BanLink

How about a time stamp when a user was added to the list. And if that name wasn't requested for a week/2 weeks it would be removed from that list.

And I've discovered the same. Luskwood, Shelter and NCI have related griefing incidents in IMs on more than one occasion a mere few minutes before that griefer showed up at our club pulling the same abusive, disruptive nonsense. That's why we are planning to install Banlink after the group land changes this Wednesday (hopefully). We expect to be reorganizing our staff hierarchy and want to do that before the devices are actually in place.

@ Lord Sullivan: this has absolutely nothing to do with being "power hungry" - your post was the most inflammatory, misguided load of manure I think I've read on this board in a long time. This is about being totally fucking fed up with morons with explosives and particle effects trying to destroy something positive we've tried to build. We're not abusing griefers - we're protecting our members.

This banLink item sounds like a better item than the ones I was looking at earlier.

I also plan on consolidating my groups after the update so that I can pick people to be able to return items and ban people without giving them the ability to sell the land.

I will probably buy a copy of banlink, however I don't plan on trusting sites for a while.
I hope to be able to see who they add to the list before deciding since my standards are different.

I am hopeing that it has both a closed part and a "open source" part where I can intrigrate it with my existing "weppon scanner".

I am also thinking about "Ban on demand" where a script checks names and only adds them to the land ban list if they are both on the BanLink list and are in the sim.

This would requre a "||SecuritySystem|CheckThisName|[name],[Key]" command.

Note: I prefer to use the pipe symbol to seperate link message entrys since it's one of the few symbols that arn't in normal data. I also reserve the two first entrys for message routing.

This is an alright idea, but it needs a sunset clause. I've seen admins who think their personal disputes need to be EVERYONE'S problem, and other admins who turn a blind eye, because keeping peace with other admins is more important to them than treating visitors fairly. Once you get that kind of corruption going on, what can you do about it, other than terminating at least one of the involved admins?

Yiffy Yaffle's assertion that people who get on these lists "deserve it" is a good example of the problem. Let's say I trust Person X implicitly to control who's on my ban list, so I subscribe to their BanLink feed. But what about Person X's eight admins? Is it likely I'll know all eight of them well enough to reasonably believe they won't take out their personal grudges by adding people to the list, who didn't actually break any rules? Nah, I'll probably be lazy.

So, this may work somewhat, but I think personal agendas will probably contaminate BanLink feeds on a regular basis.

I think you should build in a sunset clause. I am guessing most griefers will simply reg new accounts if they get banned from enough places, and you'll just have to deal with them again. Meanwhile, someone who an admin has a personal problem with will have their name circulated on this system for a long time, perhaps indefinitely. People who subscribe to Yiffy's school of thought will assume that they are a griefer because they are on the list, even though the person hasn't done anything wrong.

I think BanLink entries should have an option of how long to last, and never longer than a month. If a person is REALLY causing that much trouble, and a month isn't long enough for them to chill out, the land owner will permanently ban them regardless of whether they're on BanLink or not. (And again, I'm getting that this system is primarily to control rampant griefers who go from one place to the next, who will be using throwaway accounts anyhow.)

Travis -

When you get around to it and are ready to offer this gizmo.... I want in.....

Frankly I'm tired of the day to day griefing.... and LL should get off their collective hind ends and DO something about it other that coming across like Bill Gates at a Micro$oft convention and telling us how FABULOUS SL is going to be with all these shiney new features.... sure - some of the features are shiny and wonderful (when they work as expected) and I really can't complain about SOME of the changes they've made recently... but frankly they need to re-instate the CC validation for the Main grid.

Today alone I've had to deal with two types of grief - one from some waterhead that thought it would be cute to place prims with pics of three old men doing each other at my gaming zone, and one who thought he'd be cute with a machine gun blasting away at a customer in my mall. Unfortunately for him, I was standing not 30m away when he opened up (and I have PUSH restrictions turned on at all my places now). He got froze... I told him he was a chucklehead, and then banned his silly butt.

I have a lil gizmo I wear that talks to a bunch of spheres I own on all my land... if I set a ban on someone it emails all of them with a prefix code and bans them there too. :nicker::

The Ban gizmo you're working on sounds like a great idea, and I plan to follow your progress closely.

A couple thoughts I have are this:

One, you might want to consider having the option to let those on the ban list to respond to being banned (and responses to responses). Not everyone is going to have the same definition of a bannable offense. The trusted vs. untrusted thing is a start, but how do I know who to trust or who to stop trusting?

