Prokofy Neva

It's not about whether there is a literal search string in this thread about anyone saying that LL "must" support the LEA. Binary thinking is deadly. But it is about the concept underlying it. That they have some kind of obligation or should because they're wealthy...or something. If there wasn't that assumption, this thread wouldn't even exist. I don't think those few times that the mass media wrote about art in SL, they wrote about the LEA sims. They wrote about AM Radio who works at IBM or Bryn Oh who exists apart from LEA, and so on. Of course, you may find a literal search string. But you don't need Linden to support the LEA for the press to write about good art in SL. LEA or even LL itself are not enough to do SL's bad PR. That will only happen when there are enough residents who do things that get positive attention.

I think Dekka Raymaker has made some very interesting points about art versus craft that seem particularly true of the medium of Second Life; Mollymews is right about the essential ephemeral nature of SL art and Scylla Rhiadra has some good ideas for the modalities of a revised LEA. I think first, the idea that the Lindens "must" support the arts is flawed because they are not a government and we are not a people. Or at least, they are not a liberal democratic government under the rule of law, and we cannot vote or have the power of the purse through a parliament, and the free press and justice system to back it up. So the analogy is flawed. It inevitably degenerates to its actual nature, which is that a corporation with its own interests chooses the people and projects that they feel best reflect those interests and naturally gravitate to their friends, which makes it essentially unfair, strife-prone and actually not good art. Real artists in SL don't need someone to give them a sim. They either value it enough to pay for it themselves or get friends to do so, or they do things like buy little pieces of abandoned land scattered around the mainland and put up works, such as what I have seen recently with the "holy spaces" idea in some of the bleakest parts of the Mainland. People mourn the passing of great sims but they seldom want to spend the real money required to keep them going, which doesn't mean $100 in a tip jar. And the artists don't want to do what it takes to raise money in SL because they are allergic to commerce. I just visited yet another great work of art sim where there wasn't a single souvenir for sale for any low or high price, but only hugely high-priced rentals in one area that might or might not take off. As in RL, artists tend to be leftists and liberals who embrace various social theories antithetical to capitalism, so they don't believe in business sustaining their efforts. But rather than endlessly hammer on the Lindens or make do with committees of their friends, that's where they should be going, to businesses in SL that can afford sustaining the arts as a form of advertising or simply public good will. There is an enormous amount of cash in the breedables, vehicles, sex furniture, rentals businesses (those with huge numbers of sims, which would not be me). So that's where the money is and that's where the support can and should come from. In the setting of SL, which is kind of like a cross between an Ayn Rand novel, McDonald's, Tompkins Square Park and the Calafou Hackers' farm, i.e. extreme technocapitalism and technocommunism, it might make more sense either to find ancient Medicis, patrons of the arts, or crowd-funding or some rabid collective. There is no government and in fact no "public" in SL that you can reasonably access. There is a market, if distorted, of people who do pay for art works, sometimes a lot -- I remember I once sold an original single work of Starax's for US $300 and I myself often buy art works that amount to motel art in my rentals for $1000L or more. Such is Second Life. There is an enormous amount of art in SL that sustains itself, some with one-person shows on little lots or through sales or other things. It might pay to expand the notion of what is art, i.e. to me a themed, landscaped sim can be art and SL photographs can be art, which are usually not what people are thinking of in these discussions. There are installations that the highbrows of SL whisper about in hushed tones but to me it looks like a lot of derivative Boston art school rejects, broken umbrellas, doll parts and mournful circus music. I recently went around with a flaming porcelain doll head in hand to satirize one with piano music blowing around on the ground. On the other hand, some pieces of what seems to be the shoddiest mass art from Raglan Shire Art Walk or something, amidst the fractals and twisted prims just make you happy and you want to look at them all the time. In RL, even museums that get government grants have to have things that sell in the gift shop and the SL artworld needs a lot more of that.

Get a script scanner -- they are free on the Marketplace -- and go over your parcel and see what it taking up a high amount of script time, i.e. over the middle three digits. Breedables, some particle makers, weapons, rocking chairs, adult furniture, etc. can cause these high script times and that can put then lot in the red.

Wait until the nefarious Section 230 is removed/nullified in the Communications Decency Act, then the Lindens, like Facebook and Twitter, will cease this indifferent attitude to such serious matters and police them with far more alacrity. In the meantime, always try to get more than one person to AR something, a chorus gets their attention, as do repeated ARs.

