Prokofy Neva

You can also look for houses that have a large base on them to start with that enable you to sink the house into the ground and then appear level. Otherwise make a rock foundations as Aethelwine has suggested. It's better to put the foundation down first then adjust the house to it, but if you are already all decorated, you could slide the foundation under the house. Another strategy would be to buy some big flower beds and arrange them around the gaps, or some bushes. Most of the mainland has land you can terraform; only some old Linden sims like Brown and the newer Linden Homes don't have terraforming turned on.

Look in lost & found folder -- your items are returned to you, and usually not lost. They are returned to you in big bunches -- read the notices. It may say "58 prims" and "table" but inside is "lamp, bed, rug," etc. all coalesced in a group. No, there is no way to restore the situation before your deed, especially with only a 4096 and 1024 involved. Very rarely -- very rarely, I can tell you from long experience! -- the Lindens can roll back a sim if there was a huge loss but they can't do that for 4096 because the sims are dynamically changing constantly among multiple owners and restoring your parcel means ruining someone else's parcel. Keep all land on 0 autoreturn while changing from individual to deeded and from one group to another and it shouldn't return. But it's another mater if you suddenly remove from the total available square meters of land in changing the groups, then there are too many prims on one of the lots and some of it will return. So if you have 4096 and cut it in half to put in another group, the prims will return. Land and tier are separate things. Tier covers land like a blanket. Not enough blanket, and the land is not covered and is lost, i.e. seized by the Lindens after a few days. Your table of land donated is confusing -- are these all different owners? All the same owners but different avatar? If you have 4096 level account, that is actually 5120 meters available to use to group land because the premium account gives you an additional 1024 m. If you had 5120 meters in one account and grouped that land, you should have had 5,632 meters available in a group to have group land. You should always first make the group and deed land to it and fill it with all available tier before purchasing more land to make sure you have enough tier and aren't forced into a higher tier level. It sounds like you didn't have that many meters so maybe I'm not understanding something.Deeding land to a group shouldn't remove all the content if you keep the autoreturn on 0; it is moving from one kind of owner (single) to another (group) so it's status changes and everything set to one group or no group will then return if the grouped land has a different group. But again, in theory if you always keep autoreturn to 0 you could avoid this. Go here for a tutorial on group land and its problems, with help cards and also a visual diorama: Memory Bazaar. Look for the little post office down the stairs for the group tutorials.

I have never known the Lindens to find lost inventory -- ever, in their lives. Even if you lost 15,000 items due to a bug and contact them soon enough for them to (in theory) still find it on their servers. Second Life, like Real Life, is about learning to accept loss. You may want to come to my Shaman's Gatcha Addiction Treatment Center. In addition to tips and cures and such, I now have a Sorrow level.

Totally agree. And there are scripts that deliberately disappear the box and send the item to your inventory -- and you may not realize that, either due to lag, or thinking that something is still in the box and focusing on its contents, and not looking up to the right, to see incoming inventory. I've been burned a number of times even on COPYABLE non-transfer items! I assume a copy is left in the box. I bat away and discard incoming automatic deliveries because I want to file it myself in a folder, not just have it add to a huge list of "objects". When you refuse a delivery like that, it is not in trash and not anywhere. It's gone -- until you ask the merchant to redeliver or hope they have a redelivery system.

It doesn't work that way. If you have a rare to sell, in a box, or out of a box, you are allowed to put only one copy of it at a time on the MP, or you are flagged for a violation by the Lindens, who remove the doubles. So it sells, you get a notice "out of stock," and then you replenish it -- the item automatically goes to the "Unlisted" folder in your Marketplace tab inworld. That means there is no "empty" showing for sale on the MP. To replace it, you have to drag a new copy in and re-list it, if you have multiple rares. You get an empty box not if the item is sold out -- when it sells out it is removed to "Unlisted". You get an empty box if the seller accidentally or deliberately sells you an empty box. Then you have to rely on their good will to get it. Sadly, there is no way to rate this bad experience if you see it recurring without remedy because the items get unlisted. Merchants who sell copyable items or items that are copyable but to next owner on transfer only can be rated and you can be warned if you see somebody with one star, and people leaving reviews that they didn't get something as advertised. Not so with gatcha sellers. It's too bad there isn't a way to rate their store overall as a result, not just the individual item for sale.

