Eject To Gor

A great new land owner feature!

The current parcel ejection feature is really sort of discourteous to your neighbors.

Some jerk shows up causes YOU trouble, and you eject him out of your parcel and right into your neighbors? How rude!

I propose we add a new feature called EJECT TO GOR, which when used, sends whoever your problem is to which ever Gor sim/City has space.

I feel this is an effective means to no longer grief your neigbors by protecting yourself..and it gets the people that should probably be in Gor where they need to be at the same time thusly saving much time and trouble for everyone!

EJECT TO GOR! Its an awesome feature that landowners need today!

Feature suggestions is best used for constructive topics......

Okay with that bit of early morning humor done, honestly, parcel management for controlling griefers is woefully underfeatured.

Ejecting them from your parcel causes problems for other people.

There needs to be a point where these people can be ejected to where the Lindens have control.

Cause a guy using some kind of avatar blocking weapon can still clear the sim even if I've ejected him from my rather large part of it.

Some thoughts on this should be considered.

Read above. It is a constructive topic. Its just designed to make you laugh. Try it out.

Ha

Ha ha

Ha ha ha.

See? Not so hard.

Right now we can "TP home" the griefer.
Since most grefiers are new alt acounts, there home position is...

I think it's the welcome area.

IMHO we shouldn't make jokes about this... Gor sims get griefed too, and IMHO our best chance of stopping griefing is by working together by doing things such as pushing for better security tools for landowners and using banlist-sharing systems such as BanLink.
I know that many security people would love better security tools in SL and also enjoy jokes which keep their mood up even when they have to deal with nasty people on a daily basis.

IMHO though, the idea of an "eject to Gor" feature is insulting to Goreans because it suggests that :
1) while neighbours should not have to put up with griefers, it's ok to force the Goreans to have to deal with them.
2) sending someone to a Gor sim is a kind of punishment.

IMHO we should not insult Goreans. I know, many of us really dislike their culture and what we think they sand for. Yet, they do own a lot of land in SL, and they are a serious subculture by themselves. I'm not trying to defend Gor here at all, I'm simply saying that if we want to slow down griefing, then we should work together.

IMHO, putting differences aside and working together to solve a problem is a better approach.

We need a "TP to deadzone" then, a nice white cube with no-one in it that could easily be done client-side (the effect, they'd still be in a sim but removed from the world). They can TP out again after a time, instant to begin with, but with a longer wait the more you get sent there.

And yes, naming it "Eject to Gor", even jokingly, is not nice at all. It would be just the same as saying "Eject to Furnation", furries are perfectly nice people, we try to be friendly but also hate griefers
Let's just have an "Eject to Suzanna Soyinka's house" instead

I don't have a house, I have a 20k traffic a day city. And not a single camping chair in the place...go figure.

Anyways, one of the reasons I felt Eject to Gor was good was because Goreans are equipped to deal with people on a 1 to 1 basis when it comes to armed intervention.

Griefers in general are usually gun buffs/weapon buffs, sending them to Gor puts them in a place where the culture of violence is accepted as a roleplay fact of life.

So not only does it put said griefer somewhere where they can be effectively dealt with on their own terms...it also gives them a taste of something that might interest them...and give them a way to externalize their violent tendancies in a roleplay atmosphere.

While the intent of the post is humorous, the content of it is benign and fairly well thought out and I think you're all assuming far too much on my behalf.

And I don't have an option to teleport anyone home. Eject/Eject and Ban and Cancel are the options I've got.

The goal of a griefer is not to have a 1 on 1 fight with someone of equal fighting skill. If it was, then some warriors (both Gorean and not) would kick their asses.

The goal of a griefer is to cause maximum disruption. Thus, sending them to Gor would run rather like this :
1) Griefer is sent to Gor.
2) Someone approaches the Griefer and says hello.
3) Griefer goes 'wtf r u? did u boot me? lol"
4) Person says "(we don't use textspeak here))"
5) Griefer says "fuk u", and nukes the sim.

