====== Rental Box Manual ======

==== Your rental box ====
The object in the corner of the parcel, which looks like a house with a sign stuck on the top of it, hereafter called the rental box, is your interface to your rental. It is a powerful piece of software that will allow you to automatically perform a large variety of tasks concerning your rental.

It also provides 'at a glance' status updates on your rental and any problems that may exist, its look will vary depending on the status of the rental:

{{vacant.png?200| A vacant rental box ready to be rented}}
{{normal.png?200| A normal rental box detailing rent remaining and prim usage}}
{{warning.png?200| A rental box showing a warning condition}}

In its normal mode (the center picture), the rental box will give a simple view of the two most important variables in your rental - your prim consumption and your rent remaining. The top bar shows the prim usage, the green bar filling up as you appropach your limit, and the bottom bar shows the time rent, the green bar gradually decreasing over time. As each bar approaches its limit (lots of prims, or little time left) the bar will turn yellow.

If you exceed your prim allowance a warning message similar to the image on the right will show, but saying "over prim allowance", similarly if you go overdue on rent the image on the right will be shown. Should your rental box have more than a week's credit on it, the "rent left" bar will be fully green and will stay that way until you drop below a week's rent remaining.

This method of displaying information we believe is superior to the visually unpleasant floating text method, one key benefit is it is more visible at range. We do however have the floating text option on the rentals, which most users have preferred switched on (our default setting), it can be enabled or disabled through the Summary page (see below)

Should your rental go overdue or your prim allowance be exceeded you will also be sent regular Instant Messages by the Quiet Life Rentals bot. If your rent is overdue and you do not intend to continue your rental payments there will be a link in that instant message which can be used to cancel the warnings and let us at Quiet Life Rentals know that we should not give you a grace period on your rent but simply reset and relist the parcel.

A vacant parcel (as per the image on the left) can be rented as the sign suggests by right clicking on the rental box and choosing "pay" from the menu, and depositing an initial rental payment of your choosing.

All of the features of the rental box and rental can be controlled by left clicking on the rental box, a "Open this webpage?" dialog will appear in second life and you may open the web page in either the in-world browser or your usual external browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, etc). You may even bookmark the URL supplied and it will remain valid until the renter changes, meaning you can administer your rental without even being logged in to Second Life!

**Please do not give anyone else your URL, it is specifically tailored for YOU and anyone else using the same URL will appear to the rental box to be you. If you wish to allow someone else access to the rental box features please see the section on adding users below**

====Paying Your Rent====
This is the only operation that can not be performed through the web page (for obvious reasons), you must go to the rental box in world, right click it and select "Pay". The preset payment buttons are configured to credit 1 day, 3 days, 1 week or 2 weeks worth of rent, or you can use the manual input box on the pay dialog to pay whatever ammount of L$ you wish, the rental box will automatically compute and add the correct ammount of time to your rental.

We request that you keep the rental box in credit, if the rent becomes overdue the rental box will display a large "WARNING Overdue Rent" sign (pictured above) and you will start getting periodic IMs from the Quiet Life Rentals bot.

If you do not contact the landlord (use the link in the warning IM to send an IM to Iain Maltz - do not attempt to have a conversation with the bot as it's rather dumb!) and your rent remains overdue for a couple of days we may move on to the parcel, mass return all remaining items and relist it as a vacant parcel.

If you do not wish to continue your rental, you can use the Not Renewing button on the rental box's web interface, or alternatively follow the link supplied to you in the warning IM. If you do this, you will not be sent any further warnings and we will quietly clean out any items left on the parcel (returned to their owner's lost+found folder) and relist the parcel without disturbing you further.

====Index====
The main index page for your rental box will look something like this (without the [Staff] link in the menu area)

{{index.png}}

Down the left side of the page is a menu, along with the vital statistics for the rental box (Prim Allowance, Rent Remaining, Security Status, and any relevant warnings regarding the rental), each of the menu items on the left will take you to a new page, these are all detailed below. The index page also shows you a brief description of what each menu item does.

All of the menu links will take you to a new page, none of them immediately perform an action, so looking around the menus is perfectly safe. The software will warn you in bold type of any action you may take which would be potentially unwanted (such as returning prims, etc).

