Insilico, Inaccessible: After Reported Permaban of Owner/Lead Creator, Second Life's Renowned Cyberpunk City Blocked from Public Access

Meeting Skills Hak in 2008

Insilico, Second Life's universally acclaimed and extremely popular cyberpunk city, currently seems to be blocked from general public access. This follows an announcement last weekend from the sim's owner and lead creator, "Skills Hak", who writes that she's been permabanned after committing some unspecified abuses:

I am still not sure what exactly caused my ban... In fact, some of the stuff I did was pretty fucking bad so honestly LL is in their full right to remove me from the game. Whatever Linden employee thought it would be a good idea to kill me, Thank You. I think that the chances of finding out what’s actually happened are absurdly low so i’ll just move on. I’d much rather be happy than right any day.

Skills seems more relieved than angry to be leaving, citing a long list of past dramas she and the sim have been involved with. Moderators for the Insilico community say they are working with Linden Lab to bring Insilico back to general access. This from "Abeus" on Insilico's web portal:

I'm not too sure if I am allowed to discuss the terms of the deal. To be on the safe side I won't get into it the fine details. Just suffice to say that we've been given a period of time to hopefully recoup the losses that this lock-out has incurred for the sims. Once the transfer of ownership documents are received and completed, the sims will be reopened again (they did mention this could take a day or two, so please just a little more patience).

Linden Lab is in a very touchy place here. There's always been a boatload of drama surrounding Insilico, an exhaustive and near-impossible-to-verify list of claims and counter-claims of abuse and worse. At the same time, Insilico is also one of Second Life's most beloved, admired, and active locations, a regular subject of official Linden Lab promotion. The company even sponsored this marketing video tribute to Insilico:

... all of which, I suppose, suggests a good takeaway for future user-generated virtual world platforms: If you're planning to base your marketing revenue model on user-generated content, you better be ready to manage your users' content to a high degree.

That said, I'm still sorry to see someone as marvelously talented as Skills Hak go, who I first met in-world in 2008. Her departure post is worth reading with a grain of salt, including this passage on the future of SL and Project Sansar:

Now SL is dying and has been for a while, it’s a ghost town, TP around on the map and you will notice most of the groups of dots are traffic bots, unless there’s a shopping event. Most of the sims seem emtpy, great builds are being taken offline because the number of visitors are dropping to near zero, while LL still happily charges 300$ USD a month to keep a simulator online (which probably doesn’t cost them more than 50$ USD). I grew tired of it and the only reason i stayed around was you guys really, making stuff with you, talking to friends and shopping was always the most fun to me. I have no hopes for Sansar, it’s made by a company that doesn’t understand their own userbase. It will just be a new Patterns, VR buzzwords won’t be enough to give it much traction and my main pet peeve with it is it being closed source. Even Lindens commented to me that they are rather underwhelmed. I still wish you guys the best with it.

... though like I said, read with some sodium in hand. For instance: The fact that Linden Lab open sourced its Second Life viewer so early in its consumer launch led to much or most of the drama that indirectly led to Insilico's undoing.

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Comments

[Mamentas]

Skills is getting a compensation too http://skills.tumblr.com/post/141861650417/my-last-snapshot-after-being-logged-out-by-an

[Clara Seller]

I read the passage and didn't require any salt.

She's a very talented and successful resident who is making some very good points from inside the world. This is going to be a huge loss for many people and LL.

Whatever the circumstances are, I do hope that the parties with the facts dissect the situation with a genuine desire to learn. This one deserves reflection.

[Kaylee]

Hamlet, Please consider how harmful and strung out this topic is by SLU everytime something happens people run to SLU blaim linden lab then all the former SL Residents start beating a drum over their putting on a witch hunt against linden lab like skill hax deserved to know why he was banned when he broke the terms of service on a daily basis and manipulated the servers to grief other residents.
Please do not beat the same drum as those people they are only hurting SL every chance they get by using Google search as a weapon against linden lab.

Linden lab had more then its reasons to ban skills after years of skills using his position in the community to shield themselves while basically teeing linden labs hands for so long they had to do something.
too all the haters,detractors and wannabe judges leave linden lab alone!, by hurting Linden Lab your hurting my second life you selfish bastards who are again time after time point fingers at the lab .

This comment was not directed at you hamlet, but in general all the needless FUD thrown around from former residents who think it's OK to post graphic images of a woman having intimate moments with an animal or shielding someone found to be more then once using a very very young looking avatar
for unstated forms of gratification.

The Second Life Terms of Service can be guide to how you conduct your virtual life or the guidelines to how it ends it, that's all in the residents hands not the other way around in most cases!

Kaylee

[Mondy]

Kaylee, I might be able to take your comments more seriously if you could at least realize Skills is a girl....

[Oumara]

Kaylee, how long have you been on SL?