Sad, but I expect that is what would probably happen.
So sending griefers to anywhere populated is generally a bad idea.

A function that *really* deterred griefers would be something like :
1) TP them to a random sim in the middle of the desert.
2) Set some flag on their account such that they can't TP anywhere until they've spent at least 15 minitues in this desert/void/jail sim. The whole sim would have scripts and build off, too, so all they'd have to do would be chat with other griefers about how they got busted.

Unfortunately, this proposal, like many others, is completely unworkable, because :
1) it is prone to abuse by landowners/security systems.
2) it *encourages* the griefers to get together and work together.
3) it would require a bunch of time to implement and some people would be (rightly) unhappy about it to the point of deliberately abusing it themselves just to make a point.

The problem with dealing with griefing is that on the one hand, we want the griefer to go 'far away from us', but on the other hand, we don't want to just shift the burden to the neighbours next door. That's why I like systems like BanLinkas they can set up a sort of exclusion zone which prevents the griefer getting close to the place they wanted to grief.
IMHO the 3 things most needed to prevent griefing are :
1) better resident co-operation on security (e.g. more people using BanLink). Seriously. Us residents have no hope of stopping griefing while griefers can simply hop from parcel to parcel because it takes awhile for them to get banned on each parcel.
2) better tools to exclude griefers from land (e.g. the ones inprop 1632). One especially needed tool is the ability for bans to affect alts. I'm tired of seeing people evade bans using alts. That has to stop - bans should be treated as being set on a *person*, not an account, and thus if a person is banned all their alts should be too.
3) better tools to determine an avatar's investment/accountability in SL. Meaning, something like an optional sponsorship program so that people could start using "deny those who are unverified and unsponsored". In short, ways to stop newbies being suspected of being griefers when they're not. Easy, social ways of making accounts less disposable.




I'd love there to be some kind of global way to deal with griefers that us residents could use and see the visible effects of,

I think "Eject to Rausch" would be a bit more use. You want to shoot at people? Okay, fine, see how long you last with your freebie cagegun there.

Eject to cornfield.

Or maybe just get llTeleportAgent() implemented properly, and call llTeleportAgent( llDetectedGriefer(), "Cornfield", <128,128,768>;

Eject to cornfield would be very similar to my 'eject to desert' idea, except that :
1) I'd *guess* the cornfield is actually an island somewhere, which means that people couldn't *fly* out of it.
2) I think if someone is suspended, they login with their home as the cornfield... however, if someone is sent there by eject, they either won't be able to leave (as they never get 'unsuspended' to trigger leaving) or they will always be able to leave by using the 'login at' menu on the startup screen.
3) I think the cornfield is only a punishment given to white-collar criminals. People who grief are not white-collar, they are involved in a violent offence. Thus, suspensions/bans would be used for them instead.


I'm not sure the whole cornfield idea would work... they'd just relog under another throaway alt. Why should they bother serving out their time in the cornfield, or anywhere else, when they can just relog as another alt (creating one if needed) within 60 seconds, and ignore their punishment?

To really be able to punish griefers seriously, two assumptions need to be changed.
First, the assumption that bans are placed on an account. They're not. When I ban someone from my land, I don't want to ban their account, or their avatar, or even their name. I want to ban *them*. I want to ban the person behind the keyboard. Until LL notices this and provides us tools to ban a person *and their alts*, then bans will be no more than a slap on the wrist.
Second, the assumption that bans are very local. SL is a big place, and even if a griefer could never return somewhere after being banned there (assuming that bans affected all their alts too, magically)... this won't matter to the griefer, because SL is so big there are always more places they can grief. So, to really deter griefing, we need systems like BanLink which enable the sharing of ban lists so that if someone griefs one place, they get banned from many places.

Enabling bans to affect alts is a tricky idea that Torley and others have commented on in the past. Accounts with the same credit card info on file are clearly alts, but what about accounts that login from the same IP address, hardware hash, or MAC? Family computers share the same IP (as do some friends who live together, or even some dialup users). Identical computers (pre-packaged deals from major companies like Dell) might share the same hardware hash, unless some unique serial is included to separate them. MAC spoofing is easy for anyone who knows how to do it.

