Privacy Update? Please?

Indeed. As SL gets bigger then the "anonymity of the crowd" becomes more important.

Me too.

Indeed, and there's plenty of people who are "internet celebrities" who'll tell you that eventually being approached by strangers in foreign cities gets wearing after a while. In SL, everyone's got that status.

How about a compromise? An option: "don't show avatars on this land on the world map"?

Persephone:

Hey! It's been a long time since we've seen each other at a music event - hope all is well. Here's the link for anyone who would like to sign up for the Community Roundtable Mailing List. All mailing lists are located under the Connections header on the left menu of the SL site.

http://secondlife.com/community/mailinglists.php

There's a link on that page where you email a subscription request, and Pathfinder will sign you up to join the fray! Plenty of interesting and insightful opinions in that mailing list.

Oh, and as for the "minority" of people who want privacy controls in SL? I think that vote supported proposals reveal just how important these kinds of things are to most people.

On a personal note, Ranma, this thread started as a proposal for serious consideration of adding a new feature. If you disagree, fine, I can appreciate that. Please don't attack people personally. It only got ugly when you started using discriminatory terms like "creative ones" as if to single them out and actually questioning Flip's motives for the proposal. There's no reason it needs to dissolve into this.

Of course, it's why I rarely read the forums anymore, too.

Take care,
Nether

Well said Hiro and Argent. Thanks Flipper for bringing this issue up. It is something that has been asked for since WAAAAAY before the ability to create props was around. It is not just the wish of a vocal few. In fact, it is one of the issues that comes up frequently in random conversations I am party to in-world. I'd put it in the top 5 in terms of frequency. There have been several props made with regard to the issue. Nearly every single person I know in SL who came from TSO has expressed that they would like this ability, and that's a hefty number.

As for griefers - well griefers are griefers, they live to find ways to hassle people, because of whatever it is they lack in RL. They will always be around, and they will always find ways to grief. Simply brushing this idea off because some griefers may find a way to use it to their advantage isn't enough justification to shoot it down. If it's implemented properly, the avenues opened up for griefing can be minimized.

As for the comments about the side-effects of celebrity - in RL a person doesn't have a magical Rolodex which they can invoke to see if a celebrity is in their home and then teleport to their house, or force a phone call on. Another red herring. Not to mention - being a celebrity does not make harrassment ok - laws are laws.

I am by no means an SL celeb, yet I would like to be able to phase out so I can build and texture uninteruppted. Something I can do in RL if I want to - so why not here as well? How many IMs and uninvited guests do you think artists in RL have forced upon them? If they want to they can turn off their phone or pager, and focus.

BINGO!!! you do understand my concern! The other part about the IM's does not mean much to me either way. I am worried about the griefers!

If someone wants to sit in the corner of there lot cut off from everone else that is their concern and not mine.

I dont - do they have Trolls in Gor too?

I don't know, I don't care, I wasn't talking about that. When I log in I always have a bunch of IMs come up from when I was offline... most of which I've already answered in email if I was going to answer them. Closing them all while I'm waiting for the Lag Monster to eat the Loading Textures is no big deal.
One advantage of Jabber is that since it's open source a Jabber server can save and post messages when I connect, as well as doing anything else I want with them... including letting the sender know I'm offline or just storing the message silently.

Just like a cellphone can be off or just have the ringer off.

Thanks Nether, I just signed up. Gee, I feel silly for not subscribing before now

Erm, there's multiple ideas being thrown around here, and the message I was replying to was commenting on haven mode.

There's a reason I wrote "I'm not a big fan of "Haven" mode" right before the suggestion for a "nerfed" version of Haven that you quoted.

That's abundantly clear, as I am sure it is to the "tons" of RL customers you have who send you complaints and hate mail.

If anything is bad for SL, it's divisive stuff like this.

If anyone needs to be knocked off their "high horse" it's you.

Can you debate without getting personal, pigeon-holing, and not-so-cleverly calling people deceptive liars? If you've got a beef with the "creative ones", make a thread about it, but please quit shitting all over this one because of your personal preoccupation with people who create.

I think that's ideal. Wouldn't it be the world map they'd be checking your sim for you? If they're using the mini-map, they'll probably have you in sight soon enough.

i guess i wonder why you think people have a right to know when i am online? or when i am, where i am? why is this a right?

I think you'll find that makes them creative.

You already convinced me that it isn't necessary to announce my "unplugged" status above my avatar. Only until someone tries to IM me and gets the notice that I'm not taking IMs at that time is enough.

