How to solve the self-replicating problem once and for all

Man, the worst part about a grid attack isn't the downtime. It's the flurry of bad, half-cocked ideas that invariably show up afterward.

Self replicating objects use llRezObject. llRezObject does hundreds of other jobs in SL, as outlined earlier. If you put restrictions on llRezObject then you hurt alot of scripts.

The only 'valid' /self/-replicator I have heard of is those adorable lil breeding eating fish

Man, the worst part about a grid attack isn't the downtime. It's the flurry of bad, half-cocked ideas that invariably show up afterward.

i'm fairly new, so don't flame too bad, but why does it take so long to fix? Are the Lindens in there manually removing these objects?

If thats the case, or even if not. an idea with this I have is to create search and destroy B1 bombers, abram tanks, autonomous hitmen, killer furbies, or whatever your imagination fancies. The Lindens should (I'd imagine) be able to write a script that patrols a sim, searching for objects owned by the person responsible then deleting it. Maybe a few killer furbies per sim to get the job done faster. Once done, the objects self-destruct, the grid is back up, and hopefully took less time to reopen.

Or a backend script built into the self replication giving linden's permission for a "one-button kill-all" function. If you use the replication calls, the script automatically has a 'backdoor' that can be used by employees if the replication gets out of control.

Just some ideas I'm throwing out there, if their viable or not. Something like this though won't take away from the game, add more costs, and everyones happy.

I appreciate that you're not doing this to be nasty, but it still makes your land hostile and I won't hang around any area that's like that.

I'm not trying to start an argument, but I don't see using restrictions on my land as "hostile".

Your idea is just retarded, I'm sorry but it underminds creativity and learning.

/sarcasm on
Your super-cogent argument has convinced me. You are right. All my ideas suck. Oops! hey wait... the grid is down again? hmmm.... how did that happen? I'm stuck yammering at the trolls in the forums again.

I'm having a hard time being "creative and learning" since the grid is down, but that must be a problem with me, since we would not want to limit someone's ability to creatively learn by taking down the grid for everyone. I'd hate to cramp someone personality that way.
/sarcasm off

You right to swing your fist ends just short of my (and everyone else's) nose.

Since we are all in this together, either you all accept the idea of some sort of limit on self replicating and some sort of throttle on your creativity or the grid is up... occasionally.

have a nice day!

Since we are all in this together, either you all accept the idea of some sort of limit on self replicating and some sort of throttle on your creativity or the grid is up... occasionally.

We keep having the grid taken down by self replicating objects because the capability to do this exists. Expecting everyone in a population of 200,000 avatars to play nice is unrealistic, and expecting the threat of RL legal action to deter this behavior is clearly not working. Any large population is going to have criminals. We need to change the rules so crime does not pay. In fact, crime should be very expensive.

What will solve the problem is to attach a cost to the act of rezing an object. If the owner of an object is automatically charged to rez an object inworld, self replicating objects create a self-replicating drain on your L$ balance and a automatic brake to stop runaway scripts. By setting the price-to-rez very low for small numbers of objects, the vast majority of users will not feel any pain. Those that feel the need to rez more can buy more L$. And those that want to replicate without bound are automatically throttled. What I have in mind is an exponential increase in the cost to rez an object after a threshold number of rezed object in a day, so the cost goes up very quickly. With a volume-based surcharge (the inverse of a volume discount) after you have rezed enough to fill half a sim or so, there is an effective and automatic brake on this problem. The idea here is very similar to the charge to upload textures. Just add a sliding chrage to rez and you stop the problem before it gets out of hand, and nobody doing reasonable things loses any funactionality.

Another weak spot in the whole SL system is probably the user's inventory, since objects held here are against stored "free", and there is no volume-based pricing to throttle excessive database resource consumption. The same principle of volume-based surcharges can be employed to protect the database by running the L$ balances of abusers down to zero.

Providing the capability to cause large volumes of resource intensive transactions without some sort of cost to the user is why we have these grid wide attacks. Without a throttle we are going to keep having them. Linden Labs can fix this problem inworld, if it wants to. That it has not adopted any of these sorts of measure makes me question how interested they are in providing a stable game environment.

/sarcasm on
Your super-cogent argument has convinced me. You are right. All my ideas suck. Oops! hey wait... the grid is down again? hmmm.... how did that happen? I'm stuck yammering at the trolls in the forums again.

Only someone who is too lazy to work towards a real solution would assume those are the only two options.

I'm not hte only one who thinks there needs to be costs associated with scripts/objects to address the problem.

While I do agree that some kind of cost mechanic might prevent future self-rep attacks the same mechanic will also hit legitimate self-rep users.

they did have a cost mechanic, free accounts weren't always free.. Hey! How about we only let free accounts onto the preview grid? Then you can learn a little, pay 10 bucks, and move into the real SL?

Interesting idea. Have a separate grid - not the preview grid - something something like the welcome island that you get to play around in but you don't get out of it until you've paid your fee. Regular users could get there, but they'd be unable to give you anything because you'd only have access to the Linden Library... no "your objects".

In fact... how about just keeping that restriction, and not worrying about the "island"?

When you show up, if you hadn't upgraded from Free to basic by paying your initiation fee of $10 (before everyone yells, existing accounts should be grandfathered in), you don't get any money or inventory, you can't edit anything except appearance, you can't rez anything except the objects in the Library, and so on. Once you upgrade to basic... then you get the tools.

You could even defer things like picking your last name until you pay. Until then, your name would be "Randomname Guest". That way people will have an idea of what names are like and how important it is to pick a good one instead of ending up as "HornyStud65" or the like.

We keep having the grid taken down by self replicating objects because the capability to do this exists. Expecting everyone in a population of 200,000 avatars to play nice is unrealistic, and expecting the threat of RL legal action to deter this behavior is clearly not working. Any large population is going to have criminals. We need to change the rules so crime does not pay. In fact, crime should be very expensive.

When you show up, if you hadn't upgraded from Free to basic by paying your initiation fee of $10 (before everyone yells, existing accounts should be grandfathered in), you don't get any money or inventory, you can't edit anything except appearance, you can't rez anything except the objects in the Library, and so on. Once you upgrade to basic... then you get the tools.

You could even defer things like picking your last name until you pay. Until then, your name would be "Randomname Guest". That way people will have an idea of what names are like and how important it is to pick a good one instead of ending up as "HornyStud65" or the like.