"Blacklisting" residents...

I've been having problems with some griefing objects last couple of days on land near my home, and have had a couple of Lindens out through live chat.... both of whom were fantastic I should add.

Eventually one of them said that they would "blacklist" the owner of the objects to get rid of them. Does anyone know what this actually does? They seemed reluctant to do so, which makes me think it's quite an extreme thing to do....

Not the same as ban?

I assume not... how would a ban remove scripted objects?

Perhaps it's adding them to a list of griefers that is used by something like the Clocktower Probe that the Arbor Project uses?

It's got a huge list of griefers, ad-farmers, land sharks, etc, that it auto-bans, and it's used all over the place.

Maybe something like that would be considered 'blacklisted'?

ETA:: Didn't read the OP well enough, didn't see it was a Linden that said it >.<

Most likely banning or muting them. Muting in cases dealt outside the home.

But wait! You've come to the right place as there are several experts in muting in these forums. Oh, yeah. They go thru' this same routine every other day too. Just wait 'til they arrive, you'll see. That's their thing. You know, things that make them go ahhh. They just love showing the community how they fight back when they can't cope with debates or argumentative topics. They feel doing this will actually show the person in question how badly they've punished them.

It hurts so much too!!

A bit sardonic are we?

LL is almost famous for giving real griefers more chances than most residents think they should..

I'm curious.. What kind of griefing are we talking about here?


I have heard them mention an automated process that walks the sim and eats anything owned by a particular resident. Banning wouldn't start a process like that automatically, though. It's more for when people do grid attack type stuff.

There is a blacklisting thing that marks classes of objects (e.g. from a given creator) as evil and unrezzable. Once in a while you'll see infohub rats complaining about blacklisted things in their inventories.


This part is even visible in the viewer at the moment. Admin->God tools, Objects tab.

Was the object owner also banned? When PN raids used to be common, I got hit a couple of times, and by the time I logged in, the offenders had already been banned, while their objects were still strewn around my islands (where tenants had left 'Everyone Build' enabled on their land, at least). This is an incredible pain in the butt because the estate manager tools require that you pick a resident's name from the name picker in order to send a specific avatar's objects back at the island level- but when the person's banned they don't show up in the picker!

Fortunately, after someone gets banned for griefing, LL runs a process that sweeps over the grid and deletes that avatar's objects. It doesn't happen immediately, but it does happen, assuming the person was banned for leaving grief objects and not for something else.

slbanlink.com is another tool similar to the above. Although, since you're talking about Linden Liasons performing this action, it sounds like they're using some sort of internal tool, rather than any resident-created one.

It's a self replicating cube that spams channel 0..... on a neighbouring parcel it used up all the remaining 800 odd prims he had free. I was given the impression that the griefer had received suitable punishment....

I'd offer one of my usual replies, but I can't seem to find my tinfoil hat today...

...my guess is that this isn't some horrific, grid-sweeping phenomenon that will destroy resident lives that they are talking about.



It would have to be a pretty huge, pervasive blacklist system for anyone to even *notice* in over a billion square meters of grid.

Say griefers get banned from 1000 full regions. That's likely to be only about 5% of their SL experience that is affected. Would they even notice? Typical teleport failures impact their experience more than that.

I think the days of truly effective blacklists are waning fast. Not that banning ever really stopped aggressive griefing anyway - just the casual offenders.

Ouch!

The Lindens to take action on self Replicators... as one who lived through the Grey Goo attacks I know just how upset they got.

I think we can both agree that blacklists are extremely controversial. And that goes for RL as well (check out the wikipedia entry on "DNSBL" for some interesting parallels).

Controversy aside, however - the statements you made above seem more like wishful thinking than reality. Blacklists are here to stay, I'm afraid to say - whether they're private & secret, or open & transparent. Hopefully more of the latter variety rather than the former.

Wielded responsibly, blacklists can be a very effective & useful community tool. The challenge is: how to make sure they're indeed used responsibly. BanLink has a creative solution to that challenge; I hope other similar systems do as well.

And besides greavers usually just make another alt AV and keep going.

I'd be all for banning organized banlists

They could go the way of the Casino.

Not likely to happen of course.


But like Desmond touched on - banlists aren't going to stop griefers as much as they will stop non-griefers who find themselves banned.

Which reduces even their advertised value.

And from Colette, with whom I rearely disagree, but it does happen:

"I'd be all for banning organized banlists

They could go the way of the Casino.