The HELP button just brings you to this website and hence will not be discussed further, at the bottom of the main area of the Index page is a "To contact us click here" link, which will open an Instant Message window to the landlord should you wish to contact us for any reason (any questions, things we should be aware of, issues or concerns you have, please feel free to drop us a line!).

Please note that even if the landlord appears to be offline you should leave an instant message anyway with as much detail of the question/problem as possible. It is possible there are staff around who are simply not logged in to Second Life at this time, and upon receiving the "Instant Message to Email" form of the query we will log in and help you. Alternatively if the staff are asleep or otherwise unable to respond immediately we will attempt to get back to you as soon as possible, most queries are answered within hours of being logged (human staff have to sleep!).

You may find that what you are trying to do is answered in the frequently asked questions on the main page of this website, at Quiet Life Rentals we strongly believe in empowering our tenants to be able to perform any operations they need without having the hastle of needing to contact a human and wait for something to happen, we have a pair of bots dedicated to performing support tasks for you which are available at all times.

Please note: If you are not the main renter you may not be able to see all the items on the menu. What options are available to you depend on what permissions have been granted to you.

==== Summary ====
The summary page provides a more in-depth view of the vital statistics of the rental than the bar chart on the rental box or the short form summary on the left of the page

{{summary.png}}

Listed are the main renter, the weekly rate of this parcel, full details of the prim count and time remaining as well as the actual location of the rental box (clickable to open a teleport dialog box). The physical width and length of the parcel are listed here which can help you determine what will fit on the parcel, and the status of the security system is displayed.

If there are any warnings regarding the status of your rental they will also be listed here.

On this page (not shown above) is a button for enabling or disabling the floating text above the rental box.

==== Rezzing items/Setting Home ====
In order to be able to rez items on your parcel (with the default settings), or set home to your parcel, you will need to be in a Quiet Life Rentals group.

When you rented the parcel an invitation to this group would have been sent to you by one of the bots, along with an instant message advising you to look out for the group invite.

If for some reason you missed the invite, or left the group, you can request another invite be sent to you via this page.

This page also briefly discusses how the group works, the complications of needing to "activate your group" (sometimes known as "show your group tag") as well as a convenient shortcut available in some Third Party Viewers such as Phoenix or Firestorm.

==== Security ====
The security page provides only one function, that is a master on/off switch for the in built parcel security system.

By default the security system is disabled when you first rent the parcel, in order to activate it switch to the security page and press the enable button there.

When enabled the security system will monitor visitors to the parcel and if detected will pop up a "Dialog" box on your screen giving you 4 choices for dealing with the visitor:

  * Allow - allows this user to visit the parcel, and adds them to the 'allow' list so they may return at any time.
  * Ban - bans the user from the parcel and adds them to the ban list, they will always be ejected if detected on the parcel.
  * Guest - allows the user to remain on the parcel this time. If they leave the parcel and return they will cause a new "Visitor Detected" dialog to pop up.
  * Eject - ejects the user from the parcel at this time, and adds a 5 minute ban to the parcel, if they return again after that they will cause a new "Visitor Detected" dialog to pop up.
Please note that the guest and eject features remember the choice for up to 5 minutes after the user leaves the parcel, this means that if you give a user "Guest" access to a parcel, and they crash or relog within 5 minutes you will not be bothered with a new "Visitor detected" and it will simply assume the previous choice is still in effect. If they leave the parcel for more than 5 minutes then they will be treated as a fresh visitor and the "Visitor Detected" dialog will spawn.

If no choice is made within 30 seconds, or there is no-one present to make a choice, the user will eventually be automatically ejected from the parcel as if the Eject button had been pressed.

If you wish to manually add someone to the allow or ban lists, or remove someone from them, please see the section on managing users below.

==== Music ====
This page allows control over the parcel's music media settings.

At the top is a box where you can type in a stream's URL and press enter, if you know a particular stream you wish to listen to.

The "Silence Music" button will turn off any music playing on the parcel.

Below this we have a list of radio stations gleaned from the Second Life wiki, or otherwise entered by our tenants. Please note Quiet Life Rentals takes no responsibility for the content of these streams or the accuracy of the data, however if you feel something is wrong with these stations please let us know.

