Feedback on proposed Teleport Home changes

I've mentioned this before but was misunderstood.

SL already has a hard-coded procedure in place which warns an agent before they are ejected from a parcel (when a land pass expires, the agent is warned, given a grace period, then booted in a manner similar to llEjectFromLand).

It seems obvious to me that this procedure could easily be applied to llTeleportAgentHome and llEjectFromLand.

While I have been a strong perponant against "security" scripts. It is only because of the abuses. Any delay that is added to the function will only be gotten around by multi-threading. So I have a proposal for how to get it working in a way that will reduce abuses and defeat mutlithreading.

When a script requests to send an agent home the agents key is placed into a list, this list also has a counter for each agent. The user is then delivered with a warning, the counter is increased 1 and the object.energy is reduced to 1-counter * 0.34 or object.energy-0.34, which ever is less. Negative energy levels are allowed. After twenty seconds the counter is reduced by one when the counter hits zero the name is removed from the list.

each time a requests is made to the sim to tp an agent home it results in the object loosing energy. Since energy for all requesting objects is dependant on the number of the counter, it defeats multi-threading. Multi-threading would just burn up the energy faster. The agent is only ever sent a request once.

The request would be handled by the client. The user would have 20 seconds to leave the property.

something like this (probably should have writen it in c++)

//true globals
list Users;
integer Counter;
float TPHInc = 0.34;

TeleportAgentHome(key user)
{
    integer mycounter;
    if(Users != [])
    {
        integer pos = llListFindList(Users,[user]) - 1;
        if(pos+2)
        {
            llListReplaceList(Users,[mycounter=1 + llList2Integer(Users, pos)],pos,pos);
            jump skip;
        }
    }
    else
    {
        Counter = 0x80000000;
        llSetTimerEvent(20.0);
    }
    Users+=[mycounter=2 + Counter, user];
    llTeleportAgentHome(user);
    @skip;
    float a = llGetEnergy() - TPHInc;
    float b = 1.0 - (mycounter - Counter) * TPHInc;
    if(a < b)
        llSetEnergy(a);
    else
        llSetEnergy(b);
}

timer()
{
    ++Counter;
    integer a;
    while(1 + a = llListFindList(Users, [Counter]))
        Users = llDeleteSubList(Users, a, a + 1);
    if(Users == [])
        llSetTimerEvent(0.0);
}

Cory,

Ultimately there needs to be more privacy functions with land ownership. Period.
As I brought up with you in August, I believe one straightforward way of doing it would be allowing landowners to create a bounded box in their land that would be a "privacy box". This box would have to be integrated into the rendering queue as an exclusionary item. Basically the same principle as inside/outside. i realize it's a major alteration to the rendering engine, however I think it becomes more relevant and feasable as SL 2.0 is calling for prim-reduction and simplification algorithms to accommodate longer draw distances.

In the meantime, I hate to set a precedent of depreciating working functions.

However... in this case, security scripts are inherently laggy with sensor functions and annoying and I really feel no pity for people who can't use them right. As a Live Helper I've answered plenty of "some script is booting me" calls for both this function and auto-turrets.

I realize Linden Lab does not want to punish paying customers (landowners), so perhaps I would suggest going to the security script makers, basically laying it down that they will make scripts respect fly-bys or they will have their commands (like teleport hom) removed. I imagine they will snap to attention and fix the problem ASAP.

Ignoring flamebait quite happily, I feel that Prok is once again marginalizing cool minds on this issue and instilling this thread with apropos paranoia. I strongly suggest anyone reading Prok's response thoroughly research Prok's posts and viewpoint. I'm kind enough to not use ignore because it's against my morals.

As stated, I feel a warning with delay is the appropriate recourse for getting people through protected land without bouncing them unknowingly.

Formalizing this and enforcing it at the system level prevents needless upset and wasted customer service hours to enforce a TOS standard over time; keeping the function in play prevents needless economic and social instability in the short term.

Is this so difficult to understand? Or should we once again place one person's interests above others'?

llTeleportAgentHome is the only effective method for combatting grief today.

It is imperfect. Accepted.

If you remove llTeleportAgentHome, fine. But you MUST give us a delegate-able alternative at the same time.

If there isn't dev time to offer us such tools, then the right thing to do is to wait on depreciating this function until you do.

More detailed comments on my feelings on this subject are noted:here

Geez, "one person's interest"? There are THOUSANDS of people in this game PLENTY MAD about the bounce scripts and the Lindens know it, and Hiro even admits it and proposes heeding these concerns and having Lindens adjust.



Oh, this is just the usual character assassination and distraction from the real point -- that I'm saying what dozens of people have said in numerous threads on this subject for months. It's not about me. It's about freedom from weapons in safe zones, and these scripts constitute weapons.

