What is it with home security?

I'm flying along towards the red line, watching the red circle on the map get smaller as I reach my destination, then suddenly bam! I'm teleported home because of someones stupid security system. I didn't want to land in their silly parcel, I just wanted to get to my destination! Can this not be counted as abuse? Fair enough they can keep people out, but what's with the teleport home or the push to the opposite side of the sim?

Trace back the offender, abuse report.

No, I do not think they'll do anything about it, but yes, if enough abuse reports get generated perhaps they will do something about it.

Another option is to go there and IM the person and tell them exactly what you've just posted here. Hopefully if enough people do it they will get tierd and remove the thing.

Track the guy down, and try to reason with him/her. If not, for a posse and spend some free time stalking and abusing this guy.

Well i'm having troubles with flying to an area and getting logged out. How am I supposed to track down who it is when I can't access my report abuse thing, then it gets cleared when I log back in... and there are quite a few land owners in the area?

Yes, it IS abuse. Jeska or Robin has requested we abuse report the jerks that use these scripts. Unless, it was the regular land tools that did that?

This is abuse? Seriously? Even if on a private island or is this only for mainland?

I'd check their Profile too, to see if they've written something about themselves: not to prejudge but if you notice some fairly hostile ramblings about being the "lord of their domain" or whatever, then probability points to the possibility of you being treated badly in what's to come.

Okay, next step: attempt to make reasonable communication with the owner of said home security system, send in a few questions and let them know that it's been a problem for you -- be gentle and graceful, and in my case, I use emoticons as to not give them a hard time. Take time to listen to them, get their side of the story. Don't argue defensively! If they CLEARLY act like jerks after this, THEN I'd file an Abuse Report without a hesitation. Quietly as you fly away but fully and as detailed to the best of your ability. Make sure to mention you DID attempt contact, and that you were essentially told off for it.

(How someone reacts in a context like that, after you've given them grace and dignity, says a lot about how they respond to reason and how they get along in the community at large. Heck, I used to do that. It's no fun.)

More awareness needs to be put out too about better-programmed security systems on the market. If there were highly improved ones that were propagated around quickly (i.e. word of mouth, buzz on Forums even), then I can see the "old style" phasing out over time and these annoyances curbed down on.

Those who refuse to change are the dinosaurs, and I was there once. It's a sad place to be!

Advice for getting your abuse reports followed through on:

1. Be specific - tell them where, what object, what provocation they had (hopefully none), etc.
2. Try talking to the person first and give them 24 hours to respond. Be nice, give them the benefit of the doubt. 50% of the time you can resolve it yourself this way. The other 50% of the time, you now have more chat logs to submit to Liasons that show you as a nice person and the other person repeatedly being a jerk.
3. Whatever you do, don't violate the TOS / CS, especially in the chat log, since Lindens can see that.

Someone remind me to add him to my ban list.

I don;t understand how this is abuse. Im pretty sure the LSL function to teleport avatars home was made for the reason of teleporting avatars home, was it not? Just be more careful next time.
Oh, and maybe the reason they needed it, was because some person and their "posse" was allready greifing them.

I would hope that private islands do NOT fall under these complaints. I use the teleport home feature to remove dead players from our battlefield. It would be a very sad day when other players told me how to spend my $195.00 / month in tier fees.

I can understand these complaints on the mainland, but private sim owners should not be subjected to these types of complaints. Without the ability to TP dead players home, combat games like SimCast could not function properly...

The problem, of course, is that if SL gets checkerboarded with these scripts it will be impossible to travel from one point to another. It's a "greater good" thing. Plus it's just not very considerate.

No this isn't a problem with private islands, or even a very large land parcels, it's the tiny parcels that you don't notice until it's too late that causes the problem.

Wow. You DONT get that?! I get people telling me every single day what I should or shouldnt be doing with my island. Where am I going wrong?

Oh, and I use teleport home scripts. Don't like em? Don't fucking visit!

Be more careful of what? How does one tell there's a no-warning security script in your path?

It's abuse because on the mainland we have the *right to passage* over other's land (by flight - the land tools range helps define this). The scripts in question prevent that passage without rhyme or reason.

This does not extend to private islands, since there's nowhere to pass to.

Hey... (Beware, half-baked idea ahead.) I was thinking about stuff we could use for games that would be less like swatting flies with Cadillacs, like llP2PTeleportAgent(key id) which would be an official replacement to the sit target hack and would move an agent/avatar to any point in the same sim, provided the agent was over the script's owner's land. This would be a nifty lil addition to the secutity tools, maybe, by looking at the direction the avatar was flying, you could *PIFF* Point to Point port them to the other side of the parcel. They were never on your land, they still get where they're going. *shrug*

The teleport home scrits that I have seen have allways IM'd the person about 10 seconds before the person was teleported every second... *shrugs* I can see why this is for the greater good; perhaps the lindens can make this teleport announcment mandatory?

