General News

Second Life: Beggar Bots

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People are reporting more occurrences of Beggar Bots hitting their groups. BUG-40546 – Group Chat Spam Bots. People are asking if they should be reported. The ToS is fuzzy on the topic. In general begging is not a violation of the ToS. Spamming is. So, we see varied opinions on whether to report or not.

Whirly Trapping a Beggar Bot
Whirly Trapping a Beggar Bot

The apparent consensus among those in the know keeping up with such things is: REPORT ‘EM. The Lindens are working at closing and banning accounts of the spammers.

Group managers have the Eject and Ban tool. Some do not realize it has been upgraded. Originally it did not terminate the current chat session. So, E & B didn’t immediately shut them up. Now it does. (SVC-32) 

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Second Life: Halloween 2016

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October is almost here. Halloween is near. The Highlight’s page in Featured News is listing lots of Halloween oriented places. Soon there will be rotting virtual pumpkins all over Second Life™. Oh… wait… even more scary, those evil pumpkins never die.

Botanica’s Halloween Haunted Cornfield Maze
Botanica’s Halloween Haunted Cornfield Maze

Check the Featured News and the Destination Guide often as new places will be appearing almost daily. Those listed Friday are:

  1. Angel’s Haunted House – fun, actually scared me a couple of times
  2. Dark Sewers
  3. Slaughter Creek
  4. Medieval Fantasy Manor
  5. Deadman’s Island Haunted Sim
  6. Haunted Home of Frankenstein
  7. All Hallows at Moochie – pretty place
  8. Shenanigan’s Spooky Halloween Cemetery
  9. Screaming Woods
  10. Oh the Horror Cart Sale & Hunt
  11. Skeleton House – Halloween Store

Halloween is becoming a huge economic thing in developed countries. Almost as big as Christmas. I dress nicely for Christmas parties but, I DRESS UP for Halloween.

Second Life Changes 2016 w38

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Thursday about noon the Lab announced some of the things that will be changing in Second Life™ viewers. We know viewers will change. But, never exactly what change is coming. See: Important Viewer Evolution Update.

Most of the changes mentioned, we know about.

Dark and Red
Dark and Red

The viewer’s built in web browser is changing over to Chromium Embedded Frame work. So, it is basically a new browser, like Firefox or Chrome. This affects lots of things inside the viewer, search, profiles, etc. Most importantly it is part of the frame changing how streaming media is handled. There is an RC version of this change on the Alternate Viewers Page.

The avatars are changing and the RC version of the Project Bento Viewer is out, also on the Alt Viewer page.

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Cheap Efficient Use of Second Life Land

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Penny Patton is one of those people that think, which usually gets me in trouble. She has an article out titled Virtual Space/Infinite Space. Her paradigm for conceptualizing land in Second Life™ is different from how I suspect most people think of SL land.

Gift of a friend
Gift of a friend

If you are looking for land or feeling confined by borders or just looking to reduce the cost of tier then her article is something you will be happy to have found.

Virtually free land…

Second Life: Introduction/Beginner Tutorials

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I like to have a collection of tutorials to which I can send new Second Life™ users. Every so often I update my in-world note card list. I give that to new players I meet.

Strawberry Singh has a series of introductory(?) videos and she is adding to and updating her collection. Her post Introduction to Second Life is pretty much an outline of those videos. She has done a good job of answering questions new users have. Including signup, downloading, and installing the viewer, something often missed by tutorial makers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t3tNQ_53us

I find 1 or 2 posts a month in the Second Life Forum asking how to get into SL. These are people that signed up but somehow didn’t realize they needed to download the viewer. It has been a while since I signed up a new avatar. So, I don’t really understand how they miss understanding they need to download the ‘game’. I just know they do. And these are people that write well when posing their question. So, they aren’t mentally handicapped or simpletons.

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