Brenda Archer

Price drop! Now 5,120L.

Sold, thank you!

Try http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Falcata/128/176/23

Falcata 128, 175 1024 land near water on Heterocera continent for 1024 L. 512L.

Osondoson 83, 199 512 water land with one large side bordering Linden protected water and sailable to the ocean of the Jeugeot continent, for 10240L. There is an adjacent 16 sq m I will sell to the new owner for 1 L if desired.

This is really excellent advice, thank you.

Nope, just set your camera so it doesn’t get blocked by land and then move it sideways using the controls, it will cut through everything. I do this all the time while I’m building or when I’d like to take a look at something I’m too lagged to physically get my avatar to.

My computer is a potato and I can do it, although of course my FPS will then be nothing. I’m still trying to understand why someone camming over and finding my brand name avatar on my brand name furniture is personal enough to warrant all this *modesty*. The avatar mesh is not me, it’s a Barbie doll more or less like everyone else’s. What is specifically me is my avatar name and UUID and no security tool does a thing to hide it. I can see setting an orb to avoid awkward visitors. But that’s a different thing than trying to be somehow hidden. In any sense that has any non-RP meaning, you can’t hide at all.

Or if cheap: fly around with land owners turned on and see if you find a small abandoned lot you like or a good deal on sale. I found two Moderate waterfront lots that way, very very cheap. I use one to rez boats to go in the water around Jeugeot. The other one is in Heterocera not far from a "gas station" on the road where I rez a car.

This really is the way forward. And with a protected layer of air, we can have both planes and skyboxes too. We can even have a skybox that's a helipad! Win all around. Since for whatever reason people don't usually wander at high altitudes, it's much more private up there than on the ground anyhow.

One of the most freeing things about SL for me has been this lack of physical danger. At least while still in SL, you can hang out with anybody doing anything, and I still love that.

If this works for you, go for it. I’m at the opposite pole and a little digging will turn up my RL social media. Most people who have used SL for a RL related reason are in the same situation. Instead I fall back to the level of caution I apply to social media in general. There are a few details of life I don’t post anywhere. Social media is a real problem for anyone who has picked up a stalker. This is definitely an area where the law needs to catch up to reality. SL is actually better than average because we have anonymity.

We’re using a different meaning of “designed.” If Mainland was going to be thoughtfully designed for everyone, it would be a very different kind of software. Instead it started out as a techno libertarian Burning Man sandbox, there’s no way that’s for everyone. There are good reasons why platforms like Facebook and games like WoW can get the mainstream, and SL cannot, even though LL really tried for a while. To my mind the biggest reason is just what SL *is*, a sandbox of mostly uncensored user generated content. The mainstream can’t tolerate this level of choice and self direction. It’s not just prudery, although I’m not sure LL could ever be anywhere other than SF. It’s that the total sandbox and anonymity break down the social cues normies need to navigate. I remember when the idea was being floated to show RL gender on the avatar and the overwhelming rejection of this idea by the residents - except for a very few male presenting avatars using very old fashioned conservative and religious arguments. When many people get thrown into another culture, they don’t know how to act, and if the culture is anarchy there’s no one to ask. Sandboxes are great if you can enjoy the ride, but SL was never going to be a RL dating app and a sandbox at the same time. We still only have social SL as RP by the users.

Thank you, and I agree with your whole post. I once naively thought I could know someone just from SL. But it does hide them from us, and if someone is a bad person we might never know until we experience their RL behavior. Some people live their whole life building up a narcissistic mask. They are often very good at it, and any virtual world is their playground. Normal people do *not* understand how these people work or their potential for deception. LL is definitely no Facebook, for which I’m very grateful.