Plus there is the whole privacy issue. Assume you have two accounts, 'A' and 'B'. You want to find out of these two accounts are alts. So you ban 'A' and invite B onto your land, making sure that you only have one ban on the land, and the ban is set for 'A'. Now, the result of this is that if B can come to your land, then you know they're probably not an alt of A, but if they can't then you know the reverse. Or at least you have as much of an idea if they're alts as LL is willing to use in their "banning alts" system.
Sneaky people could and would use this to figure out who the alts of a person are. Not necessarily Lindens (it wouldn't work against Lindens, because Lindens are probably able to ignore all bans anyway), but it would work against residents. This could be a disaster for resident privacy.

Unfortunately... without this measure, bans are pretty much useless because anyone with 5 minitues to create an alt can evade them. The only way to stop this is to ban unverified residents from your land. Something like the 'sponsorship' proposal could help make this less bad by banning those who are unverified AND unsponsored. Unfortunately that wouldn't help that much either, because it still means that fundamentally, you have no way of detecting alts.

LL can't give us the tools to check if residents A and B are alts of each other, because that would violate privacy. But unless they give us these tools, then bans are never more than a slap on the wrist for griefers, because they can always create an alt. Many people don't trust LL to even read, let alone act on, abuse reports.... so they don't bother sending them and the griefing continues.

What should we do? IMHO the best way would be for bans to affect alts of the person banned... if the ban list for the estate or parcel contains at least 25 entries, and the entry for the person banned is at least a week old. Or maybe a special ban reason could be given to those who are alt-banned, warning them not to tell the landowner they are alt-banned in case this surrenders their privacy.

The question of privacy vs security is a tough one, but I think I'm going to side with security, given :
1) the volume of griefing we have to deal with.
2) the fact even with this proposal there are ways of keeping privacy (e.g. check if your alt is on a parcel ban list ifyou're banned, and if so, don't complain about that to the landowner)..... yet without this proposal there are no ways that I've seen of keeping security from alt-griefing. We've tried ARs, and the response I get from many people after advising them to file ARs is "they're a waste of time, LL won't do anything". What we have now is a Linden-run system which many Residents don't believe is working very well. What we really need is a resident-run system that *can* stop alt-griefing.


Or at least, that's one line of argument. I can see some flaws... but at first glance it seems pretty convincing to me.

LL can make it possible to ban alts without revealing whether someone is an alt by using my sponsorship proposal, and without having a "circle of bans" spread exponentially where people share computers.

If you ban someone, naturally you would ban everyone sharing the same sponsor (and the sponsor themself)... so bans might be a little broader than they need be, but on the balance I think that's not so broad as to be a problem, and it's not so broad as linking machine IDs under the covers cold become. And by making it known that bans are potentially quite broad AND involve people who have no closer relationship than a common friend sponsoring both of them you make the confidence that both A and B in your example are alts significantly less.

<edit: actually, I think I must have been in a very bad mood at the time>

Sorry Ordinal, but I was a sysadmin in a past life. As you probably know, the law states that we have to surrender our sense of humour when we sign up to take on the job. I did, and mine was placed in a very shiny preservation jar at company HQ. Unfortunately I died whilst on the job in that life, when I hard a heart attack upon seeing a DNS root server running an unpatched version of Windows 95. Naturally this so disturbed my soul as a sysadmin that I couldn't rest in peace, and was doomed to haunt computers all over the world for about 10 years, during which time I tried to persuade people to switch away from windows by making their comptuers crash inexplicably. This was not appreciated by the powers at be, and they cursed me with the ultimate computer horror - being forced to be the living personification of 'Clippy' for a year. After that, I learnt my lesson, and was ready to be reincarnated again. Unforunately, my soul was still completely without a sense of humour, so, naturally I was reincarnated as a traffic cop. That life was brought to a close after a short time, although I did earn a place on American TV as they tried to locate the killer. The powers that be considered that things had been tough for me up to this point, so they decided to reincarnate me as a Second Life resident, a ghost in the system. This is also the reason why I'm a cross between a wolf and an angel. They thought it'd be the starting point for finding my sense of humour again. They figured this because, in their words "if your face when you see yourself as a human/wolf/angel cross isn't funny, I don't know what is". I still don't know what they meant by that, but, as I say, I'm working on it.

