LifeRental System guide

What's included

Every product runs one small script and talks to the LifeRental server. Nothing about your rentals is stored in the object, so a box can be reset, picked up or replaced without losing anything.

Quick start

1. Rez a Rental Meter or Box where tenants will find it: your rental office or the parcel itself.
2. Touch it. The first time, it gives you a link to create your LifeRental account: your Second Life username and a password of your choice. After that, touching it and choosing Dashboard logs you straight in.
3. Allow debit permission when the box asks. It needs it to give refunds. You can always grant it later: touch the box and choose Allow refunds.
4. Set the unit up on the dashboard: give it a name and a price, and choose how tenants can pay. The box updates within seconds and shows Available.
5. Rez a Drop Box anywhere and put in your rules notecard, info notecard and landmark. Then pick them for the unit on the dashboard.
6. Add remotes if you want the unit payable from more than one place (see Remotes).

That's it: tenants right-click the box and choose Pay. They get a thank-you IM with a link to a receipt for their payment, and the unit's rules notecard and landmark from your Drop Box.

Setting up a unit

Open Units on the dashboard and choose the unit. Each unit has four tabs.

To rename a unit, rename it on the dashboard, or rename the main box's object in Second Life: the dashboard picks the new name up by itself.

Prices and payments

• Price per period: per minute, hour, day, week, 30-day month, calendar month or year. A calendar month ends on the same date and SLT time the next month (Jan 31 runs to Feb 28 or 29).
• Pay buttons: up to four amounts, each a number of periods or a length of time. With fixed payments, only these amounts are accepted; otherwise any amount buys time in proportion.
• Limits: smallest and largest payment (and a separate smallest first payment), the least time a payment must add, and the most time a tenant can hold.
• Discounts: pay at least a certain amount and get a percentage back.
• Bonus time: buy at least a certain length of time and get extra time free.
• Profit shares: a percentage of each payment paid on to a partner automatically.
• Overdue rentals: a tenant who pays late pays from when the rental ran out, so the overdue time is covered first.
• Changing the price can adjust tenants' remaining time to match (double the price, half the time), if you tick adjust time.

Refused payments (too small, unit locked, and so on) are refunded straight away with the reason. Every payment gets a transaction reference like LR-7E0195DA3B0D and a receipt page showing exactly what happened, step by step.

Remotes

1. Rez the remote in the same region as the main unit, touch it and choose Link.
2. Within 60 seconds, touch the main unit. A gold chain shows which remote it is; choose Finalize link.
3. Move the remote wherever you want it, even to another region. It stays linked and shows the same state as the main unit.

The main unit's Remotes button lists its remotes, with Teleport To and Unlink for each. Any remote can link to any main unit: a box remote can mirror a meter and the other way round.

Drop Box

Rental boxes never hand out items themselves. Your Drop Box does it for all of them, so you keep one copy of each notecard and landmark.

• Rez it anywhere and grant debit permission: it then also pays refunds, discounts and profit shares.
• Put in your notecards and landmarks. They must be copyable (the Drop Box never gives away a no-copy item).
• Choose them for each unit on its Details tab. Taking an item out of the Drop Box removes it from the units that use it.
• It gives one item at a time from a queue, so a busy moment never runs into Second Life's limits. If it's offline, items wait (up to a day) and refunds are paid by the unit's own box instead.

The Drop Box page shows whether it's online, what it holds and its recent deliveries.

Touch menus

Tenants and rentals

Extra tenants

A tenant can add up to 10 extra tenants (friends or partners) from the box's Tenants menu. You can switch this off per unit.

Reminders

Tenants get IM reminders at 7 days, 3 days, 2 days, 1 day, 6 hours, 2 hours and 1 hour before their rental runs out, when it expires, and then daily for a week while it's overdue. Tenants can turn reminders off from the menu, and you can turn them off per unit.

Running out

• With auto-evict on, an overdue tenant is evicted after the grace period you set (0 to 720 hours), or at once if they said they won't renew.
• With auto-evict off, the rental stays overdue (the sign says so) until they pay or you evict.

Reservations, transfers, renting by hand

• Reserve a vacant unit for one avatar: only they can rent it.
• Transfer a tenant to another of your units, with their time, extra tenants and credit.
• Start a rental by hand for someone who paid you another way, and add or remove time. Time added by hand isn't refundable.

