BanLink

I've got something along these lines in progress as well.

What I have (already works for the most part) is a scanner that allows rating people, and checking the ratings. The way it works is that it follows your positive ratings up to 2 levels deep, and checks if anybody you like rated the person you're checking.

The score works like this:
Your rating is worth 10 points to yourself. If you're checking a person you rated you always get +10 or -10, on the assumption of that if you like or dislike somebody, there's nothing else that needs to be done, as your opinion is final for yourself.

The ratings of the people you rated positively are worth +1 or -1 points.

The ratings of the people they rated positively are worth +0.1 or -0.1 points.

There's no such a thing as a global score, as the result depends on where you start from. The same person can have very positive and very negative ratings depending on who does the check.

There will be an API for querying the database directly. You could make a door that refuses to open to people with a rating below -2, for instance. The API will provide extra functionality, like allowing restricting the depth, so that you could use it as just a banlist of unlimited length for example.

There's no website, as currently I plan to operate entirely from inside SL. This might change if enough people want something that'd be best done with a website.

There's no support for different kinds of ratings yet, but that's definitely going to be added. There's no possibility of adding a comment yet either, but this will be added as well.

Your ratings are public (they can be seen and deduced with the scanner, but not available in bulk), but nothing else is. Any other data gathered is for my own use (debugging and statistics mostly), and won't be given to anybody else. If I provide data from my database, it'll always be aggregate information (number of ratings, percentage of negative ratings, etc), but never anything that personally identifies anybody.

I plan to make it available for everybody. Pricing is not yet certain, but it will definitely need to be sold, as hosting this is going to take some resources. I will give out some for free, though.

I'm interested in comments and suggestions. What I have so far is already usable, so if somebody is interested in testing it, it can be done.

No one is perfect, and you frequent furry sims which on the whole, tend to be notorious for drama. Changing your password often is good practice, but that won't protect you from [future] exploits and nothing can protect you from bad business or land deals. Remember that Anshe incident you mentioned in another thread? My point was, bad things can and do happen to good people, and as a result, people do occasionally get unfairly disciplined. Simply writing them off as not decent and deserving of their misfortune is not compassionate or logical and should be avoided.

EDIT: my statement about furry sims are meant to be read as: "furry sims tend to carry a lot of drama because furries tend to be dramatic" not as "the furry sims you visit in particular are dramatic." Also, I'm a furry.

Man, that's a lot of naked avatars!

coco

Sounds like a DNS/Spam blacklist for troublemakers, I think it's a great idea.

I understand your consern but the main outbreak of this banlink thing is because the griefers have had a free ride for every since LL removed paypemt restrictions. Now that the residents found a way to combat the griefers and hit them where it hurts, they begin to get all whiney and apologetic (Fake Apology). IMO if they don't like what were doing to them then they needed to play fair to us in the first place. Giving them a second chance just gives them another opertunity to grief.

I have been a security officer in SL for a year and a half. I was also a security officer in Furcadia in a popular dream. I know how griefers work. If they get banned they get all whiney and start asking each officer inocently "why am i banned i didnt go anything..." when i have proof they did. The fact that they just lied right there is proof they arent to be trusted. The big difference is, the griefers are breaking the terms of service for SL when they grief, yet our method of stopping them is within the rules.

I understand sometimes inocent poeple get trapped in the banline. In that case they will have to confront the land owner and talk. I'm not saying that will fix it, but the problem needs to be adressed. If no proof is found leading to their wrongings then i would assume its safe to let them go. However... If they come up to me and plead like they did nothing wrong, yet i have tons of evidence saying their guilty, il definatly put them on ignore... Griefing is one thing but Liing is another.

I must also point out that some quality of griefers find it amusing to be banned. It's like a trophey, only for being a loser.

Actually, my point was only that accidents happen, folks should be wary of them, and that systems should be designed to be fault-tolerant. BanLink does sound very promising so far, though.

Honestly, I think if you set your threshold to something like "4", thats pretty much a failsafe for accidental or 'light' bans.

Travis, is there any functionality which looks at ban frequency across all sites? For example, if Site A does not subscribe to Site B's list, and site C only subscribes to A's list but not B's, - let's say a person still gets banned from A, B and C independently. The likelihood of that being a personal agenda is pretty low... and could add more weight to the metric.

Note that of course someday there will be a 'blind global ban list' out there. unlike Banlink, the authors probably wont be willing to take input.

Hopefully, an area that would subscribe to such a list would be avoided anyhow. I think the 'fairness-in-structure' in these types of applications are directly related to their degree of success and trust.

Not so much, if you do it silently and without any reaction. "IM GONNA BAN YOU!" <ban> IM: "SEE THERE I BANNED YOU HA!" ... will get em rolling. Simply 'turning off their fun switch' tends not to.

*sort of*...

Each site has its own 'view' of the ban list. However, the 'eject count' i talked about a few posts above is indeed cumulative.

So, depending on how you have BanLink configured, yes - it looks at ejection frequency at all sites. You could also configure it to ignore it (Setting a landban threshold to 0).

If a person was ejected once at Site A, once at Site B, and once at Site 3 - they will have an ejection count of 3.