Make sure that you don't put items in "share" because due to a BUG in the group code, even if you set the powers of the group members NOT to be able to return group-set objects, if put in "share" they can.

Thank you so much! What needs to be done is that has to be UNCHECKED if you don't want it jerking your view around. I never saw that before and never had to do anything with it.

I could weep with this new (for me) annoyance. I don't know whether it is because I got a new computer and something changed in the settings for SL, or it's because I happened to download a later version of SL for Windows (the regular viewer) and this is changed in the latest version, but it's just ruining my SL. I can't imagine what the Lindens were thinking by making zoom-in a default. It's not the boon they imagine for builders or decorators, truly. Here's what happens: So when I want to edit something, I right click on it, and immediately the camera drags me into a close-up of that object. Drags me. Against my will. No, I didn't do ctr-left click -- which is how I'd prefer to zoom into things, thanks. No, I didn't do ctr-0 - which is another way to zoom in. Yes, I have "Disabled Camera Constraints" but that doesn't seem to cure this -- I've tried with and without. When I let go of the edit, it rocks me back out again, which is the most annoying because the whole point often of putting something into edit is merely to MOVE IT. Something necessitated often by the need to first rez mesh on a prim, then cam it into place ahem. So this new zoom-in against your will makes it awfully hard because you get rocked out, then have to deliberately zoom in again more gradually to be able to place something. But obviously you have other reasons to edit things -- to shrink or enlarge, to re-colour, to add scripts, etc. etc. - or perhaps you're building something or modifying something. It occured to me that this annoyance got built in this way because the Lindens not only don't build inworld anymore; the FIC doesn't build in-world, but outside, in Blender or whatever, and without a care about the mesh-bouncing issue, so they seldom have any reason to try to edit an object or place an object inworld, something I do a zillion times a day. As do others, surely. And often you want to see the object in the whole scene, at a distance, to adjust it -- you don't want to be zoomed in AGAINST YOUR WILL in a close-up by the system. If I wanted to zoom in, I'd use ctr-left clink, thank you. I have tried EVERYTHING to make this go away. I've looked at old forums, I've tried this and that. NOTHING IS WORKING. HELP!

I think you must never have studied Linden Lab's Terms of Service. https://www.lindenlab.com/tos "You acknowledge that it is your responsibility to ensure payment in advance for all paid aspects of the Service, and to ensure that your credit or debit cards or other payment instruments accepted by Linden Lab or an applicable Payment Service Provider continue to be valid and sufficient for such purposes. Payments made with a United States-based payment instrument will be charged by Linden Research, Inc. Payments made with payments instruments based outside of the United States will be charged by Tilia Branch UK Ltd., which is located at 11-12 St. James's Square, Suite 1, 3rd Floor, London, United Kingdom SW1Y 4LB. Linden Lab may offer you the opportunity (directly or through an applicable Payment Service Provider) to purchase or use virtual credits, points, tokens, services, or items ("Virtual Goods and Services"). Linden Lab may modify, revalue, or make the Virtual Goods and Services more or less common, valuable, effective, or functional. Virtual credits, points, or tokens as further described in each applicable Product Policy ("Virtual Tender") associated with your Account that were purchased with U.S. dollars or other accepted fiat currency may be used or exchanged before Virtual Tender associated with your Account that was not purchased (e.g., Virtual Tender that was earned through experiential play), no matter when that Virtual Tender was acquired. Except as set forth in any Additional Terms (such as any refund policies that may apply to a subscription service) or above with respect to Usage Subscriptions, if Linden Lab modifies, suspends or terminates any Usage Subscription or Virtual Goods and Services (including any Virtual Tender), then you will forfeit your rights to the modified, suspended, or terminated Usage Subscription or Virtual Goods and Services. Likewise, except as set forth above, in any Additional Terms, or as required by applicable law, Linden Lab is not responsible for repairing, replacing or restoring access to your Usage Subscription, or Virtual Goods and Services (including any Virtual Space or other Virtual Tender associated with each Product, as further described in an applicable Product Policy), or providing you with any credit or refund or any other sum, in the event of: (a) Linden Lab's change, suspension or termination of any Usage Subscription or Virtual Goods and Services (including any Virtual Space or other Virtual Tender associated with each Product, as further described in an applicable Product Policy); or (b) for loss or damage due to Website or Server error, or any other reason." There is nothing new in their mailing about Tilia today. Tilia has already been their division handling subscriptions and payments for years. The LL TOS already talks about tokens, i.e. the Linden dollar and has for years: The language about inactive accounts and fees is no different than numerous other financial services, starting with banks: https://www.mybanktracker.com/news/inactive-bank-accounts Long ago (14 years ago?) LL declared that all other outside parties selling or buying or converting Linden dollars were invalid and all such agencies, like Anshe Chung or Gaming Open Market ceased to operate because LL wouldn't recognize them. There is nothing new here. Far from being "terrible" terms, these terms were *necessary* for LL to comply with existing banking and finance laws. They're also not new. It's just that they are presented in a focused and distilled way with the addition of the tax identification or Social Security number. It strikes me that like other developments of the past, whether the declaration of gambling as illegal when US law changed, or the collection of VAT to stay in compliance with European law, those SL businesses that function like real-life businesses and have real names in particular, and established practices, accounts, etc. will find nothing new in this and nothing onerous. In fact, many people outside the US do have passports, as it is more common for them to have this as a form of identification. Anyone in any significant business that earns enough to cash out will likely have a RL counterpart. But very small businesses of the type that are run by anonymous avatars with PayPal accounts that don't clearly hook up to any known business may face difficulties. Yes, it seems that LL will make it harder to cash out. But if you can't provide a real name, government ID, address, and tax ID number to a business providing you a payment, why do you imagine that you can go on existing in the real world? It's funny when 3000+ complained about doubling of the cashout cost, the forums regulars including some in this thread denounced them as somehow failing to realize that "LL is a business" and "LL isn't a charity" and "LL can't run a unicorn realm". But when people are asked to supply the exact same information you supply in RL to open up a business account even just on PayPal, let alone a real bricks-and-mortar bank (ID, Social Security #, valid address), there is some outrage as if something illegal or horrible has occurred. It hasn't. And any lawyer will explain this to you.

