*serious* banning tools for all group/estate/parcel admins to fight griefing/spam

This is a proposal designed to counter :
1) spam on groups, given the inadequacy of 'eject' and the restrictiveness of invite-only status
2) greifing on *all* land (both parcel and estate, both mainland and island)
3) privacy invasions by banned users such as scanning through ban lines
4) the inability to ban large numbers of avatars easily (e.g. griefer teams)
5) the difficulties involved in having a ban list managed by many different people
6) the difficulties of having your ban list get full too fast (e.g. for busy, often-griefed locations)

This proposal is finalised - that is, I won't be editing/changing it after today,17/July/06. The reason is simple : I want to make sure people know that the above list is *exactly* what they are voting on.

Here is the list of features this proposal stands for:

---> With regard to all ban/allow lists generally :
1&2) Ban/allow lists should be managable by multiple people, secure against alt-griefing, and easy to maintain.
All ban/allow lists in SL should have the fields :
* avatar or group name effected.
* 'active' checkbox. If checked, is in effect, if unchecked, is not in effect. Useful for giving people an 'official' warning before banning them proper, or for marking someone as a troublemaker without banning them.
* 'set by' field, listing the name of the avatar who set the ban or whitelist entry
* 'reason' field, an optional string set by the avatar who set the ban, read only afterwards
* 'set on' field, listing the time that the ban/allow was added on
* 'last used' field (for land bans only), stating how long ago someone affected by this ban/allow was within normal rezzing range of the parcel or tried to teleport directly onto the parcel. Whenever an av can see a parcel, and they are banned on it, the last used time of their ban on that parcel should be updated. This field should be displayed as a number and then a time interval, such as "52 days", "12 minitues", "15 seconds", "3 hours", or similar. Time intervals less than 30 days would display as white, between 30 and 90 days as yellow, and over 90 days as red.
* 'ban alts' field, on by default. If this box is checked, any alts of any person affected by the entry are also effected in exactly the same way. The should work in a way that means land/group/estate owners can't tell who someone's alt is, but can be sure a ban will work against alts too.
The banlist should be forward/reverse sortable by any of these fields.
These functions would :
* enable us to identify provide us a way to give someone a 'non-active ban', a great way to flag up troublemakers so other admins can be quicker to ban them later.
* make managing a big ban list much easier by helping to identify old, inactive entries on the ban list, so they can be pruned.
* make managing a ban list between a group of people much easier, as we can now see who set what ban and why.
* make it possible for us to combat griefing by alts, by treating bans as per-person, instead of per-account as they currently are.
3) "Ban/allow by group" options
Whereever there is a 'banned avatars' list, there should also be a 'banned groups' list, such that anyone in the banned group would count as banned just as if they were explicitly named. Wherever there is a 'allowed avatars' list, there should also be an 'allowed groups' list. Access would be checked as follows :
* if the person is named explicitly on the allowed avatars list, allow them
* if the person is named explictly on the banned avatars list, deny them
* if the person is a member of a banned group, deny them
* if the person is a member of an allowed group, allow them
This would enable you to, say, ban a list of known troublemakers but make an exception for the few nice people in a group. It would also stop someone joining one of your 'allowed' groups to evade a group ban.
4) Bigger ban lists
Ban list maximum lengths should be increased to 500 for the avatar-based ban list and 50 for the group-based ban list. 50 is simply not enough.
5) Ban lists must be scriptable at all levels
One should be able to read from and modify ban lists, parcel, estate and group, via LSL scripts.
This would let you detect, for example, when banned avatars approached your parcel.
This would let you use an object owned by the sim owner or estate managers to do estate-level bans without needing to give people estate manager permissions. That would result in potentially a HUGE benefit to sim owners because they could have lots of people with 'estate orb' access who can ban/unban but nothing else... and thus, sims get MUCH better security.
It would also allow you to use scripts that enforced a 'delete any ban unused for X days' rule, and other ideas such as potentially *automatic* estate bans for people who do various things. Imagine a Second Life where "no weapons" orbs exist, I think grumble Loudon already made one that detects weapons fire.... and they have the power to estate ban violators of the rules. Automatic security enforcement! I know some people may be squeamish about giving that level of power to bots, but remember, some people may find these scripted tools VERY useful and we are not obliged to visit sims whose scripting we disagree with. Bans/Allows added by the script should display both the owner of the object that added it, and also the name of the object itself in its 'set by' field'. LSL-level access to ban/pass lists would enable things like ban list monitoring scripts and and 'neighbourhood watch' systems where parcels/sims could operate on a 'if someone gets banned here, they were probably *just* causing a problem here, so lets ban them for 1hour from nearby parcels, just to keep them away from the parcel they were banned on long enough to keep them out of scan range of that parcel'.
Basically, scripts would enable 3 great things : logging of ban/unban activity, banlist management via automatic rule-enforcing security devices, and various forms of ban sharing. They are a very good idea, as they give us Residents better abilities to collectively decide who we do and don't want on our land and have those decisions respected.