As far as the bans themselves, currently no. However once we implement the Sunset Clause, I believe the plan is to reset the 30-day clock if the same person is banned again at a different site. So yes, it will ultimately matter.

aye the more stink you make the bigger prize you make

case in point, last time a "greifer" landed on my skypad

me: hello
them: hi
them: can i shoot you?
me: i would rather you didnt...
me: but i understand theres some ppl with pinecones up their asses to the east of me
them: sweet thanks

end of session

this isnt a theory that only works with 1 on 1 situations, even in populated areas it tends to go like this

ppl: PUT THE GUN AWAY NOW OR IM GONNA AR YOU AND BAN YOU !!!
them: what?
ppl: NOW!
them: whats a prim
ban

so the prize does depend on how worked up ppl get, this is nothing new, just like your mom probally told you "just ignore them" ... course ma never took things as serious as they can get so there is a line in there somewhere

I personally have been honed in on Ban Link since right before it stared testing (Travis and I are buddies, yea yea travis has lots of buddies but thats besides the point)

I personally think its a good system, theres some issues to be cleaned up with "morality" which all of you are discussing quite well ... among other little (like itty bitty) code things (which i will be smoothing out as soon as my DSL quits sucking, thats how much i like it)

in the end its just a expansion of the SL land tools, and if treated with the highest regard, it, in theory, should be transparent and thus nulling any greiftard glory points, if the offince is not serious theres a cool off period and reversal ...

please anyone offically involved with the project feel free to corect me

hehe - such as my gratuitous use of llGetSubString?

This is one of the big reasons why its all open source as much as possible. I'm certain there are others that can skin the same cat better than me

I'm pretty confident that the Osgeld Remix of my BanLink code will rock

it's hardly a betal, at best it might weight something, at worst, well i will have a web based ban list -_- . Never said it was comercial.

Yeah this system is a great idea, but in addition to the public list showing the full names of people who are banned, it should also show the name of the person that added the ban.

That way, people would know who to contact to dispute the ban.

Good point. A lot of banned people don't know who banned them and run to every officer and complain.

They do. Look at the current list. The list has information divided up as so:

Name Flag By Date Location/Group Reason Ejected

Name = Person banned
Flag = Ban duration
By = who issued the ban
Date = Date & Time of ban
Location/Group = The location and group who has the Banlink installed
Reason = Why they were banned
Ejected = The number of times they've been manually ejected from other places equiped with Banlink

Banlink offers alot of information on this list for the officers to make proper descisions regarding unbanning someone

and very welcome. I had been working on a system similar to this, but after reading your design philosophies and how yours is intended to work, I realize my approach would never ever have worked as intended. Mine didn't take into account the fact that different land owners might have different reasons for banning people, nor would it provide the kind of comprehensive information your system does.

I'm very interested in your system, and in helping to promote it.

Making it free is one of the smarter things you could have done, by the way. Nobody wants to trust a networked security system you have to pay to use, because the opportunity for corruption is too great.

I very strongly applaud what you're doing, and will support this idea in any way I can.

I think it's a great system.
I had two attacks again last night

One shot a bullet and the scanner TP'd him home and baned him without a problem.

The second rezed a rocket atack shooting outwards that got stuck in the walls spewing particals all over the inside of the building.
I had to log in and return the objects.

The best part was his lame "My little brother used my computer while I was in the bathroom" excuse. I might unban you for using the rocket, but your excuse means I can't due that due to the fact that there is a chance that you might let a minor acces my site again.

Note: I've tested the "weppon scanner" on the preview grid and found that one scanner seeing only a few objects only adds about .01ms of script time. It took over 20 of them seeing 16 objects each before it was even noticable.

Although it is possible to have the weapon scanner auto ban link, I don't know if that would be a good idea since I still get ~25% false triggers from pets and such.

Ideally I could have it ban link immediately, and then log in when I see the IM (2 to 8 hour delay) and unban in those cases. This however would on average add about 4 events a week to the ban link system.

I am adding a security team made up of regulars to my site and that should help.

I just signed up on the main site for this. I like this idea a lot.
I feel like there's an item I need or something in world to go with this?
That part isn't entirely clear to me.

Thanks, guys

I know a bunch of you have applied to participate - please be aware, we're targeting this for larger sites that have lots of grief problems.

Our focus is on venues that get at least one griefing incident per day.

Also, we've been continuing to work in as much of folks' feedback as possible. Finally today, we've completed the dispute feedback component.

There's now a mechanism for folks to dispute their presence on the publically viewable banlist. It doesn't neccesarily mean that particular site will unban you, but it allows you to give your side of the story publically if you feel the banning was unjust. (Huns - hopefully this is the kind of thing you had in mind.)

If your feedback is reasonable, it may make the difference whether other sites choose to trust the site that banned you or not.

The viewable public list, along with the ability to submit feedback, is here:
http://www.slbanlink.com

And if you are a heavily-griefed site, and are interested in participating - by all means, go to the site & fill out the group application form!

This is really cool. If any of my rentals every get popular, I'd like to implement this.

On a side note, looking at the reasons column in the banlist is rather amusing. Is it possible to also record who did the banning? This way, if I were a sim owner, it would allow me to tell what administrators of mine were banning for reasons I disagreed with.

Yes there is, go back and look at the list. You'll see the group banlink is setup for and the name of the person who issued the ban.

It does log the individual operator's name - but that only shows up on the logged-in view. If you're not logged in (or logged out), you see the public view.

For the public listing, the site owner becomes the 'person who did the banning', and is the one who takes responsibility for it. The name of the site & owner is listed next to every entry.

I suggest that at some point that this system spread to smaller land holdings where they get perhaps one griefer a week - a lot of the names on the list I recognize as being career griefers, and I've run into several of them in various areas demonstrating their attention-craving psychosis. They often prey on smaller places because they know there's not much of a downside to being banned from small clubs here and there, and they'll do a dozen raids a day on places like these.

What I noticed about the list was the griefers who were unbanned and given a second chance went back to type and were soon banned again! This is got to be a sign that the idea works.