The stations are sorted by a catagory and you may simply click on any of the named stations to instantly tune your parcel to that station.

At the very bottom of the page are three input boxes where you can enter a "Genre", "Station Name" and "Stream URL" for a station of your choosing, this will then be added to the list of stations available to all tenants of Quiet Life Rentals.

==== Skybox Control ====
The skybox page allows you control over the pieces of your skybox, from here you can have them retextured or removed.

The three buttons at the top "Remove Walls" "Remove Floor" and "Remove All" do as they suggest, the appropriate part(s) of the default skybox will disappear from the world. Beware that gravity may have something to say on this matter if you delete the floor!

If you wish to revert the skybox to the default supplied skybox then you can press the "Reset Skybox" button, this will rez a temporary floor underneath you for a few seconds, then delete the entire existing skybox and re-create it from scratch giving you the "default appearance" we supply with freshly rented parcels. (The reset skybox feature is part of our standard 'reset a parcel' code that happens when a parcel becomes freshly available to rent).

You may also retexture the walls and floor of the supplied skybox, there are two links at the bottom for retexturing the walls or floor which will take you to a grid of textures, each texture may be selected and will be immediately applied to the skybox pieces.

There is also a manual texturing process which you can initiate by selecting the final link on this page, the webpage will guide you through the steps for manual texturing, but in a nutshell this will enable you to hold down CONTROL on your keyboard and drag+drop a texture onto whatever piece of the skybox you wish to retexture.

==== Prim Management ====
The prims page may take a second or two to load but will give you a report of who is using how many prims on your parcel:

{{prims.png}}

From here you can mass-return all items belonging to any user (other than the Quiet Life Rentals group, as that would include returning the rental box!) by clicking the appropriate 'Return All' button. You will be taken to a confirmation page first to ensure this is what you wanted to do.

You can also return a specific object, even those deeded to the Quiet Life Rentals group (typically security orbs, media controllers and so forth) by using the link at the bottom of this list - please note this will not allow you to return the rental box still!

The web page will guide you through the steps involved in returning a specific item, but the basic procedure is that the rental box will ask for permissions to track your camera, which you must grant in Second Life, this will enable the rental box to figure out what you are looking at. Once you have granted these permissions, you focus your camera on the object you want to return and press the "scan" button on the webpage. The page will then explain what item it has detected your camera being focused on and ask if this is correct and you wish to return this item. If you confirm, then the item will be returned shortly thereafter.

Item returns - either the return of all items belonging to a user, or of a specific item, are handled using our Quiet Life Rentals Janitor bot which will fairly promptly teleport to your parcel, perform the operation requested, and then disappear.

The bot is immune to the default rental box security system and the rental box will not trigger a "Visitor Warning" message. Similarly the janitor bot is added to the parcel's access list, however, if you have any other security system in place that is "overly protective" and immediately ejects people, you may need to add an exception or otherwise allow the bot to enter the parcel. The bot's username is "QuietLifeRentals1 Resident". In over 99% of cases you dont need to worry about any of this, the bot will turn up, do its thing, and then teleport back out as soon as it can (Second Life sometimes just crashes people on teleports and bots are not immune to this effect either, however it will strive to complete any operation as quickly as possible and then get off your land).

{{::qlrjanitor.png|}}
(Our helpful Janitor bot)

==== Rental Logs ====
The logs page is an extensively comprehensive list of actions taken on your rental, changes made by staff, you, other users you have allowed to control your rental, security visitor detections, what happened to said visitor, and so forth are all listed on this page. The page comes in two formats, the "Logs (SLT)" version shows the time and date of events in Second Life Time (A.K.A. PST/PDT), and the "Logs (UTC)" version shows events in Universal Co-ordinated Time, (A.K.A. GMT, Zulu time, GMT+0, and so forth). Note that UTC format is not the same as UK time which may be an hour ahead of this during the summer (BST = GMT+1).

An example logs page:

{{::logs.png|}}

==== Managing Users ====
The rental box allows comprehensive control over other users access to your rental box. You can grant all the features you can access to anyone else, or grant a small subset of them. This provides an excellent way for giving your friends, partners or alts, some, or all access to your rental box's features.