I think that this is deliberately left somewhat vague in the TOS or community rules because on the one hand, the Lindens don't want to lose customers give what the main attraction for their customers is, but on the other hand, they don't want liability for some activity that may bring them unwanted press attention or even a lawsuit from some countries. What I've always found the basic truth to be is this: Lindens themselves don't go out policing the world, hunting for pictures or skyboxes. The world is too big and complex. They do this on the Marketplace very vigorously, but there they can use search globally more easily. So they rely on ABUSE REPORTS. And the favourite sport of people griefing you, or people who have become your enemies, is to try to AR you for something in G that is not G, whether a swear word in chat or a picture of a nude or adult furniture. So it's a vulnerability you have, that griefers or enemies or just busy-body neighbours who think you are lagging the sim can use on you. But most people mind their own business and don't do this. So really, it's a question of "Better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission." If you put out adult furniture in M, behind closed doors, or even in G, in skyboxes, likely nothing will happen. And the worst that can happen is that some net nanny will AR you and you will be told to remove the offending item. Or it might be returned and you'll get a warning. But it's not a big deal.

Re: "Let's be honest, renting has always been a terrible deal for everyone except the landlord." Tell that to my hundreds of tenants, some of whom have been in my rentals literally for 10 years. No one gets into Mainland rentals for the profits.

Yes, I agree. I do not allow "group only" ban lines on my rentals and don't allow security orbs on the ground, and only allow them 500 m or higher in the sky. Any that I put in properties are for "eject" only and not "TP" home which is unnecessary. I have run a rentals business for 15 years in SL and have been a target of intense griefing as you may know. But I continue to believe in open groups and open systems that don't create an archipelago of egos in bunkers. MOST people are polite and do not enter others' homes. MOST people prefer the convenience of a group they can join without waiting for a landlord to come online, and which enables their friends to come and build or decorate or just show off creations or purchases without hassle. As in real life, the benefit of an open society outweighs the negatives caused by crime and terrorism. There's always a small percentage of tenants who are shocked when they read this on a lease and live in fear that someone will enter their house and use their adult furniture. I have come to see this is hard-wired behavior achieved by evolution that will not go away online in a virtual world, where you cannot get AIDS by definition. So I accommodate it -- but with limitations (go in the sky). The reality is, most sims only have a few people on them for a few hours at any one time, and any intruder can easily be ejected with ban powers of the ordinary type -- or you can type a name in the ban list. The reality is, with different schedules and time zones, even on my most crowded sims with the smallest lots where there might be 30 tenants, only 3-4 of them are actually there at any given hour. So the overwhelming fear of intrusion, loss of privacy, and (evolutionary and societal) fear that, say, a male will not be able to determine the paternity of his children really are misplaced. There's another thing. You can uncheck "avatars can see me" and be invisible outside the parcel. You can't get more privacy than that!

That's great news! I was wondering how I was going to get a boat out of my boat house with all the yellow lines surrounding me. Now...do this same thing on your old legacy estate...called "The Mainland" where Governor Linden reigns. Imagine if ban lines (access only) could be GONE from the Mainland at large -- currently there are entire rivers that cannot be navigated due to "group only" access (such as in Keuka/Cayuga). Imagine if security orbs didn't knock you from plane or boat because you were merely flying or sailing near a lot with an aggressive orbs, but only could be set to the range of a building, and only eject, not teleport home (which more often than not leads to a crash). Imagine! It could be done!

Oh, is that ever good news! Because boating was looking like an impossibility, let alone flying, just to get out of your own lot, past your trigger-happy neighbour, out into the clear. I wonder what their security will be like, whether it will only work directly inside a house. That in theory should be possible for them.

So you think this is merely a displacement, not new Premiums getting these homes, but old premiums abandoning or selling their mainland and then taking one of these homes? That would be a shame. The Lindens used to tell us how many premium accounts were. It reached 100,000, then started to go down, and then they stopped reporting it like 10 years ago. So I wonder what it is now. You're right that mainland rentals are people who aren't premiums -- but I find a fair number of my customers in fact *are* premiums. They buy land, even several parcels. Then they also have a rental for a change or a getaway. Or in between sales and new purchases, they rent. They rent went SL is working badly because they can leave easier (as some of my tenants are doing in the last few days as TPs haven't worked). Some come back, and then don't buy for awhile. SL has to be working well for people to buy.

