Estate Admins Need Group Ban Ability

Hello, I just got done fighting a war against the terrorist/racist/homophobe/antifurry group Patriotic Nigras, an offshoot of the 7chan griefing organization. Had I not received key intelligence from someone including a list of most of their names, I would have lost this war and my sims would be shattered wrecks. As it was, i had to spend a couple hours before hand entering each name to the estate ban list, one by one by hand. There is no means to simply load a list of names, nor is there a means to ban people by group affiliation. Doing this during a surprise griefer attack, when there may be dozens of griefers in your estate, over many sims, is pretty impossible without a large organization of spotters reporting the names of griefers to you reliably (and not mistakenly reporting innocents as griefers). I had such an organization, and good intelligence ahead of time warning me of imminent attack. Most people are not so lucky, and their sims go down easily under a storm of griefing.

Having the ability to do both of these things would go a long way to improving sim administrators abilities to combat griefing more effectively, both in banning griefer avs, but also in returning all scripted objects of griefers.

Which is the other weakness: having to return scripted objects by avatar, one by one. We need the ability to add a list of names, or a group name, in order to mass return the already planted scripted objects of griefers.

Most griefer groups are invisible. This means you can't find them in search->groups, and you don't see them show up in the profiles of griefer accounts.

This means that you can't tell when griefers are members of a griefer group unless you have inside information... and you can't select their group from drop-down lists easily.


Personally, I quite like the fact that we can't ban by group - because at least this means that griefers don't go to as much trouble to hide their groups, and usually we can go into the group panel and manually add bans for their members. Unfortunately if we gain the 'ban by group' ability, then they will make their groups invisible and we won't know about them anymore to ban them.

Good point, Angel, however my mass-add idea still stands as useful. Time counts during a griefer attack, and being able to load a list of names at once, both to estate ban list, as well as the 'return all avatars scripted objects' function, is very useful to stopping an attack in its tracks.

Mass upload to banlist is a great idea.

For parcel and estate bans, it would help a ton with synching ban lists, and during griefer raids.

One of the most useful things for island owners would be the ability to put a bunch of names in a notecard, then upload this notecard as is.... any names on the notecard :
1) have all their objects, scripted and unscripted, returned/deleted on all estates owned or managed by the uploader
2) are estate banned on all estates owner or managed by the uploader.

That'd be sweet.

Oh and SLBanLink.com should have a feature where the ban function takes a LIST of names, and a reason, and bans all the names for the reason given.

On Group Bans
~~~~~~~~~~

It takes time ~and money~ to set up a group. It should cost me nothing to say "Right, I know ~that~ group is a bunch of people I don't want." and ban them. It isn't going to cure all the second-world's evils but it would be useful.

On SL User Interface
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I WISH that damn tiny 4 line ban-list box would 1> be expandable!! 2> alphabetise the entries!! 3> Skip forward through the list as I type to find someone!! 4> allow me to add more than one person at once through the pick list!!

The ban lists were created for a world without open registration. Not a bash at open reg; but the world IS a different place because of it and the tools have NOT caught up.

On Returning Items
~~~~~~~~~~~~

Give us the ability to return all objects belonging to person X from ~all~ estates that I manage. Yes! not just the current sim, not just the estate, ALL ESTATES I MANAGE. And, give me that ability for accounts that are disabled and don't appear in search. The Lindens did such a fast job of killing the last lot of griefers, I couldn't pick their names up to mass return their scripted objects!

Without open reg this would be pointless. With open reg this would be a god send.


Address the Root Cause
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Most importantly -- reduce or eliminate the ability for griefer guns to crash sims or overload them. It's the same reason my car has a rev limited and my house has circuit breakers. My car should never have to do 20,000rpm and my house never needs to draw 5000amps, so why should a sim ever be expected to cope with 2000 physical objects? (Or any other conditions that predictably kill sims!!)

Oh, I agree it would be useful *now*. There are several groups *now* that I'd quite like to ban from all sims I own/manage:
* YTMND
* w-hat
* CAKE
* Human
* Concerned Griefers of America
.... in short, several of the major groups that a lot of griefers use.

Problem is that if LL put in a 'ban by group' feature, then:
1) Most of the major griefer groups would suddenly turn into invisible groups, and thus, we'd have no idea that the people attacking us all belonged to that group. As a result, we wouldn't know to ban the group.
2) New avenues of griefing would open up, where a few people join a controversial group and then grief places trying to get the whole group banned.