[Joe Unbulder]

@ Kaylee

Linden Lab only has themselves to point fingers at! they not only overlooked SLUniverse mass trolling in SL but acted as if they were the good guys when they tried and even to this day tried to day to get giggles beach Sims shut down over an old grudge by SLU Trolls,
lets not forget not long ago SLU going inworld hindering entire access to regions to try to get residents banned for operating a legal business on adult mainland they were paying for.linden lab ending banning all those people they were stalking just taking the word and fabricated proof from them.
linden Lab has only itself to point fingers at when one day they allow a griever group who operate under the falsehood of promoting SL but at the same time have several threads about normal 2nd life residents they plan on getting in trouble thru the lab or a outside 3rd party.
the SLU/JLU not much difference just packaging with 2nd life in decline the kind of damage SLU has done in the last few years has run off thousands of linden lab customers out of the grid because when you prosecute one resident you affect not only that person but the entire friends list, it has a trickle down affect that cost linden lab not just money but an endless bad record by former residents.
the trouble is linden lab takes down one griever but cuddles other types of trolls just as damaging if not more so what if skills did do a little trolling of a few Sims is it any difference then SLU closing access to entire public regions denying access to private land owners to get in the land they paid for?..that went on for months on dozens of regions how many people quite sl over that? that was on the mainland!!! while skills was basically trolling people in his own private regions? his right if he owned the land!.

Smells to coffee to me what about you?

[Joe Unbulder]

@Mondy

Skills is a man in Real Life!. sorry pixel DNA not counting in the argument here.

[Betty]

They should just leave that place closed,not save it! do they save the countless other thousand dream lands lost by residents each year?
nope!
Save an outdated sci-fi place created by a griefer
while the the owner of The Pillars of Hercules was one day late on tier they deleted a grid treasure without a twitch, makes perfect sense! pfft!

[Iggy]

Whatever this particular SLer did to merit a ban, just ask legions of educators formerly invested in SL about how consistent Lab policy can be. There's no need to troll the Lab and ruin their Google results.

They've been doing them to themselves for years and years.

[Serious Starsider]

I remember that place fondly, even sort of lived there for a while. It's been over 2 years since I have been in SL but if I ever went back I'd want to see that sim again. Too bad!

[Elsa]

@ Joe Blowhard!
Proud FIC Member here,yes the Giggles Sims need to be shut down, with all the phedaphila taken place under the guise of being a 'community' with that said its no secret of ours, rest assured we will make it happen one way or another' for the good of Second Life' giggles will be gone its traffic went from 20k a day to 4k a day so by december we will make sure it's 'zero' then the death knell LOL, "as for Skills she is a victim of linden lab outdated policies that need to change to be more democratic.
Just keep running your chops' but no one is listening! while LL knows who to trust in these matters'. thats really none of your business who do you thing you are pal!

[copybot]

Wagner, the picture you use to illustrate this article displays copyboted content: https://gyazo.com/48c540edfb739a7a47f21023101c2d62
How do you feel about this?

[Oumara]

Wow no wonder Skills became a little griefy with these trash-tier wanna-be trolls trying to get on her nerves. Those two allegedly copyboted "designs" don't even look close and very generic, are you going to sue everyone who makes windows with prims bent like that? Who even is fs sixx and why should we care about your drama from 2008? I noticed a pattern with the people bringing up their dirty laundry with skills, they all somehow seem like complete idiots.

[Alex]

LOL, when I met up with Skills in real life she was still a girl. Looks like she made some internet people very angry :D
Never change

[Teidea Galicia]

I thought it was interesting that people who are trying to tarnish Skills' reputation in broken english are the same who are promoting and defending well known pedophile SIMs like Giggles beach. Skills apparently has always been a polarizing character but i have to agree, the handful of haters seem like they are not very bright and have a rather questionable agenda. SL would be a better place without them.

[Tesla]

No you're another RPers who thinks your community is above all who also thinks skills is some kind of exception when skills is not! and those sims do not deserve speciel treatment when no one else gets any. hey what about all the other roleplaying sims that have went under were was linden lab then? Steelhead was a fantastic steampunk community linden lab just let die less then 6 months ago that was over 10 yrs in SL! were was the bailout for them! Hamlet ran several articles about Steelhead, did they not create enough drama or copybot enough? to be noticed for speciel treatment.

RIP Steelhead! if only you could have been ebbe lindens poster child or been based as a 3 region boat community.

Skills admits to being a big violater of the terms of service but you love skills so much its ok just ignore whats been admitted.