I will pipe in with my two cents to say I hate being teleported home by some power-hungry landowner, even with Gestapo-like warnings to "clear the area within ten seconds".

I would be just as happy if no other resident ever had the power to teleport me home when I wasn't GOING home, or wanting to go home, for crying out loud.

On the other hand, there is no way to get rid of griefers otherwise, apparently. I agree that something should be added so that people can do something about that. Sending them just outside the Sim boundary doesn't stop them from causing trouble, if my experience at a Bingo game once was any indication.

coco

One person's interests. If you wish to bring your point more emphasis, get others to post to this thread in their own words that share it. Let them speak for themselves.

Continue discussion.

Take out teleport home, and people will go back to pushing or ejecting people, LL - and what's more it's already pretty well known that you do very little to police the problem.

Unless you want to, like, try giving us the tools we need instead of just nerfing more functions for the whiners?

You can't just take this away and leave us with no method to get rid of undesirables. ESPECIALLY with regard to private islands, and where there is a need for more than just the owner to control the land. Or maybe you can - it seems you're quite happy to cripple SL these days when you can't be bothered to code round a bug, or if people cry loud enough.

If your land tools weren't so ridiculously inneffective, then maybe this wouldn't be so bad. But they are.

So sure - take it out. Then we'll 'eject' people from the land parcel of private islands instead - to offworld at the border - where they'll have to relog for sure. Suits me fine.

I think it should be more than 10 seconds, i've seen a sim covered with these scripts giving a 6 second warning, obviously i cant complain as it gave me a warning but with lag of a few seconds, and me alread been half way into the sim before i was detected how was i supposed to leave the area in 5 seconds, i barely had time to read the warning before being sent home nevermind having chance to fly another 128m out of the sim

I would love to see it removed though, but i totally agree with travis that its the only defense against griefers, and until linden give tools to combat them, like the ban option in land tab, has more slots, but it also teleports home if they are on property, so its not a script function, but officers or owners of land can protect land for the full height of land can protect themselves.

ok. People say that land owners who use this are swinging a 'heavy hand'?

In an automated fashion, if it's done indiscriminately, maybe.

But hey Prok. What the HELL are we supposed to do when we get a TEAM of griefers who decide to camp out above our heads, above the *voluminous* 20m ban height, pushing *us* with their bounce -GUNS- for hours, until they get bored?

When a Liaison simply says "use ban or abuse report thx". ?

Should we say, "Oh. Well, abuse report filed; let's log off for the night, they win, for now. Maybe next week they'll get taken care of."

Until now, we've used *selective, manually initiated* "tpHome" commands to -get rid of- the most RECALCITRANT of griefers.

What's your solution? Talk to them? Have a nice chat?

Which *monsters* are you interested in preserving; the ones who actually should be accountable for their actions? Or this *monster* of a function that, god forbid, keeps morons away from whatever the hell you're trying to do?

Without this, we have *NO* recourse except filing an AR and waiting. Meanwhile, these poor misunderstood souls are going to drop Hand of God on the sim repeatedly so that the landowners can't even get back to their land to uh, I dunno... give them a stern talking to.

So you press on with the campaign for removal, but what about those who are constantly under attack?

I think this hotline post is rather good example of why its not good - yet - to just remove this function. As someone thinking rather hard about getting an island, this gives me pause (and will lose LL money while I wait for a definitive answer here).

There is no good recourse to keep someone away from an island other than WhiteListing, and that is something I'm not interested in doing. Of course making the island PG would be a deterrent in and of itself, but I digress.

Couple short responses:

Jeffrey: llOverMyLand() does not work on group land, IIRC. Else I would have continued some of the AI experiments I was working on. This needs to get fixed first; Otherwise I agree with the kind of system you propose.

I also like Strife's idea. Though I do not understand all of it, the underlying concept is interesting.

I think the first step is to try and nerf the function's use while better land management gets implemented. Then (and only then) should we consider removing it. As Michi and others mention, it does have good uses and is filling a gap that is currently unavailable in any other form right now.

Unless the command is completely non-sequitor and half broken, it should work if the object is deeded to the group.

You'd be suprised BTW, the code you posted earlier that uses llOverMyLand doesn't take into account that llOverMyLand produces extremely strange results where sim borders are concerned. You'll get a false positive but with a llDetectedPos() including negative numbers if the detected avatar is in the next sim. So you always need to check llDetectedPos() as well to make sure they are actually over your land. I encountered this many months ago when trying to protect the development team on my island due to private island tools not actually doing their job properly on joined islands.

Yes, much of what you have to do, is because functions are half broken I'm afraid.

