Another Go at Ban Lines

w00t! What a golden opportunity to spam my first hitsingle here! It's on the YouTubez of course, and it's called 'Red Fences Suck':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QwoZwAjjZM

That was priceless!!! And to the tune of one of my favorite songs!!!

Thank you for giving me a smile today

Well first off I would agree that the red ban lines should be made invisble.However, I am all for makin the land private.Too many times I have loged in the game just to find some inconsiderate person invaiding the place that I pay weekly for.Yes you can use orbs but they can be beaten,I have ran accross that too,but by having the place private took care of the problem.Its simple guys when you pay for a lot you can say ok Im not putting up those lines and you can have people come on in your homes acting like they have every right to be there,but until then leave that choice to the one paying the montly tier for the land.Yes you can fly over them,but if you have ur home on the ground you do not have to worry about morons helping themselves with your stuff .They have public areas for all you people that want to run around carelessly.Same as the real life,you would not want someone you do not know just to walk in your house and start watching tv or taking a nap or whatever.Same goes for the virtual world.Not saying that all of you complaining go around helping yourself to things that you have no right to use,but I think its safe to say alot of you that are against it,are the ones that are inconsiderate and help yourselves.Come one people use your heads,if people respected other people then there wouldnt be a need for the lines would there.But the simple fact is they dont, and they dont care cause they feel that they should have everyright to bother and use or invade the privacy of others thinking that it is funny.

That sort of line keeps resurfacing in these ban line threads.
Why is it "safe to say" that "a lot" of the people who are against the implementation of butt-ugly ban lines are in any way interested in your place or your stuff?

How many are the "all of you complaining"?
How many of those are the "a lot"?


The kind of people that intrude and abuse probably don't even know that the Forums exist, nevermind actually post here.

I think that people should have to live by a set of design rules on the mainland, so the explorers don't have to be exposed to their ugly builds.

Personally, I think castles are ugly, so they should be banned. No one should be allowed to build a castle on a plot of land. Ever. No modern stone houses, either. None of those "Brady Bunch" looking prefabs. Yep.. those should be made verboten on mainland. They're disgusting.

In fact, I think that everything on the mainland should look exactly how I want it to.

And no sex. Not on the mainland. No poseballs, no hidden dungeons, nothing to do with sex. I think that it's gross.

oh. and only Linden trees. Some of the usermade trees are nasty looking. People shouldn't use those.

That they (the ban lines) are an annoyance does not automatically define the motives of the user. These are the tools that LL has given them to achieve a measure of privacy. They aren't perfect and they are ugly. Mandating that they purchase some piece of equipment (which I find more annoying when set to trigger at the boundaries and five seconds or less to respond) simply is not appropriate. It would be nice if they did. It would be a cheap solution to buy one that transfers and give it to them. But my annoyance does not translate to them being a jerk. They may be, but that isn't a given.

I'm sure if someone could define a more perfect solution that could be made available under the land tab, LL would consider it. Until then, I'll live with it.

And so far, all of the solutions seem to annoy everyone, other than everyone else give up privacy or move 400 meters or higher if they want privacy. Some people want to live at ground level. And nothing seems to work well with 1024 plots or smaller.

[I wrote]A person who maintains ban lines despite being aware of the effects on people beyond their boundaries is an extremely inconsiderate and selfish person.[/QUOTE]

Once the user is made aware of the fact that people outside are subjected to the very intrusive red lines, and still choose to keep the lines up, then that user is very much in jerk territory.



Unwelcome avatar on your land?
Right-click / More / Eject & Ban
It's free! No cost. No set-up notecards or menus.

Want to deliver an attitude-adjustment service to an unwanted guest? (If you really must, but why waste your time?)
Right-click / More / Freeze -- deliver service --- Eject & Ban

Sorry to hear about all this hassle Czari and to make the matter worse I nearly bought that plot (it was for sale at L2500) but did not have any spare tier and the next time I logged in it was sold

And before anyone says it, I did not know you owned the land on the other side otherwise I would have alerted you.

Alt

I always found it interesting, that Mike Brady was an architect, yet they lived in such a crappy looking house.

Hi Alt...great to see you and I appreciate your comments.

Those tier jumps can be killers

At this point, it's pretty much a non-issue to me now.

What's that they say?

If you can read this, you're too close.


You can't see ban lines unless you're right on top of them and if you are then back tf up and go find something else to do. Stop being nosy...er..."exploring."

What's they say?

You stand in your own land, and you see your neighbours ban lines
You move back 7 metres into your own land, and you see your neighbours ban lines.
You are in your own house on your own land and your neighbours ban lines appear to be inside the walls of your house - because of the alpha-sorting bug.


So.... ?
Never go within 7 metres of your own boundaries.
Never build anything with a transparent texture or opening within 7 metres of your own boundaries.
This can be just a tiny bit difficult (impossible even) to achieve in a 512 or 1024.


People who put up ban lines and keep them after they are made aware of their effects have absolutely no consideration for others.

Ricardo, you need to try living on a 512 for awhile. It can be an interesting experiment in so many ways.

Hey, hey...what they say?

Well what Sling and Jannae said...except I wanted to add the point that when I saw my new neighbor's ban lines I was flying in a diagonal direction from one of my parcels to the other which was separated (at that time) by empty ground which had been empty ground for quite some time - for sale but with no sale signs on it.

I *did* see the ban lines up close - when I smacked into them on the small flight to my property. Had there been a house there at the time, I would have flown around it. So I wasn't being "nosy" unless one finds bare ground incredibly fascinating.

Oh come on now!
Don't try to spin that story!