The Lindens shouldn't have had ban lines work if they allow skyboxes and should have told people to put orbs in their skyboxes and not harass their fellow residents on the ground. I grew up in RL suburbia which I and even my parents fled after awhile, so I pall comes over me when I see those identical houses. But less and less percentage of Americans seem to live in suburbia and perhaps that's why they aspire to it virtually (they can't afford a house in RL as our parents did). I do see some people adding things as you say but I guess I can't get much of a garden on a boat house lol. Maybe I will get one of the tiny ones on another account and decorate it for tinies.

Linden Lab is always competing with their own customers, but they have a good reason -- their own customers are generally too preoccupied to assist with on-boarding new residents, and Linden Homes make a nice, easy way for new customers to have a home without fear of all the decisions and risks. So my instinct is to say "no," the new project won't affect business. It will lead to more furniture purchases and when the economy is better it is a tide that lifts all boats. Whenever the Lindens have built communities like this (a friend calls them "Linden Assisted Living"), it doesn't seem to affect rentals on the mainland, and certainly not on the private islands. At least, not much. Just as the Lindens rolled out what will likely be popular -- new boat slips -- one of my boat houses rented yesterday -- it has more prims and flexibility. I find boats are popular in waves -- they fill up, they're in demand, but then people get sick of them. Perhaps in spring, when they wish to plant a garden, and there is only water all around LOL. People like to buy their own homes and switch them out -- Linden homes get dull after awhile. There is an enormous variety of houses on the market and hopefully Linden Homes won't affect the house merchants' business. Most rentals are on islands, Mainland rentals are a niche, and premium accounts are a minority of users, with most owning land themselves rather than using the tier to rent (some landlords like me accept tier in lieu of rent). Of course, the Lindens want to increase this number of premium accounts, and I'm all for that, because it creates more stable communities with people more dedicated to the value of SL and increasing it. It means more sales of both furniture and land. Yes, it seems like a large number they are adding -- 400 sims ("regions," as we are supposed to call them) is nearly 10% of the 5,000 of the Mainland, correct? Or I may not have the latest numbers. But it's a lot, with more to come! From the sound of this video, they expect to retire their old ones. Perhaps they weren't selling so well? I find it hard to imagine that people will move into these identical suburban houses and leave the Asian, hobbit, and A-frame houses that at least represent some variety of style. To be sure, whenever I look at the map, I see a fair number of green dots over the Assisted Living sims. But in fact, whenever I got and get a house myself -- and I have tried a dozen spots -- I find there is no one on the sim. And closer to the ground, it seems no one is online. Even with the option to change wall paper and such, I myself get bored quickly with Linden homes. So it's only an anecdotal impression. I suppose the Lindens will then get rid of the old ones if the 512s are not taken, to make way for the new. So it may not stay at this higher number of 400 new regions plus whatever the figure is for the old. The Lindens say *some* of the houses are bigger than the old ones. But some are definitely dinky and no amount of forums' regulars claiming to the contrary can undo that fact -- go and look; better yet, go and *live* and try even to fit a bed and dresser in those boxes. The boat houses will likely be more popular than the houses, but who knows, we'll see. One good thing about the "planned communities" is that they are planned -- there are waterways, peninsulas, shores, public areas of various types -- you wish the Lindens had done this with the Mainland especially with waterways. Ultimately, I think the Linden Homes don't compete with private rentals because of all the rules they have. You can't replace the houses. You can't have the house in search or engage in any commercial activity. That means not even a gatcha yard sale. I have commercial activity restricted in my rentals, too. Why should I have you rent cheap land and reduce your business costs and make money from land I could be making money from? That's why commercial rentals cost more. But generally if someone wants a yard sale now and then, I just ask them to put it up in the sky. If someone wants their house in search, they can do so if it is not a store, and of course stores can, and it's included in rent. That's not possible in a Linden Home, and people chafe at that restriction. It seems you can have skyboxes on Linden Homes land at 2000 or higher, at least that's the rule in the new ones. The main problem I see with Linden Homes is the use of ban lines. It seems there is even more use of it here than on the Mainland at large, perhaps because the houses are close together. It's super annoying trying to fly around and smacking into ban lines everywhere along the boats. You can't fly over the houses to get to the public areas due to ban lines and have to hunt for a crossing. Even so, I think there will be a big rush for the boats. What do you think?