Hiro, please stop comparing SL to IM clients. It's not an accurate analogy.

IM clients only offer one avenue for chatting, the instant message. Furthermore, there is an approval process involved. You can't IM just anyone. Online status in an IM client determines what your approved buddies can do in relation to you (see you, not see you, send you a IM, etc).

SL has two forms of chat, face-to-face local chat and IM and neither one requires approval! I can IM Philip Linden 5,000 times today if I wanted and there's not squat he could do about it. He would have to accept all 5,000 of my messages next time he logged in. Furthermore, if I saw him in world I could walk right up to him and shout in his face although I would have to find his location first and since I doubt I'm on his approved friend's list then I wouldn't know where to look.

Now, you guys suggest giving everyone the ability to appear as "Offline" even when they are in world. I'm guessing you think that will detur poeple from sending IMs and confuse others enough to keep them from bothering you. I call that bunk. People are smarter than that. Once you make online status meaningless (being in-world but marked as "offline" then people aren't going to take that status seriously.

Furthermore, you're still going to get all those queued up IMs the next time you log in. You're still going to get any new IMs sent to you while you're in-world from anyone who chooses. How does pretending to be "Offline" or "Invisible" keep these distractions from happening? They don't.

At least if I could set myself "unplugged" I would have piece of mind that nobody could even *try* to send me an IM and I'd be free to continue my casual local chat, build on my property or attend some event.

Apparently, it's only certain creative types that Ranma has issues with.

You've just illustrated why privacy controls are necessary.

Ranma... your concern has been acknowledged, and addressed, more times than I can count.

There's two separate concepts here. One's a "I'm online, just not public about it, OK" 'offline' mode, where you can log in but are only visible in the "Virtual World" part of SL, not the "Online Service Instant Message World Map" part. Nobody's proposing that avatars in this mode be invisible in Second Life, they would just be offline (in one way or another) to the associated directories and address books and pagers and cellphones and other things that have no parallel to just being there as part of the world.

The other is a "I'm just not bloody here, OK" totally invisible "haven" mode. There's not a lot of support from that from anyone, and if anything like that were implemented it would have to be "sitting in a corner of your lot cut off from everyone" mode, or it would be so abusable it's not funny. I'm not a fan of it, my first message in this discussion was about how it was a bad idea, even... and I'd be real wary of how it's implemented.

The problem is you don't seem to be willing to separate them. Someone posts about "offline mode" and you go on about green dots and stalkers. That puts people off, and people are starting to just respond to you as if all your messages were about it. Can you set it aside as something that's not going to happen and think about the other proposal?

That's not it.

If I'm unplugged, I shouldn't show up as being online in my profile, I shouldn't show up as being online to friends, I shouldn't show up as being online on the website. I'm "onworld" in the sense that my avatar's THERE, but I'm not "online" to the IM/email/cellphone/pager side of things.
SL isn't like an IM client. The IM functions in SL are like an IM client.

No, it's not. There is no approval process in SL. You can IM anyone. Also, I can't disconnect from the IM client inside SL when I'm in SL. That was entire genesis for my "unplugged" proposal.

I do understand it, I think you're exaggerating and exploiting the possibilty to try and fear people into seeing it your way. Also, no matter how many times you repeat it - this is not a small minority who wants this.


If you didn't mention celebs, then I wasn't speaking to you (see Harris's posts if you don't get it - just because someone says something in a post, especially when they don't reply to a quote by you, doesn't mean they are talking to you). And just because you personally don't view anyone in SL as a celeb doesn't mean there aren't celebs. There are certainly celebs - Anshe, Francis, Prokofy - just to name a few.

I notice you're going on again about how most people don't "mean a thing" to you. I think that is indicative of your whole problem - you're so aloof that you can't see that other people aren't as dismissive of people, in general, as you are.

You apparently miss the entire point of Second Life. Which begs the question why are you here? That is other than to piss off and annoy people with you sheer utter ignorance and irrelevance.

You know that all that fundraising that Flipper and I did for American Cancer Society, Hurricane Relief in FL and Hurricane Katrina etc. in Second Life makes us complete and utter assholes. I mean jeez those thousands of US dollars could have just bought me a new car or something. I mean what the hell were we thinking when we donated it to charity. My gawd I don't know how I live with myself and my lack of doing anything constructive in Second Life. I should be ashamed of myself

It's kinda of a shame that such an otherwise intelligent and useful conversation about one of the most important issues in Second Life has degenerated into a dozen people arguing with just one. How can we save this?