I have dealt with these issues for years and I always chuckle to myself when a tenant IMs me angrily that "my land is lagging them out" -- and I fly in and find Ma and Pa sitting on the porch with their loaded shot-guns, in rocking chairs, with 20 breedables aimlessling wandering and colliding, a security orb, a badly-scripted locking door, temp-rez flowers, a beer dispenser, and much more. It's like the old Pogo cartoon, "We have reached the enemy, and he is us!" I stopped fussing about scripts and lags years ago when the Lindens changed the way they did servers -- they slowed everything down and forced doors to close more slowly for the sake of the whole sim, which was its own annoyance. But I also found much of the time when a sim was always in the red, dropping to its knees on FPS and TD, that was because it was being shared on a server with another sim that maybe had a club on it with 44 avatars in bling packing it. When you file a ticket about these kinds of chronic problems, the Lindens often inform you they have moved the sim to another server. There used to be a resident who published the "secret sim sharers" so you could tell who you were sharing the server with and complain if it were a club or mall, but now either he got bored with the project or LL doesn't reveal that data any more. Recently, I became more aggressive about trying to solve a sim's chronic stall problems and filed a ticket, and a Linden told me once again that she had moved the sim to another server, and gave me the long lecture about FSP and TD and seeing these numbers with ctr-shift-F1, which of course I heard 15 years ago, and 10 years ago, and I should even send her the longer and more complex version of that lecture I got from a Linden at one of their office hours. Truly, we get it, guys. Once the famous Lee Linden told me laconically about a certain sim that was always lagging that he was seeing that it was humming along like a Swiss watch. I pointed out to him that it had no avatars on it, not even himself, as he was viewing it from a master panel. And that's just it: Linden Lab's sims work best when we are not there. "The World Without Us..." So more practically, I finally went and got one of those scanners. I have had several, and they work with varying degrees of accuracy and helpfulness. The free XOPH scanner seems to be the best but try all the free and low-cost ones. I began flying around in earnest and found the Ma-and-Pa problem is still really the best explanation -- those complaining the most about lag have the lagging craziness right on their own parcels. Breedables are often big laggers, but security orbs are the worst -- likely because they are constantly scanning and listening for certain avatars on the list. It's worth going around with the scanner because you find things you can get rid of, like high-script fish, or invisible sliding windows you didn't realize had escaped, or wearables from rezzers that didn't get deleted, etc. But ultimately, after removing 400 scripted items from a sim, and trying to police all the high time eaters, I was not that much better off, the "spare time" hadn't changed that much. It's true that it's more about the accumulative power of many scripts, rather than a few high items.

