SecondLife - How To Make Money In Second Life

When we announced we’d be looking at changes around Adult content, we talked about 3 features in particular -  geographically separating Adult content, filtered search results and account verification.  We also provided the areas where the community could provide useful feedback, specifically about the timeline, more granular definitions of mature vs Adult and how those who need to move want to make that work.

Over the last week and a half the team has been watching and engaging in the forums and will continue to do so through the end of the week.  This week and next we’ll be meeting with small groups of stakeholders including educators, solution providers, land owners and adult content merchants to get their feedback about how our adult content plan affects them.  We are also inviting a few forum participants to talk with us around the question of content definitions.  We will record and provide transcripts of all the meetings so that everyone will be able to access the conversations.

What we’ve learned so far:

Nearly all your questions revolve around the following subjects and while we don’t have all the answers yet, we’re committed to answering them before this program launches.

1) Enforcement
2) Definitions
3) Scope
4) Business Impact
5) Impact on Private Estates
6) Why not a PG Continent?
7) Personal Information / 3rd Party partners

Next steps:

Week of March 23rd and 30th - conduct brown bags, post transcripts of meetings

3/24 - Solution Provider brownbag
Text Transcript
Audio Recording

Please join the Forum Discussion.

We will continue to provide transcripts and recordings as the brownbags continue.After we’ve compiled all the feedback, we’ll announce our thoughts around the next phase of the project.

thanks!

Last month, we announced our plan to begin the process of introducing Adult Oriented content controls to Second Life. Key elements in the transition will include geographically separating Adult content, filtered search results and account verification.

    A sneak peek at some of the infrastructure on the new Adult Only continent…

Following our initial announcement, we’ve been discussing this initiative in the forums, and in several targeted in-world ‘brown bag’ meetings that we held to discuss specific groups affected by this initiative and the definitions behind the new maturity rating system. These conversations have been very productive, and Residents have shared some valuable insight with us, which has helped to further our plans and refine the definitions we’re working on to ensure that this initiative is implemented in the least disruptive way possible and is aligned with the standards of the community.

You can read a recap of some of our key takeaways from the forums and find recordings of the in-world brown bag meetings here:

Brown Bag Meeting to discuss AO with Solution Providers
Brown Bag Meeting to discuss AO with Educators
Brown Bag Meeting to discuss AO with Merchants
Brown Bag Meeting to discuss AO with Landowners
Brown Bag Meeting to discuss AO Definitions

We have heard your concerns, specifically in the areas of: 1) Enforcement 2) Definitions 3) Scope 4) Business Impact 5) Impact on Private Estates 6) Personal Information / 3rd Party partners  We’ve addressed some of these issues in an updated FAQ, which can be found here

So, what’s next?

Today, we’ve published a working draft of the definitions for PG, Mature and Adult here. We want to continue the discussion about our definitions and then finalize them by the end of April. The forums will stay up through the end of this process so we can continue to hear your feedback.  Next week, we plan to release the Release Candidate (RC) for Viewer 1.23, which will be the first to include the new functionality related to this initiative. If you want to get an early look at setting maturity ratings and filtering search results, you’ll be able to do both with the new RC. Over the next few months, we’ll be continuing to work on the main viewer, which we anticipate will be ready by the end of June. When Viewer 1.23 is final and ready to become the main Viewer (again, estimated to be by the end of June), the full implementation process will begin - all regions will need to be maturity-rated, search will be filtered for everyone, Adult content on the mainland will need to move to the new continent, and access to Adult regions and search results will be limited to Residents with verified accounts. This process will of course take some time and the feedback we’ve received from discussions so far will help guide the details of the implementation process; we currently expect it to last through August.  We’ll of course update everyone with the details of the timeline as they are pinned down.

The level of engagement we’ve seen has been terrific - the time and effort you have put into explaining your sensitivities and concerns is much appreciated! We look forward to continued dialog as we work on this challenge together.

Thanks once again for your feedback!