New Land Owner Looking for a Good Guide

by various contributors

QUESTION: Now that [we have] some islands, I need to get up to speed on setting land use. The SL guide is sadlylacking on specifics. Can someone point me to some useful info?

CHRIS HAMBLY'S ADVICE

• I have all land on my island group owned.
• I then turn off everything for strangers, i.e no building, no scripts, no push, for everyone, nada.
• Then in my group settings I set up roles, and give the people in those roles varying levels of permission to script, build or push.
• This works very well, and stops random people coming along running intensive scripts and building giant elephants.
• Just one way of doing it, the group roles are excellent, very comprehensive,

AJ's ADVICE

What I did was to make the portal/telehub area a main area that is open to everyone. That parcel is rather small but its left open so anyone can attend an event or visit, like today's Academic CIO meeting, without having to become part of a group.

A portion of the island is dedicated to experimentation, etc.. So that part of the island, that parcel, albeit a rather big parcel, is restricted to a group that is open to join. The remainder of the island is parceled off for specific projects. Once a project is dedicated to a parcel the project leader is given control of the parcel and can set up access as s/he wishes. The remaining parcels that are currently not assigned have been access controlled to a different group that one can only be invited to and is reserved for those involved in the project.

The set up took some thought and planning, but it seems to be working out so far.

FROM ROSS PERKINS (Milosun Czervik)

Unless there is an instructional need to do it, I would say making it public right away is not in your best interest. Anyway, it's summer - and it's likely that faculty won't be needing it ASAP. It's more likely that your university's public relations engine is more active in mid-August than it is at this time of year.

I would make at least two groups for [your group] - one public (potentially set so anyone could join) and one private (not listed, and by invitation only). You do not need more than this as member roles can be sufficiently controled within each group. Some might argue for only one group, but to me this simplifies things a bit, and it allows the private members to interact on group chat channel without broadcasting to all others.

For the private group, I'd say that this would include all faculty and staff at your university actively involved in sim developement. WIthin this group, there may be just one or two who can invite others, some who can build, some who can edit land, etc. As Chris notes, the permission settings are comprehensive and quite useful.

The public group could be by invitation only (uni students only), or indeed L$0 for anyone to join. The folks there could be limited to ONLY getting group notices, etc.

The management rights at EduIsland were not set up well at the beginning, so we've learned a lot of lessons from this (though the griefing has been limited, fortunately).