How To Run A Large Second Life Event

The Immersive Life blog has a nicely comprehensive post on "Managing a Large Virtual Event in Second Life", much of it based on the author's experiences helping run the huge Peace Fest featured last week in Lanna's List.  Lots of handy technical tips, and subtle anti-griefer counter-measures, such as: "Check for unusual names with numbers such as 'sean874902 Hax' and for birthdates within a few days. These may be disposable alt accounts that griefers will use for an attack." Image: slpeacefest.wordpress.com.

Comments

[rikomatic]

really interesting advice, some of which I had not thought of. It's sad that for large scale events you have to be so suspicious of new avatars and ones with weird sounding names.

I'd be interested in his thoughts on load-balancing attendance at multiple sims and reducing lag.

[Trinity Coulter]

It is interesting advice, what would be wonderful is if Linden Lab would share its challenges with events like SL5B and Burning Life openly rather than worry about looking bad. I attended a literature seminar/class one day in Second Life, that compared SL to 'incunabula', which is an old Latin term for 'swaddling clothes'. Essentially the idea was that books weren't always how we see them today. Someone had to invent bindings, and page numbering, and printing techniques, etc etc.

Second Life is very much in the same situation. Despite the (IMO) somewhat optimistic take from M Linden at SL5B that SL is moving out of the early adopter stage into maturity, there are so many challenges still and its far far too early to say the swaddling clothes are off.

What we need is openness and clarity and to be learning lessons from one another. There WILL be difficulties, but that is why it helps more to be willing to share lessons learned and not hide "mistakes". Because they aren't mistakes, they are lessons.

[Jeff Lowe]

Thanks for the recognition...

rikomatic: I'll mark that topic for a future posting. I've seen several different tactics used to load balance (event in corner of 4 sims, Audio/Video/Text broadcast to multiple sim locations, even booting people to allow more entry) and to reduce lag (reduce permissions in sim, request AVs wear low-res clothing, etc). I'm not sure which is most effective...I'll do some research & blog it.

Trinity: "Because they aren't mistakes, they are lessons." Very true! Virtual environments are still a young technology. We all need to continue experimenting and sharing what we learn so that we all might benefit.