Vint Falken has a very good tip for SL photographers who want to hide poseballs and other obstacles from a composition without time-intensive photo-editing.

But, she opines:

Note: I’ve tried this on avatars and prim clothing and it does not work on those. Bummer. :p

Well, glorious day and jubilations, because I’ve found a way that it will work! Just toggle on `Client > Character > Character Tests > Allow Select Avatar’, and you’re ready to go! You can now select avatars and their attachments — and so, in combination with the `Client > Rendering > Hide Selected’ option, you can hide them!

Here’s an example: This annoying avatar was absolutely ruining my composition:

So, I selected her and her prim hair, thus dramatically improving the quality of my snapshot!:

Unfortunately, to hide the avatar and all attachments, you have to manually select each attachment (luckily not each individual prim!), which can get tedious!

Fortunately, with the `Allow Select Avatar’ option turned on, you can just select the offending avatar and move it (along with all its attachments) somewhere else where it won’t be in your way! The movement is client-side only, so if the avatar moves (walks, turns, jumps… animation movement doesn’t count), the server will send an update to your client and the avatar will pop back into its old position. But, it should be enough to get your shot in!

Everett Linden writes:

So, flag your parcels and do your part to increase trust and safety among your fellow Residents in Second Life.

Nonsense. Absolute, pure, grade-A malarky.

Flagging parcels as “Restricted Content” has little to do with trust, and absolutely nothing to do with safety.

North Korea will not decide to bomb Japan because they learned that somebody didn’t flag their erotica gallery.

Women in the Middle East won’t suddenly stop being oppressed and abused, now that the potential customer base for adult shops is being slashed.

Children in Darfur will not stop being slaughtered for the color of their skin, just because some teenage boy in the US is prevented from catching a glimpse at a polygonal pudendum.

Violence, oppression, persecution, and militant zealots — these are the sorts of things which threaten our safety. Nobody is going to be safer just because some “verification” company is able to add a “This person uses SL” checkbox next to your entry in their database.

So, given that it’s not about “trust”, “safety”, or any of those fluffy words that Linden Lab litters their blog posts with, what is this about?

Gwyneth Llewelyn has offered us her extremely thorough and in-depth look at the implications of identity verification. It contains what is, in my view, the most likely explanation:

In effect, Integrity does not really provide “just a verification service”. Their core business is actually far more interesting: they buy LL’s liability in case LL gets a lawsuit for letting minors to see “inappropriate content”…. Whatever lawsuits will come LL’s way, they will simply get Integrity to pay for them.

In other words, this isn’t about ideals at all. This about business, legal liability, and cover-your-ass. The only way to get insurance against civil lawsuits is to get rid of the gambling and shift legal liability to land-owners who neglect to appropriately flag their parcels.

That’s all well and good. Really. The legal system is full of warts and onions as a result of its long and storied past. It’s perfectly understandable, from the business perspective, that a company like Linden Lab would need to buy insurance against lawsuits.

But why doesn’t Linden Lab just come out and say, We have to do this, in order to protect the future of Linden Lab and Second Life? Why do they try to pull the wool over our eyes, and feed us this propaganda about trust and safety and think of the children!?