Accounts: Unverified, Verified, Citizen

I'm generally in support of verified and unverified accounts. In fact, I'd take it one step further and create an additional account type I'll call citizen, based on a single identity (no alts) authenticated even more stringently than verified. The one condition is that account type information be accessible in or part of every system in SL: scripting, land controls, group controls, everything. This is a system I (utterly incorrectly) predicted would have begun to develop on the wider internet by now. That is, a system that allows both anonymous spaces and non-anonymous spaces, just like the real world does.

The benefit is that people can choose to partipcate as accountable adults in activities where this is necessary, without infringing on people's ability to be anonymous when they want. To work though, you need to be able to restrict people who aren't "verified". In SL, this means land access based on account type, scripted functionality based on account type, group membership based on account type, etc. Personally I think it would be more efficient if LL just created a verified grid and seperated it out that way, but I don't think they want that.

The citizen account type would provide the highest level of trust, among residents and between residents and LL. For instance, for a long time I've wished LL would create a real developer program with, among other things, access to testbed sims that aren't treated like schoolyard sandboxes. LL could implement this by restricting access to developer sims to citizen accounts. Residents could decide whether to rent land from an unverified landlord, a verified landlord, or a citizen. Land owners could allow building on their land by everyone, or only by verified accounts. And event holders could grant access based on account type.

In other words, there would be an incentive to establish a verified identity, and a disincentive to abuse it. But anonymous access would still exist.

I'm saying all of this idealistically, and I admit, unrealistically, because I don't have a lot of confidence that LL will even consistently expose account type information in the system as it stands now. But that's the concept.

This would exclude pre-6/6/06 users who created paid-for alt accounts for legitimate reasons and in good faith. For example, the creators of SLExchange are trusted by hundreds of people on the grid, but could not become citizens because Exchange Street is an alt.

That's an interesting point. In RL we have business entities that can have their own accounts. But as a solution in SL, you could allow citizens to have alts which are completely transparent. So in this case an owner of SLExchange would be a citizen, Exhange Street would be her alt, but it would be public information that it's her alt. The alt would just serve for accounting purposes, not identity.

My wife and I share an IP and Credit Card and we created a 3rd account to allow us to create a group wholy owned by us to give us control over our land without sharing.

Are we not citizens because we want to control our land and not share it with anybody?

No, Androclese , I'd say it's weird that this "platform"'s permissions system is tied to its social club mechanism. There's only one member of the Administrator group on my computer, me; I didn't have to create a couple of alt accounts I think this is more of an issue of technical details with SL. If they actually did what I propose, I think there'd be a bunch of these to work out. What would make sense to me is if you could create a permissions group for your land and assign both you and your wife to it. That's the way other "platforms" work.

For the record, the requirement to have 3 people in a group should be eliminated in the next release. 2 people will suffice once they get the group tools updated.

Today's update includes land access based on payment info, which is an important element. It's just as important to be able to get account type through scripts, though.

* Each resident's profile now includes a field revealing whether the resident has provided payment information to Linden Lab.
** The profile's "Account" field includes account status: "Resident" or "Linden Lab Employee" and, in the case of "Resident" status one of three status entries:
*** "No Payment Info on File" - account was created with no credit card or Paypal
*** "Payment Info on File" - account has provided a credit card or Paypal
*** "Payment Info Used" - credit card or Paypal on account has successfully been billed
** We plan to provide features in future updates to mark specific parts of the Second Life world (or allow residents to mark their own land) as accessible only to accounts with payment information.