Two, how do I find out more info and how to get apart of this once the forums close? Is there a forum that basically "everyone" is going to move to?

Why is there need for rehab in SL. If someone decides one day that they're finally bored with griefing and wish to take the good route, then they can create a new account and be good. No one would ever have to know their past history as a griefer. Land and L$ can be transferred, and the loss of no-transfer items can be considered, 'cost of being a reformed griefer.'

hm lemme expose a little problem i though about travis's system.

lets imagine i get banned from club A for an illegitimate reason, this club A has lots of friends that own other clubs, lets say club B and C, since they are friends, club B and C share the ban list of club A. as a result, i would be banned from B and C for an illegitimate reason. But it wouldn't matter to them because "OMG I TRUST MA FRIEND IF THEY BAN U THEY PROLLY ARE RIGHT"

we saw already in these forums "friends" defending to death someone proven over and over to be in the wrong. Humans are mostly emotional, and when they are about something there is no logic or reason.

What your system will become is that the person wich has the most connections or is the most popular will be able to ban whoever they wish and all their "friends" will follow. SO it will go down to a simple popularity contest.

It is what happened with IRC and the ircops, ircops have blind trust between eachother and if you got banned from one server of the network the others will share the ban "you got banned for a reason" its easier to consider you got banned for a reason that to put in question if your friend did it legitimately

Thanks for all the constructive feedback, everyone - this really helps

Ok - lots more stuff to comment on. This is going to be long - I just want to make sure I cover all the comments/suggestions.


Both the graduated ban and sunset clause make a ton of sense. Just from my own experience, I can think of only one griefer I've experienced who was truly 'chronic' - and griefed us multiple times over a year span. Agreed though - that's the exception and not the rule. I'll see what I can come up with here.


Already in place, except for the sunset part. Here's a screen shot from our test database to give you an idea of what we've got already:



Thanks for the vote of confidence, grumble - but just to clarify... you don't buy this thing. Its free.

On the flip side, however - not everyone will be able to use BanLink. This system is targeted for medium to large traffic sites that experience regular griefing incidents. (Regular = at least once a day).

For bandwidth and scalability reasons, this is not intended or will be offered for residential or personal use - nor will it make sense for something like this to cover an individual store - unless it gets a high griefer volume.
We're only targeting the people with the worst griefing problems with this system - this is not something that Joe Newbie can use to protect his 512m first land plot.


If someone questions their ban, all they have to do is bring it up to the owner of the site they're banned from. As far as having a place for the banee to give an explanation - the only trouble I see there is verifying that its actually the real banee making the comment. I suppose we could build a verification system in, but I'm not sure the benefit outweighs the effort involved. If you disagree, please still say so, though.

Here's how we're currently working bans:

-Whichever site initially issues the ban becomes the 'ban owner'. If the ban owner lifts a ban, it gets lifted globally.

-If a trustee (but not the ban owner) lifts a ban, it gets lifted just from the perspective of that trustee.

The theory is, whoever initially issued the ban is probably in the best position to globally unban.


Deciding who to stop trusting is much easier than deciding who to trust. Providing the administrator entered the ban properly, all bans should have reasons with them (see screenshot above). While some limited information about each site is collected at signup, the best way to decide is just to look at the master list, and see if the site you're thinking about trusting appears to have reasonable bans.

Stopping a trust isn't as difficult. Once you've had to take the trouble to unban a couple people that were banned from the same site - you'll probably re-evaluate whether you want to continue trusting that site or not. Once you remove that trust, all the bans owned from that site drop off as well.


I disagree that BanLink will add to this issue. First of all, this sort of situation goes on already, right now - with or without BanLink - its just not automated. Site admins already IM their friends and say "Make sure you put Joe Griefer on your ban list!" - I get those kinds of IMs all the time. (Although I tend to ignore them).

What's worse, is that with the manual method there's no accountability, no history, and nothing to reference 30 days later when you want to go back and figure out why someone was banned in the first place.

Additionally, unless 'all their friends' are other large-scale griefing targets, BanLink won't exasperate this problem anyway - as we'll only be signing up large sites or venues that have chronic griefing issues.

Since our BanLink target audience is relatively small in numbers, hopefully this wont conflict with the retail security project you're working on.

You'd better have them allow in some alts too, so that you have someone to use the poseballs with.