There are a few issues involved here:

1. Are owners allowed to control the airspace over their land? Answer - Yes.
They can build there and they can use the 2 Linden provided functions to control access to it.

2. Should trespassers be given fair warning before being ejected or sent home? Right now that is the land owners choice. By giving a a warning, the trespasser has time to enter the land and potentially do or see whatever the landowner is trying to prevent in the first place.

3. The actual TOS violation comes when a scripter produces code that intentionally crashes a client through a known bug in the function that teleports agents home. Anyone that scripts these systems should check to see if the trespasser is actually over the owner's land before attempting to teleport them home. At least until the Lindens fix the bug with llTeleportAgentHome(). The script most people are being hit by intentionally attempts teleports of agents outside of the owner's land in a tight loop which crashes the client. The creator of that script and the owner of that script are the only 2 actually in violation of TOS.

What needs to be done is that the 2 functions (llTeleportAgentHome and llEjectFromLand) should be changed to not work at certain altitudes, leaving a 'free fly' zone across SL. But, if they are going to do that they need to make that same zone 'no build'.

what some home security should implement is a warmup (silent or not, 10 second is enough to flyby your land and leave it)

and no , land is expensive enough, i have some sky building that need same rights that the land has

They can always solve the problem by letting us teleport directly to our destination, then we don't have to 'fucking visit'...

Totally agree. This is what I want too. For one thing, I don't see the need to force people to download and view stuff they're not interested in seeing. If I tp anywhere, it's inevitably with a final destination in mind. I don't care what's on the way.

Direct tp'ing would save so many major headaches not only with this issue but with lots of others. But I dont think its ever gonna happen.

I may have misspoke when I said it was abuse, the scripts that cause folks to CRASH are abuse. The scripts that cause folks to be teleported home MAY be abuse if they exceed the range the Linden land tools allow for.

I am under the impression such a warning is already mandatory - it's simply not done for a goodly number of scripts out there.

Frankly, I can not think of an appropirate reason to instantly teleport Joe Passerby home - It is unreasonable to belive that no one will pass over your property on the mainland, people are going places, exploring, getting lost, etc. With the highly mobile camera we all poses, privacy is going to be very difficult to acheive anyway, and a teleporting script doesn't actually solve that problem.

There are worthwhile ways of getting close, however.

Always associate your security with your build. I can't avoid a 100 cubic meter area of nothing ir invisible prims - but I can steer clear of a skybox. Mind that at high altitude, we can't tell where your property begins and ends, too. we need a visual cue.

Arrange your script so that it checks for the avatar's position, If they are within 10 meters of the build you don't want them in, issue a warning and issue it repeatedly once every X seconds for however long it might take to get past the build at avatar-flying speed. After that, boot 'em. If they end up inside that build, then boot 'em without further warning.

Have a ban list - some people should already know better and no longer need the warnings.

I think this nicely balances the right to privacy with the right to get where one is going. YMMV

Teleporting people home without warning is IMHO not very different than hitting them with a push gun on safe land. You are hitting someone with a script, simple as that (and with a script that has the same effect as "death" in SL, by the way).
If someone is polite he will stop at a locked door anyway, if he is not, well, i just phantom the floor under his feet as soon as i have a chance.

Agreed. And while a warning would be nice, SL can be so laggy sometimes that I doubt they're always gonna register before I stutter into a "forbidden zone" at 3fps. And again, even with warnings, if SL becomes checkerboarded with these scripts it becomes an utter ordeal to travel.


Well, as we are all probably familiar, people are not always polite in SL. And you can't phantom a floor if you're not onsite. I can understand the motivation behind a send 'em home script, but I personally consider them overkill, and a bit selfish.

Now, is it possible to create a script that prevents being teleported? Or like a web browser with a popup blocker, have a dialog box that says "The script 'Piss Off' wants to teleport you. Do you agree?" (buttons:*Teleport Me*,*Cancel*). Hey, I sense a feature request.

If you give me an alternative? Because you're asking to make the whole function pointless if you ASK them if they want to be tp'd.

Personally, I'm actually not interested in tp'ing people home. It's just the most convenient method of dispatching them. If I could put a 'bubble' around my lab that stops them dead, unable to get any closer, that would be fine, too.

And any warning I give negates the purpose of the script, cuz they can sure as hell fly to the center of the scanner and see what you were trying to keep them away from in 10 seconds or whatever.