Many units at once

On the Units page, tick units and use the quick buttons (lock, unlock, payments on or off, refresh, evict, delete) or Bulk edit to change prices, options, notifications, groups, items and more on all of them together.

Evictions and refunds

Refunds are fair to both sides: tenants get back what they paid for time they haven't used, and never more.

• Each payment is a checkpoint: the value of the time used since the last one is taken off the tenant's credit (never below L$0), then the payment is added.
• An eviction with a refund pays back the credit left, never more than the value of the time remaining.
• Time you add by hand adds no credit, so it can't be refunded out of your account.

Each tenancy has a credit ledger showing every checkpoint, payment and refund, alongside its rental log and transactions.

The dashboard

The dashboard works on phones (the menu slides out) and in light, dark or your system's theme: use the switch at the bottom of the menu.

Bringing your tenants over

Upload a CSV export of your current rentals on the Import page. When you set up a LifeRental box with the same unit name, it takes over that tenant and their remaining time, and the tenant gets an IM saying so.

Staff

Add staff by their Second Life username on the Staff page. They finish signing up by touching any of your boxes, and log in with their own account.

Prim Counter

Rental boxes don't count prims themselves. The LifeRental Prim Counter does it for a whole region: it finds the parcels, counts whose prims are on each every 3 hours, and keeps every unit's land impact up to date. It doesn't stop anyone rezzing (that's what land settings are for); it tells tenants, and you, when they go over what they rent.

How many you need

One per region per land owner. A Prim Counter can only count prims on land owned by whoever owns the counter: you, or the group the land is deeded to. It doesn't matter how many rentals there are; what matters is who owns the land. Rezzing a second one for the same land owner in a region replaces the first (it de-rezzes).

Group-owned land: deeding

1. Wear the land group's tag and rez the Prim Counter on the group's land.
2. Answer the permission request. It asks for permission to return objects; only the group's owners can grant it (choose No if you don't want object return). Let it connect for a few seconds.
3. Right-click › Edit › General: tick Share with group, then Deed. Rezzing under the group tag isn't enough: it must be deeded.
4. Wait for green. It turns yellow ("Finding parcels"), then green ("Online") and counts straight away. If it says "No valid parcels found" in red, it isn't deeded to the group that owns the land.

Whose prims count

• By default, the tenant's and their extra tenants' prims on the unit's parcel.
• With count objects belonging to any avatar, everyone's prims on the parcel (yours and your decor included). Add an extra allowance to the unit to leave room for your own objects.
• With prim consolidation, all the land owner's parcels in the region count as one: the tenant's prims anywhere there are compared with the total allowance of all the rentals they have there. Use it for malls, or when a tenant rents several units on one parcel. Leave it off to count each unit's parcel on its own.

A unit's parcel is where its main box or one of its remotes stands, or its Land location (set on the Details tab), which the Prim Counter turns into the parcel itself.

Counting and checking

• It counts every 3 hours. Touch it and choose Count now for a full recount, or Find parcels after you split or join land.
• Tenants choose Land Impact on their box to see their count; you'll find it under Tenants, with Update Prims to count now.
• Over the allowance, the tenant and your staff get an IM, and the box shows the TEX-overlimit sign.

Returning objects

Off by default, because it's powerful. Turn on Return the tenant's objects when the rental ends for a unit, and when that rental ends (expired or evicted) the Prim Counter returns the primary tenant's objects on the land owner's parcels in the region, unless they still rent something else there. Extra tenants' objects are never returned, so a tenant can't add and remove someone to clear their objects.

LifeBots

Connect your LifeBots account on the Bots page to:

• Invite new tenants to a group with the role you choose, and eject them when their rental ends (only if they rent nothing else that uses the group). Set up several named invite groups and choose one per unit; your own bots or LifeBots' shared group service both work.
• Send a copy of every IM through a bot, so tenants still get them when a box is busy or offline.

The Bots page checks that the bot has invite and eject powers in each group.

Custom looks

A box shows the texture in its own contents named for its state. To use your own, upload a texture with exactly the same name, delete the old one from the box and drop yours in.

The meter switches its scale by itself to fit the time left: METER-minutes (up to an hour), METER-hours (a day), METER-days (a week), METER-weeks (8 weeks), METER-months (12 months) and METER-years. Remove any you don't want and that scale is skipped.

When things go wrong

Questions

Coming soon

• Email notifications, alongside IMs and LifeBots.