Scraping data like this on an entire sim and finding all the objects of other private property owners is an invasion of privacy. I remember what havoc Electric Sheep caused when they scraped all of SL in this way and ruined people's privacy and also caused theft (because people casually set things to $0 for another person to buy, and when the whole world is in search, griefers can hunt for $0 objects). Eventually this search was scrapped, but I wasn't surprised to find that Firestorm built it into their viewer, and it's not the first time they've enabled data-scraping. The response to this kind of concern, although privacy is a new obsession for the techs who hated copyright -- an obsession I don't share -- is usually "but you can do it because you can". "Code is law," and if you can area-search, so what, you area-search. Even so, Firestorm could be persuaded to change if there was enough community awareness. Of course area-search enables cheating on hunts. What do you do when someone on the sim where you live hogs all the resources? It can be a script eating problem like this (I remember submarines diving up and down that brought a sim to its knees years ago). Or it can be a club that takes all the avatar spaces. If there were an abuse report category called "overuse of resources," then perhaps the Lindens could act and enforce fair use -- but what is fair use? In a world with such cheap land, the obvious thing to do is to move, especially because land in Zindra fetches very good prices, and given that some land was gotten for a song *cough*, moving out would seem to be a wise economic decision. Of course, a note to the owner to delete the listening scripts from their building operation might also be in order...

No. That doesn't work. When you pull up a name from search -- which is obviously something I do all the time -- because the groups don't load, because people aren't in the group yet -- I STILL have had the issue of having to log-into their profile. It's not about web search, but something else, when that happens.

I don't know if you are able to reason by analogy. I didn't say literally that these teleporting issues "were the same thing" as the log-in issue. I said that when I point out a problem, people always claim it's my fault, but most of the time, it's the software. And rarely, Linden Lab admits this, as they did not teleporters. Once again, you can't "automatically log into the web profile" WHEN IT IS BROKEN. Read what Whirly said -- it's a bug. It's not always the case -- and in fact when I tried her cure, deleting the files which are apparently corrupted, it seemed to PARTLY go away. That is, I still can't pull up people's pictures, but at least I get a profile to be able to IM them.

@Whirly Fizzle FYI - there was only one of those folders you mentioned on my system: C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\cef_cookies Inside that folder were two more folders: Cookies and Cookies-Journal. So I erased them. Then it took a half dozen tries to get logged in, and I had to re-start my computer even to get rid of the SL log-in screen which always hangs. This is likely related to other issues. Then once logged on, I crashed a dozen times, couldn't load inventory etc. Finally I got logged on, tried looking up a profile of someone who wrote to me and had left the group because they said they were suspending their SL because it was just too difficult to get logged on and to TP to places, including home. Sound familiar? I was able to reach their profile but their picture didn't rez in. At least that was enough to IM them. Here's a rare admission from LL that they have a problem: Had I complained about this last week, I would have been told that it isn't a bug, that I am calling "bugs" things that I don't like, that it's because I don't use Firestorm, or it's because of my own computer. Of course it isn't. Thank God for Whirly Fizzle!