"So i got permabanned again last monday, second time in a month, apparently for multiple reasons. All my regions have been shut down and probably some of my alt accounts too, some of which were premium members as well. Inventory worth thousands of USD, around 1000$ USD in cash and my regions i paid around 200k$ USD for in tier over the years. All in all that isn’t really a big loss to me, considering i never paid a single dollar for this game. That’s right, when my account Skills Hax got banned in 2008 (later unbanned in 2013) i made a new account the next day, spent thousand dollars on a full sim and have never used any RL money again on SL since that day. In fact SL was paying some of my real life bills for years, CDS even helped me to finance my new apartment a few years ago. So i guess i should be thankful after all, it was a lot of work sometimes, but huge fun and probably sooner rather than later all of us will lose everything anyways.
Even though SL has been getting rather slow lately, INSILICO has always been able to keep itself afloat since the first month and was even profitable enough that i could add 4 more regions to it. INSILICO rentals, my own content sales, custom jobs and then CDS generated enough money to buy and sustain regions dedicated to viewer testing and griefer sandboxes like Emerald Point, CVNT, Yiff Yiff, or Poop aka Cumboy Canyon aka Purge or just personal hangouts like MEOW, Mindcandy and others.

Frankly, it is in Linden Lab’s best interest to keep INSILICO alive, given its icon status as one of the few sims that got people actually interested in Second Life and made them stay over the years. Hell, they’ve got a picture of the sim on the back of their business cards and have been promoting their service with our work countless times.
I encouraged Abe and Stark, two of the INSILICO GMs to come forward and discuss a transfer of ownership of the regions and gave Linden Lab my OK, My content is all yours to play with. The community website with its 2600+ accounts will probably change ownership too shortly, as well as the inworld groups with 6k+ members.
LL kept the INSILICO estate locked for the past week and thankfully they have been very cooperative in regards to the sims so far, let’s hope it all works out. I would like to thank all the renters, players, donors and staff who have been running this place for the past 5 years without my involvement, you guys rock. I’m very confident that the INSILICO adminstration will continue to do their best for the sim and community, although it is going to be very hard financially, so there will likely be cutbacks.

INSILICO has always been a spearhead of innovation and i have been using many different hacks while i was still working on it, probably the first sim above 800 meters, first sim surround, first windlight, almost entirely built with megaprims everyone considered “laggy”, NPC bots, sim wide IRC, lots of custom scripting, etc etc. LL still seems to use it to test performance and other things judging by the frequent “Tester” accounts. I always went beyond limits of what was possible on SL so getting into viewer coding while building INSILICO was just the way to go. It wouldn’t have been possible to build a whole city alone in such a short time with any of the standard viewers, some of the things i made needed a “hacked” viewer to bypass restrictions like upload limits, linking rules etc. I work as project manager so i’m not really a coder, but learning C++ to write silly Secondlife viewers like Gemini, Emerald and especially Onyx helped me in my real job immensely and i think i got pretty good at it over the years.
I’m a curious cat and always enjoyed breaking and improving things, i had sooo much fun with exploits. Like breaking experience permissions, force-teleporting whole welcome areas full of people screaming at each other to my place, making them dance. Mesh hax that was finally patched after 3 years last winter which would allow me to duplicate any mesh object, including rigging info without reupload on the fly, making mesh objects with only 1 LI no matter how complex, even bigger than 64m. Inverting or flipping mesh assets to only name a few. Soooo many voice related exploits, tools to roll back regions, hundreds of useful features that LL simply won’t give you because they could be abused. I never shared the bad stuff since i didn’t want to harm Secondlife as a whole (more recent Onyx leaks or mesh hax would have been a disaster for example).
CDS was about raising awareness and getting ignorant people off bad viewers, and i guess it worked. When was the last time you heard about a copybot scandal? For the past few years i have been unlisting many people who got caught in 2010 and contacted me about it, because a lot of Linden water has passed under the bridge now. I still regret that my beta script was leaked, which was used by zFire Xue and others to create Redzone and other griefing tools. Ash, the other creator of CDS told me he is interested in taking over the system, so it might be continued as well, maybe even free.
Think what you want, there have always been a lot of rumors about me, i thought it was funny and even encouraged some of them, because i liked to see how far it would go. Many people have tried to find dirt on me over the years and realized there really isn’t that much. There was not a single copybotted item in any of my sims, you can’t crash sims with voice and what other lame theories certain angry anons come up with.

I am still not sure what exactly caused my ban, maybe i knew too much or maybe they got mad they couldn’t break my IM encryption. Or that backdoored copybot viewer some guy made that IMs me the user’s whole info without their knowledge if i am in range, in plain text and for every Linden to see, in an effort to frame me or w/e.
As you can see, i guess i am not completely innocent, have been skirting the rules for years and some of the things i was involved in sparked serious grid-wide controversies, while LL turned a blind eye.. think Emerald/Onyx or CDS. Most of those were based on FUD but it was certainly bad PR for Linden Lab and i don’t blame them for hating me a little.
In fact, some of the stuff i did was pretty fucking bad so honestly LL is in their full right to remove me from the game. Whatever Linden employee thought it would be a good idea to kill me, Thank You. I think that the chances of finding out what’s actually happened are absurdly low so i’ll just move on. I’d much rather be happy than right any day.