In practice and for cultural reasons, most of the harassment is aimed at female presenting avatars, but of course sociopathy knows no bounds of gender. I can think of an example right off the top of my head of a male presenting avatar with a male RL user who was RL doxxed by a female user. But this is less common than the opposite, just because the cultural drivers aren’t there. And the culture is one of the things a hacker considers when making a design, or breaking it. You're absolutely correct to say someone near you on Mainland can know exactly where you are even if they can’t see your avatar. So real privacy in this case would be the ability to conceal your avatar name or presence, and we don’t have that. Firestorm, for example, will let me scan and zoom in on avatars anywhere nearby. Additionally, if your main avatar owns the land in its own name, rather than a secret alt or group, you have a sign out that anyone can read. So you want a lot which you have told no one about (at least no one who is not proven super trustworthy) and that’s your downtime home, while the other lot is the one where you entertain and which you tell everyone about. They should be far away from each other and the downtime lot could also be a private estate rental or a high skybox, although, in practice it seemed to me some people used their Linden home for this. The concept here is keeping a secret. And the culture I come from doesn’t really support the idea of women being so self-interested, so we usually wind up learning it the hard way: you *don’t* have to be nice to someone who doesn’t respect your boundaries, you don’t have to be open to strangers. An IP ban, which we don’t have in SL, is a tool you may have seen if you’ve had an RL online store. A website like this can log the IP addresses of every visitor who requests to see the site, and there may be a tool for the store owner to block requests to see the site from an IP address or a range of them. So for example, if a particular ISP in Florida was the location of someone running fraudulent credit card tests, you would ban the whole range of that ISP’s IP addresses from ever loading your store site. If we had this in SL, it could be a form of ignore or a form of banline. But we don’t. Obviously this might turn into a case of whack a mole if a stalker was technical enough to use a VPN, but most of the SL type stalkers probably aren’t. But we don’t have such a tool, so the only way to not be seen in SL is to be at a location you have kept a secret. This includes from whoever you’re SL dating. You don’t know him. And this is where culture comes into play, will you give yourself permission to keep a secret from someone? Because you should. I would also say: if anything makes you embarrassed, don’t put it on the ground on Mainland. I have used silent Visitor Counters for a long time on all my lots. Generally, avatars just passing by on Mainland are on the ground. I rarely see anyone at my skybox with a ten second counter. So that’s where I rez any adult furniture that might make me blush. I might orb a skybox where I’m holding an adult party. But the truth is, it’s still not a secret from my neighbors who are in the next skybox over. This is the other missing feature from Mainland - blocks on camming. We’re not going to get it. I don’t see the point of doing anything in SL that makes you uncomfortable and this is where culture again comes into play. If I’m really too embarrassed to ever be seen on a sex bed or whatever it is, I won’t use one. (I’m not, but that’s me.) The old joke that PG is where the adults are comes to mind. PG with no sex furniture makes a nice downtime home. So we can’t hide an avatar name on Mainland, we can’t stop anyone from getting our coordinates who is nearby, we can’t hide any of our rezzed prims from camming and we can’t keep someone being tossed around by a botched sim crossing or boomeranged by lag from dropping in even if they didn’t want to. For the love of god, why would anyone put adult stuff on the ground on Mainland? Unless they’re me and don’t care other people know they’re there, but Mainland really is not for everyone. By design.

I don’t actually think a teleport home orb is necessarily wrong - it depends on the context. Any of the currently available “security” options might be sensible and helpful in the right context. What I’m trying to communicate in this thread, and I don’t seem to be making the point very well, is that even with a zero orb, banlines and can’t see avatars turned on, you don’t really have either privacy or security on Mainland. I’m not making this argument to sneak in an argument that all these features should be turned off. But what I’m hearing about in this thread are legit problems with stalkers and griefers and a desire for a level of privacy that doesn’t exist on Mainland because we don’t have the tools for it, not even with everything cranked up to 11. When I was hosting meetings and adult parties, and the available tools were even less granular than what we have now, I always maintained a little parcel far away - owned or rented on a private estate - to serve as a bolt hole, and no one but me ever knew where. I maintain this will fix the casual harassment problem by simply being able to take off when someone isn’t taking a hint. And bluntly, if SL harassment is bleeding into RL harassment it’s time to call the cops. I have relocated from one state to another in the past to get rid of a RL threat, for sure if he was reaching me through a piece of software I’d turn the damn thing off. SL is not that important, unless it’s the source of your living, in which case you’re far more technical than what I’m hearing from some in this thread. On a security level, we need to drop all RP and look at the software. We do not have real privacy on Mainland by design and the bones we’ve been thrown are not enough. They are not an IP level ban or a block to camming or wandering. So instead of affecting your neighbors with banlines at property edge and hyperactive orb settings - and your neighbors are more affected by this than vehicle users - why not learn how your tools work, and their hard coded limitations? If you’re in SL to meet with a select few and venture out mainly to shop or go to events, you want your real SL home to be a private secret. The ground on Mainland is not ideal for that, especially if an avatar and not an unlisted group owns it. If you can pay for land in SL, you can have two completely separate homes! This will throw off all but the worst stalkers. Not just SL, but a lot of platforms are designed badly for women from a safety point of view. If you’re getting hassled, please drop the RP and try to think like a hacker long enough to protect yourself. It’s a world of security threat out there and the illusion of safety is usually just good luck.

For this to go on for 17 pages is proof we’re dealing with bad design. What we really needed were small sized “regions” at a price and size similar to a 1024 on Mainland. A number of them could be put on one server. It’s clear the Mainland is not really private (this used to be worse) by design. To get to my first Mainland home in 2005 I had to fly a long distance from a hub to Heaton. We couldn’t set home back then or have point to point teleport. My next door neighbor kept shooting me out of the sky with a cannon when I was trying to fly home and I had to file a ticket to get her to stop it. I don’t think she meant to be hostile to me personally, she just didn’t understand the effect of her scripts. We only got point to point teleporting after a ton of complaining and only got avatar parcel privacy after years of begging. None of this solves anything except for those of us comfortable with the collective nature of Mainland. There really, really needs to be a feature of tiny, totally private regions with ban by IP. In the meantime, I personally try not to be a difficult neighbor. I personally don’t put adult furniture on the ground, but always inside a skybox. As far as I know, if you’re inside a house or a box you’re covered for TOS in Moderate. If someone is camming through solid prims, that’s on him.