---

Serious stuff below...

I like Argent's idea for banning based on who sponsored a person... however... I worry that there are still two problems for the sponsorship proposal :

1) There doesn't seem to be any incentive for a paying user to sponsor someone else. Why should they sponsor others if they get nothing when the sponsored person behaves well, but are potentially punished if they behave badly? If nobody has an incentive to sponsor others, then the effect of this will be that a lot of work goes into putting the sponsorship program in place, but few people use it.

2) Banning "X and who sponsored them" (type A) or "X and those they have sponsored" (type B), or "X's sponsor and everyone else they have sponsored" (type C) is still prone to abuse by alts. It is prone to abuse in at least two ways. Firstly, someone can simply get a paid account and ban evade using that. Heck, if bans on sponsorship work in the type C way, all a person has to do is put pay info on file and end their sponsorship in order to be unbanned. If someone is banned, they should never be able to get out of the ban simply by putting payment info on file and ending their relationship with their sponsor. The second way that this can be gamed is by people simply relying on, say, newbies with payment info on file to sponsor them. In short : getting sponsorship from clueless people... there may even be a black market of 'sponsorships, $5', generated by people who don't care about their paid accounts (they take the money, cash out and leave SL on that account, say).
In order to stop this, you need to make the penalties associated with the sponsorship system quite harsh. Doing this increases LL admin overhead and makes the whole system vulnurable to problem #1 above.

Not saying that sponsorship is a bad idea. I'm just saying I don't think it's a replacement for a 'ban X and their alts' system. Maybe a supplement, but not a replacement.

What I'm suggesting is an extension of the referral program, so when you sponsor someone you're also their referrer. When they upgrade to premium, you get a bonus.

Not to mention that some folks are also interested in supporting their friends, or even helping people.

That's true, but that was always true, even before the first "free" accounts were created. Someone could get a new unused credit card and pay $10.00 for a new account on it to evade bans. The current problem isn't that someone can pay money (a couple of times, at least, until they run out of cards) and get around a ban, it's that they can do it for free with nothing at risk.

The only change is that instead of an "unused" card, you get an "untainted" card... and even with cheap anonymous debit cards that makes each "griefer alt" cost a minimum of $16.00 between the card fee and the account fee, plus in most cases an additional monthly surcharge.

I don't understand what your "part C way" is. What I'm talking about is:

The person is banned from the parcel.

If the person is sponsored, then the sponsor and everyone else sharing the same sponsor are also banned from that parcel.

If the person is a sponsor, then all their sponsored accounts are banned from that parcel.

If you are banned from a parcel, and you become a premium account (and end your sponsorship) or you get another sponsor, you are still banned from that parcel, and so are your new sponsor (or, if you upgraded, anyone you sponsor).

Yes, I'm sure that all these things will happen, but LL doesn't need to do anything about it, any more than they "had to do" anything about third party trades in Lindens, or any of the other resident businesses in and out of SL that trade in SL-based resources... these schemes are all self-correcting because a sponsor who has a number of "problem" accounts is self-punished. Even if he doesn't care about hos account on SL, the people he's sponsored will suffer from the fact that his account has become tainted, and he will be unable to attract much on the sponsorship market.

It's not a "replacement" for 'ban X and their alts'. Rather it's a form of 'ban X and their alts' that's more workable than the current ad-hoc combination of machine IDs and artificial limits, and without the potential privacy issues.

