The Docks @ Phoenix Unbound

Sunday we moved to a new location! (Phoenix Unbound 38,68,976)

Special thanks to Cheri Jinx, Elliot Mefusula, Yana Choche, Ramone Penucca, & Trouble Darcy for helping make this happen.

Many of you have asked why we've moved... let me take this post to explain not only why we moved but also let off a little steam and start to rant a bit regarding Linden Labs' new policy on adult content.

Why We Moved:

1. As you may have noticed our new parcel is ~4 times the size of our former parcel and as you can see our build size reflects that.
2. As per Linden Labs' new policy regarding adult content... we were forced to move off the mainland.
3. Low Lag! The sim where we are currently located in [Pheonix Unbound] (for one reason or another) is much less laggier than our old sim... this should allow us to host many more people before without having people walk through walls or wait 20 seconds for their chat messages to display.

With that being said... Regarding LL's ban on adult content on the mainland I have a few thoughts:

1. It seems strange that adult content will potentially be harder to access in SL than on internet in general. One can easily find pornography through Google search but in SL they have to verify their age through some inconvenient method? It seems all a bit unnecessary to me.
2. In terms of PG builds being next to Adult builds... Linden Labs claims the intent of the ban is to prevent people on the mainland coming across content that 'they'd rather not encounter'. I have two counterpoints to this: First -- most adult areas on the mainland are floating in locations that most users wouldn't casually encounter. Second -- in RL people have much greater freedom as to where and what they can build... you only has to drive down the street to find a porn shop on the same block as any reputable business. so why should SL be any different? Three:What the fuck linden labs!? Really?!

/end drunken rant for now.

P.S. Traffic is broken in many regions once again... on my count this is the third time in two weeks... /me dies.

P.P.S What truly qualifies as "adult content"? This I think is the biggest gray area regarding the move.

the perfect storm

Many of you who frequent my parcel in Second Life (THE DOCKS) may already know - in the past 24 hours Linden Labs has had some trouble in keeping certain regions online see: GRID STATUS. Unfortunately my problems as a landowner seem to be greater than most. The purpose of this post is to record and track the issues that have been beleaguering my parcel.

1. Approximately 14:00 SLT on 6/18 the sim which our parcel is located on experiences extreme lag when more than 14 people are present on the sim.
2. At around 21:00 SLT all traffic in the region where we are located resets to 0 causing THE DOCKS to appear last on search results.
3. Around 5:00 SLT our region goes offline along with 8,000 other regions due to a "power outage". Our region stays offline for at least 6 hours.
4. Due to "emergency maintenance" At 22:10 our region goes offline again... for how long is yet to be seen.

As I stated in my previous post -- for the casual user in Second Life these issues may seem to be minor but as a landowner with both a financial and personal interest in growing the popularity of my parcel these issues are not only extremely frustrating but also a significant setback when considering the highly competitive nature of a parcel in our category in competing for traffic (and thus popularity). What makes this "perfect storm" of disasters even more frustrating is that it comes on the heels of our recent explosion in growth and popularity and at this point I fear it may take days or even a week to restore the traffic that we experienced just prior to all these problems. My hope is that Linden Labs can restore service to normal by tomorrow and we can resume with normal activities by then.

random thoughts

• Today was a total fuck up on Linden Lab's side. 8,000 simulators were disabled due to a power outage? The public highschool I used to attend had diesel powered backup power generators but Linden Labs can't seem to afford to host their simulators on servers which host, for all intents - critical data, in a location with similar provisions?
  
• Also, lack of transparency in disclosing both: a. cause of the outage; b. what linden labs is doing to correct these issues; c. disclosing an approximate time frame to fix these issues --- is extremely frustrating! Maybe for the casual user these are non-issues but for those of us who spend a good amount of time on the Grid such failures can be more than a little aggravating.