Cabbage Acanthus

As many people have said, the sim owner makes the rules. They pay for their land and can do with it pretty much as they please. Not everyone is welcome everywhere. That being said I have a fondness for non human avatars, some of them quite strange indeed. Heck, I even went through a phase where my favorite avatar was a cured ham of all things and still was able to go almost everywhere and have a heck of a good time. If you get booted from a sim, go to another one. You will find plenty of great places to go and great people to hang with no matter if you are a Beast, a furry, a robot, or a giant fuzzy slipper. No matter how normal or strange you make your avatar, you will run into a place in which you are unwelcome or rub an estate owner the wrong way. It's just how the world works. Not everyone is going to like you. A quick review of your posts in this thread does point to another potential cause for your troubles. In my experience the vast majority of bans take place due to behavior and attitude instead of appearance. Yes, there are some themed sims that want to preserve a certain look or feel and will have a dress code of sorts but most places are pretty freewheeling... unless you are disruptive or otherwise cause problems and then you will be bounced from no end of places and it will have nothing to do with the avatar. Even now, SL is a big place and there are a lot of places to go. You can have fun or you can get your tail in a knot over being persecuted. Whatever strokes your fur, man.

So many people have done exactly that, Ela. So many people are gone now. The "You don't have to be here. Leave if you don't like it." hasn't exactly done SL any favors and that culture of disregard is what is destroying SL. I will likely sign the new TOS since I no longer really create anything anymore... Whenever I actually get around to signing back into SL that is.

If the followers are using a sensor one thing to try is to lure the followers up high enough that their sensors will no longer detect you on the surface and then teleport back down. This isn't absolutely guaranteed to work but I have used this technique to good effect before.

Increased distribution is only worthwhile if the product can hold new customers. Right now I don't see SL doing that.

I've been offline for awhile and was wondering what has changed in the past year or so? Any good places for someone to go or any new "must see" build out there?

I think that a good question to ask yourself is what exactly do you want to do when you say you want a place to "live". With a little exploring and ingenuity there is probably a few places where you can (legitimately) do some or all of what you want to do with your own place for free. I am currently happily homeless and will only buy land again (or rent) when I either want to "play house" with someone or perhaps make a permanent or semi-permanent build. Otherwise I just drift quite contentedly.

There are places one can go in SL to experience that sort of "realism" in varying degrees if one wishes and I think such a theme might be an interesting one for a roleplay sim but I think that such things being imposed on the residents across the board would not go over well at all.

That's a good question. I recently went premium because I wanted a small parcel in order to park a few prims. Owning a parcel was a bit more stable than renting and the move made sense for me. In my opinion, "owning" "land" here in SL is the only reason to go premium that makes any sense. The premium sandboxes are nice though.

Welcome to second life... lol Every now and then a tiny person gets a little bit of authority and something like this happens. Like others have said, it was a group tag from a recently joined group. Sims are individually owned and the owners or their designated officers can pretty much ban anyone they please for any reason that they please. Overly agressive banning is a recurring theme. Nothing you can do about it really and there is a fair chance you didn't really do something that bad from the sound of it. My advice is to not worry about it too much and find another place to hang out. You can always send a notecard to the owner of the sim politely (emphasis on the polite part) introducing yourself, explaining your situation, and requesting a lift of the ban. More often than not, the actual sim owners are fairly reasonable people who want people to spend time on their sims. There is a quite good chance that you will be let back in if for some reason you really want to go to that sim. That's a lot of effort though and SL is a big place. There are loads of places to go here and most folks are pretty welcoming and supportive. So don't worry about getting banned from one sim too much. From the sound of it, the person banning you may have been a bit of a jerk.

Screaming "Why won't you work?" and a vague sense of disillusionment means that you are fitting in nicely! It's a lot like jumping into a cold swimming pool. Once the shock fades and you can breathe you will have a lovely swim. Don't focus on making a living at first. Wander around, have fun, meet people. There are loads of fun things to do.