Before proceeding please be aware of the following stipulations:

  * Any permissions you grant to a user will be honored by staff. That is, if you allow someone the right to return items on a parcel, and they instant message a member of Quiet Life Rentals staff asking for an item to be returned, we will perform this action for them. If they do NOT have the permission, we will not take any action.
  * There are always a couple of uneditable permissions records for every rental. Specifically, "Iain Maltz", the landlord, can not be edited by anyone, nor can the entry for "QuietLifeRentals1 Resident" (the Janitor bot). Also the record for the "Main Renter" is always full permissions (other than staff permission) and is also uneditable by anyone.
  * As far as dispute resolution is concerned, the "Main Renter", that is the person who first paid the rental box and whose name the Summary Page shows, and the user management page shows as "renter" always has the last word. At Quiet Life Rentals we are not interested in resolving personal differences, if two people undertake paying the rent between them and then fall out, we will not reimburse, compensate or otherwise give any consideration to the requests of those other than the "Main Renter". Obviously if you are the "Main Renter" and have a dispute with your co-tennants, you should immediately revoke their permissions via manage users so they can not perform unwanted actions such as returning all prims. Quiet Life Rentals will always consider the "Main Renter"s word as the final word and we will not enter into any debate or discussion about this under any circumstances, no matter how unfair this may seem or what the logs might indicate in terms of rental contribution and so forth. This is simply to protect us from dealing with any form of drama or having to act as a "judge" in any dispute. The "Main Renter" is the primary customer and is always right.
  * The main renter may be changed, though only staff may do this. If you wish the rental to be transfered you must instant message a landlord from the existing main renter and request a transfer. Only the main renter may request the main renter to be changed. Again we take no responsibility if you have disclosed your Second Life password to someone else and they use your account to hijack your rental, your account's security is your responsibility not ours, and we will not revert a transferred rental unless the new "Main Renter" requests it.
  * In order for the security to remain secure you must never give anyone else the URL you use to access the rental box, this URL contains your user details and will always access the rental box as if it "is you", hence it will always have full permissions. Instead you should grant other users access through the "Manage Users" page and have them click on the rental box themselves to get a URL personalised for *their* user. This means if you later fall out with that user you will be able to revoke their permissions, which you would not be able to do if you gave them your "Main Renter"'s URL.
  * If you do give out your URL still for some reason, we can reset the "secret" for the rental box if you drop us an instant message from the Main Renter, this will invalidate all existing URLs and everyone will have to click the rental box to get a new working URL.
That all said, we believe the user management features are quite powerful and comprehensive and allow much better management of your parcel, the above is all just the usual "disclaimer" stuff you should expect to see.

On the "Manage Users" page you will see a list of users the rental box knows about, this will include 2 staff members and the main renter, along with anyone who has been added to the security allow or ban lists (both of these are 'permissions', odd tho that may seem for a 'ban').

There is also an "Add a user" button on this page where you can manually enter a username (NOT display name) and have a blank permissions record added to the system.

Once you select a user, or add a user, you will be taken to the permissions record for that user which will look like the following:

{{permissions.png}}

Note, if you are viewing a staff member's permissions record, or the main renter's permissions record the record will be read only and can not be edited (records may also be read only if you only have permission to view, but not modfy, user records).

Each permission may be toggled on and off by clicking on the true/false button. Rows that are 'red' with a false value are off, rows in green with a true value are on.

The permissions are summarised on the record page, however a full description of the permissions is here:

