Prokofy Neva

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.

It seems the auctions are now live. I may try them, just to see how it works, but I see that you can't sell as a group, which means you'd have to withdraw land from a group, losing its 10% bonus, so you'd have to have a float available to cover that at least for the week of the auction. I wonder if this will get much use -- I think it might. It will be an alternative to abandoning land, which will be a good thing. If it is easy enough to do, people may try it before abandoning. But abandoning often happens at last minute when land that people wanted to sell and priced too high for the market doesn't sell, and after lessening it a little, they abandon it. They should at least try selling it even for $100, as they will get at least that. But many don't want to bother. The 15% commission the Lindens take seems like quite a bite, but they look for revenue wherever they can find it. And if more people succeed in selling land this way, especially more end users, it may be worth it to people. One down side I can think of, is that people will use auctions to force people to buy land who are near them for fear of "losing the view". If land is priced high and the seller waits, or it is abandoned, there may be long periods when a land isn't vulnerable to "ruin-the-view". But now, with way more an audience presumably, people might price lower and try to force a buy. There are so many variables that it is hard to see what the impact is. We will know when Tyche shows less abandoned land, for example. Or perhaps the Lindens will provide some figures of how many lots sold through this system, and the average sale price. SL is too big, there is too much land for sale, and the search list in land-for-sale too long that it's hard to reach the market. Will this system worsen or alleviate that problem? Even if you are willing to buy a classified or at least put your land in search/places, that may not help. People also have a habit of putting land for sale for ridiculous prices as a way to advertise rentals or other businesses -- because again, there is so much pent-up sales activity without good advertising capacity. This is why I always advocate having the Lindens bring back infohub ad boards that we used to have and pay for.

1/3 Homestead on the landscaped sim of Belarus with pine tree forests and nearby Russian-style builds. $2400/wk/21,504 sq m or $8460/mo with 10% discount, currently in winter season. 1,640 prims. PayPal accepted. You can landscape your 1/3 as you like (leaving the mountain backdrop in place) and have any theme for building as long as it doesn't block the view of others. Sim is open to view. IM Prokofy Neva for the group. Teleport to Belarus

Right now, I can't even get logged on. The only reason I logged out was that I noticed that search was showing anything more than "G" level, despite having "G,M,A" checked off and saved in preferences. I saw the same problem with only "G" on the web page which was odd. Ages ago, I did age verification -- 10 years or more? Not sure what's up. "To the cloud..."

It's a matter of taste, and in my view, the pre-Windlight was better. The gradations are more subtle, there isn't the glare. In any event, what I can see now is that at some point, there will be NO CHOICE. The ruination of the DEFAULT sky and land will occur and you will not be able merely to choose the EEP settings. THAT is the problem.

No, the problem was the viewer - it's the release candidate which came to me because "release candidate" was checked off although I don't recall checking that box because I don't want them. Anyway, it's unchecked now, I have rolled back to the viewer currently on offer, and it's back to normal. Nothing worked as you say. Instead the sky didn't give light, there was flashing light and glare in many places, removing local shaders got rid of some but not all of this, and changing midday/midnight etc had no effect. It's discouraging to think of that coming now as a forced option. Reminds me when Windlight itself destroyed the original quite subtle and good lighting of the old SL -- forever.

Second Life Release 6.2.0.525395 (64bit) Release Notes You are at 63.6, 29.9, 27.2 in Hope 2 located at sim10367.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.51.17:13009) SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Hope 2/64/30/27 (global coordinates 132,672.0, 185,374.0, 27.2) Second Life Server 19.03.07.525089 Release Notes CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6400 CPU @ 2.70GHz (2711.99 MHz) Memory: 12184 MB OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 17134) Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 970/PCIe/SSE2 Windows Graphics Driver Version: 25.21.14.1735 OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 417.35 Window size: 1920x1017 Font Size Adjustment: 96pt UI Scaling: 1 Draw distance: 176m Bandwidth: 3000kbit/s LOD factor: 4.125 Render quality: 4 Advanced Lighting Model: Disabled Texture memory: 512MB VFS (cache) creation time: December 28 2018 18:19:59 J2C Decoder Version: KDU v7.10.4 Audio Driver Version: FMOD Ex 4.44.64 Dullahan: 1.1.1320 / CEF: 3.3626.1895.g7001d56 / Chromium: 72.0.3626.121 LibVLC Version: 2.2.8 Voice Server Version: Not Connected Packets Lost: 33/4,972 (0.7%) March 22 2019 14:08:43 I'm puzzled why the EEP viewer was forced on me if it's true that it is still a release candidate -- yet it was, I was logged off, and it automatically installed. Now I'm noticing that the "SL Viewer" shown at the top of the downloads page has a different number: 6.1.0.524670 Odd that I was given this other one. But I will now try installing it and hope it doesn't have EEP then.