Linden Lab Official talk:Adult Content FAQ

Once this page is deemed reasonably complete and has been reviewed internally, then we will redirect History/Adult content to here, unless people may want to keep the old page around for posterity.

Please add questions and comments here. --Rand Linden 22:16, 25 July 2011 (PDT)

Public vs Private needs more clarification?

I'm very uncomfortable with the implications of "For example, if someone whats to have a swinger party and invite some friends, there is no problem with that. As long as they don't advertise it, who is going to know what is happening in their own home?" That says to me that it's in some way illicit, and only OK if you stay under the radar. Maybe that is the case, but, if it is, it should be spelt out in terms, to my mind.

It's particularly an issue, I think, since when Blondin was trying to answer people's questions a couple of years ago, he didn't have Hiding avatars and restricting avatar sounds to worry about. There we're warned that Adult activities are not allowed on parcels in General regions, regardless of whether the parcel has hidden avatars. On Moderate land, such activity is only permitted privately, behind closed doors, and it's always been my understanding that I'm OK to have a sex bed in my house on Moderate land, so long as it's kept private and it's just for me and my friends, but not a sex blanket in my garden -- if I want to do that, I have to be on Adult land.

But certainly you could now argue that the metaphorical doors are far more tightly shut if I put the blanket in my garden, hide avatars on the parcel and set access to group only, than are they if I have a sex bed in my house. In the former case, all anyone's ever going to see from the outside is an innocuous blanket; in the latter, anyone can cam in and, if I've not surrounded the plot with ban lines, come and join the fun. Is it really the case that the sex blanket in someone's garden, with avatars hidden, is against the rules on M land but it becomes OK if the garden is then enclosed within a large prim box with the walls and ceiling set to fully transparent on the inside and fully opaque on the outside?

I'm not trying to argue the case one way or the other -- I just think it needs spelling out, because it's not obvious to me what the rules are, and I don't think "who is going to know what is happening in their own home?" is helpful. As everyone knows, there's various activities that are completely banned in SL, and the fact people are not advertising them -- indeed, they may well be going to considerable pains to conceal them -- will be no protection if they get found out, after all. Innula Zenovka 04:46, 26 July 2011 (PDT)

Behind Closed Doors

I'm sorry but this has left me even more confused that I was before. First it says,

Adult activity on Moderate land must be conducted "behind closed doors," meaning that you must make every reasonable effort to ensure that the parcel is private. The parcel should be:

Set to group or specific individual access only.

Hide avatars (turn off avatar visibility) for the parcel.

Enclose the area behind walls or other visual barriers.

If the land is group-access only, the group should not be freely open to join.

and then it says, in the the next section,

Mixed public and private use of a parcel: for example, a store at ground level which only sells non-adult items, and a skybox above, which is residential, and contains sex furniture. The landing point is at the store only. This would require a Moderate rating.

Does this mean that if I have a house on moderate land that contains a sex bed I have to restrict access to the land and hide avatars but that if I put the same house and sex bed on a platform and put a shop underneath, I needn't bother? How about if I put the house on the platform and just leave a garden underneath?

Up to now, everyone has thought that the rule was sex beds were ok on M land so long as they were in private houses for private use. If people really do now need to hide avatars and put up ban lines, I think it certainly needs some publicity because otherwise a great number of people on M-rated land are going to find they're contravening the ToS without realising it. Innula Zenovka 17:45, 3 August 2011 (PDT)

Agreed, adding the requirement of access controls only makes sense for ground-floor buildings. Skyboxes should retain the current rules, because making people set up restricted access areas at ground level that have no effect on their skyboxes is silly. Unless you implement my proposal to let parcel owners flip the protected zone from the ground to a skybox:

This would allow people to protect skyboxes without using "security" scripts.
This would decrease the amount of the ground level mainland that has pointless access controls on parcels that only contain a skybox.

-- Argent Stonecutter 18:42, 3 August 2011 (PDT)

FYI, my proposal is at https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-2390 -- Argent Stonecutter 14:23, 4 August 2011 (PDT)

Requiring banlines, closed groups, and hiding avatars IMO goes beyond reasonable effort. Joining even an open group requires affirmitive opt-in by the user. The requirement as I understood it was visual barriers; this sends the clear message to the observer that what happens beyond his point is not meant to be public. Jack Abraham 13:17, 4 August 2011 (PDT)

Depictions of Nudity

"Non-sexualized depictions of nudity (basically, the images most skin-makers tend to use) are Moderate NOT Adult": I think this moves the goalposts a bit, and could have considerable implications for adult content manufacturers, or at least for our packaging and advertising. In the past, the distinction was between photorealistic nudity (glossed on the maturity ratings page as "images either are or cannot be distinguished from a photograph") and other sorts of image. That's given us rather more leeway about our packaging and vendor pictures than we have on the marketplace, and, while I'm pretty sure all the materials I use on my adverts and vendors would still be OK for M land, I really don't want to have to review everything and make sure there's no stray female nipples in view unless a change in the rules means I absolutely have to.

For what it's worth, I far prefer the distinction between photorealistic vs non-photorealistic, because it's clear and obvious. It protects skin-makers because, no matter how good and "photorealistic" the skin, it's never going to be mistaken for a photograph, and means they don't have to worry about the far more subjective test of whether their advert is "sexualized" or "non-sexualized". Innula Zenovka 07:44, 26 July 2011 (PDT)

Profiles

I think it would be helpful to have a section about these, because so much has changed over the last year or so. When we started, the rule was certainly that all profiles should be PG (as then it was) because they were visible to everyone, and people were told to revise both their content and profile pictures accordingly, and no one ever seemed to sure if you were allowed to have Adult destinations in your picks. Certainly people were told to remove nude or semi-nude pictures of their avatars (as opposed to "photorealistic" pictures) from their profiles.

We've now got little flags on Profiles for Maturity ratings, which I, for one, don't understand at all -- I don't know what makes my profile G and someone else's M or A (I don't think I've chosen thus to flag it). Does this mean things have changed -- that I can have M or A material on my profile so long as I don't mind only being visible in search to people who've chosen to see such things? And that's what it does mean, do I have to take any action to flag it, or does that happen automatically?

On a related topic, what on earth is the deal with comments on people's New Web Profiles? Since these seem to appear on the feeds of everyone on the friends lists both of the person making the comment and the person on whose profile the comment is left, do I have to watch what I say in comments, making sure that, as the Maturity Ratings KB Article puts it, I only say things in comments I would be "be comfortable saying ... in front of [my] grandmother or a grade school class."? Innula Zenovka 05:00, 27 July 2011 (PDT)

Comments

We'll be providing some docs around the new profiles, with an eye toward answering questions like these. I don't see the "little flags on Profiles for Maturity ratings" you mention, for example in my profile. Could you be more specific?

Sorry, I meant what shows up in in-world search when you look for someone -- like this Innula Zenovka 12:46, 1 August 2011 (PDT)

Working on clarifications

Thanks for the questions. I'll be working to get clarification from various authorities within LL. Please bear with us... If you have further questions, please post them here. Thanks!

--Rand Linden 10:55, 1 August 2011 (PDT)