Census Procedure

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Sudane Erato
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Re: Census Procedure

Post by Sudane Erato »

Josie Fotherington wrote:

... the technical realities of SL land management. It's very clunky and un-user-friendly any way you look at it.

What's doubly astounding about this situation is that it doesn't have to be this way. What's missing are the economic incentives to create the tools which could make this a smooth and efficient process.

What's very certain is that ORIGINALLY, this was a completely disfunctional process. Region controls, About Land and the whole concept of land ownership were mainland-centric. Linden Lab owned all the land, and you paid your "tier" in various stepped amounts... the amount you paid qualifying you to own certain areas of land. That's why it's called "tier". And to the best of my knowledge, that's how it still works on the mainland (I haven't owned land there in years).

When "private islands" were invented, the same tools were extended to them. But the circumstances were different, with a single sim owner "selling" land to multiple residents. As Josie says, the tools were clunky and un-user-friendly, and made for huge amounts of work to administer, if residents were going to own land.

BUT... some years ago, the continuing evolution of the SL programming language, LSL, added key functions, functions which if taken up and used by the programming industry in SL, could well produce extremely efficient land management tools for estates such as CDS where residents own their land. These LSL functions, for the first time, read the various fields in the About Land pages, which are the information which describes each parcel. Also, and this was especially critical, the SL master database was expanded to include UUID's (universal numeric identifiers) for each and every parcel. Like avatars and objects, each parcel became unique and identifiable. (Some people tell me that these parcel UUIDs always existed. But if so, they didn't appear in About Land, and they weren't in any way accessible to mere mortals, so they may as well not have existed).

A program can now read the complete status of every parcel. (There is some dispute over whether the "For Sale" status remains accessible to LSL. It was possibly blocked, temporarily, because of the development of bots which were then able to scan land masses seeking For Sale parcels). An entrepreneurial program could use that information to develop an application which could sense the status of every parcel, determine who owned it, determine if that owner had paid their tier, if they were current with tier, and send both them and the managers messages should something be amiss. Of course, generating a list at any given moment of who owned land in the estate and was in good standing would be elementary.

I'm not saying that writing such an application would be elementary. But the Hippo rental application is no more complicated than the one I describe. Timo and I have discussed this project for a long time; Timo is currently reluctant to get involved in something like this out of a skepticism about the future of SL1... and what would happen to the very large amount of time and effort which would be put into something like this. Reasonable concerns.

But I bring this up... again.... because it is truly sad that we must live with the clunky dysfunctional system we have. The issues, like most things in life, are economic. I thank god for those who put the hours in, like Lil and Widget, to fill the gaps in the existing very un-user-friendly system.

Sudane......................

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Re: Census Procedure

Post by Widget Whiteberry »

Thank you, Sudane. It's a contribution I can make to the common good. One I'm happy to make. I imagine Lilith feels the same way. She's certainly never complained to me.

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Re: Census Procedure

Post by Widget Whiteberry »

Thank you, Sudane. It's a contribution I can make to the common good. It may be weird to people who wouldn't, but it's one I'm happy to make. I imagine Lilith feels the same way. She's certainly never complained to me.

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