---> With regards to bans in groups :
6) Ban addition/removal permissions in groups
There should be a role/action based permission for adding/deleting people from the group's banned avatar and banned groups lists.
7) Anyone banned by a group should not be able to join or IM the group.
All avatars in a group's 'banned avatar' list, and all avatars which are members of any groups in its 'banned groups' list, should not be able to join the group. They should NEVER be able to IM the group, and they should be forced to completely leave any group IM session they are in when they are banned, and not allowed to start any more IMs to that group while banned.
Auto-close group IM sessions for avatars when they become banned
If an avatar becomes banned while they have an open IM session to the group that they started, that IM session should be closed for EVERYONE in it (to banish spammy group IMs and avoid flooding people with "X has left this session" messages after the spammer is ejected).
9) Selected group members should be able to see banlist changes
There should be an 'action' in the group roles system : "is notified when ban list changes". Anyone in a role with this action is notified when additions/deletions are made from the ban list, being told who is added/deleted, by whom, and what reason the adder/deleter gave for the addition/deletion. Additionally when someone deletes an entry from a ban list, the reason that was on file for their original ban should be displayed alongside the reason that their ban was cleared.

---> With regards to Estate Tools :
10) If someone is estate banned an option should also be given to return ALL their objects as well
Automatic 'and return all ____'s objects?' popup when someone is estate banned.
If a resident is banned on the estate (by name or by a group they are a member of) they should not see the estate at all, they should not be able to teleport to the estate (even by Landmark!). If they are on the estate when they are banned they should be sent home. Further, there should be an automatic popup question if they own objects in the sim, that asks : "do you wish to return ALL of the now banned person _____'s objects?", defaulting to 'no'. It would work for all objects, scripted or not. It would preferably result in a small notice to the person doing the return stating how many objects were returned. Use of these functions should be logged by LL, so that when someone is ARed and then sim banned, LL's abuse team can verify that they did indeed rez objects/push/etc, and were then banned, and what objects they had returned to them by the estate manager. (e.g. if 100 objects named 'bullet' are returned, it should help LL's abuse team build a case).
11) It should be possible to easily share bans between estates.
There should be two more lists in the 'estate' section of 'estate tools'... : "accept shared bans from" and "offer shared bans to". These lists contain one or more names of other estates. If estate A has estate B in its 'accept shared bans from' list, and estate B has estate A in its 'offer shared bans to' list, then any avatar or group that counts as banned on estate B also counts as banned on Estate A.
In other words : if estate B offers to share its bans and estate A accepts, anyone who counts as banned on estate B also counts as banned on estate A.
Estates should be able to share bans to and recieved shared bans from lots of other estates at once, to faciliate the sharing of bans between estates of similar theme.
Estates should be able to have a two-way ban sharing relationship.
Estate owners and managers should never be able to be banned from their own estate by bans shared from other estates.
In the lists, estates where the relationship is established should display differently from ones where you are waiting for the other side to add you to their list. That way you can see which relationships are active and which are pending.
In the estate ban list, there should be an additional checkbox beside each avatar or group name : "share". If checked, the ban is shared with those estates you whare bans to. If not, it isn't.
Double-clicking the name of an estate you accept shared bans from should show all the bans they have that are marked 'shared'.
12) Deleted bans on an estate should be viewable for a short time after deletion
Estate bans which are removed should not disappear from the ban list at once, rather, they should appear greyed out for, say, 7 days. During this time they would not be active, but would be marked with the name of the person who removed them. This allows other estate managers and the estate owner to see when someone has removed a ban from an estate and reinstate it if needed.