From the wiki, regarding llovermyland():

I think a simple answer to this would to be to add the teleport to home functionality, to the ban function in the land tab, then it only applies to named people, if you add a person to the list while they are on your land they are teleported home, ie to stop griefers etc, and prevent them coming back. and if they approach your parcel and try to enter below height they get treated as before, bounced off the red lines etc. if they fly over they are then tp'd home

My experiments say otherwise. Perhaps it has been fixed since.

The problem stems from the lack of preplanning on LL's end. When they took away point to point teleporting in favor of telehubs they did not create adiquate infrastructure to allow people to get around effectively. They did not lay down travel lanes to allow folks to fly unrestricted so we are constantly flying into buildings and bouncing off ban lines like balls in a pichincho machine. What about roads? you say, well that isn't a good answer, if you look you will see property lines zig zagging all through them and they are usually to narrow to fly over and stay within. Compounding the problem is the rediculas distances people are forced to travel in many cases. If I have to fly 1200m to get where I'm going its going to expose me to a lot more security scripts because I have to fly over a gazillion pieces of private property that I have no choice but to cross.

LL needs to ask themselves what sort of experience are the users going to have if every resident turned on their ban tools? What would happen if even 30% used security devices? Since LL has provided almost useless tools for home defense and their Abuse Reports do nothing to stop current attacks, people are going to use whatever they can to ensure they get to use the land they are paying for. LL needs to address the root causes of the current situation, not put bandaides over bullet wounds.

1 Point to point teleporting.. this would make the current problem moot since it would reduce flyovers to near 0.

2. Establish safe fly corridors. Unfortunatly it is too late to do this without major disruption to land owners. If you are going to make people fly, give them somewhere they can fly without tall buildings, security scripts and bans. One solution would be to establish a "safe fly zone" at a specific altitude range that would be unfettered fly zone say starts at 40 meters and ends at 100 that avatars will drift up to and stay within that band unless directed to leave it. Within that zone, security, push or teleport home scripts will not work

3. Stop griefing at its source. If some one shoots me off my land with a griefer script, I file an abuse report and this fuctard is guilty beyond doubt, don't just ban him for a few days..Make him pay MY land tiers for a month. I am the injured party, I am not able to enjoy land I bought and pay tiers on so I should be compensated for the loss and it would significantly reduce griefing since it would be hard for most of them to explain the extra charge on their mom's credit card. The Forest could pay for itself from griefing fines alone. W-hat could subsidize half of the entire grid. They giggle at a few days suspension as they fire up another alt, cost them cash and they may reconsider.

4. Give better tools for landowners so they don't have to use scripts or improve the scripts so they don't cause problems when used.

Something needs to be done about griefers, although I'm not sure automated scripts are the way to go. As an example I used to have a vendor in some land in the corner of a sim with no immediately adjacent sims (a 'corner of the world'). For some time the adjacent land was owned by a larger shop, but they eventually moved to an island. The new owners I've never met, but they want their privacy for their home. They have a push script that makes it almost impossible to get to the corner I want with any control.

I have no problem if llTeleportAgentHome(), llEjectFromLand() etc. are deprecated and destroyed eventually. But some other mechanism that gives the landowners the ability to protect themselves from griefing would be necessary FIRST. I don't much care whether that's scripted or built into the land tools, or some combinations of these, or if llTeleportAgentHome() is fixed - the teleport part since the script works OK.

The fixes, whatever they are, need to allow most people to overfly without anything extra such as scripts that allow them to fly at 1,000m. If I'm looking for a shop either to update my vendor or to spend my money, I ought to be able to get there without hassle unless and until I start acting in a griefing fashion.

Whatever you choose will be tricky. I do have a suggestion though:

How about longer ban lists, and if you're actively listed this way the ban extends up to the edge of the sky box? Add to that no objects you rez are permitted within or to enter the banned area? Add to that that you are automatically muted and your IM's fail to people inside as if permanently busy?Add to that scripted ways to record who does these things so you can come back and find out who's rezzed things on your land or pushed things into your land, but NO way to automate it - no 'llAddedAgentToBanList()' or similar. This will mean giving different access to the ban list I suspect.

That means more and different work at the server end but seems to add a group of tools that prevents the griefing tactics I'm aware of. Of course if doing these make you more prone to crashing than llTeleportAgentHome() you might say that there is no point. But actively banning griefers and allowing innocent overflights and that running risks of crashing the griefers, well sorry, but tough. They chose to be griefers, they can choose to stop, and in the mean time it prevents innocent tourists, shoppers etc. getting crashed by overzealous security scripts, and probably takes out the llSensorRepeats() that are currently used. It stops us considering each time whether we should abuse report a landowner for their security script we did nothing to evoke apart from flying into their parcel - something that often we can't avoid.

I'll keep that in mind - in all my days, I've written a single security script on request. It worked, of course, and in a polite manner similar to that described.