I'm not saying ban-by-group isn't helpful.
I'm just saying that it'd get a lot *less* helpful after it was put in place, because it would probably result in a lot of useful information hiding from the public's (read: the law abiding admin's) eye.



1) good idea
2) great idea
3) great idea
4) great idea

Agreed also re: changed world.



Several good ideas here :
1) Return prims from ALL ESTATES I MANAGE, not just the region/estate I'm on.
2) Return both scripted and unscripted objects.
3) The ability to select disabled accounts, so we can cleanup after griefers.

The one thing I'm not sure about is the Lindens doing a good job in dealing with griefers. From what I have seen they are definitely doing *better* than they were, however, in my experience the way they deal with griefers has several flaws.
Examples :
1) I've heard that they have a massive backlog of ARs to deal with, because they no longer penalize people for filing silly ARs like "my GF used an animation to slap me with a trout, this is assault!". IMHO they should make it clear when they reject a useless AR, and give the filer some information on what a useful AR looks like, in order to encourage residents to file useful ARs, and cut down on the amount of junk they get.
2) I've seen that they ignore some kinds of evidence that would be useful, such as what is posted on 3rd party websites. I can understand that they do not want to take a 3rd party website content as gospel, as people may lie or try to frame others. What I cannot understand is that they seem to refuse to look at it at all, even when it could serve as useful evidence, or at least a way to narrow down their search.
3) I've heard that they refuse to take action against those people who support griefers - e.g. accounts that exist as weapons depots to equip incoming griefer alts. They seem to have this policy on the basis that it is legal for someone to own a sim-crashing gun, and legal for them to pass it to someone else, but not legal for them to fire it. So they are welcome to equip incoming griefers with sim-crashing guns - heck, they're welcome to make alts with the entire purpose of arming griefers prior to griefing attacks - so long as they don't fire it themselves. I can understand they don't want to ban everyone who has WMDs, as some people may be upstanding citizens... but I do think they should target the 'suppliers' in-world.
4) LL never seem to pay much attention to 3rd party websites which are used as a base for attacking SL as a whole or specific sims in SL. I can understand that they are VERY busy and don't want to waste their time, but IMHO a 'please take this site down, it is facilitating a DoS against our system' type letter from LL's abuse department / legal team could go a long way in some cases, and even save LL money as they wouldn't have to pay people to fix the damage griefers cause, and could have more happy residents.

I'm just a resident who has to deal with some griefing. I do not know much about the inner workings of LL's abuse team. The above is based on a small amount of experience, and glosses over some significant exceptions (such as it being against ToS to own a sim crashing gun that uses an exploit to crash sims).

So, take the above with a pinch of salt.
Nevertheless, I still do think it would be interesting to take a look at the internals of how LL does handle ARs and such, to see if it could be improved. One of the major things I'd like to see is more accountability. A short, simple response of "thank you, this person has now been permanently banned from Second Life" given to the filers of ARs which cause that respose would go a long way, IMHO, to making residents feel that the AR system works.
I know LL have privacy objections to giving us much information, but I do think that they should tell us when someone has been permanently banned as a result of ARs. That would really, really help motivate people to file ARs.



Common sense good idea.
Perhaps a limit on the number of physical objects on a sim?
I don't know what sort of limit we could have that would stop replicators without killing artificial life projects, but the limit on physical prims seems to be much easier. Perhaps a limit on physical prims that can be changed by EMs, so it doesn't stop people using their sims the way they want to, but does provide scope for damage limiting in emergencies?

Most of the sim-crashing tools I've seen the griefers use depend on being able to create enough physical objects fast enough to overwhelm the server. Limiting the number of them on a sim to something the sim is guaranteed to be able to handle wouldn't limit normal day to day use in any way I can think of - even in combat sims, where bullets are rezzed dozens or hundreds of times per second wouldn't reach this limit, and we know this because it's possible to do it at all.

Limit physical objects in a sim and you take away one of the major thrills griefers have. When it stops being fun, the griefers lose interest, since most have the attention span of a gerbyl anyway.

I'm going to look through the feature votes and see if I can find this, and vote for it if it's there.