Huns i only say that cuz i deal with my share of serius griefers on a day to day basis. I don't meen to sound currupt, though it might seam from how i said it. I no longer have tollerance for those kinds of people. I choose to trust the other admins in the fur valley community only because they have been doing a fine job at managing their sims and have had no public complaints as far as i know, except for a few griefers trying to sweet talk back in after proof of their attacks have been disclosed. If trying to protect the residents who live in the sims i help maintain is curruptive then i guess il run for president. O.o

I had to save answering this one until I could touch base with Mera first

To apply to have your site put up on BanLink, fill out the site registration form here:

https://www.slbanlink.com/members/newgroup.php

Again, there are some things we need to hash out first before taking on new sites - so this is nothing immediate. But feel free to fill out the form now & include your contact info, and we'll get back with you as things come together.

(When the form asks for 'Group', that is intended to mean the name of your site/venue/estate/group of estates, that are under the same administration. 'Codeword' is just a random word you pick to secure your devices.)

If you do fill out the application form - make sure you represent a medium to large traffic site with at the very least a daily griefing problem. If you're smaller than that, BanLink probably won't be a good fit for you.

I've found that a great many of the griefer accounts eventually disappeared from "Search" - probably after they get enough ARs and Lindens suspend or terminate that account. Otherwise, I think there are three flavors of griefer:

1. Those who have nothing but ill intentions toward anyone else in SL and really should be perma-banned from SL entirely. SL has entire groups full of these ass hats.

2. Those who shoot and bomb because they thought it was fun or "that's how the game is played" without understanding the consequences of their actions. The REAL irony here is that if enough sims are using Banlink, those are the griefers who will feel the consequences a lot more severely now than before. If they are refused admittance to 6 or 8 or 10 sims because of their antisocial actions in one, maybe it will sink in finally. I'm all for second chances if they're sincere.

3. Those who either lost control of their account (a shabby excuse I hear a lot but I'm sure it does happen) or had no idea what that "nuke" object actually does. These are one-timers who could legitimately appeal their banning.

That said, my group does at times ban people who are simply annoying - if you act like a jerk toward other people, insulting them, insisting that females pixel-bump with you after they say "no", you're a low-level type of griefer. That's the kind of behavior that will be noted on the banlink website so that other sim owners can decide if it warrants banning from their own places. These aren't firebombers, these are just the jerks that members complain about to managers. Everybody has 'em. And on more than one occasion I've revoked the ban on a jerk on the condition that he reform - if he persists, it's easy to ban him again. You might say we "reach an understanding" for the benefit of all parties, but not before they understand their rudeness isn't allowed.

Could a level of access be granted to people who can only consume the ban info but not be allowed to provide any? Or would there still be the technical problems (bandwidth, scalability) with that?

Now that this has been brought up, you know everyone wants to know who was banned from where.



I didn't initially realize that this was only going to be accessible exclusively to larger highly-griefed sites. Given that, this might be ok.

I only mentioned this because I think any system that allows one person to flag another person as bad (or good) should allow the person being flagged to respond.

The technical solution isn't the issue. The real problem lies in how people use this, or any other, shared blacklist. The people who use it appropriately will have clearly defined, well-documented, fairly applied rules as to when the banning is applied, and those rules will be written in such a way that anyone else who Trusts a Banning Sim can easily and unambiguously apply the same criteria to the same circumstances in their own sim and come to the same conclusion.

That's the real problem, and is the real problem in RL governing as well (what constitutes a 'crime' and whether sovereign jurisdictions can come to the same conclusions regarding the 'crime' given the same starting set of facts and similar processes of law).

Kyrah is also right - unless there are clear, open, transparent processes to follow that resist subjugating to popularity contests and factious politics, any such system is going to be fractionated into subgroups who ephemerally 'trust' one another because they seem to agree that "ageplay is a crime", etcetera, arbitrary shared values. Eventually people would use this to ban - say, furries or Spanish speakers or whatever.

Get ready to start writing treaties and agreements of caucus.

An offence code would be useful. The code should be in some sort of sequence so that scripts can use "if (x > y) BanThem();" Making it a bit-field would allow for multiple offences.

Codes
1 = I don’t like there kind.
4=Annoying
16= Offensive conduct
64=Shooting
256=Grefing
1025= scripted attacks
0x4000 = Deliberately used a scripted attack to crash the sim. LL will deal with them soon.

--
I also see this working in connection with the "non existent" llReturnUserObjects(key) and llParcelMuteAvitar(key). Having the land ban list disable scripts for that user would also be a way to head off scripted attacks.
Or the land control script could disable all outside scripts when a 0x4000 is received. Of course this is curently not posible without a bot.

