email address and a password was included in any of the major public data breaches. If so, and if you reuse passwords, change them! And mix them up.

This thread reminded me to check my own complexity; it's normally fine, but I was wearing a bit of a quirky outfit (think Mad Max). Turns out my goggles have five times the complexity of my mesh body, and three times that of my mesh head, and fourteen times that of my mesh hair. At least according to the LL/Firestorm complexity count; Black Dragon's alternative rating (which is much closer to ARCTan) rates the goggles as what they actually are (relatively insignificant), and slams my mesh body/head/hair for the actual rendering impact they have, rather than pretending that some jeans are more taxing than hair. It was however also penalising the bits of armour I was wearing pretty highly, which is fair, it's exceptionally detailed with chains and spikes everywhere.

Legitimate question - and I've only read this page, so this may not have been true earlier in the discussion - but did you miss the point about 2FA being opt-in? Because yeah I agree with you about a blanket forced 2FA for every account. 2FA is a pain in the ass to manage; I use it for a handful of key services that matter, but not for accounts that personally aren't worth the hassle. But if it's opt-in, for those that want it? I can only see that as a positive.

I don't really hoard too much, perhaps heels that I know I'm not going to want to wear but buy because a 75L sale is too good to pass up? But kinda related, I haven't deleted a single saved snapshot since I started taking photos. I've got 3,800 saved shots, yet only published just less than 200 finished pics. Okay so that's 200 editor files and 200 finished photos, but that still leaves 3,400 draft snapshots, anywhere between 5 and 30mb each... I should probably delete those.

Pretty much. Which is weird; SL account security is objectively below standard. No 2FA, optional or otherwise, and your login username is broadcast in a box above your head, without the account name/display name sanitation that everything bar email that matters has these days. Like I don't get why people deny basic facts like this. I honestly can't comprehend why people would complain about an optional extra layer of security. Just seems like complaining for the sake of complaining.

This, if possible. And if it's a no-copy gacha item, make a notecard with the default co ordinates before you start to edit, so you can reset the position if you screw it up or change anything.

Was too lazy to quote the entire post chain, just used the most recent relevant one for context, not aimed purely at you

Part of the problem is that there are bloggers out there that behave badly. Certainly not all, but enough that anyone who's active in the Flickr community will be tired of the worst parts of the bloggerati. There are bloggers that blindly follow thousands upon thousands of accounts in the hope of getting enough followbacks to raise the profile of their "brand". There are those that will add every single photo to every single group, regardless of appropriateness, making mountains of work for group admins and rendering some groups almost useless. There are those that are only interested in racking up the faves and the views, to translate that into e-fame and free stuff. And then there are bloggers that clearly care about their work, who do what they do out of raw passion, who don't fall into the monopoly-millionaire trap of thinking that followers and views are the only things that matter, and who do show groups half an ounce of respect. It's not really fair to brand bloggers as saints or sinners; it's a pretty big community, there are plenty of both. Painting everyone with the same broad strokes is pretty meaningless.

I've been trying one or two different editing techniques over the last couple of photos, and this is the one where everything just clicked into place, one of my faves ever in terms of colour balance - and it's actually SFW! ?

Weren't free Flickr accounts limited to just 200 photos up until 2013? So the "good faith over 15 years" bit is utter tripe anyway. Also, I didn't notice this part of the blog earlier: #theyarethe3%

I've never tried, so didn't know. Point still stands though; there's plenty of reasons why a child can have payment info checked and an adult can have it unchecked.

There isn't really a flawless, reliable way to check the age of other residents. The Payment Info box is often used as one, but it's far from a perfect test. As a general rule, if they have used payment info then you can assume that they are over 18. Unless they just used their mother's credit card, like most children on the internet do. If they have no payment info, that usually means that they either make their money inside SL (a creator, DJ, escort etc etc), or have an alt account that they buy Lindens with, or they prefer the system avatar freebie lifestyle... or they could be underage. In other words, it's kinda useless as an age test.