---> With regards to Parcel Bans :
13) People who cannot access a parcel should not be able to see or interact with its contents and vice versa.
Anyone who does not have access to a parcel should not be able to see any objects or avatars on that parcel. They should not be able to see, hear or interact with *anything* in the parcel. People in the parcel should not be able to see them, and none of their scripts should work while they are in the parcel. They should not be able to rez objects in the parcel, or move already rezzed objects into the parcel. They'd be invisible to the parcel and the parcel and its contents invisible to them. They'd be able to move through it but not interact with it in any way. Being banned from parcels would completely remove an avatar's ability to interact with that parcel or people on it - even their scripted attachments using llSensor should not detect avatars in parcels they cannot access, and they should not see minimap blips for people who are in those parcels. No chat text on any channel by them or any of their objects should reach into the parcel. Preferably, 'ban lines' could be removed completely as there would be no reason not to let banned avatars fly around in parcels they are banned in (because they cannot do ANYTHING there)... so it would be needless to force them to leave. Plus, ban lines are ugly, and a solution where content on parcels one cannot access simply does not render at all is neater, cleaner, and hopefully will result in a lot less ugly features (ban lines) on the landscape, and a lot less impediment to peaceful Residents who harmlessly want to fly around.
14) Once the ban limit is reached, new bans should replace the ban which has gone unused the longest.
If the ban list is full and a new ban needs to be added, then the ban that which hasn't been used in the longest time should be dropped and the new ban added. A notice should be sent to the land owner the first time this happens, so that they understand what is going on. The notice should only be sent once, however, to avoid possible spamming of land owners.


----> Getting rid of unwanted objects
15) llReturnObject, GetPrimCountForObject, and family
Ok. There are lots of situations where you want to let people build on your land, but not "too much". For example, you're a mall owner and you want to let people have X amount of prims in your mall but you don't want them to break your prim limits. Unfortunately you can't enforce this, without llReturnObject. With llSensor you can detect objects. With a function like llGetPrimCountForObject you can see how many prims it has, and with llDetectedOwner you can see who owns it. Tallying all this up, you can produce totals for who owns how many prims in the area. Then, with llReturnObject, you can return the excess. Adding these functions would help the people who rent out space a LOT, be they landlords, mall owners, or even just normal landowners who want to let a friend build on their land but not to use up all their prims (they could have a warning orb scripted that IMs the friend when they have over X prims in the parcel).
The llReturnObject function would also be useful for security devices.
Make no mistake, banning someone from a parcel or estate that they have objects in should pop up a "and do you wish to return all their objects too?" box.... but for the moment, similar things can be accomplished with llReturnObject.
llReturnObjectKey(key object_key_to_return); <--- returns a single object identified by key
llReturnObjectName(name name_of_object_to_return); <---- returns a single object identified by name (good for dealing with chat spam objects!)
llReturnObjectAllByOwner(string ownername); <---- returns all objects owned by given owner name - perfect for clearing out griefer objects quickly!


I realise that this is asking a lot. I realise that LL staff have a lot on their plate. I wish I did not have to ask for these things.
However, while I was surfing the SL forums looking at proposals to deal with griefing, my sim was attacked by a group of people who attacked the sim using what appeared to be ICBMs, nukes, push guns and chat spam. This is unacceptable. When you have organised teams of griefers trying to take down sims, the situation has got serious, and it is time for more serious banning tools.

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To vote for this, click HERE and vote for proposal 1632. Note that you must be logged in to the main SL website to vote. To add your votes to this proposal, make sure your name shows at the top right of the page, make sure you have votes free (use 'my votes' if you want to see what other proposals you have allocated votes to), and then use the drop-down box to allocate votes to this proposal. Note that you can only allocate 10 votes, total, to all the proposals in the voting system in total. You can allocate your 10 votes to this, or spread it more thinly, but whatever you do, please vote for *something* to make sure your voice is heard on the future direction of SL.