The purpose of my note is not to provide a perfect LSL example, but rather to offer an example of how the Lindens might go about it at the backend using their functions.

The bottom line is such a fix is not extremely hard to create, but still needs feedback. Hence this thread to begin with.

I've just logged in real quick to confirm this. It does in fact work when deeded.

OK, just need to get the wiki fixed. Thanks.



Agreed 150%. The only possible way I can see to be as private as I *really* want to be, without the current function as we have it now, requires ownership of an island and extremely draconian measures for both myself and any residents sharing the land. I just don't want to do that (I'm a kind and willing helper - when I have the time), but I also want to be left alone sometimes - without going Busy.

great ideas so far guys.. keep them coming.. LL is looking at the thread here and the more options and feedback we can give them, the less disruptive a change inthe system/function will probably end up being, no matter how significant.

Before even looking at all the other replies to this thread, I'll post my own opinion:

We need a COMPLETE overhaul of teleporting, including the ability to script teleports
of any agent to any location within LSL and it needs to be tied into the permissions
system just like llTakeControls() etc. This functionality should replace the current teleportagenthome function. If we could point-to-point TP, we would no longer even have to worry about the effects of these security scripts.

To prevent griefing, we need more granular controls, like the ability to ban specific people from scripting on our land, and why not simply write it into the UI that if some griefer is over my land & has been there more than, say, 10 seconds, that I can't simply select him from the land tool & 'eject' him? This could teleport him home without use of any scripts and automatically ban him from the property... Maybe even extend the barriers for such people up to infinity instead of just the 40m height?

In short, the ability to prevent griefing should not involve any requirement for use of LSL or purchased items; it should be part of the UI. This would remove the need for scripted objects which are considered abusive, and it would also create some flexibility for things this world really needs in the way of portals and gateways. Thus, we could have a world
that is truly 'virtual' and immersive, and not tied down to flying all over the place.

When considering llTeleportHome and bounce scripts in general, many people fail to understand that other people may be in SL for a different reason than they are. There are different KINDS of residents!

This thread /120/6d/48334/1.html discusses "why griefers grief". It is a discussion of an excellent paper on griefer motivations (http://www.itu.dk/op/papers/yang_foo_koivisto.pdf). Go look at the chart on page 4.

While the topic of the paper is griefer motivations, the paper has an excellent summary of current thinking on why players play MMORPG in the first place. The chart on page 4 compares 5 different categorizations of player motivation. Notice that specifically "griefer" isn't a category-in-common, even though grief is widely considered the number one problem of MMORPG. Why? Because there are as many different kinds of griefers as there are kinds of players. I would even muse that players in one category think of players in the other categories as griefers.

Of course, as the paper points out, these aren't so much categories of players as categories of motivations. Most players have varying degrees of several motivations.

SL is unique in that it has rich content creation tools, and a functioning economy with a convertible currency. I think these tools attract another motivation not listed specifically in the chart (but discussed in the text), of "artist". Yet another category not even discussed in the paper is "merchant". These two categories are unique to SL, I think.

To relate all this to bounce scripts, you have to appreciate what people are getting out of the game, and how things like bounce scripts interfere with their experience.

If your motivation is "explorer", then bounce scripts ruin your experience, especially if you use a vehicle or aircraft to do your exploring (which is becoming increasingly useful as the world grows). If you are not an "explorer", then these things aren't ruining your exploring experience because you aren't exploring. (So "these things never bothered me" is evidence that you aren't an explorer, not evidence that bounce scripts aren't a problem.)

If your motivation is "artist", then you are busy making things. You will never get bounced while painting a bitmap in Photoshop. If you are building things, don't you want people to be able to SEE them? Artists enjoy the idea that other people admire their work, and many of them feel a sense of accomplishment when somebody plus-rates their work. But if you exclude the explorers from the game, just WHO is going to plus-rate your build? Your neighbors? You should care about this too.

(side note: There are actually two creative categories I think: "artist" and "craftsmen", where "artists" want to show off their work and have it admired by other people, and "craftsmen" want to create for creation's sake.)

If your motivation is "merchant", then you are busy tending your shop, communicating with customers, partitioning land, etc. So you yourself may not get bounced very often. But where do your customers come from? Tycoons and well established merchants benefit from point-to-point teleport, because customers won't get distracted by somebody else's store on their way to yours. But if you are not one of the top 20 merchants, what about you? Who's going to discover your store?

I think that bounce scripts and unattended teleport-home scripts ruin the experience for explorers, and reduce the opportunities for artist/builders to show off their work (by curtailing exploring in general).

If you are in one of the other categories of motivation, at least have some appreciation for these factors. The fact that these things are no problem for YOU does not mean that they are not a problem.

Buster