Feedback on proposed Teleport Home changes

I think *anyone* pushing or teleporting me is griefing.

My right to fly across the world is greater than your right to stop me potentially looking at your collection of those same old sex balls.

For someone to be griefing you they have to be doing something to you. Therefore you need to be in world, and present.

I accept that in a large venue this needs to be delegated.

You don't have a right to live in a gated community with an automatic anti-aircraft gun. Why should I have to stick to flying along roads because of these tabloid reading morons? I don't care about your pr0n collection. I don't care about your pretend mafia or the 50 times you've been married since Christmas. I don't know who you are and don't care.

The evil griefers would be too busy bombing the edge to notice you, sorry.

My best hope is that there are heavy amounts of roleplaying on both sides. I don't understand why you'd want to role play being a Daily Mail reader - maybe it's a mild nazi fetish.

Cubey Terra already figured a solution for this problem. Give people some amount of "red bars" coverage, say 60 meters. You can apply this in slices of arbitrary size up to a maximum height of 768 meters. So you could, for example, protect a house (ground to 40 meters) and a f--- shack in the sky (with the remaining 20.)

Additionally, the eject and teleport home functions should work exactly the same as the parcel access controls (i.e. "you are not allowed here any longer and have 15 seconds to leave. If you do not, xyz will happen."

In the long term I'd like to see individual avatars and objects given the ability to opt out of being pushed, either with llPushObject() or by being collided with by a physical object (a bullet, an avatar, a car, whatever.) This could be tricky from a technical standpoint but it would be worth it. While over damage land, I think push/collide would still need to work as it does today. There would also need to be script calls that can detect whether an avatar is pushable etc., so that certain games would not become impossible to implement.

The reason I say objects ought to be able to opt out of being pushable is simple. I've been harassed in my airplane by someone with one of those stupid "Hand of God" things.

No thanks, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I trust Lindens more than the average player, but they are human and ultimately my trust for them doesn't extend that far.

Not all uses of llTeleportAgentHome are automated. As I said, we use it MANUALLY, as a LAST RESORT, with only the most RECALCITRANT griefers who WILL NOT LEAVE *POST* AR, and *POST* ineffective BAN.

Second: Any given moron's right to come onto my land and get in my face, harrass, push, and make sickeningly graphic comments at my guests, just because of what avatar I'm wearing is not greater than me kicking them the fuck out.

The land I pay for is not a subsidization for your petty entertainment. This has nothing to do with 'sex balls' and '512 plots'. We're in a PG sim, we're 90km2, and we get hit -regularly- by people we've never, ever had any contact with, to the point where it's an EXPECTED part of holding an event now.

Get it through your head that this is *NOT ONLY ABOUT AUTOMATED SCRIPTS* . The function CAN be called MANUALLY; we have NEVER used it in an automated fashion. For our 'send home' to work, an officer of the area has to say on a given channel "gohome Avatarfirstname Avatarlastname".

So yeah, we are in world when it happens. And we use it REACTIVELY , not as a preventative or pre-restrictive measure.

In this thread we are DISCUSSING ways to curtail and eliminate AUTOMATED ABUSE of this function. The "only solution" is not ripping the damn thing out. That's the simplistic, knee-jerk, sensationalist reaction.

One of the ugly little problems here is that the very thing that makes llTeleportAgentHome() a powerful tool against greifers is the same thing that makes it abusable. Immediate, quiet response.

If it automatically warns the greifer of impending teleportation, then said greifer will pop off your property for that time, and return to continue his pernicious efforts, encouraged by the knowlege that you're annoyed. This is the same problem llEjectFromLand() has.

If it quietly waits to eject the greifer, than you still have X seconds of annoyance to deal with, and it still won't solve the problem of someone wandering above the land - if they don't know they're not wanted there, they may well still be shot home if they linger, or if it takes longer than X seconds to cross the plot.

Having it work only if the owner is on his or her land breaks it for group land users, who appear to be the primary user of this tool - large projects and gatherings being more interesting targets than Joe 512's house. Extending it to the precence of group officers makes it worthless for people who need to pass on the tool to employees not trusted to be officers.

