Josephina Bonetto

I am finding that so-called event spamming groups are becoming increasingly less effective, probably because all members are advertisers and the ones who aren't have notices turned off. The SL official event listing is ok but I release my schedule monthly which means I can no longer list a legitimate month in one sitting as only 5 events can be listed in a 24 hr period. I am finding though that there are less spam events, so maybe it is just a trade off. I am a 1.23 LL Viewer user mind you so I cannot vouch for the accessibility of events displayed in search via V2. I use my groups, one pay per notice group, my subscribe-o-matic (which rarely bears fruit these days) and hope for the best. I am trialling the Second Life advertising beta this week to see how effective that is but the cost is a bit prohibitive for club owners with very little income, so it might not be done every month. I use Avatars Events (free) and I am about to advertise on SL Universe (free event forum and paid banner ads) and a radio station (paid) too. I do attempt to maintain a Facebook Fan Page and a Twitter account, although I don't want to spend all my time listing events in a zillion places with no reward. I want to work smarter, not harder and I find Google calendar particularly useful for this - I have a Google event board in my club linked to my Google calendar and it is also embedded in the clubs website.

I think too much is made of event security. I run a system where the volume of events is never beyond what myself, and staff, can cope with in terms of security. Cheaters can easily be spotted as can spammers, and if a tight ship is run there are no real threats to security. Clubs try to grow too big too quickly and burn out, for little reward. This is usually why they close. As for the recent fuss over alts, they are easy to spot without the need for dodgy databases stored in some random persons basement. Stopping object entry and the running of scripts are two basic functions that can be configured on the land, mine are set to group only, as is rez. I have a security system that is grid wide running off a server, which enables me to give out Remote HUDs to staff in the event I can't get online and gives them the option to ban people. My land is not, and never will be deeded, although it is set to a group. There will always be obnoxious people but they are rare. The main issue appears to be contests. I have my contests configured so that only contestants can vote which stops the mass TPing of friends at the end of an event. Contestants do have to join the group now too, which I resented doing but now the group limit has been increased is less of an issue. I add casual staff to a block list in my board which prevents the awkward conversation about reminding on duty staff they are not permitted to enter the contest. My DJs take a personal interest in helping me to spot people not in theme, or any other dodgy goings on but really this sort of thing goes with the territory and is not really a security issue per se.

It is a bit unfortunate really for those of us who returned to mainland only to find that because of neighbours use of physics and scripting, events are now unable to run effectively due to poor region performance (in particular poor script performance). I know a portion of my visitors complain about the crashfest and I am powerless to do anything because mainland has no real restriction on rezzed content. I know that as a small community-based club owner since 2007, I am mindful of excessive scripts and try to create my environment responsibly. When I owned a private region, it was nice to not have this issue, but the price tag with VAT was prohibitive. On mainland there is very little you can do for optimum region configuration but on private estate I would suggest that monitoring top scripts and a regular restart regime of at least once a week are the absolute minimum things you would need to keep on top of for event configuration.