I heard some dramatic news person mention how i am terrible and it is my fault that thousands of people have nowhere to play now because i am a “highly controversial” figure and other FUD he scooped up somewhere.
I created INSILICO, the idea, the brand, style, the websites, the basic rules and roleplay lore, the regions, countless builds, items, avatars, scripts and textures, it was my baby. Granted i burned out on it after 3 years and found some very creative and smart people like Stark, Jodie, Abe, Betz, Zero, Alexx, Cinn, Risa, Perri and others, to keep up my legacy, adding amazing mesh builds and fleshing out the roleplay lore. But it was still my intellectual property and i have been providing it to people for free all this time, despite the usual drama that comes with owning a roleplay sim. For 8 years.

I’m a rather private person and always preferred to stay behind the scenes, just make the game for others and only interfer when needed, not just with INSILICO but many of my other projects, as well. Not because i want to be some sort of game god but because i like watching people having fun with my ideas.
Advertising for LL never was my job, i liked the attention in the beginning but it’s not like we got any kind of special treatment ever.

Clearly the times when a dozen of Lindens a day would come to my sims to hang out and shoot shit or talk like normal human beings are long over. I used to build offices for Linden friends, nowadays there aren’t even real office hours any more. The layoffs at LL in 2010 when i lost many good friends, the dark times with many bad decisions and years of cold shoulder treatment of the Kingdon era, later Rod Humble and now Ebbe completely ruined my trust and sympathy for LL, I still think SL is an amazing thing but simply in the hands of the wrong company. Not all of you of course, you know who.

I put the autoresponse feature in Emerald because people would overload my IM box while i was trying to build INSILICO back in more active times.
Now SL is dying and has been for a while, it’s a ghost town, TP around on the map and you will notice most of the groups of dots are traffic bots, unless there’s a shopping event. Most of the sims seem emtpy, great builds are being taken offline because the number of visitors are dropping to near zero, while LL still happily charges 300$ USD a month to keep a simulator online (which probably doesn’t cost them more than 50$ USD). I grew tired of it and the only reason i stayed around was you guys really, making stuff with you, talking to friends and shopping was always the most fun to me. I have no hopes for Sansar, it’s made by a company that doesn’t understand their own userbase. It will just be a new Patterns, VR buzzwords won’t be enough to give it much traction and my main pet peeve with it is it being closed source. Even Lindens commented to me that they are rather underwhelmed. I still wish you guys the best with it.

I’ve witnessed all the good and terrible things that make SL what it is: the furries, neckbeard trannies, memers, mutant goons, blender nerds, ageplayer vampire families, femboys, shopaholics, fashionistas, the brazilians, hairy gay hulks, linden alts, stalkers, breedables, botox lip findommes, unfunny youtubers, banbox collectors, undertales, cloacas, bling, woodburies, mesh butts, boob physics, latex bondage ponygirls, gfx crashers, copybutters, anti-copybutters, anti-anti-copybutters, anti-griefers, sandbox-foxes, thirsty beta males, escorts, cucklords, creepy daddies, the army of bots, L$ beggars, group spammers, knowitalls, virtual weed dealers, sonic pedos, weebs, permanoobs, cowboys, angry bikers, dick pics, redlining violets, the 1337 hax0rs, the obsessive script kiddies, spergs, the angsty anons, brown nosers, the namedroppers, people who say they know me who have never talked to me, the people who scream “I got your IP bitch!”, the Linden suckups, the newfags, the oldfags, the alts, the opensourcerers, the SLU pitchfork hivemind, the BBCs, SJWs, BFFs, JLUs, ARs, HUDs, W-HATs, MLPs, YCBs, TWHs, DWs, NEETs and FICs.
I played through all the levels, even the bonus level and the secret maps, seen all the cheats and easter eggs, it’s game over.

I started from scratch with new alts a few times when i got bored, for some reason i often ended up as sim owner again, building new communites, but now without my L$ it would be too much work and i am honestly kind of done with the game too. My SL folder is 90 GB big, not counting video and audio recordings, i will keep all the memories and will still stay in touch with the people close to me like the INSILICO gang, the Cumboys/TWH/whatever and all my other friends, actually we have been spending most of the time outside of SL anyways for the past years, playing games or watching movies together. If you want to add me on Skype, my username is chillnesse.

Unlike last month’s “permaban” i prooooobably won’t come back, at least not as Skills Hak. I got suspended and banned many times before, in fact the Hak account was a ban evasion itself so i could build INSILICO.
The cure for boredom is curiosity, there is no cure for curiosity. I got into trouble usually during those times when i was off work for longer periods of time, like right now, i haven’t been working for the past 3 months. An idle mind is the devil’s playground as they say. I reached the top of the pyramid and have spent my last days as exhausted hacker overlord endboss, surrounded by my most trusted men in the mighty empire that was the region of Poop, giggling at Second Life and having the most fun ever in this game.

