key for selecting phantom objects

I suggest that it be possible to select through phantom objects (such as water or light) unless a particular key or combination of keys is held. This way, people could click on a chimera even if a spotlight is in front of it, or click to sit on the bench in a hot tub while the tub is full. Without the key combination, the phantom object would be treated as though it weren't there.

please explain your key combonation for handling exceptions in more detail.

I presume he just means have it so that if you just click, it goes through phantom objects, but if you do want to click the phantom object, then you may have to hold down CTRL and click or ALT and click or something to that effect.

EDIT: I suppose it would have to be CTRL, because ALT is already used for zooming.

You don't even need a hot-key really, just right-click and do whatever you want from there (touch, sit w/e). The exception being if you are in mouse-look in which case clicking acts normally (since you can't choose to right-click in mouselook anyway).

Definitely support this, though I'm unsure how easy it is (the issue of detecting what you actually did click on) but it would be one of the many useability things that SL could use.

....and how does that help? What are you r-clicking? The stuff behind the Phantoms, or the Phantoms? If the stuff behind, how do you r-click -> Edit the Phantom prim? If r-clicking the phantom, how do you r-click -> Sit/etc. the stuff behind?

This is correct. The idea is that phantom objects such as water and light would be un-clickable unless a key or combination of keys is held. Alternatively, there could be a menu setting in the "World" menu that would give the option of turning "Phantom Objects Clickable" on or off.

I think there should be a new attribute "non-selectable", because there's existing code that depends on people being able to select phantom objects, and there's times you want non-phantom objects to be non-selectable (for example, a transparent bounding-box prim added to a ground vehicle to keep it from catching on small irregularities).

Sorry, I'm thinking in terms of the new release coming soon (1.10.x), it allows you to set what an object's default 'touch' behaviour is, e.g sit. If sit were the default action of the seat under phantom water then clicking would be all you need? I dunno, but more key combinations seems overly complex to me if it can be avoided.