This is a good reason to make rentals self service with an initial group role to join to immediately set prims and home so that the tenant doesn't queue up waiting. If at any time they are unhappy with themselves in their self-service, they can fire themselves and refund -- which I think should be mandatory for any good landlord. Everyone should be able to refund for any reason for a small early cancellation fee.

Recently while trying to reduce numbers of scripts and script time on a sim, I was flying around and I found the item on that sim that was the highest script time item on the sim -- a hippo rental box. I understand it had multiple scripts. But even the one showing was a huge script time eater.

1/3 Homestead for rent Teleport to Belarus Homestead $2400/week 1640 prims $8640/mo with 10% discount US $33 on Paypal If you have a premium and 1024 m available, donate to our mainland group and get $450 discount off your rent per week. Beautiful mountain landscaped forest sim with pond, your part is 1/3. You can terraform it and decorate it as you like. You can have a home or store. Pets, skyboxes are welcome You share the sim with just 2 other tenants, one (me) hardly ever there. IM Prokofy Neva for the group invitation.

"Who is behind this"? It's not a crime, Lindal. It's more than fine. More than 3,000 people have signed with their names, and that's what counts. If the person "behind" this petition -- and again, it's not a crime, even in Second Life -- didn't have any support with this idea, they'd have 50 or 100, or 1, like some of mine. But they have 3,000. It's not about that person. Slavish loyalty to the Lindens isn't exhibited necessarily by aligning with their every move, especially on something like Zindra. As for gambling, sorry, but that's the law of the USA; the Lindens complied with this, where they were slow on other things (like *****) because the major credit card companies like Master Card simply informed them that if they violated US law on Internet gambling, they would no longer process their transactions. Because real-life companies grasp that they have to abide by the law if they want to keep having customers. So LL reluctantly complied. And that counts more than virtual reality. And I personally think it's a good thing, as there are too many gambling addicts, too many lost fortunes, and too may vultures preying on poor people, so we shouldn't add to that. No, slavish loyalty is indicated in a phrase like "I realize LL has to make money out of SL, or the world goes away." Huh? What are WE, if not the world!!! We are the world. We make money for the Lindens. We show up and pay for premium accounts, server rentals, fees on every Marketplace purchase, Linden conversion fees and cash-out fees. We already sustain Linden Lab wonderfully. Server rentals produce way more revenue for them than cash-out fees, even doubled. They only reason they are grabbing at this now is ideological -- they bear the historic socialist/communist aversion to land as a basis of a society's economy, because then they can't control the world as much -- not only do people do what they want to on their land -- they make money from that land that the Lindens can't see any part of, unless they grab at transaction fees and cash-out fees. Understood, but need they grab so much? People are canceling premium accounts -- after first buying them when they added 512 more "free" tier. So they are undoing that good. There are indeed other ways for Lindens to make revenue. o Content sales -- eventually they will come to this. They already compete with house builders and land renters so they will eventually invade this space. And why not? They know the platform the best and can build to it the most skillfully. For years, Linden and Mole content was superior to residents' content. This changed with the advent of mesh, when Moles didn't make mesh things. But eventually this strange imbalance will revert and they will sell content. o More granulated tier increments -- any time the Lindens are ready to stop grabbing at 8192 from the poor 4096 owner who wants to go beyond 4096 plus 1024 a bit for prims, they will get more purchases of tier. o The Lindens could temporarily rent tier in 512 blocks by having a Tier Linden who joined your group and gave you tier as long as you paid him X in Lindens. o Welcome area ad boards to teleport to venues of interest, and highway billboards. In a world where the Lindens refuse to meet the pent-up demand for advertising that would help their business AND our businesses, I can't take seriously their "need" to double the cashout fee on our backs. o Special events -- every single Silicon Valley business makes their cash in events where big wheels pay to speak on panels, and where techs and others interested pay steep admission fees to rub elbows with big wheels at "fireside chats". Even if all the Lindens did was another SL meet-up for residents, as they did about 5 times in the past, they could make cash if they put their minds to it -- after all, they do the birthday now, whereas in the past they left it to residents. The only reason they stopped was because they ran into all kinds of scandals on the one in Chicago, remember? I can enumerate if you forget. o Special admissions passes -- the feature on the land menu to pay tickets to get admitted to land has almost never been used by most people. That's because they don't have anything compelling enough to get people to pay. But the Lindens do. They can create events that are recurring like games or live music or whatever. They themselves are a scarce quantity people would pay to see/listen to. Never, like Elizabeth Warren, say the socialist idiocy, "You didn't build that" about Second Life. The Lindens created Second Life by accident, as a second thought after their first thought of making virtual world goggles and haptic gloves, which were their real interest at first (they were just too early with this). Their first iteration of the world was something they not only blew up -- they did nothing to stop crashing by griefers for years because they found it a useful load test. So, in real life, first came businesses in RL, then came taxes, then came government services like roads. People and commerce "built that," not governments, which are secondary if necessary. When socialists try to do this in reverse, it doesn't work. The residents really did build Second Life. As it happens, they have made the best clothing, skins and hair (only former residents-turned-Lindens have done that, not Lindens per se); they have built the best live music; they have built the best home & garden decor and so on. The Lindens are poised to grab an even bigger chunk of the housing and rentals market than they already have, banking on the fear especially of newbies -- stoked by forums' regulars -- of being ripped off by unscrupulous landlords who either disappear, or don't refund, or perform badly. The only problem with the Khrushyoby Linden-style now is the same as what Khrushchev found in real life -- he can't get the state-controlled building and housing ministries to function fast enough to satisfy all customers.

