Is it possible to say that the hypergrid has remained the same free? The answer to this question is obvious and, unfortunately, it is negative. Today, you can see numerous dramas, widespread rule breaking and a huge number of prohibitions. The grids always find something to blame each other for. If we compare the situation today and 6 years ago, it is obvious that the OpenSim community has significantly degraded. Degradation occurs at the level of social interaction, communication, ethics, and most importantly, freedom of speech and self-expression. You can remember how welcoming and friendly the OpenSim community was 5 years ago. There really were no boundaries. A number of main problems can be identified that contribute to the degradation of the community. The main of these problems are copybot hysteria, ubiquitous censorship, (which is used as a weapon against individuals and grids), virtual pedophilia, violation of content permissions (via god mode), more frequent cases of DDoS attacks, various types of aggressive behavior. OpenSim has already lost a huge number of unique free content stores, a number of grids that have become victims of DDoS attacks, some grids have simply closed from the hypergrid in order to protect their users from various dramas and aggression.

Content issues

Today, there are very few of those who provide unique content for OpenSim. But there are a lot of identical stores with the same content collected from other grids. This is despite the fact that this content was not originally planned for copying or transmission. Some users violate these permissions. They change permissions, change creator names and logos. If earlier the creators could count on high traffic of users of their regions, on gratitude and fame, today they are deprived of even this. What they do for free eventually ends up in stores with monetization systems. Any incentive to seek and create new content disappears. This is especially true for complex objects, scripts and avatar bodies. It takes months for creators to develop such complex scripting systems. Of course, everything that gets into OpenSim will be necessarily copied and duplicated an infinite number of times. This is the nature of OpenSim. However, it makes sense to exercise free will and keep all permissions, creator name and logo. This simple rule allows you to express your respect for someone else's work. Nobody asks for your money, nobody even insists on gratitude, but simple respect for the developers.

Many developers spend their own money to purchase objects in Second Life before porting them to OpenSim. Of course, in this case they do not want these items to be obtained anywhere else than their own stores. That is why the rule “Sharing is Caring” does not work here. It's about premium unique content. This is an attempt to add at least something unique to OpenSim. Sacrarium contains a lot of content that is not found anywhere else. Local developers provide unique content with no copyright or redistribution permissions. They hope that more people will visit their stores and take the items for personal use only. Some users from other grids come to get these objects for their trash stores, where they collect content from other grids. They broke permissions to copy and distribute via god mode and display these items for sale in their own stores. Of course, this behavior greatly upsets developers, depriving them of the motivation to create new objects.

From the very beginning, Sacrarium saw its mission in filling OpenSim with good and accessible content, to become a platform for the best freeby shops. In a time of hysteria copybots and a global witch hunt, the Sacrarium defended content developers by giving them free land. In this way, several very good projects were saved. The Sacrarium refused to follow the common agenda and disobeyed the lobbyists to fight what they called the "copybot". This is despite the fact that the Sacrarium has repeatedly insisted that users buy original objects from the original creators in Second Life if they use replicas of their objects in OpenSim.

The position of the Sacrarium on the “copybot” is well known. To some extent, the Sacrarium managed to break the agenda. Today, most Opensim users have realized that the fight against windmills is unreasonable. Second Life content has always been basic to all grids. All we can do is just buy the original objects in Second Life, or simply refuse to use this content. If you are using an object in OpenSim, then go to Second Life and buy the original to thank the original creator. It's not that much money for a good job. Of course, often the replica does not have the same quality as the original. It all depends only on your personal will. Unfortunately, most people choose to open their mouths wide, but when it comes to them, they are not willing to pay the original creators for the things they use. It is simple: pay or shut up.

Unwanted uploads issue

The next issue is the use of the Sacrarium resources to upload content. Some users from other grids come to the Sacrarium to quickly upload their models. Many model files have errors, which negatively affects the Sacrarium. This is because most grids use the 0.9 version of OpenSim, which is still not stable enough, unlike the 0.8 that is used in Sacrarium. This practice increases the amount of garbage in the database. It is bad, very bad. And of course, any requests and rules are ignored.

Pedophile Invasion

Another unpleasant problem is the increasing incidence of intrusion of users with a child's avatar, who harass other users and offer sex. As you know, the Sacrarium is a completely intolerable place for such perverts. We see the community's reaction to such things becoming more and more bearable. There is no longer such a strong public outrage. This is gradually becoming routine and is likely to over time become a "value for a democratic society" that, like most such values, will be enforced by force. The Sacrarium treats such things extremely negatively, which is directly reflected in the rules of our grid. There should not be any child avatars in the Sacrarium. Especially with a sexual context. We're not going to listen to lectures about the fact that users are adults, that they are just pixels, and everything else in the same vein. Let these pixels live in other grids and not disturb the peace of the Sacrarium. At the end of the day, we want people to enjoy a calm and healthy atmosphere and have fun. This position will not change, even if cannibalism and incest become the next "value".

No Drama Space

It can be seen that the Sacrarium as a community becomes more and more isolated over time. This is largely due to the ever-increasing aggression within the community and strict censorship that prevents people from expressing their thoughts without the risk of being bullied by thousands of fake accounts. Today Sacrarium has its own social network, which allows users from all grids to be always up to date. Here you won't see annoying ads, constant drama and thousands of fake accounts. If sometimes something happens, then the intervention of the administration puts things in order very quickly. Convenient design and cross-platform functionality makes Soziarium one of the best communication platforms for OpenSim fans. Now it is important to put things in order in the Sacrarium so that our users and creators feel safe. In the end, it is our duty.

Closing of the Hypergrid

As you can see, we have been facing a lot of problems with hypergrid lately. There are many features available to help prevent unwanted access to the grid. However, there are just as many ways to bypass this protection. All new challenges make us think about closing the hypergrid and working only for the development of the Sacrarium. To transform the Sacrarium into a calm and pleasant place for our community to communicate. More and more of our users want this. Among them are creators, land tenants and ordinary users who are tired of being disappointed in the hypergrid. We need to ask ourselves how much we need hypergrid today. Most of us rarely visit other grids. This is due to the fact that there is simply nothing else to look at. Can we find any interesting content there that we still don't have? I don’t think so. The only thing that matters is our friends from other grids. The Sacrarium can ban grids that constantly break the rules. But this has little or no effect. After each Summer amnesty, we see the same grids in the ban again. Based on everything that has been said above, we believe that closing the hypergrid would be a good solution for the Sacrarium. It would even allow us to reopen user registrations and continue to work based on the needs of our own users. Over the years, the Sacrarium has already brought quite a lot of value to the OpenSim community. Few people today will remember that the appearance in OpenSim of the first Bento bodies, heads for avatars, BOM - all this is the merit of developers from the Sacrarium community. The content of OpenSim has taken a huge step into the future thanks to the efforts of the Sacrarium. Remember what OpenSim was like up to this point. Some of the best developers of OpenSim have found their home with us, becoming a friendly and successful team. You all know the gratitude the Sacrarium received from the OpenSim community. Why do we need all this? Why should we drag along those who are not in any way interested in the development of OpenSim? The OpenSim core developers create an amazing system, the Sacrarium develops the latest content solutions. Everyone else is busy with drama, and the war with the windmills. There is no reason to tolerate such an attitude. We are the Sacrarium, the center of excellence for innovation and the latest fashion. We did everything we could and now it's time to move on. What do you think about this? Please leave us your comments and opinions.

Best regards,

Sacrarium team

English translation by Murzilla Potapov. Special for Sacrarium.