The problem is, it's not even good for that. It has reviews for 15 female mesh body creators; of that list, only 3 are supported by the creator community at large, possibly 5 if you include Tonic and eBody. The heads list has 6 Catwa heads and 2 Laq heads; right now there's over 30 female Catwa heads, let alone their range of male heads, and Laq have even more options. Old info is fine if it's still accurate; but it's better to be told nothing than to base a decision on falsehoods, and those reviews contain more out-of-date points than actual facts. I'm speaking from experience here, as someone who started 6 months ago. I nearly fell into the TMP trap because I got given that list without context. Luckily I made a friend who could tell me what things are currently like, rather than what the clothing market was like in 2015, and I could make an actually educated decision rather than one built on dust. The tutorials are still amazing though, I would have been lost without them.

Maitreya Lara, the two Slink bodies, and the three Belleza bodies have the widest range of clothing available for them, by a pretty large margin. Out of those, Maitreya is almost universal, you can almost guarantee that an active mesh clothing creator will be rigging for at least that one body. The other five I mentioned will run into the "Maitreya-exclusive" problem that plagues the fashion world, sadly. Out of the Bellezas, Freya has more options than Isis or Venus, and Slink Hourglass has more options than Slink Physique. The Kemono body is also popular, but that tends to be used by a more niche market, such as furries and people after a more "anime" look. Avoid TMP at all costs. So my advice depends on what your priorities are. If clothing availability is your big concern, go with Maitreya. If you prefer the more distinct shape you can get from Hourglass or any of the thicker Belleza bodies, then go for that. My personal experience is that Slink Physique and Maitreya Lara can produce exceptionally similar shapes with only a small amount of shape tweaking - Maitreya looks a touch more perky in the T&A, but aside from that is very similar. Have a look at the default shapes to get an idea, demo your shortlist, and try and make your preferred shape with the demo to make sure you're happy with it before buying. In terms of heads; most major head creators have a wide range of different heads for sale. I'd suggest checking out some creators and looking through their range of heads, and pick a head that's as close as possible to what you want to look like. The same shape on a different head by the same creator will look totally different. I'd recommend using the shape that comes with the head as your starting point, and rebuild the body the way you like. What I did was manually copy the slider settings for the head from that shape to my old one, thus keeping my old body shape with the new head shape. Save that, make a copy, then tweak and customise from there. In terms of creators: I am totally biased here, but I adore Laq heads, I think they are the most gorgeous out there. Others will disagree. Catwa is the Maitreya of the head world, the big cheese, and most makeup/tat/etc creators will make a Catwa version. However thanks to Omega appliers (that work with any compatible body/head - ie all of them that matter) that's less of an issue. Lelutka is another big name, similar size to Laq. There's a few other names I've heard good things about, such as Akeruka and Logo, which could be worth checking out. I've heard people talk about a free Genus head recently, not sure if that's still a thing, but could be worth a look. Make sure the head is Bento. Also demo. (Quick note about Laq heads: most heads come with a HUD that controls expressions as well as alpha control and some basic makeups etc etc, they include that in with the price. Laq charges for the HUD separately. You will need this HUD, even though it's technically optional.) I'd ignore the reviews section of the websites @AnyaJurelle gave you entirely. Most of them are half a decade old, and the vast majority of the review content is misleading and wrong because of that. The tutorials section of that website is excellent, well worth a read - just avoid the reviews. They do more harm than good.

@NiranV Dean, I summon thee! If I remember correctly, the Belleza bodies are an order of magnitude worse than, well, everything else out there because of their extremely high polygon count. Maitreya/Slink/Signature are about the same sort of level, comparable to Catwa and other heads. This is also why neck seams are much more of a problem with Belleza bodies than the others. Kemono is the least performance intensive of the major brands by a significant margin, but the clothing/skin/etc market is aimed at a more niche audience than the others. But I'm working from my memory of a discussion that happened on the Black Dragon discord a while back, Niran and others can give you actual numbers if you wish.