This proposal is *not* intended to replace the system whereby land owners can ban unverifieds from their land. Instead, this proposal is meant to cover a lot of things which that system of banning unverifieds does not provide (like bans for people who spam group chat, bans of griefer teams based on their group, and so on). This proposal is also intended to provide a way of banning based on people/groups that are known troublemakers, and to make these bans really have some weight. It is not intended to replace the verified/unverified banning system, it is intended to provide other options (such as banning by groups), and more power in the banning system overall (e.g. bans from groups and stopping banned people seeing what is on your land).

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The above is my official version of this proposal. I realise that it is asking a lot. I realise that some people may worry it will lead to griefing by landowners and abuse by group officers. I firmly believe, however, that the net effect of these proposals will be positive - that the bad will be vastly outweighed by the good it does combatting griefing, spamming, and antisocial behaviour generally in Second Life. Lindens, I know you don't have the ability to meet all resident requests, but I think you should seriously consider each and every idea in this one. Even if you choose not to do some of them, please consider each in turn. I know you're already planning to make use of some ideas like these. So, please consider these ones? They range from the obvious (people ejected from groups should not be able to IM that group after being ejected) to the new yet good (we need the ability to ban by group, to take care of griefer teams, enforce parcel/sim rules and prevent conflicts pro-actively), to the radical (replace ban lines with a system that both guarentees privacy/security for land owners by stopping people without access to a parcel getting information about avatars/objects in it AND does not hinder the ability of fliers to fly through parcels). I know it is a big batch of ideas, but consider it, please.

Hell yeah, with you all the way.

Yeah, damn right I'm with you on that!

As my first post on the forums, I'll say that additional tools to prevent griefing is necessary, especially in a game where making new avatars is so easily accomplished. While we may never get all of these tools, even some would be greatly appreciated.

Ryd Faulkner

Steps need to be taken to curb the increasingly unpleasant griefing thats goin down. I agree.

with you all the way!

Exceptional post here. Dont think there is anything I can disagree with. I'll read it again tomorrow to make sure i didnt miss anything but this sounds like a good plan.

Two suggested additions:

1 - Allow some kind of #include statement to include someone else's ban list in your own. There could be limits to the level of nesting this would allow, but there are plenty of people out there whom I would trust to know who needs banning. This might require a permission setting on the part of the av whose list is being included.

2 - Allow an option "ban alts" on each ban line. LL says they have ways of knowing that someone is logging in from the same system, and if CC or other verification means are used, that's another way of knowing. We, as users, should never get to see the data that are used to determine whether someone is an alt, but a griefer should have to go to considerable trouble (e.g. replacing network card or spoofing IP address, etc.) to get around this. Yes, there are cases when a perfectly nice person is sharing a system/CC with a griefer. Not everyone will choose to ban alts. But then again, if I lived with and shared a computer with someone who was making a stain of themselves online, I'd like to know it.

Also, unless this is already specified elsewhere, a "mute on ban" option in the banning tools would be nice.

neko
(who has actually never used any banning tools or been subjected to them, so take all this with a grain of sodium chloride....)

The only thing in this I am unsure on is the "ban whole groups" option. My reasons are severalfold:

1. For a serious griefer, leaving a group is a 2 second job (and similar to rejoin it after), so it provides no defence against serious grief attacks.
2. People may join groups who are already banned on certain sites without knowing, and as if you are banned from a palce it doesnt list in find they may miss out on aspects of SL without realiseing.
3. I has the potential to turn personal conflicts between 2 individuals into major ego battles (consider 2 club owners who dont like each other as individuals who each ban all the gropus related to the others clubs from their land)
4. And for me the major argument as to why this should never be done, is you are creating an instant bigotry tool. 50 groups is a sufficient list to get all major groups related to any subculture in SL you care to name (base it on nationality, sexuality, religion, ethnic group or whatever).

Other than that though I agree totally with the list. Although I would like to make 1 addition - make the effects of any ban/limited access go right up to the sky ceiling. At the moment bans do but group access only doesn't. Even if group access only is something that is only toggled for when under active grief attack, given the amount that skyboxes are used something that only goes 70m up is of limited value.