I had a good run. 8 years on this account and the timing of my ban couldn’t have been better. In fact my boyfriend was really happy to hear about my final ban since i am spending too much time at the computer and i am going to be a mommy soon.

It was a wild ride, thanks for everything ♥"

[Better then Ezra]

She was sweet & innocent,poor little thing never hurt no one, 'says sarcasm'

"I always went beyond limits of what was possible on SL so getting into viewer coding while building INSILICO was just the way to go. It wouldn’t have been possible to build a whole city alone in such a short time with any of the standard viewers, some of the things i made needed a “hacked” viewer to bypass restrictions like upload limits, linking rules"

"i had sooo much fun with exploits. Like breaking experience permissions, force-teleporting whole welcome areas full of people screaming at each other to my place, making them dance. Mesh hax that was finally patched after 3 years last winter which would allow me to duplicate any mesh object, including rigging info without reupload on the fly, making mesh objects with only 1 LI no matter how complex, even bigger than 64m. Inverting or flipping mesh assets to only name a few. Soooo many voice related exploits, tools to roll back regions,"

"As you can see, i guess i am not completely innocent, have been skirting the rules for years and some of the things i was involved in sparked serious grid-wide controversies, while LL turned a blind eye.. think Emerald/Onyx or CDS. Most of those were based on FUD but it was certainly bad PR for Linden Lab and i don’t blame them for hating me a little.
In fact, some of the stuff i did was pretty fucking bad so honestly LL is in their full right to remove me from the game. Whatever Linden employee thought it would be a good idea to kill me, Thank You."

[Marissa Zuckerburg]

LINDEN LAB COMPENSATING GRIEFERS WHILE YOUR LONG TERM HIGH TIER PAYORS SUFFER LARGE FINANCIAL LOSSES.

YOU ARE GOING DOWN ANYWAY LINDEN LAB !!!!!!!!!!!

[Oumara]

Jesus christ, these comments are getting spammy. No, i'm not 'another RPers', just giving my own two cents. How did Lindenlabs "kill" Steelhead? If you let your sim die that's your own fault, maybe you didn't go with the times and people lost interest or you didn't monetize it right. We would all have less problems if LL tier wasn't so damn high. Somehow Insilico managed to be in the spotlight since the beginning and attracted ten thousands of players and renters, even before Lindenlabs started promoting it. As for skills admitting to skirting the rules, who of us never broke the TOS? Raise your hands. She's a damn legend and accomplished more than all of us combined.

[Stephen Mcdaniels]

insilico will be open again hopefully soon! it not just brought me to secondlife, i met my reallife partner here! I hope some day to see you again skills i still remember your karaoke nights and pool parties. Maybe one day we will sing together again? Greetings from Oz

[copybot]

Oumara, I am asking Wagner how he feels about this. This is part of what got her permabanned the first time and it is no big secret (Let me google that for you : http://bfy.tw/4zJc). I just think that Wagner was never aware that his own picture contained content that got copyboted and I am just asking him a very simple question.

[Wow]

Not surprised LL doesn't want to interact with the residents much, judging by some of the hateful comments here. Glad i left the game 3 years ago!

[Gordon]

@blog post copybotter Tesla:
There is a difference, if a roleplay community manager decided to close their own RP (Steelhead) or if Linden Lab make this decision by terminating the account of the land owner.

@cpoybot:
Your picture comparison for copied Insilico content is just a joke, right?

Some comments give the impression that Skills is only means to an end, to let out the own aggression against everything. Poor Hamlet.

[Shyte]

Yes, yes @copybot, i know what you are talking about. this story is brought up by the very same people every time when skills is being mentioned. Some "prim motorbike designer" who took himself too seriously and went out of business and some french people who copyied skills' sim. Multiple people inspected the prims and it turned out to be false allegations, which is why that account from 2007 got unbanned as well when she asked for it. I am sorry but nobody cares about your 2008 prims, stop ripping off Skills ideas, stop blaming her for your incompetence and get a life.

[Wimple]

Skills is the best of the best creators in all of second life...Free our goddess now linden labs !

Hashtag #FreeSkillsHax

Better then Ezra is a liar too !

[Oumara]

No offense Hamlet but your comment section has about as much petty drama as the good old SL Herald. Looks like a lot of bottom-tier trolls are still upset about skills lol.

[Telsla]

Oumara we get it anyone who does not agree that skills was a mater builder or angel is a troll.
Some want a fair second life but those living high off the hog are blind to that notion.

Steelhead was a bigger if not better community it did not tolerate or promote griefers or was created by one.