  * Staff - this permissions is granted to Quiet Life Rentals staff, it may never be enabled or disabled via the manage users system and is infact hard coded into the software.
  * Renter - this permission is granted to the "Main Renter" of the parcel and grants ALL permissions (except 'staff' permission) to said user. This permissions record does not really exist either, it is 'fabricated' during permissions checks and as such can never be modified (even by staff).
  * Landgroup - this permission allows the user to join the Quiet Life Rentals group, this allows them to rez objects on the parcel and set home here. When you turn this permission on a group invite will be sent to the user, and when you turn this permission off the user will be ejected from the landgroup. If the user loses or does not receive their group invite, they can go to the "Rez/Home" menu on the rental box's webpage and request a new group invite.
  * Security - this permission allows the user access to the Security page which lets them turn off or turn on the entire security system, this permission is separate from the following permissions which allow the user to interact with the security system without the right to turn it on and off
  * Security.allow and Security.ban - these permissions are effectively the security system's "allow" and "ban" lists. Any user with security.ban is banned from the parcel and immediately ejected if they visit. Any user with security.allow is always allowed to visit the parcel without triggering "Visitor Detected" popups. Please note if you grant a user security.allow and security.ban, security.allow takes precedence.
  * Security.tempchoice - this allows the user to receive "Visitor Detected" messages when someone unknown visits the parcel, however this permission only lets them choose "Guest" or "Eject", temporary choices, and does not let them add people to the allow/ban lists.
  * Security.permchoice - this allows the user to receive "Visitor Detected" message with all 4 choices available to them - "Guest" and "Eject" as per tempchoice, as well as "Allow" and "Ban" which are similar but add the user to the permissions system with "security.allow" or "security.ban" permissions, essentially permenantly allowing them or banning them from the parcel.
  * Media - this allows the user access to the "Music" page, along with the ability to change the station, add a station, manually enter a stream URL, or silence the music.
  * Skybox - this allows the user to delete or reset the skybox, or retexture it.
  * Primreturn - this allows the user access to all prim return features, the ability to return all prims belonging to a user, or a specific item via the "camera return" system. Beware granting this permission as a malicious user might simply return all content on the parcel
  * Alerts - this isn't really a permission, however, if the parcel goes over prim allowance or overdue on rent, this user will get a copy of the notification regarding this condition. This is very handy if you allow others to build on your land so they are aware when they have rezzed too much stuff.
  * Viewlogs - this allows the user to use the Logs page to see changes to the parcel.
  * Endrental - allows this user to mark the rental as "Not Renewing", more details on this feature below. Beware granting this permission as it may cause your rental to be quietly terminated without us contacting you
  * Changeprims - allows this user to request additional prim allowance, or remove an additional prim allowance, more details on this feature below. Beware granting this permission as extra prims come with extra rental costs, although you will be notified by instant message of any changes to your rental box's rates.
  * Transferrental - allows this user to transfer any remaining credit to another rental box with the same "Main Renter". More details on this feature below. Beware granting this permission as it causes the termination of the rental that credit is being transfered from, which will include the return of all items left on said parcel.
  * Viewusers - allows this user to view permissions records
  * Editusers - allows this user to edit permissions records. They can not edit the staff records or the "Main Renter"'s records, no-one can do this, beware however they could grant themselves permissions they don't already have, or grant these permissions to other users. In essence this permissions is rather like a "superuser" or "admin" permission.
==== Changing Prim Allowance ====
This page allows you to request more prims for your parcel, or remove extra prim allowances from your parcel.

Please be aware that changing the prim allowance for a parcel also changes the rental rate on a parcel, you do not have to pay anything immediately however the time left on your parcel will change to reflect the new rental rate.

As a simple example, lets assume there is a parcel that is 100 prims for L$100 per week (this size parcel does not exist, nor does this rate, however it makes nice easy numbers for an example).

If you rent this parcel by paying it 200 L$, you will have 2 weeks worth of rent paid up.

If you then request a prim increase of "+100 extra prims for +100 L$ per week", you will not be expected to pay anything immediately, however, what will happen is the rate on your rental will become 200 L$/week total, and the 200L$ you have paid to the box will then only buy you 1 week's rent, that is, your "Time Left" will decrease from 2 weeks to 1 week after you make this prim increase.

The "Extra Prims" page will show one or two selections of prim allowance options, some can be automatically applied right now (and in future more and more increases will be performed automatically), the second selection of choices require a landlord to do some "hocus pocus" and will instead send an instant message to the landlord requesting they do the appropriate work.

Please be aware the automatic prim increases may take several seconds to go through, you should click the appropriate button once and wait for the web page to update (finish loading). If you do not and close the browser, the increase will still go through, if you spam the same button over and over you will likely get an error message back from the server (as you will be trying to claim an increase that is already claimed).

Please also note that "prim increases" are not a fixed feature, it depends what else is available in that region - there is no way for any user in Second Life to create prims out of thin air, prim increases you claim are essentially prims taken from another parcel which is then "delisted" and the prims applied to your parcel. This means that the options on this page may change over time depending on your region, an allowance increase that is available today may be gone tomorrow, or vice versa, new options may be available later that are not available now. If you need advice or more information about this please feel free to drop an instant message to Iain Maltz.