Like the ideas, but not feeling the Ban Entire Group... let me explain why.

You might have one or 2 or 3 people in a group acting like idiots and the wrong judgement can be made that ALL in that group are idiots.

In a former game I was part of a clan and when a few clan members (who I didnt even know) went out on a "Killing Spree" our entire clan was then hunted down by people who jumped to the conclusion that we were all trouble makers.

I say go by the person not the group to make a judgement.

I would object to that one. Many people use Alts for perfectly reasonably reasons, such as specific types of role-play. Also, some people find their original AV doesn't really meet their needs and move to a second more or less permanently. This approach would discriminate against lots of good people.

I assume what Nekokami means isn't ban anyone with 2 characters they mean if you ban a character all alts from the same account/ID should also be banned

Good idea. Added.



Good idea. Added.


I think if someone is banned on a parcel they cannot be heard on that parcel. I think LL have already put this in place, or they plan to soon. IIRC.



Thankfully most griefer attacks are done by confused newbies who are used to playing FPS games. Also, how would they know which group to leave, if they were not told it was a group ban, and couldn't get the land ban list to see which groups were banned? Ok, in practice they might just leave their griefer groups... but it still disrupts their ability to organise and enjoy team griefing (it's less fun to grief an area when you can't chat to your friends about it while it's going on in group IM).
The more serious problem is that griefer groups may become invisible. The solution to that is to make 'invisible' groups still appear in Search->groups and in the 'ban by group' boxes - but limit information about them to their name, number of members, and possibly their titles and charter. That'd provide enough information to ban them, without forcing secret groups to become public.
Oh, and needless to say, we need an option on the pie menu 'ban this person's active group' - for those times when (as happened to me yesterday) griefers come by in a team all wearing the same group tag.


Personally I think this is a good thing, because :
A) If they were told they were banned due to being a member of a certain group, then griefers would quickly get around it by forming new groups. So we can't really tell them.
B) Not telling them also avoids creating drama and whining and inter-group wars by keeping bans semi-secret.


Clubs run on traffic. I think it is much more likely that club owners would see people in other club groups and actively try to market their club towards those people in the hopes of getting those people to stay at *their* club more. If you're a business owner, and someone comes along who'se a member of a customer group in your industry, it is far more productive to think "someone who'se interested in products like mine, lets be extra nice to them!" than it is to think "they bought someone else's product, lets ban them from buying mine!". Very, very few companies ban potential customers if they buy someone else's product, and those companies that do, I would suspect, don't tend to last long!



There's a difference between creating bigotry and creating a tool that makes bigotry obvious.
In this case, if, say, group A hates group B, then any member of group B on group A's land is going to be treated badly anyway. If group A bans group B from their land... then group A feels better and more comfortable, and members of group B are saved the unpleasant experience of wandering into land they'd get treated badly on.
Example : most Gorean sims ban furries. Now, I can see a use for this in that Gorean sims could just put the main furry groups on their group ban list, and the result would be :
1) Gorean sims deal with a LOT less griefing or troublemaking by furries
2) furries don't take the chance that they'll wander into a place where they get treated very badly.

That is not to say that the Goreans have a moral advantage over the furries! I am *not* saying that it is always morally right to ban groups you don't like from your land. That is not what I'm saying at all.
What I am saying is : banning groups of people who'd get treated badly on your land anyway may save a lot of hassle, drama and potential griefing.
Therefore even if groups are banned for silly reasons... it does, potentially, work out better overall anyway in terms of its consequences of problem-avoidance


Personally I think that when someone has no access to a parcel, NOTHING anywhere on that parcel should rez for them. So if a parcel is group only, the skybox on it should not rez for anyone not in its group or auth list.

I also think you should be able to give access to your land to *multiple groups*.



Will that happen? Sure. But what's the alternative?
The alternative is that bad feeling persists in the community against members of that group, and the bad feeling is made worse by the fact that the land owners feel helpless to deal with it, so their resentment just simmers against that group.

At least if the land owners can ban by group, the group's members find out, eventually, either by asking the landowner or trial and error, that their group is banned. The result is that the problem of the few trouble-causing members of the group is eventually noticed.