IMHO, it is simply not fair that I have better security options when I rent a cheap colo server than I do when I own a bunch of SL islands.
I pay many, many times more for the SL islands, yet I have almost zero ability to ban griefers and other troublemakers from them. The most I can do is ban their account, yet they can create a new one in 5 minitues. Even if I ban all unverifieds (which I don't want to do), they can still just pay a tiny fee to LL to give them a new account, then ban evade using that.

See my problem?
I'm paying a lot of money for the ability to run islands in SL. Yet, despite the amount I pay, I still do not have even the basic ability to exclude a specific person from the resources I have paid for. I know it's hard to ban people on the internet - IPs, MACs, emails.... they all change. I've been an IRC operator for years. I know it's much harder than you'd think.

Still, I'm very annoyed that I'm paying so much to LL, yet they don't even offer basic banning by IP address. I know, I know, privacy issues.... but really, that excuse is simply not good enough.
If they gave us the ability to ban people by MAC, IP, email and sponsor/referrer, that would be a great start. They wouldn't have to give us the information, there could just be a checkbox : "ban all IPs this person has used to connect to SL", or "ban any account with the same email address", or "ban anyone using this person's MAC".

I know it might be technically difficult. I know there are other proposals.

Just for a minitue though, imagine my frustration when my land gets attacked by teams of organised griefers, and the most I can do is ban their accounts. They can get back there within 5 minitues using alts and there isn't a single thing I can do about it short of closing up my public space and making all access to it invite only. Even then they could create new alts and lie their way in, then grief, leave, and repeat.

The security tools in SL are so far below adequate it isn't even a joke. Most people don't have to worry about such things because most people don't get griefed so much. But, for the few of us who own VERY popular locations, or large amounts of land.... it is a frequent problem for us.

I'm thinking of posting a question in Linden Answers...
"Why can't landowners ban residents from their land via their IP addresses and/or MAC addresses? This is important, given that bans based on IP address are common in almost every other corner of the internet... from websites to IRC chat rooms. Currently, the most we landowners can do is ban an account, and that can never be more than a slap on the wrist given how easy it is to create a new account (with or without payment info). Why are we, SL residents, denied this very basic ability to keep alt-using griefers off our land? Server admins can do it, and they pay very little compared to what us island owners pay to LL in land tier on a monthly basis. Webmasters can do it, and they can host for only a few dollars a month. IRC channel admins can do it, and they get their hosting from the major networks for free! How does LL justify charging us so much, yet not allowing us to protect what we paid for? I know you may care about resident privacy... but the fact is, you could allow us to "ban this resident and the IP addresses they have used", or "ban any resident with the same email as this one" or "ban any resident with the same MAC as this one".... and this could be done in a way that doesn't surrender resident privacy. So.... why isn't it? I know you guys have a lot on your plate, but we're paying you very serious money here, and we deserve more than the current ban/eject security system, which due to the ease of creating new accounts, can never be more than a slap on the wrist."


I know I'm not responding directly to Argent's points. I'm trying to draw attention to the fact that island owners pay huge amounts of money to LL yet don't get as much control over their expensive islands as many people get on free chat services like IRC. It's not fair to charge us a fortune but not even give us the basic tools present in free environments.

From what I know, true on all counts.
Though the Cornfield isn't technically an island. It's a single isolated sim (meaning you can't TP to it from the world even if you could find it, and when there the world map doesn't show the rest of the grid).

This would actually be a punishment for most people, furries included. D:

Nah. Just take the old Satyr sim that recently got confiscated from Voted 5, make it so it's a grid unto itself, with NO access to any other sim, and take all the gun toting, bomb-throwing, self-replicating object launching griefers and dump them there every time they log it.

You can call the new sim Hell...

Let then shoot at each other. Not us.

*smirk*

Ban them to a hell of their own making...

Good in theory.... but here's the rub.... either that sim is set no script, or it isn't.
If it is, you might as well suspend/ban them from SL, as being confined to a no-script sim takes away much of the point of SL.
If it isn't, then those griefers may come up with some way to attack the asset servers even from that 'jail' sim.

Good reason to only use Cornfield for white-collar crimes.