Yes, it's a bug, and it has been discussed before on the forums. No, I do not have cookies disabled -- in fact several times a day I have to RE-DO that "agree" message when logging into SL's web site. It's not about logging into MY OWN profile to edit it, but logging into OTHER PEOPLE's profiles. Yes, my password is saved and if logging in or changing accounts, all I have to do is type the first few letters and it comes up, if I have saved it. BUT THAT DOESN'T WORK FROM INSIDE SL WHEN THE SYSTEM DEMANDS YOU LOG-IN AGAIN TO SEE OTHER PEOPLE'S PROFILES! Most annoyances in SL I don't like are in fact a function of bugs. You can change a group title on the group itself after updating the group if it occurred during that log-in session. But that updating does't always work (another annoyance). More to the point, people don't always realize they have to join a group despite several notifications, in the least, in FAQs on site, on my profile, etc. So when I see a payment, I have to LOOK THEM UP IN SEARCH to be able to find them and send them a message (there isn't any other way). There are a variety of other reasons you have to look up people: o if they are squatters, to ban them o if they are merchants, and you have a question or problem o if they left the group after setting prims (some people opt to do this), but you know they are still paid tenants, to contact them about either overprimming or other issues. o to give them raffle prizes (not all who play the raffles are tenants in a group) And likely other reasons -- which is why a dozen times a day I have to do it, and have to keep logging into OTHER PEOPLE'S PROFILES, and not just once, after checking "Remember me". I almost never check a web profile. Indeed, I never check tenants' profiles to see who they are unless I am trying to see what happened to them -- sometimes I have long-time tenants who have been in their rentals for years, and they disappear, so I don't know whether I should give them more time to pay. A profile sometimes says they have left SL. Or it has an open group to see if they logged in recently, to confirm what their own rental group might show (group log-in dates are not reliable indicators of whether a person is still in SL, but work well enough).

This is a very old bug, but a recurring bug, which has been back in recent weeks. And no, it's not true that if you go through the nuisance of typing in your name and password and checking off "remember me on this computer" that you are done for this log-in session. It makes you do it over and over again. And it is SUCH a nuisance when you have to repeatedly look up people's names to change their titles in group or answer their questions or give them prizes or whatever. What is the mechanism for why this happens? What is the JIRA status? (I don't have access to the JIRA).

What I always wonder about all the open sim type worlds is this: do they have group land? Because without group land, I think it's hard to offer rentals.

That's a great idea. I don't know if the assumption of "sitting" would be valid every time, but mainly it would be. Another thing I wish those with waterfront land would do is to take a strip of land of 32 m, or even 16 m, and make it a separate parcel, and leave that strip open, if you put "access only" with a list or group that creates ban lines for others. There's a property with group-only that has made boating down the river on the Hidden Lakes sims completely impassible. Or set your orb so that it doesn't reach right to the waterside. In general, the Lindens could make waterways with easements that would be impossible to block. What's amazing is that in this same area, the Lindens have entire parcels they left as Linden land along the banks but right at the waterside, it's impassible because there just isn't enough room. I asked them to push down their own land to make it water to get around these blockages but they wouldn't do that -- they have a principle of never changing Linden land or the tickets would be endless. As for the "I can do WTF on my land" mantra, the point is, you live in a shared world, and without any loss of your own privacy, you could make it so that people could boat or fly without ban lines.

I do. Use search/places with the term “Ravenglass Rentals”. Apartment towers in Ravenglass the sim, Refugio, Juanita. And more.

Re: Now I follow the instructions at "Creating your own auction" and set the parcel for search, go to its Place Page, click "Auction This Parcel," fill in the fields, and click "Create Auction." According to that link, "when you create the auction, the ownership of the parcel is transferred to a temporary holding account named AuctionServices Linden" so now I should have 1024 of individual tier freed-up, which I use to "make good" on the group's overdrawn 10%. OK, I had missed that part about the "holding service" -- that would take the land off your hands, but you'd have to look sharp to make sure that if no one bids on it and it doesn't sell and comes back to you, that you are not overtiered because it's not in a group. I rarely sell land as an individual -- I put it in a group for land sales made only for that purpose with my alts, so that the sale distributes only to them and not tenants, and so that way I keep the 10% bonus on this. When I tried this, it was "down" and kept giving errors so I will try again in awhile.

Actually, the land barons WILL be the ones willing to suck up both 15% and 30L charges. It's the little guy who won't, so land barons will go on dominating the market. And that's normal, as they have the capital to sustain the long waits for their sale price. The reason there is so much abandoned land is that most people don't have that.

Qie, your theory works only if there is no bid in a day. But likely there will be, or at any rate, you have to plan for that, and it means covering the tier for that singly-owned piece, now out of a group. You can't leave a group under-tired for a week while the auction lasts.