I have mixed emotions right now about SL Gor. I’ve met plenty of wonderful lovely Goreans, including BDSM liberal people and pew pew fighters who just like medieval weapons. But the US has a powerful political faction that’s trying to turn us into the _Handmaid’s Tale_. So while I have no problem with Gor as a kink, I can’t promote it as a religion. Like security orbs, some things should only affect your own land.

I wonder how much of this could be solved with a rule that if you haven’t logged in for a year, your land’s scripts will be temporarily disabled. I’m not saying this is the best idea, but I’m very curious.

I really disagree. Small landowners have been building on the vertical in SL forever, and it’s not a cheat. Not everyone can afford the tier to spread out on a large lot. As long as the charge for tier also includes a limited prim count, landowners *are* paying for what they’re getting. The largest cause of the privacy issue is trying to RP privacy while still on the ground. It just doesn’t work. People wandering mainland are mostly on the ground and always have been. This makes it desirable, and definitely not a cheat, to use a high skybox for a private room. It works - for whatever reason, people don’t often wander around at high altitudes. I do think the approach that’s going to be taken with the new Linden homes is a really good one, with a ban on skyboxes below a certain level, but encouraged above. This preserves aesthetics on the ground, creates flyable airspace and encourages good privacy building techniques all at once.

No ambling would be the end of mainland as a community, so it’s fortunate most people aren’t trying to have total privacy on the ground on mainland. I’m not fast enough, nor is my computer fast enough, to save myself from a bad sim crossing in twenty seconds using whatever technique. I’m not in favor of an orb ban or even a ban on a zero second timer, but I question the neighborliness of someone who can’t subdivide his land so the zero timer isn’t right next to a road, or his neighbor, or who feels the need to orb someone a thousand meters above a house with no one in it and no nearby skybox.

Yes, exactly. You can check your scripts using an alt that is not in your land group. Walk around your parcel, fly across it, see if your orb or banlines are actually doing what you think they are. Not only will travelers appreciate this, your neighbors will too. I wouldn’t argue that I should be allowed onto water land just because it’s water. I use water as part of my own home with a mermaid RP theme. But if you are next to a Linden passage and your scripts affect someone in that passage, you have actually exceeded your rights as a landowner.

FWIW, 20 seconds is not enough time if I have a vehicle stuck in a banline, a car turned wrong on rough or narrow ground or a separation of a skipper and a passenger after a botched sim crossing. It’s also not enough if I’ve had to set my wind to a low low speed so I can very slowly navigate a narrow strip of Linden water. Also I’m not sure everyone knows how to use the Firestorm mini map to show parcel lines at the middle setting. So they’re steering purely by visual cues according to what has managed to rezz for them.

My two cents FWIW as both a vehicle user and mainland owner of a small parcel. I'm completely sympathetic to people who are getting SL stalked and have to be a bit draconian. But I really wish there was more newbie education, not about "rules" which anybody can look up, but about etiquette and self-protection. 1) The wandering exploring newbies who wander into houses didn't get that part of the etiquette lecture. I always put dressing areas and bedrooms into high skyboxes. It is rare to encounter anybody up there, and even the neighbors I can see from there are all privacy minded. We have learned to assume a skybox is a bedroom and we keep out. It's almost superfluous to use an orb up there, unless you have the misfortune to get an actual stalker. I really like the suggestion to have a layer of air that is skybox free, so planes and skyboxes can live happily together. 2) You will get more sympathy for vehicle users if you try it yourself. You might enjoy it! 3) The two things I want to implore people to do (etiquette, not rules): If you need banlines or an orb, don't buy land next to a sim edge, water, or a road. Orb the house and courtyard but not the whole lot, so you can use a more punitive interval but nobody is affected just passing by. 4) People who expect privacy in SL without turning off avatar visibility can't have it, not because of parcel security, but because of camming. Even on the potato I use to go online, I can crank up my draw distance and change my settings so I can cam through land, prims, everything, sims away from me. Not everyone who does this is polite of intent. The correct reaction to this is not fear or modesty but a certain detachment about the Barbie doll you're using for an avatar. 5) To male avatars: the female avatars you find in their houses did not come to SL to have sex or even a conversation with YOU. Unfortunately everybody who drives a female avatar has come across a clueless character who didn't seem to realize this. It's griefing. It will bring out my hyperactive land security tactics like nobody's business, that includes damage, because I enjoy shooting at targets. But I don't like to do this, because I'm in the camp of the vehicle users and I'm not trying to tie up an innocent sailboat or a helicopter in my banlines and orbs. When I threw parties I had a private bolthole and set home to that instead of my club or house.

Agreed. Thank you LL for opening up the Jira. It's going to be a lifesaver for a lot of people.