Why on earth does it matter if the drafter of the petition is anonymous??? Like you, with your name "Lindal Kidd" not linked to a RL name on your profile, are anonymous. Many people signed the petition with real names -- I sure did. Change.org encourages that. Some signed with avatar names. As I see them go by, I recognize some of them. So this isn't a campaign with 3,000 anonymous people. And people who aren't in Second Life wouldn't understand or bother with this. There are all kinds of ideas one can provide for increasing LL's profits but that's not the essence of the letter, which is to convey a protest about the doubling of the fee -- which has attracted SIGNIFICANT support. I'm trying to see here the real version for the animosity to this petition. I suppose it's jealousy of a social class of people in SL who make a living or at least enough to cash out and have it matter. I'm *not* one of those people myself. But even so, it's truly annoying that not only has the cash-out doubled, the Linden's value has crashed along with it by two points now. So that adds up. The Lindens could have staggered these changes. They could have allowed the lower prices for tier on the island to take effect and provide some relief...the premium account increases to undo that...then doubled the cashout. Instead, they've put in all three, ensuring the lower prices for the islands is essentially cancelled out. What else could this be about? Feverish loyalty to the Lindens, which is pandemic among the forums' regs. Even so, I think there is something else driving this. And maybe some people have been put up to their angry posts about this.

None of this is relevant because in SL, you have the fixed cost of $10 per upload regardless of the quality of the "fabric" but more importantly, there is YOUR TIME. That's really the only cost -- if you pay yourself. If you don't, and SL is a supplement, you can value your time or not. Since you describe your costs as "zero," evidently you don't. You likely can't sub-contract out the "stitching" work in Photoshop. If you don't have a store or tier to pay, then your costs are quite low. If you do, or you have to pay event fees or clerks to manage customer complaints, then your costs are higher. There would be advertising costs -- how could you compete otherwise? In short, I'm not sure you've calculated the real costs of your business, and your claim that adding $10 easily to cover cash-out costs then isn't believable.

Once again, ad boards aren't just destinations, they are places *where there are people who are motivated to help because they are in business*. Hello! Unpaid mentors are never going to be as reliable, and as I've explained, it's a system that is easily corrupted. And just as it is annoying to have a store clerk hovering around you when you go to a store and you want to be able to browse in piece, so newbies shouldn't have Mentors hanging on their necks. When people have OPTIONS, they CHOOSE. At this point they do not have those options.

Breeding barns like this are the bane of every landlord. I put limits on the number of animals and in some high-population or smaller-square-space room areas I urge people to take the animals out and put them in other rentals I have that are like stalls. I think the Lindens need to do the same thing. Yes, breedables or any moving animal (new animesh animals) are high script-time items -- go around them with a script scanner and you will readily prove this. The effect is cumulative -- perhaps this or that one animal isn't so high-time by itself, but as you add more and more to the sim, it degrades the performace. It's their collisions that are really the sim killers, however. If you have an animal or toddler caroming around a house, the collisions it is constantly making are laggers, too. So if the residents can make sure the animals are all put stationery when they are logged on that's helpful but even a stopped animal still has a script in it consuming time. Often people have these breeding barns not because they love animals but because they are trying to breed a rare and sell it for a high price. Understood. But then the Lindens need to create not "Linden Homes" but "Linden Stables" and encourage people to put breedables on those sims where they don't bother others either with the look of a lot of animals which can be annoying or the actual fact of lag.