Skills hax not only got grandfathered tier but discounted 25% on top of that maybe if other roleplay communites had got that then they would not have died.easy for others to talk trash when they have been riding the gravy train of favertism even when the banhammer comes down they get to keep a community and screw everyone else.

Lets do the math

Steelhead had 6 regions at 300 dollars a month each thats $1800 dollars a month.

Insilico had 4 regions at $199 dollars a month + 25% discount thats $150x4 = $600 Dollars $800 without double discount

Steelheads bill was $1800
Insilco bill was $600

If only others got this kinda break were everyone in second life was equal.

"In other news, Linden Lab is going to transfer INSILICO *as is* to my friend Abe, who has been one of the administrators of the estate since very early on. No transfer fee and a tier free time to recoup, which is cool. I wish it would always be so easy to talk to them."

"So i’ve been emailing back and forth with Linden Lab for a bit and i just agreed to accept a one time payment that will recoup my losses (although, technically i didn’t lose any money). It was more than i expected, they showed good faith and i will leave them alone now, promise."

http://skills.tumblr.com/

[Telsla]

Oumara we get it anyone who does not agree that skills was a mater builder or angel is a troll.
Some want a fair second life but those living high off the hog are blind to that notion.

Steelhead was a bigger if not better community it did not tolerate or promote griefers or was created by one.

Skills hax not only got grandfathered tier but discounted 25% on top of that maybe if other roleplay communites had got that then they would not have died.easy for others to talk trash when they have been riding the gravy train of favertism even when the banhammer comes down they get to keep a community and screw everyone else.

Lets do the math

Steelhead had 6 regions at 300 dollars a month each thats $1800 dollars a month.

Insilico had 4 regions at $199 dollars a month + 25% discount thats $150x4 = $600 Dollars $800 without double discount

Steelheads bill was $1800
Insilco bill was $600

If only others got this kinda break were everyone in second life was equal.

"In other news, Linden Lab is going to transfer INSILICO *as is* to my friend Abe, who has been one of the administrators of the estate since very early on. No transfer fee and a tier free time to recoup, which is cool. I wish it would always be so easy to talk to them."

"So i’ve been emailing back and forth with Linden Lab for a bit and i just agreed to accept a one time payment that will recoup my losses (although, technically i didn’t lose any money). It was more than i expected, they showed good faith and i will leave them alone now, promise."

http://skills.tumblr.com/

[Oumara]

"Skills hax not only got grandfathered tier but discounted 25% on top of that maybe if other roleplay communites had got that then they would not have died.easy for others to talk trash when they have been riding the gravy train of favertism even when the banhammer comes down they get to keep a community and screw everyone else."

what? what makes you think insilico has grandfathered tier and where do these 25% "favertism" come from? you are being ridiculous.
also, nice double post.

[Shyte]

@Telsla

can you cite a source for that? where does your info come from re: skills had grandfathered tier and got 25% discount, that would be very interesting to know :^)

a full sim is 300$ + VAT so around 330$ * 4 + 125$ for the east homestead = 1500$ USD per month, not counting the many other sims she had.

Why are you so angry?

[Canuck]

@Oumara
Down playing this huh? just skirting the rules aye?
Forcing someone out of a safe hub then forcing the avatar to her home then again forcing the avatar to dance like a puppet.how many residents left over that and who cares is likely your feelings it takes similar mindsets like skills to completely ignore others feelings & rights,surely you both got along like peas in a pod aye!

Skills Hax wrote..."Like breaking experience permissions, force-teleporting whole welcome areas full of people screaming at each other to my place, making them dance."

[zz bottom]

It is much easy now to have a choice and do not stand with those that wish All to be drama, just move to kitely.

[Oumara]

@canuck
Got a mighty stick up your arse there aye?
Just abuse report skills under the category > I have no sense for humor "Dear LL, Skills Hax hurt my feelings by making me dance"
Down playing this huh? Calm down buddy, aye.

[David Bumstead]

Lol zz bottom, we have no need for a bunch of self- centered people like that in OS, just look how the elf clan almost single handily destroyed Inworldz thru drama with Oumara n crew the developers would run for the hills as skills crashed one grid after another on the hypergrid deleting entire grids at her wake.Lol

Linden Lab deserves to keep these people for one i agree Lol

[Little dimple]

Again we witness the corruption by Linden Lab who charges clients tier fees at random. Skills Hax the griefer received massive tier discounts only holding a couple of regions while others who do not grief need to pay through their nose and NEVER get any form of compensation.

These Lindens are corrupt through the bone. They scam and cheat their clients year in year out.

I wonder who pays normal tier these days.

Not only that but once the griefer is told to leave these Lindens pay a big fat monetary bonus to the griefer to make him leave.

Why is that Linden Lab, afraid he would put your hacked database with customer credit card information all over the internet for anyone to see how incompetent you are?

Do you fear the griefer so much Linden Lab you paid him a big bonus? Scared money Linden Lab?