Short term, the only solution I see is a clear statement disallowing its use and the use of llUnSit() and llEjectFromLand() in an automatic and indiscriminate manner, taking ARs of scripts that do this on a case by case manner, and ever so slowly getting people to fix thier scripts or get rid of them.

Long term, quite a few really good suggestions for effective land tools have been offered that would be as effective and far less abusable.

Do not remove this tool until it has been made superflouous!

Hopefully, some sort of solution will come from all of this. There have been alot of ideas thrown about, but only a few seem to address the frustration felt by many that they can't travel. I understand that some people are very concerned about the security of their land holdings and I certainly like the ability to have some security control over my land, but we need to have something that can satisfy both. Many many SL player are NOT landholders and being knocked about (forced to relog, etc.) would seem to be counterproductive to LL's interest in keeping these people in the game, or attracting new ones for that matter.

Maybe it will come down to a choice between freedom of movement and freedom to erect a superfortress, but hopefully there will be some sort of compromise that can workable for both. Although we may have to meet somewhere in the middle on this one.

I have nothing to add to this argument. It's exactly what I wished to bear out from it.




Moving on to current debate, two further issues I'd like to touch on that have been brought up:


1) Multithreading Scripts:

Establishing a 10-second timer as noted would render Multithreading "mostly useless." Since all of the scripts would need to start and wait ten seconds, there would be no point to multithread other than for script coverage.

As a related matter, multiple teleport requests for one avatar need to be throttled if they're causing a problem. That should go without saying.

Edit: On the subject of multithreading, this might actually address Jillian's concerns about a warning. I feel the script should only warn the person once, then throttle all further warnings for sixty seconds. That seems to be a balance to me, since multithreading and simply looping the function would solve the problem without being easily "gamed."


2) Overall implications of this problem:

I feel these delays should extend to features like llEjectFromLand, as well as any new features that are added in the future.

I feel that, in the long run, this will be more of a moot point once the server code is released, as it will allow for a drastic amount of cost-cutting on the part of the personal sim and make it feasible to people.

For now, a compromise needs to be struck for the short-to-medium term, for the reasons eltee, Michi, splat1, Travis, Prokofy, and anyone involved describe. We all have competing interests here, and I feel that the best way to address them would be with this new ten second delay (and if possible, warning) set off before a teleport is ever issued.

The defense rests.

Not everyone who uses this function is 'erecting a superfortress', nor are all users of it impeding movement in any way.

I'm sorry Michi, I just had to comment on this, because you're two statements don't follow. if the poster that evoked this response or I fly over your land, you as a responsible land owner say 'They're not griefing, we don't need to do anything' so we don't have any beef with you either.

Not everyone is as restrained as you, to the point that they are seriously affecting the quality of SL for other people. It is griefing if I come and disrupt your event by swearing, shooting other people etc. but how different is it if I get tped home and crashed repeatedly trying to get to an event I want to attend but can't get a tp to? Or to an event I'm running for a friend when I need to be the first one there to call everyone else in?

I appreciate your need to be able to defend against griefers and at the moment llTeleportAgentHome() and llPushObject() and llUnsit() are the main two tools but they are being abused by other people. I, and several other people, have suggested ways to make that harder that involve taking them away AFTER there are good alternatives. In my case in particular adding it so the alternatives CAN'T be automated.

Impact to you, you need to learn the different tool set provided, but otherwise you can still defend your events, possibly better than the current tools permit you to.

Impact to me, as long as I don't grief you or others, I can actually go to the places I want to go to without problems.

Telling me that LL can't do this by 1.7 but might be able to in 1.8 or similar and so the abusable items must stay is fine, I'll swear, abuse report the abusers, until such time as the alternatives are in place.

Generally I'm opposed to censoring coding options. But the current implementation of this causes crashes because of something, and whether that's bad coding implementation, deeper issues with SL or something else doesn't matter. Give people legitimate alternatives to defend against actual griefing, take away the then redundant function that *currently* has legitimate as well as abusive functions as it will purely be a tool of abuse.