Well, ask your friend Carl, Lindal. And he will reiterate what I've said. I think you're on mission on the forums to always disagree with me, and that's fine, I'm used to it, but there are too many inherent negatives in the Mentor system, and too many cases of Mentors acting badly for you to go on protesting that because you're good, therefore we must all bow and accept this system. No. If the selfless actions of which you are capable and which you have demonstrated over the years are the selfless things you say, you do not need a label on your profile. The quickest way of ending abuse is not allowing the use of "Mentor" as a description on a profile. Because indeed it does attract precisely the kind of person that needs to role-play cop or lord it over others. The hall monitor is a universally-understood persona around the world and universally loathed. It's not required to make SL succeed.

Let me point out that you said something very important here: you invoked Caledon. Caledon is not part of Linden Lab or an "endorsed" by Linden, although the participate voluntarily in a Gateway system whereby LL steers newbies to them (if I'm not mistaken). That's a GOOD thing. Commercial interests are GOOD. Therefore this BUSINESS has an incentive to try to recruit more customers. So they are willing to have a "loss leader" -- they provide free help and free costumes and furniture in the hopes that some of that newbie stream will stick and pay them rent or buy their content. And that's a GOOD THING. The reason you can cite the quality of Caledon is that it is a BUSINESS that is INCENTIVIZED to provide this service ultimately to make a profit. And making a profit is a GOOD THING as it provides incentive and literal means for a lovely themed and regulated community like Caledon to go on existing. So ponder the factors that went into the goodness of Caledon: commerce, merchants, incentivization, quality, reputation. When you introduce socialism by force or by vote, you usually don't get those results of the sort you get in Caledon. And that's why I'm opposed to a "government-sponsored" (i.e. Linden-run) help system that has no entry for advertising and participation by BUSINESSES. Many of the forums regs have an inherent allergy to capitalism, commerce, even non-profit activity that gets its own costs paid through sales. it's the modern craze. But do contemplate how you get the goodness of Caledon.

The nature and tenor of the responses in this thread strengthen my conviction that the forums' regulars do not run viable businesses inworld; do not have any customers; do not even log into SL. Otherwise they would sympathize with "the little dressmakers," as they were once scornfully called when copy-bots first appeared. Adding $10 to a price can price some customers out of business. I would certainly not raise all my rental prices $10, not only is it work, it would just incur wrath from people who have paid the same price for years. I don't raise prices unless I am offering something new; I don't lower them unless I am packing in more rentals to a space, i.e. with skyboxes. $10 is not an increment that makes sense for rentals anyway. I have never been wrong in responding to every single Linden change of this type by selling or abandoning land. You can never go wrong by paying less tier.

Um, no. Newbies either don't have money or don't want to spend it yet on things on rentals. Occasionally I'll get a newbie but it's almost by accident, or they've just read the search/places ads like anyone else. Of course, I'm familiar with the narrowed eyes and scorn from certain forums regs who imagine that any proposal made by me will only involve somehow drumming up business for my rentals, which is ridiculous. I only lose money on subsidized areas for newbies and often they don't "convert" to higher-payer rentals but move to islands so I am merely prepping them for other merchants that are probably the regs' friends. It's funny how this kind of instant hatred and suspicion of anything involving commerce, or any proposal at all, isn't then applied *to the Mentors program revival idea*. It should be. Once again, if you have teleport boards that you institute as paid ads, people in business with stores, clubs, live music, and yes, rentals, will have an incentive to help newbies. The newbies in turn will be able to pick from a variety of options of "things to do". it seems very hard for people to get started and some don't even seem to be able to search in the search interface as they presumably do in Google (but I've learned not to assume even that!). A board is easy to click on inworld; it is easier than figuring out "destinations" on the log-on or at the top of the screen; the Lindens have even tested such a system briefly but didn't give it enough time -- and also put their FIC friends in it, so it only replicated the same lack of retention, as new people were not interested in the things of the founding geeks. Again, in RL, you are not greeted by a Mentor who is the Mayor's friend or relative when you land at JFK or Grand Central Station, you use search, you look at ads, you look at brochures in a hotel you may have selected in advance. In the same way, the splash page of Second Life should have that equivalent of a Bookings.com or an Expedia.com, where you see a square that says "Live Music" or "Shopping" or "Poetry Reading" or "Sex Club" and you CLICK ON IT AND GO THERE. This shouldn't be so hard, people. And the Lindens should sell the splash page ad space, too. They want to earn revenue from methods besides rolling out more servers -- ad sales are one way they can do that. Every form of media since time immemorial has sold ad space as well as subscriptions. There is no reason why the publishers of a virtual world shouldn't do this. That means teleport board ad space; splash page ad space; highway billboard ad space; special events ad space; whatever. It can all be regulated and done tastefully.