[Oumara]

Clearly you don't know a single bit about me or her. FWIW several grid operators have contacted Skills over the years, ass-kissing and offering free regions to get her on board but she declined. I think she has contributed large portions of code to some of the opensim forks though and made custom viewers for them, so there's that. Better ask her yourself. I am sure most grid owners would love to have her on the team, not just because of her talent in content creation. Why are you being so terribly dramatic about everything?

[Oumara]

@little dimple, again why do you think skills had tier discounts? are you done making sock puppet accounts to comment here?

[copybot hollywood]

"self centered" David, right lol, look how far they go into self-persuasion : http://insilico.geminicybernetics.net/profiles/blogs/did-skills-work-on-the-
this is hillarious (wait you are going to see one that will maintain that this is the actual truth , brings popcorn)

[zz bottom]

The only thing i can add is what can any with good sense to expect from a company that is hosted on a country that is close to place Trump in power?

[Kristof]

I ran into Skills several times in welcome areas and she always sounded very polite and kind despite the rudeness going on there over voice sometimes, she's an endearing individual.
Don't know much about her In Silico business and i haven't really been paying much attention to the drama that has been surrounding Skills but i think it's easy to see by the types of comments here that it isn't really her fault but mostly jealous people who can barely speak english and are bad at math, making up funny rumors about how she got special treatment by LL and is crashing grids while copybotting and leaking credit card info.
Meanwhile Skills rolls in dough, thinking about her next fun project. Stay excellent betch <3

[zz bottom]

Btw, who the fu****** is any to say that someone does not know how to speak english?
is there any law that says that one needs to speak it to be heard?
How i longed for Felipe the 1st and the bad weather!

[Oumara]

I don't think he was referring to you zz lol. But english is important on the net yes, glad i learned it as second language.

[Amanda]

Oumara can you stop trolling people here with different views then you, i will report you to hamlet if you continue.

[Oumara]

you consider asking people about sources for their baseless claims trolling? report away!

[Hottie]

Drama is as drama does.

It's too bad when things escalate like this. On the comment that nobody is logged in except bots, though I think that is mostly sour grapes. I run 25+ sim estate and if I bounce around to my sims I see anywhere from 1 to dozens of people in the sims. These are renters using their land. We haven't had to sell off a sim in a while, in fact a few times I have considered buying a sim when we have gotten low on land, especially now that you can transfer grandfathering again. However I am still hesitant to invest in SL when Linden Lab is no longer investing in it. I don't disagree with the idea that SL may be dying. But I have also seen things stabalize and bounce back a bit in the land biz recently. Which is probably mostly due to less competition (and less idiots who think running a business means undercutting everyone even if it means losing money). But anyway, even if SL is dying, it's a slow death and it's not dead yet.

I am both curious and dreading this supposed next gen SL. Part of me hopes they make it like the old one with a place for all business owners I cluding land owners. But part of me has a feeling they will cut us out of the picture. We are the red headed step child as always.

Anyway. Sorry that was a tangent.

I hope the people who count on and enjoy the sim in question get it back soon.

[Carlos Loff]

I pay 75 dollars per month on Opensim and I have 256 SIMs land area, yes you read correctly (256) and performance is much better than on SL and same features exactly

Nowadays with the server solutions out there, Im sure SL does not pay more than 5$ per month to have a Full Sim running and charges 300$ to customers

LL don´t care about SL they believe Samsar will be the one, otherwise they would cut quite a bit on land tiers and reborn with great impulse

[St Denis]

Why do some people think Skills is male, everyone already knows who she is in RL and has seen/heard her. Must be hard to accept that you have been outsmarted by a girl LOL

[Gypsy Tripsa]

Quote.. 'INSILICO was just the way to go. It wouldn’t have been possible to build a whole city alone in such a short time with any of the standard viewers, some of the things i made needed a “hacked” viewer to bypass restrictions like upload limits, linking rules"

As a mesh creator in Second Life, i might work an extra40 hours in one week to reduce the land impact a few numbers just to try and give my customers the highest quality that will not eat up all the land resources.

here this hacker,bypassed permissions for years, uploading overcomplexity mesh hacked at 1 land impact is not only tragic, but a slap in the face to those who play by the rules,
while added he gets to keep his legacy paid thru friends and alts how wonderful if only the rest of us were no peasants in the eyes of linden lab.

Had it been myself getting my account terminated,my business and community would have been toasted overnight, no help from so-called second life advocates or lindens would have followed for certain,the cult followers you would have a hard time saying otherwise in this sickening matter.

let the griefers dream die, he had years to do the right thing, instead he used his community as a protective layer against his actions. then in the end still gets to keep everything while getting rewarded,being treated as some kind of hero is unbelievable.

