Estate Manager

An Estate Manager is a land manager for a privately owned island, much like a landlord. Estate managers have control over settings for the entire island (sim) which they manage, and settings that they change occur on a global level, therefore affecting all parcels of land on that particular island.

Appointment

Estate Managers are employed by owners of private islands (estate owners) to assist in the day-to-day operations of managing their island(s).

Responsibilities

While individual responsibilities differ from island to island, many estate managers share a basic set of common responsibilities, as listed below...

Covenant Enforcement

Most privately owned islands have established covenants which describe to the residents that occupy the parcels within which types of activities are acceptable, and which are not. It is often the responsibility of the estate manager to monitor the island(s) for violations of this covenant and not only notify the owner of the parcel which is in violation, but also provide consequences if the violation is not remedied in a acceptable amount of time from said notification. In some cases, the estate manager is also responsible for assisting the parcel owner in resolving the violation in any way they can.

Land Sales

Many estate managers are responsible for selling available parcels of land on islands which they manage. This is generally only required when a privately owned island is first placed on the market, as once the parcels have been purchased by individual users, it commonly becomes their responsibility to sell the parcel when they desire to move away from it.

Dispute Resolution

As privately owned islands are commonly divided into separate parcels of land for purchase by many different residents, those occupying neighboring parcels of land can have complaints to lodge against one another, or even worse, get into disputes with each other. The estate manager is often bestowed the responsibility of mediating such disputes so that an acceptable resolution for all parties is reached.

Performance Monitoring

Since many parcel owners use an abundance of scripts and/or physical objects on their land, issues which affect the overall performance of the island can arise. An island which performs poorly not only becomes unattractive to potential buyers, but to its current residents as well. As a result, it is often the responsibility of an estate manager to detect what is causing these performance issues and rectify the situation immediately.

Combating Griefers

Griefers are a common occurrence in Second Life, and they can wreak havoc on an island should they choose to do so. An essential responsibility of an estate manager is to identify, and remove, griefers that may be attacking the island(s) they manage, whether it is a particular parcel of land, or the island as a whole.

Abilities

As abilities for estate managers are assigned by the estate owner, they vary from position to position. Many of these abilities are described below, but may not be available to all estate managers. Each of these abilities apply to the estate as a whole, and every parcel on the estate (island) is affected when enabling/disabling these options...

• Kick User - Ejects a user from the estate
• Ban User - Bans a user from the estate. The user is ejected and banned, and should the user try to return to any parcel on the estate, they will be denied access
• Send Message - Sends a message to the entire estate, which will cause all users currently on the island to receive the message in a blue popup window in the upper right corner of their screen
• Public Access - Toggles whether or not avatars which do not own parcels on the estate are allowed to teleport to the island
• Allow Voice Chat - Toggles whether or not parcel owners have the ability to enable voice chat on their parcels
• Deny Access On Payment Status - Allows the estate manager to restrict access to the island to those who meet certain payment status requirements, such as "payment information on file", or "payment information used", etc
• Block Terraform - Prevents parcel owners from being able to terraform the parcels that they occupy
• Block Fly - Prevents all visitors and parcel owners from being able to fly; overrides any individual parcel settings when disabled
• Allow Damage - Toggles whether or not damage can be inflicted on avatars either visiting or occupying parcels on the island; overrides any individual parcel settings when disabled
• Restrict Pushing - Toggles whether or not physical objects have the ability to "push", or move, avatars on the island; overrides any individual parcel settings when disabled
• Allow Land Resell - Toggles whether or not parcel owners have the ability to place their individual parcels for sale to others
• Allow Parcel Join/Divide - Toggles whether or not parcel owners have the ability to join two or more parcels they own into one, or to split a parcel into multiple separate parcels
• Agent Limit - Allows the estate manager to set the number of agents (avatars) that are allowed to be on the island simultaneously. If the agent limit has been reached, avatars will not be permitted to teleport to the island
• Teleport Home - Allows the estate manager to teleport an avatar that is presently on the island back to their Home Location
• Disable Scripts - Disables all running scripts on the island. If a script is causing issues, but cannot be reached to be disabled, disabling all scripts will allow the estate manager to get to the object containing the script which is causing the issue and return it to its owner, then re-enable all running scripts on the island
• Disable Collisions - Prevents objects from colliding into one another, which is often a cause of lag on the island
• Disable Physics - Allows Physical Objects to be disabled. Griefers typically use an abundance of physical objects to slow island performance, as having many physical objects present causes the server on which the island resides to become very bogged down with commands to process, causing severe lag to the point where avatars on the island cannot even move
• Return Scripted Objects - Returns all scripted objects owned by a specified user from an island
• Get Top Colliders - Lists all of the colliding objects on the island which may be causing severe lag. Each object has an associated "collision score"; the higher this number, the more likely the object is to cause lag
• Get Top Scripts - Lists all of the scripts on the island which may be causing lag. Each script has an associated "time" in milliseconds; the higher this time, the more lag the script creates
• Restart Region - Allows the estate manager to restart the computer on which the island resides, thus rectifying performance issues. This is what is done to each island when Linden Labs performs their "rolling restarts", and all avatars on the island will receive a warning that the region is being restarted and that they will be logged out if they are present during the restart. The typical restart takes the island offline for 5 minutes or less.
• Terrain Edit Limits - Allows the estate manager to set limits as to how far up or down terrain on the island can be adjusted by parcel owners, in meters. The "Block Terraform" setting explained above must not be checked in order for this setting to have an effect
• Water Height - Sets the water height for the entire island
• Covenant - Allows the estate manager to edit the island's established covenant, if permitted by the estate owner.