I'm glad you've stepped up to say all this, it's true, and I don't doubt that I don't know the half of the abuses that went on. It seems if this is the case, and these are Mentors with a very narrow scope of setting up homes (that are already set up? I'm not getting this), then the Lindens should make sure they aren't the same ones selling kits to adapt the homes or other home-related products, or their friends. But honestly, I don't see this as either necessary or a good idea, and once again, it merely creates a class of residents lording it over others, often not really helping, but only gaining social or commercial advantage.

Chic, you yourself are a Home & Gardens merchant. I assure you that I don't need to be trapped in a lag fest of women's clothing -- or even men's clothing which I seldom buy -- for 20 minutes just to buy a chair and get a gift. They could easily put all the H&G on one sim, and if it doesn't fill the sim, that's fine, but it would all be on one sim. You need to see how this system loses you business.

You don't need to have a "habit" of making new accounts to make 2 or 3 of them and track the experience and see how it works -- and also interview others who have. Don't be silly. There aren't just odd bad apples, the entire system encourages nepotism, cronyism and corruption. Help is needed but it doesn't have to be delivered in THIS WAY. There is nothing to prove this works. Indeed, it was disbanded before, with good reason! It's just historical memory fades and now new Lindens are trying it again because no one is around to explain how bad it was, and some Lindens who have been around for awhile are the very ones that benefited from the Mentor-LM-slinging racket.

People who are commenting that they should be brought back aren't reading about the problems of such a system. Yes, indeed I do believe that the best way to avoid venality and corruption is to have a paid, transparent, ad system run by the Lindens. Who do I think will get such a space? Why, the same people who got them when the Lindens used to run such a system at the old telehubs -- anybody who pays the terminal. Yes, it could be run by first come, first served. In fact, your idea that there will be some huge number of people that there won't be enough room isn't proven by experience at all. If for some reason there was a huge rush, it would be easy to limit buyers to one week or two weeks and then a mandatory break for X days. As for "only the big spenders" -- that's also not proven. Not every big spender will want to advertise to newbies, who either don't have money, or who do have money, but don't want to spend it on THIS, just YET. But some will, and there could be a range of ad prices and time periods accordingly. Truly, this is the experience of the past and the objections you are raising are merely ideological and hypothetical, not practical and not based on experience. The Lindens can have expensive ads or cheap ads, but it isn't really the problem you imagine to make the system accessible and also tasteful, i.e. with rules such as "no adult images" etc. Yes, indeed, the artists and all the other beautiful people will afford it. Just like Riverwalk and many other art venues afforded the telehub ad space back in the day. It is not the horror you imagine whatsoever. Clicking on a teleport board -- an ad -- is not as hard as opening a box or building or doing anything. You just click. Yes, my Nobel Prize in virtual economics waits because this really is the solution and how do I know it? Because the Lindens used to have it and it worked. They were browbeaten into deleting the telehubs -- which were a good thing -- plus they had their own internal agitators against them -- again for ideological reasons -- and never returned to an ad system. Philip Linden admitted that most of the revenue came from telehub sims, and in fact the overwhelming majority were not the ugly lag monsters claimed -- it was just jealousy by oldbies who had boutiques far from them and who resented the democratic accessibility of telehub malls to anyone who could pay the rent, rather than to those who sucked up to oldbie designers to get a corner in their store. Real life works this way, and there is no reason SL can't work this way. When you arrive at Grand Central, you look at electronic billboards; you look at bus station ads; you look at flyers and pamphlets. You are not greeted by somebody who knows the mayor who takes you by the hand and steps you along to their own store or restaurant.