You wanted to barge in there and click on that ground, didn't you?? You know you did. Stop trying to deny it!

You wanted to so-called "explore" in there, you bad person you.

They pay tier on that ground. You don't.
You are very immature and impertinent to think that you can even look in the direction of that ground.
If you didn't look in the direction of that ground, you wouldn't see any ban lines, so it's all your fault really!!

/me spews Pepsi on the monitor

You try working next to a parcel with ban lines up.

Half the money I've spent in SL has been to make sure my parcel's big enough that I won't have to deal with ban lines. Most of the early parcels I bought the owner didn't even realize they'd blocked access to their neighbors... they were messing around in the controls and didn't pay too much attention to how they were set.

And even after a couple of years there's some diagonal blocks in our sim where we have to go the long way around to get from one place we own to another a meter away. Some of the parcels have no buildings in them at all. Another has a big empty building containing a single scripted prim running some kind of service.

And it doesn't matter WHAT they look like, they're still nasty to deal with. If Linden Labs really cared about the experience, they'd implement some kind of phantom zone or privacy zone instead of the existing ban lines.

None of those have a tick box in the client that says explicitly "Check box to create pyramid scheme" though, do they?

Going back to what Conan was saying before, I think there is some validity to his argument that "what works is more important than what's right." The fact is, blaming the land owners who use ban lines hasn't got you what you wanted. Ban lines still exist, that hasn't changed and no amount of complaining has helped. I interpret Conan's meaning as being that it's better to compromise your position and get some of what you want, than to stick to your guns and get none of what you want.

If the current strategy of insulting people who use ban lines hasn't worked, then maybe a change of tactic is in order. I forget who it was, but a wise man once said "Madness is doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting different results."

It is, after all, time for change (apparently).

I think I saw it in a Fotune Cookie once.

Yeah, I roll dice expecting to not get the same result every time, I guess that's nutty.

If you keep rolling in the hope of getting a 7 on a 6 sided die, then yes it is.

Just make sure you remember to back you bet up with proper odds.

Any suggestions?

I, for one, don't want whitelist access control to be removed from parcel settings, but I would really like it to be used with full knowledge of its effects, good and bad.

If it's being used intentionally for those bad effects--as the adfarm land scammers were doing for a while--that's a different problem. Griefing intent is obvious with microparcels or land for sale because there's just no other possible reason for the setting, but in general, if somebody is trying to aggravate their neighbors with banlines, well, there are worse things they could do. Hence, I don't see any downside to people knowing all the bad effects.

So I've never really seen the downside of having the banlines be visible to the people granted access, perhaps rendered differently so they know that this particular ban doesn't apply to them. But I'll bet fully half the whitelist banlines on the grid are there without the person who set them even knowing how they appear (or, in many cases, that they are still set at all). This wouldn't be meant as a punishment for setting banlines, but as a constant visual reminder that they're still set.

But really, I don't think the big knowledge gap is about the negative effects, as much as how very limited are the positive effects. I can't count the number of time I've seen banlines around a parcel empty at ground level, with a skybox hundred of meters above where the banlines stop working.

And I've spoken with many landowners who use them intending to stop object griefing--yet allow object entry and/or creation without setting autoreturn. This sounds insane, but there are people who have bought land without realizing that one can rez objects far away from where one is standing.

Lots of folks--even those who understand those limitations--suppose that restricting access keeps avatars out of their parcel. It doesn't. It keeps out agents--the little green dots on the MiniMap--but the avatar may appear some distance from the agent. Of course the same applies to all the other parcel controls, so if you found an avatar taking a dump on your restricted access front lawn, there may be nothing you could do about it because technically, they're not on your parcel at all.

So, really, it's not insulting to refer to whitelist access restriction as a newbie tool; it just *is* a newbie tool, nine times out of ten. People who know what little it really does rarely find any reason to use it.

There isn't any validity to "what works is more important than what's right."
It doesn't matter that access restrictions in their current form are provided by LL. What matters is that using them in the knowledge of their effect on SL outside of the restricted parcel is *extremely* selfish and inconsiderate..
In any given situation we always have options if we care to think about them.


What is this "current strategy of insulting people who use ban lines". I'm not aware of it.
Who is using this as a strategy and where?

I certainly have no illusion that any posts here will move LL. I don't even have any faith that the JIRA votes on the topic will move LL to do anything. It's to much trouble for them.




Posting about the sociopathic nature of ban lines and approaching neighbours on the ground is simply an awareness-raising and whack-a-mole tactic.
It's not a strategy. It's not intended to be one.


While ban lines continue to be the default LL access restriction, we will see the topic being discussed here again and again.
Live with it.
If anyone is annoyed or feels insulted by ban line threads, then ignore the threads.
You have that option. You'll just notice "ban line" briefly as you skim down the list of threads

By contrast, someone on land beside a ban-lined parcel does not have the option of ignoring the lines. They are there, glowing, sometimes blinking - visible 7 metres outside of the restricted parcel and even apparently inside buildings outside of the restricted parcel if the build has transparent textures in the walls.

No, and there's no check box that says "grief your neighbors" either.

Where did I say I was blaming them for anything? You're mixing me up with someone else.

I said, in fact, that most of them didn't know they were causing a problem, or even that the setting was there. There are, however, people who DO use ban lines deliberately and abusively. The fact that there are so many people who DON'T know they're causing a problem with their ban lines just makes this kind of abuse so hard to deal with.

Which is why I have been consistently arguing for better privacy controls, or better feedback to people who use access controls that they're there. The current mechanism should be a last resort, not something you can turn on by accident.