Perhaps the time has come for elves and fairies to sail to new unexplored worlds, were the gods play fair and love everyone, while the flowers are forever in bloom in new lands of milk & honey.
-Gypsy Tripsa

[frenzy]

Oh yeh?gYpSy says what an old worn out crusty mammy! LoL. Insilico brings real role playing with immersive experiences ..who cares about a bunch of geriatric elf's in some lame forest setting. shzz chritzz granny get over yourselves putting on elf ears/fairy wings is no certification to be a role player..be nice i might offer to train you.. tee heeee

[frenzy]

Oh yeh? dAviD bUmStEaD says what SOME SCHIZOID LIKE YOURSELF..tEE hEE. Skillz is not gone she just got upgraded to one of her other accounts now in a few years we get the old one unbanned..LoLzz Cheeze Wizzers!.. C Skills 2.0 is on vacation as Skillz 3.0 takes the helm using a magic enhanced viewer while the lindens give us a winky wink to play along .bOYGING BOYing to all Da Haterz Skillz

YoU Kan't kill da GoddeZZ. FEELzMe .tee heez

[pussycat catnap]

A long time ago I got confused about a 'somebody hax' that was an Emerald Dev and involved in a lot of the illegal activity. Whoever that person was, used to even post claiming credit. I had thought it was skills, but it must have been someone else because when all those people were banned skills was still there.

But perhaps somebody at LL made the same mistake?

That said, isn't this old news because I recall reading of this ban in February, and then it got resolved.

[Count Burks]

Hey Pussycat, long time observer of your thoughts on the official second life forums,well you remind me of my now departed Grandfather we 'so dearly missed, "so here is some thoughts to share in response to your special outlook on life,my Grandfather smoked his whole life. I was about 10 years old when my mother said to him, 'If you ever want to see your grandchildren graduate, you have to stop immediately.'. Tears welled up in his eyes when he realized what exactly was at stake. He gave it up immediately. Three years later he died of lung cancer. It was really sad and destroyed me. My mother said to me- 'Don't ever smoke. Please don't put your family through what your Grandfather put us through." I agreed. At 28, I have never touched a cigarette. I must say, I feel a very slight sense of regret for never having done it, because your post gave me cancer anyway.

[Coronet]

Good news!
Looks like Linden Lab had a change of heart and unbanned Skills today!!

Just finished talking to her at her reopened regions.

[10:08] Skyllz Hyx entered draw distance (10.86 m).
[10:08] Skyllz Hyx entered the region (10.86 m).
[10:10] jjccc Coronet: skills hax is that you?
[10:12] Skyllz Hyx: Deep in the Pixels smiles. have you been helped here or need any?
[10:12] Skyllz Hyx: Welcome to Insilico!
[10:12] jjccc Coronet: ohh wow they unbanned you that is totaly cool
[10:14] Skyllz Hyx: HaHa Nooo. bans mean nothing! a good VPN and my brothers credit card will fix everything, new peeps.
[10:14] Skyllz Hyx: I was never gone -Not- just evolved like butterfly.
[10:14] Skills Resident entered draw distance (15.34 m).
[10:14] Skills Resident entered the region (15.34 m).
[10:15] Skyllz Hyx: now the haterz will pay- all the guys pretending to be girls- everyone will soon find out - Thiz going 2 be BIG!! WOOP WOOP no reason some of us just want to watch the world burn.
[10:15] jjccc Coronet: Cool beans man more then i ask for lol. got to log, stay out of trouble this time around, peace out!

[pussycat catnap]

@Count: I have no idea what you're on about there. I often find it interesting that some of you love to hyper focus on a small comment I might make, rather than the long topic of back of forth from others.

For a clue on my comment: I made it before reading the 50 above it. I had no idea my old opinion that Skills was a banned Emerald dev was actually correct. I thought the fact that I later saw the person still active meant my memory was flawed.

BUT, there is a quote above claiming to be Skills' own words that says the very point of being with Emerald and then banned from 2008 to 2013.

That said... that was the full sum of my comment - a mostly question.

Don't pin any side of this debate on me. Don't try to blame me for any of it. This is all on you folks raising a storm up on both sides of it. I had nothing to do with it before, and nothing still.

[Oumara]

hax was banned long before there were any 3rd party viewers you genius, you are confusing hak with hax. she wasn't banned because of emerald either, just like the dozen of other emerald devs. has it ever occured to you that it's better not to comment on things when you have no clue?

[Issa Heckroth]

There is only one dumb, broken thing here.... and it aint the blog :)

[pussycat catnap]

@Oumara: So the quotes above that claim to be from Skillz are forged?

[Lordsirm]

Hey ! Move Insilico or copy it, and place it over on 'Space', like some other SL properties are doing.

[Neelah]

The girl and her friends are a menace to all of SL. They go around trolling, using hacks to lock and spam voice chat, and crash sims/rip avatars.

"The whole "I dont know why Im banned" is a complete load of bullshit. She knows why she was banned.