I've experimented, and it appears that the current implementation does not cause crashes unless it's called more than once per avatar being teleported.
Also, I don't think anyone is arguing that we need to keep llTeleportAgentHome() past any proper tool designed to replace it.
The problem isn't the library call, it's the abuse of it. I appreciate the efforts of those trying to find automated ways of fixing the problem across the board quickly, but so far they all pull a few teeth out of it's bite. If I could think of any way of making this call less abusable I'd offer it, but every idea i've had ends with the tool being far less effective or leaving someone without the use of it.

I suspect this problem can not actually be solved without a overhaul of the parcel security paradigm. The earliest this could come to be would be 1.8, I suspect, as the changes coming with 1.7 would probably effect how the simulator deals with avs and objects.

I also strongly belive a strong, clear stance from LL would help a great deal. It occurrs to me just now that they could even send an e-mail to every resident who has tier tied up in group or private land explaining clearly the rules for the use of security scripts and some of this problem would fix itself, and it would make it easier to allow a Linden to turn off misconfigured or otherwsie abusive scripting upon discovery, citing the e-mail as fair warning.

Now, I could live without it myself. I like to think I'm clever enough to come up with other solutions. However, there are plenty of others who need this tool - who really don't have any other useful option. Club owners, Luskwood, Abbots, private island owners... I've seen thier need for this, I know there are more.
I'm begging everyone: Don't punish the responsible folks for the inadequacies of a few potatoheads!

This bears repeating, for all of Second Life.

Then make the warning a once per day thing. If I call llTeleportAgentHome() on you right now it gives you a warning. If you dodge out and come back, no warning, you are sent home.

If that's do-able per targeted avatar/agent, I'm hip to it in combination with it having a long ass script delay afterward, so the second hit doesn't pop and/or crash you.

I'm down for whatever it takes to never get tossed out of my plane by some retarded security script ever ever again.

Maybe limit the height at which llTeleportAvatarHome works at, so if the avatar is too high, it wouldn't do anything. People flying over should be safe, and people that actually come inside your house (unless it's a skybox) could still be removed.

Maybe have a gap where it doesnt work, like between 70m and 600m (just as an example) it doesn't work, but below 70m and above 600m it can. Just so people with skyboxes can use it up there too. Im don't think most people travel around at 600-768m.

Better than totally nerfing it I'd think.. I don't like seeing land owners losing rights, especially since it's so expensive. 40$ a month plus premium account costs should entitle me to some control over my property. But of course I do see the problem.

Something should be done. I remember a time when I was flying out to shop, and it was a very long distance from the telehub. Just as a get 1000meters out, I get hit my someones home security system. It sent me home. I was not a happy camper. It was a big penalty for flying over thier lot. No warning, just a boot back home. I decided then it wasn't worth going to that store. So being a little up set, I rated them badly.

I really hate that feature, and I see no use for it. If you want to send them a way, send them off your land, or to the edge of the sim. Sending them home can be a big penalty for a little infraction.

I wish to make one thing perfectly clear:


Linden Labs, as the owners of Second Life, have the right to remove any function they find disruptive, or just don't like.

It's their sandbox, and they have the RIGHT to do what they want with it. Legal and moral. Period.


On the other hand, if LL is profiting from us, they need to make sure the largest number of people are happy, or we will go and play elsewhere. Period.


So, we have three groups: Griefers, Defenders, and Innocent bystandards.

Griefers want to make problems, and are not considered 'good customers'.
Defenders want to protect their property from either griefers or from the world at large.
Innocent bystandards have the tendency to wander into secured places and get zapped accidently (or not).

LL needs to make the latter two happy, while restricting the first.


Now, here is the truth, you remove the major tool that Defenders have to protect their land/guests/events, then you run into a problem where they cant have fun. Since this group can't have fun, they leave.

The Innocent bystandards can't find anything interesting, because all of the Defenders left. They stop looking and playing.

The Griefers blow each other up until SL get's unplugged, and the world ends.


Yeah. A bit melodramatic...

If LL removed a function that people have grown to depend on for defense, then Griefers are going to have a field day.

Lindens can't be everywhere, and I'm pretty sure that they can't stop griefers fast enough to save an event in that case.


Again, this is not about the function were talking about: This is about needing tools and systems to protect people from griefers. We need a ban that works, and we need limits to how a banned person can effect those inside the land. It's not optional, and needs to be done at the same time as these features being removed...