As an example here are the options presented at my test parcel in Oslar, you will likely have more options available than this:

{{increaseprims.png}}

If I request this one available prim increase, a few seconds pass, and then the server comes back with this message:

{{increasedprims.png}}

This shows the old and new prim allowance, the old and new rental rate, and the old and new time left. An instant message is also always sent to the main renter detailing any changes in rental fees:

<file>
[15:08] QuietLifeRentals: Rent changed
Rent has changed on Oslar(91,99,750)  11111
190 L$/week (old rate) x 0.51 weeks = 97 L$
97 L$ at new rate of 455 L$/week = 0.21 weeks
</file>
Once you have an increase in prim allowance you can return to the "Extra Prims" page which will have a new section allowing you to remove the increased prim allowance:

{{decreaseprims.png}}

If you select the "REMOVE" option to delete a prim allowance, this will likely take some 10-20 seconds, slightly longer than claiming a prim allowance increase, and will return a similar display of the changes once complete:

{{decreasedprims.png}}

As with increasing your rental rate, an instant message will be sent to the main renter confirming the decrease in rental rate:

<file>
[15:13] QuietLifeRentals: Rent changed
Rent has changed on Oslar(91,99,750)  11111
455 L$/week (old rate) x 0.21 weeks = 97 L$
97 L$ at new rate of 190 L$/week = 0.51 weeks
</file>
==== Transfering Rent ====
This page allows you to transfer any existing rent left on this rental box to another rental.

This is most often used if you wish to change to a larger parcel (or a smaller one).

The easiest way to achive this is to go to our office and find a parcel of the size you want, pay it 1L$ so it becomes "yours", and then return to your original rental box. You should remove any items from the parcel that you do not want auto returned and then proceed to the "Transfer Rent" page.

The first page will detail how much credit is available on your rental and present you with a series of warnings, and a "confirm" button.

BE AWARE: If you transfer your rent to a new parcel this will immediately terminate the rental on the parcel you are transferring rent from. When a rental is terminated, the janitor bot drops in and returns all items remaining on the parcels to their owners.

The operation will likely take some 20 or so seconds to complete and you should wait for the web page to finish loading.

The warning page confirming you understand the implications of this:

{{transfer1.png}}

The page listing your options and the final chance to cancel this operation:

{{transfer2.png}}

The page once your transfer has completed. Please note the "target presently has" line in this example is bogus due to me performing the transfer to an unrented parcel (a staff only feature), also the warning about having been ejected from the land group probably does not apply:

{{transfer3.png}}

As per the warning you will likely need to close the webpage once you have completed the transfer. When a rental box gains a new renter or a rental is terminated we scramble the secret seed that accesses the rental box software, if you try to continue to use the rental box web page for the rental box you transfered from you will likely get an unhelpful error message as follows:

<file>
CHECKSUM SECRET DID NOT MATCH

Perhaps your rental has expired? Otherwise please return to the rental box and click it to get a new URL.
</file>
==== Not Renewing ====
This page contains a singular button which does nothing more than flag your rental as "Not Renewing".

A rental that is not renewing will not send out any warnings about rent being overdue, we will not attempt to contact you to chase rent, and will instead quietly relist the parcel, returning any remaining items on the parcel to their owners.

If you choose this option and change your mind, you may return to the "Not renewing" page and select the button to reverse this decision.

Please note this option does not prematurely terminate your rental, if you have 3 days remaining and you select "Not Renewing", the parcel remains yours until the time left expires, after which we will relist the parcel.

You may also be directed to this page when you get an overdue rent instant message, to save you having to visit the parcel to select this option (or in fact if your instant message goes to your email you dont even have to log into second life to flag the rental as not renewing).

==== Change Rental ====
If you have more than one rental box rented from us, this option will present to you a list of all your rentals and you may click one to access it's webpage without having to go visit said parcel.

This page in fact lists any rental box that you have any permissions for, you don't need to be the main renter to access a remote rental box, if you have a permissions record on a rental box (see Managing users you will be able to change your connection to it via this button and be able to access whatever features you have permissions for.