I think that once major landowners have this happen to them once, a new 'rule of thumb' will spread throughout Second Life.
"Be careful about banning by group. If you do it, make sure that the avatars in that group you are banning are causing serious trouble, and that you have reason to think that most other avatars in that group would also cause you trouble. Make sure that the avatars are not just in that group to try and get it banned on your land! Make sure that they're representative of a bad group, not just bad people accidentally or on purpose sullying a good group".

Will that happen? Sure. But what's the alternative?
The alternative is that bad feeling persists in the community against members of that group, and the bad feeling is made worse by the fact that the land owners feel helpless to deal with it, so their resentment just simmers against that group.

At least if the land owners can ban by group, the group's members find out, eventually, either by asking the landowner or trial and error, that their group is banned. The result is that the problem of the few trouble-causing members of the group is eventually noticed.

I think that once major landowners have this happen to them once, a new 'rule of thumb' will spread throughout Second Life.
"Be careful about banning by group. If you do it, make sure that the avatars in that group you are banning are causing serious trouble, and that you have reason to think that most other avatars in that group would also cause you trouble. Make sure that the avatars are not just in that group to try and get it banned on your land! Make sure that they're representative of a bad group, not just bad people accidentally or on purpose sullying a good group".

This is the first time I post here aswell. But I gotta agree that we must somehow stop the greifers and spammers from ruining the experience of SL for others. >_<! So I vote yes for this proposal.

*Both thumbs up!*

Sorry, still think banning by group is not a smart idea. You are in a sense griefing others who are innocent when you are saying you want to stop griefers.
You are also setting SL up to be targeted for the "ism's". By that I mean raceism, sexism, ect... and allowing for more potential griefing.
I'm ALL FOR being able to restrict an individual person from being able to harass, attack, pester, grief or in any other way disturb someone.. but stop the person who's the problem don't make it worse.

It's unfortunate but true - targetting via "isms" already happens, both manually and automatically.
It is trivial for a sim owner to join a bunch of groups full of people they do not like, then rez auto-return orbs next to the sim telehub, which send anyone with the same active group as them home. This is almost as effective as banning the group from the sim. Ok, the sim owner/manager has to join the groups for a few seconds to deed the objects, but even if they're ejected later this does not matter as the objects remain deeded. Further, I doubt it counts as ToS violations as estate owners have the right to ban anyone they wish from their sim.

The reasons I'm proposing bans by group are :
1) there ARE quite a few groups in SL which seem to exist pretty much solely for the purpose of being annoying to other people. It'd be SO nice to be able to ban members of these groups.
2) there are many places which frequently have culture clashes with other groups - e.g. Goreans vs Furries. The fact that each can go to the others' areas, and there are many members of both groups (though, I think way more Furries then Goreans), creates a lot of opportunity for greifing and unpleasantness to occur. If they had the *option* on *their own land* of excluding the other group, life might be a lot more pleasant for both.
3) My hope is that a lot of people who currently harass people of certain groups will instead switch to just banning those groups on their own land. It avoids conflict, is within their rights as landowners anyway, and hopefully, when they see the drop in traffic that results, they will be encouraged to reconsider.

Currently, social exclusion is hard to see in SL, and people who do it often do it wherever they go. Banning by groups would hopefully encourage a line to be drawn which says it's ok to exclude other groups from your own land, but you should be nice to other people when you go their place, or you should avoid going there. I hope banning by groups will result in a lot of people making prejudicial judgements and banning that way - only to find that they suffer bad reputation as a result. I hope, in effect, that it brings prejudice out into the open, because out in the open, it can be seen, and thus prejudiced individuals will lose reputation/traffic. By this method, allow prejudice to be expressed makes it a visible target people can react to and thus helps us fight against prejudice, and helps land/group owners see the negative effects prejudice has and thus encourage them to stop using it.
Using group bans for prejudicial reasons thus has in-built negative consequences, that encourage their use for griefer and troublemaker exclusion only.