Nuff said...

... Ok, I don't understand this. What other tools do I need to learn? I'm *NOT* going to use Push. That's a TOS violation. Ban *does not work*, and we are not an "Estate in the Sky". Unsit is only useful if you're going to push someone, which I already said I'm not going to do.


Every time, this conversation goes back to the same theme: people are talking about UNMANNED, AUTOMATED systems. We've never had an automated security system, nor do we plan to.

TeleportHome in Luskwood is called -manually- when the going gets rough with a *particular person* who proves to be non-responsive and belligerent in regards to a request to leave or normal freeze or eject. We have no other way of *removing them* from our land.

While I realize that many folks here believe I should have no right to do so, I'll repeat what I think on the matter -- We aren't paying >$200 US a month just to subsidize the entertainment of those who think it's hilarious to blast us all out of our sim . People should not be using TeleportHome offensively, (which these 'security systems' do) - but defensively, it is probably the only thing that can keep a mainland area useful when griefers are determined enough.

Non-sequitur. This is not what we are arguing. Linden Lab *IS* listening to the residency, and *DOES* want input on this function, so the fact that they "can" remove it if they damn well feel like it is moot.

If they did as such, and said "we aren't going to talk about this, it's gone", well, then the community reaction and possible exit of mainland builds would be the reaction they would have to contend with.

But strutting in and shouting "LL can do whatever they like!" is an unneccessary attempt at smackdown and alignment behind a 'draconian government' which isn't there. They don't do this. They also *could* delete all of our stuff tomorrow and stick their tongues out at us.

They can, but they won't. So that is NOT the point of contention.

ONLY if this is used in an automated, all-or-nothing fashion. Which I have tried to indicate is not the only case of its use. So obviously, "nuff" has not been said.

As per those who use the function: It should not be automated, or unmanned, and it should not boot indiscriminately.

But I suppose some do, and if anything does happen often on SL, its that the 'some' is assumed to be 'all'. The reason you haven't *seen* unmanned, non-automated uses of TeleportHome -- is because they're non intrusive and they haven't affected you.

Well, unless you're someone trying to cause trouble. Then I suppose it's kind of a downer.

You didn't read past that, did you? Go back. Read.

Sometimes, people are only pointing out facts, and are not attempting to make a political statment.

My statements were made to put the reality in prespective and comment on several sides of the issues involved.

And reminding people that they answer to the OWNERS of SL is not unneeded. It's the thought we try and get through to griefers all the time.

And finally, don't put things in quotes I did not say. I never even insinuated that LL was a 'draconian government', nor was that the point of the message.

Good day, Sir.

My original post suggested that I would be happy to see llTeleportAgentHome() but ONLY after land owners got a set of tools that would let them effeciently defend their land, although not automatically.

If my suggestions were accepted completely, which might not be possible, you, as a responsible defence-only land owner, would actually get better protection but you'd have to learn some different tools to your current scripted set.

If those other tools are in place - they'd include automuting banned people, nothing they rez entering your plot, and a total no fly for them, up to top of the sky box, or a similar set, then and only then I would suggest llTeleportAgentHome() should be killed, or maybe become a permissions based trigger for places like Darklife.

I'm actually on your side. I'm just coming at it from a slightly different angle. You're responsible but others aren't and those others make the innocent suffer. So give the responsible ones tools that they can use but that they can only use responsibly although effectively and nerf the ones that are automatically griefing people, just like any other griefer.

Oh, and I should have posted this last night:

I pulled my trump card.

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I think 10 second is a little long. If you're ejecting a griefer, 10 seconds gives them far too long to be griefing. Personally I think 3-5 seconds would set a reasonable balance between getting them out post haste and giving them the chance to leave voluntarily.

An excellent example script of how this function should be used responcibly.

What I find interesting about this "techie discussion", is that most of us techies understand the question. Push Scripts and TeleportAgentHome() are not the same thing. I have yet to see a situation outside of war-gaming and griefing that needs push scripts. TeleportAgentHome() SHOULD only work on your own land, preferably with reasonable warnings and an oppurtunity to leave voluntarily. Then it is purely a security/privacy issue, which I hope any landlord could understand.