Not likely to happen of course.


But like Desmond touched on - banlists aren't going to stop griefers as much as they will stop non-griefers who find themselves banned.

Which reduces even their advertised value."


The banlists Residents have access to don't get griefer avatars off the grid. They allow a property owner to ban them in advance from his/her property before they show up and cause trouble. Many property owners deem this a good thing.

Perhaps the blacklisting the OP's Lindens referred to is the ability to block access by specific computers. I gather it is a troublesome and imperfect process, but does a lot to eliminate many if not all serious griefers.

I'm betting on the object itself being blacklisted. Makes you wonder, if that blacklist gets big, does that slow down rezzing? Does your item have to be checked against a 200 entry long list on every rez, or maybe 2000 entries? I could see why that would be something LL wanted to avoid doing if possible.

What keeps these banlists from becoming something to settle grudges that have nothing to do with griefing?

Are you sure they said "Blacklist"? maybe they meant "Black Ops". LL has a secret team of ex-Navy SEALS who go around and "rehabilitate" griefers. There's no warning. They just show up at your door, bundle you into an unmarked van and a couple hours later, it's "Welcome to Gitmo, Baby!!" A couple weeks of naked waterboarding and they're all softened up and ready to be returned to society.

I'm pretty sure this is true, but it's entirely likely I just made it up. I'm prone to that sort of nonsense. Most people don't know this, but those letters to the Lindens I post occasionally? Total fabrications. They don't really come from the Lindens. I completely make them up.

Just curious where you think I'm wrong - I'm all for learning new things, and I don't have any personal grudges or emotional investment in being 'right'.

Not a big deal if you don't want to get into a big 'forum discussion' - I'm not trying to draw you out, either.

Oddly enough, I actually have banlink use abilities insofar as I'm in Carl's NCI group... funny, huh? (no I don't use 'em). I'm sure there's a good comedy sketch in there somewhere...



Slobtoad Haxyou: "I'm a griefer, and I DEMAND you banlink me!"

Des: "No."

Slobtoad Haxyou: "Ban me now!!!"

Des: "No. You may do your worst, sir, but I shall never give in."

*various heinous, ignoble acts upon the part of the griefer"

Slobtoad Haxyou: "How about NOW!?"

Des: "Try as you might, I shall stand firm. You have rights, and I shall be your most staunch defender."

Slobtoad Haxyou: "Alright, if I can't be banned I'd like to buy an argument."

Des: "That's down the hall..."

Here is a chat snippet from someone who was so affected:

So it does look like the objects get flagged either when they're taken into inventory or rezzed, and that can't be cheap if the numbers get big.

Nobody can stop a man on a mission. If someone really, really wants to grief you, they'll stop at nothing - including making endless throwaway accounts to do their dasterdly deeds.

Lucky for us, the vast majority of griefers are Lazy. Force them to keep making those throwaway accounts over & over again, and the hassle of filling out those new account forms & logging back in begins to outweigh the thrill of griefing in the first place.



I can't tell you how other lists do it - but I can tell you how BanLink handles that problem...

Landowners that participate in systems like these want their bans to be honored as widely as possible. If they didn't care about that, they wouldn't be sharing their bans in the first place.

We use that desire for wide-sharing as leverage to convince the landowner to issue bans reasonably, and follow up with disputed bans responsibly. Instead of one big banlist, each subscriber is treated like an individual banlist, and other venues can pick & choose which 'lists' they wish to honor on an ala carte basis.

Briefly - People who chronically issue bans irresponsibly are flagged as 'untrustworthy' within the system, which results in those bans being honored by few... and ultimately carry little weight. Those who use the system responsibly get rewarded by having their bans honored widely. The goal is to not only make the banned user more accountable for their actions, but to hold landowners more accountable for their ban choices as well - by giving them an incentive to do so.


Des - at the risk of not making a much longer tl;dr post, I'm hoping what I said above answers your question. I had no idea you had BL access via NCI..... irony indeed

I know that you'd absolutely, positively, never ever use the system on philosophical grounds. But - depending on the access privliges NCI granted you, you could use that as an opportunity to do a little fact-finding recon mission of your own.... I'd hope that you'd be at least somewhat pleasantly surprised

If it's for objects being blacklisted, the list probably doesn't get that big - more likely it just pokes the asset and sets some "can't be rezzed" flag. Instead of having to go through the list of everything blacklisted when you try to rez something, it'd just get the asset and check to make sure that magic flag wasn't set.