I think the end point is that what we are all saying is the current tools and restrictions are inadequate to deal with griefing in SL. We may disagree with some of the finer points as to how best to achieve it (in my case particularly on the bans of groups - I don't see anything that makes it easier to be bigoted in SL as a step forward - but then I have always been a bit of a naive idealist) but the current tools are not adequate to deal with the issues, especially at more popular places which get targetted more.

Since there's a sim limit of 40 avs in most sims, if there were better scripting controls on ban lists you'd be able to get everything you need with a script that maintained a bigger ban list and automatically added (and if necessarily ejected) people on that list when they were detected.

I'm not sure if it's feasible to have a script manipulate estate-level bans.
If it was, I'd definately support that, as it'd effectively be a way for estate owners to grant 'can manage security' permissions to others via use of the ban orb. Good idea, but I'm not sure if it's possible. If it is, sure I might add that to the original proposal.

I already have a proposal to allow scripted invite and eject from group functions, but the proposals are on hold due to technical problems. I imagine group ban management would fall into the same category of "not possible right now, lets work on other stuff and come back to this later".

Any other functions that would qualify as 'better scripting', apart from add to estate ban, remove from estate ban, add to group ban, remove from group ban?

Group bans are already possible for island owners, I don't know why it's so hard to enable it for property owners.

As for group banning, if someone doesn't like who I've banned, they don't have to come to my parcel.

The truth is that there are already groups out there that are pretty much exclusively made up of griefers and asshats. For instance, given group bans, I'd almost certainly ban *all* mafia groups from my land. If people want to play at that that's totally up to them, but it should be up to me to say, "Your playground doesn't include *my* land."

I think it's *totally* legitimate to judge people by the company that they keep. It's *not* like racism or nationalism. No one put a gun to their had and said, "Hey, you *have* to join the Obnoxious Asshats of SL group." they made that choice on their own.

And even if it's for other things, is it so wrong for someone to decide that they don't want members of bdsm groups, or furry groups, or Gor groups or whatever on their land? (Keeping in mind that I'm a member of one of those groups mentioned.) *I* certainly don't have an issue with it. In fact, I'd be quite pleased to have away of avoiding someone who's willing to shut me out for that.

Well, a ban by group is not going to result in people being hunted down, not in SL, and anyone who depends on trafic to sell or whatever is likely to be shooting themselves in the foot if they ban too widely.

As for me, I already judge people IRL by the company they choose to keep, I think that most people do. I don't see anything wrong with extending the ability to individuals to do the same in SL.

Point one was already addressed, so I'll skip it.

Point two...world will get around that if you want to see all of SL you don't join a group with a reputation for griefing or whatever, and people who want to attract traffic are not likely to ban indiscriminantly. Also, islands are, so far as I know, already allowed to ban by group, and we haven't seen a problem with it.

Point three...In the example you give, if I club owner did something like this I'd see it as a *good* thing, because it would most likely kill their club, and anyone who's that egotistical and short sighted probably shouldn't be running a club anyway. As for the more general point, I actually see it as being more likely to cool down conflicts, since it would tend to enforce seperation of groups with conflicts, thus reducing the oportunity for drama.

Point four...if someone is enough of a bigot to want to ban me for belonging to a group based on sexuality, religion, nationality, etc., then I'm personally *happy* to know in advance that I'm not wanted so that I can avoid *them*.

This is *really* wearing thin.
I just had two griefers come by my sim, sit on the top of a club, repeatedly grief pretty much everyone in shout range... it only stopped when I overheard a shout, came by, and they tried to grief me. Being sim owner, that did not last long.

The real kicker is that they were in the group "Human", which, I kid you not, has the officer/member titles "HELLO I AM GRIEFING". Seriously. Look it up in find->groups!

Why, oh why, can we not ban everyone in groups like that from our estates?
I mean, the entire point of the group is to be a place for griefers... remember the old "Griefers Anonymous" group?

That is the second time in a few DAYS I have had an organised group of griefers drop by my sim, organised by the group system where they had their own group.

Seriously. The only way to deal with this properly is to :
1) be able to ban by group.
2) be able to share bans amongst estates. Lots of estates.
3) have bans affect alt accounts.

why are you so set on baning some one from crossing your land ; the main reason i am in sl is to fly and you are ruining flying cross country sight seeing trips