Goodness, I didn't even see this thread.

This is probably a good step in the right direction, relying on local banlists instead of global ones. I really like the idea of having "shades of gray" in the ban data (good way to distinguish between annoyances and griefers, thogh I would also distinguish between verbal and non-verbal), and recording and being able to look up context is fantastic!

I also support the idea of an automated purgatory system, perhaps with a user-defined forgiveness period. This might also help keep the lists lighter of expired and unused griefer accounts. Manual overrides are probably already planned and would be less work than an incident system that needs constant moderation. This is also kind of like atonement that I've spoke of on another thread. Perhaps there could be an area where those who wish to reform could post intent and have it linked with their ban data?

I sincerely hope you never piss off someone more influential than you, make a bad business deal, or have your account hijacked.

I see no reason why the citizens of Second Life shouldn't self-organize in this way like the the citizens of First Life.

Absolutely...especially since we're seeing too little support from LL (who have stated that they're "not the police" in preventing grief from occurring and recurring.

It's so great to see the stand-up citizens of SL banding together like this to create an *effective* strategy to the griefer problem!

I respectfully disagree, Finning. BanLink is decentralized, and does not introduce a system of government beyond the local owner's control. Hypothetically, a large buisness owner could select to ban furries or Spanish speakers - but aside from the fact that a policy like that is poor buisness, they'd have to find others that also found this practice acceptable to link up with.

Kyrah's system is the beginnings of a central government - and one that appears to be controlled by a few. That, (at least to me) appears to be much more dangerous than several locations sharing ban information in a one-way trust could ever be.



I'm really confused why you feel that Kyrah's system is acceptable, and this one is not, based upon what you posted above. Did you visit his website? Where are these bans originating from? How does one appeal (when the appeal link doesn't work), and who are you appealing to? If its just Kyrah making those decisions, doesn't that make him a defacto dictator?

Kyrah's system has one major advantage over BanLink: anyone can use it. And that scares me because folks may not understand what exactly it is they're opting into, and simply go with a knee-jerk reaction to ban 'griefers'.

Once his system is proliferated, a central government managed by a few is what you'll have. And that, is exactly what we're trying not to do here.

This is a conflict of interest. The person issuing the ban is not the person you should have to go to to register a complaint about it. Think about it, why would they help you when they dislike you enough to ban you?

Put in a verification system. You can write it in 1/2 an hour.

Fair enough - I might hit you up in world when I get home from SLCC on Wed for some ideas on the best way to do this if you don't mind, Huns. Right off the top of my head, the only way I can think of is to have the accused visit an object in world & input a response via chat that verifies the avatars name, and sends it to the database.

The publically viewable list is done, btw. The 'BanLink Public Police Blotter' can be viewed by anyone here: http://www.slbanlink.com

Anyone can go to the URL above and view all bans in the system, which site issued it, when, and why. As an unintended side-effect, a lot of the reasons are rather entertaining

Note that this is the master list, regardless of trusts. Not all sites trust each other - so an appearance on the list does not mean they're banned everywhere.

A few operators have omitted reasons on a few bans. Currently, they get a nag dialog popup if they issue a ban without a reason - but I think I'm going to make that even more annoying - as in light of the discussions here, the reasons are ultra-critical. There's absolutely zero reason not to give a reason, and we've even put in place the ability to add it in later if its forgotten. I'll make that harder to come up.

Additionally, bans that were imported from existing estate/parcel ban lists do not have any reason other than 'import'. As soon as we complete the Sunset Clause, these will all fall off anyway, as they're older than 30 days.

Next on the project list: Sunsetting of bans. Mera & I are working on that now.

What does the number in the Eject coulomb mean?
(Maybe a hover tip for the coulomb header?)

Its an ejection count, which is probably kinda meaningless for the public list.

Site owners can configure an ejection 'threshold' before a person gets added to their land ban list. This conserves the list, and makes it so only people who are most agressive about it get added to the land ban.

Personally, I set mine to 3. (Don't add to land ban unless they've been ejected 3 times already) - But anyone can set it to any value they like. A value of 999 effectively never adds anyone to the land ban list, and a value of 0 always adds.

People that agressively attempt to evade the ban system will increment their ejection count each time llEjectFromLand is fired. The initial ejection does not count.

On the site manager view, the ejection count is a clickable link, and shows a breakdown of where/when each ejection happened.

Actually no i havent and never will. I'm a decent person who knows better then to piss people off. Also i never give out my password to anyone and i change it oftenly.