You can still file an AR.. Just be as complete as possible and file one each and every time it happens to you. If it is a privately owned sandbox (check "about land") You could try informing the owner of the sandbox what it happening. Be sure to be polite and consise in your communications.... you will get better results. Your best answer is that since it is a sandbox, there is little stopping you from taking your work elsewhere. SL is filled with sandboxes. Sometimes you have to go to a couple before you find a nice well-ordered, quiet place to work. Those new premium member only sandboxes are great places, if you are a premium member. (note to any long term form readers... Yes, I went premium. What? Don't look at me like that... ) If you aren't a premium member and can't or don't wish to become one, you can look around for sandboxes that have group membership requirements. Many of these are free to join and are better regulated and if you aren't a member (a griefer for example) you can't rez prims so their orbiters and the like don't work. There are other sandboxes that don't require group membership that are pretty well regulated and policed and these can be a wonderful place to work. It takes awhile to find a great sandbox. I recommend finding a number of nice ones and landmarking them so you can jump from one to the other since griefers and sandboxes are sort of like... (insert unseemly joke about a recurrent infection here) One good tip is when searching for sandboxes... scroll down several pages. Most people get the same result you do when they type "sandbox" so if you go down the list well past the first few results there is a good chance you will find one of these less crowded "best kept secret" sort of places. Yeah.. and calling out people by name in the forum will do you little good since it is against guidelines to do so, even if they are bleeping griefers. We aren't Lindens and really can't do anything directly about them. Good luck!

I will resist the urge to tell you to swim upstream past the rapids and instead ask you to be a bit clearer. What birth place are you talking about?

Welcome! I love the phrase "varying things". There is a lot of great content in there and loads of fun things to do. My advice? Explore and create a second life for yourself, not your business. This is a great place to spend some time, make some friends, create some fun toys, and generally mess about. This is not a great place to do anything business related. Things are too unstable and inconsistent, even now. You will go through all of the hard work and risk and pain to build up something that you are proud of only to watch as the capricious whim of the week wipes everything out. Don't get me wrong, this place is great... .for what it is... and as long as you don't treat it like what it isn't... you will have a great time.

Short answer: Eeee! Don't do it! Long answer: This is an interesting one. Your "radio station" isn't based in SL. It's a RL internet stream. I don't think LL has any say as to what you do outside of this platform. Of course... LL can pretty much do what it wants and once you wade through all of the pretty language of the TOS it can be boiled down to "we can do whatever we want to whoever we want and you just have to take it if you want to 'play' here." That bit of the TOS, 11.4, is a prime example of how delightfully open-ended their wording is. If they "believe" you are an "unacceptable risk" then poof... you are gone... but it is so ill defined that it could be used on just about anything or anyone. I might have been impolite to a newbie once... was that an unacceptable risk? Or perhaps I walked around a welcome area wearing an outlandish avatar which might have made a bad first impression on some new membership... Is that an unacceptable risk? Or perhaps I decide to air an advertisement for another virtual world on internet media stream that could be accessible from within SL... Is that unacceptably risky? Well, the answer is of course that we don't know for sure. It will all depend on the particular Linden that handles the issue that particular time on that particular day and how they are feeling that moment and what they had for breakfast and whether or not they had a cup of coffee recently and how the sun is striking their monitor that particular second. We could debate the issue all day. I can see very valid points on both sides of the arguement. But all of that is meaningless since the TOS is so open ended and enforcement is so haphazard. I guess the question you have to ask yourself is this. "How will LL feel about this?" Because, as we all know, that is what will determine the result. If they don't like it, then it quite simply will not be allowed to happen. Personally I would love to see someone press this issue, take the risk, and set the precedent. I think it would be fascinating to see how it all played out. I certainly hope that whoever does try something like this isn't too attached to their SL or their business here though... I think everyone knows how it would most likely end.

Premium only sandboxes are not a bad idea at all! I'm not one to shower LL with praise but that is a quite nice idea and not a bad perk at all. For established residents, crochety old pirmbags like myself, these might not be a big selling point. We already have nice quiet places to build and more swag than we know what to do with. For a new resident, just starting out, these will be a major perk and not really cost the lab that much to offer and maintain. Kudos, LL. I will doubtlessly get annoyed with you again but I think you did good here.