Time limit on land bans

How does having a time limit on land bans sound, like, if the land owner hasn't logged in in, oh, three months, their land bans expire?

I would support this at a month, provided it applied to group owners logging in for group land.

Yep, that's a good idea.

I agree with Banking Laws here for once - and would even suggest that a visit from *anyone* who's permitted on the land should count to keep the controls live. But three months is too long. Weekly wouldn't be too short. If NOBODY in your group or access list visits your land even once a week, then you almost certainly don't need them.

Somehow, this idea does not sit well with me, for two reasons.

1) First Reason : it violates landowner rights
Landowners *pay* for their land.
So long as they pay for it, they have the right to restrict access to it in any way they choose.
If they go on vacation for 3 months, then presumably they still pay for the land (if they don't, then they lose it due to non-payment). Given that they are still paying for the land and the rights to the land, how is it fair to go against their wishes?

2) Second Reason : it lacks utility
What, exactly, would be gained from doing this? Seriously. What good would come of such a feature? It seems to me it would involve tracking who visits what land (db load), for the purpose of isolating when landowners were not using their land, and had bans, and were in the window between the time they stop using it and the time they leave SL.
The only case this seems not to apply to is Charter accounts (people who get 4096sqm free tier for life). Their land stays there forever... however.... they also PAID for it to stay there forever, there are not many of them. Is it really worth LL's time making a feature that violates landowner rights AND has such limited application?

yes, If I ban someone, I want that ban to stay, forever, in perpetuity, irreversible and irrevokable until the end of SL. Thats like saying if you go on an extended vacation, your house automatically becomes open to the public. Nobody *needs* access to my land, they lose nothing by not being able to access my land, why should their ability to access my land override my wishes at any time?

.. just let the landowner or his/her designates set the timeout for the ban? Three days, three weeks, forever - it should be the landowner's choice, not hardcoded.

No rights are unlimited. There are many limitations on landowner rights, and some of them are the rights of the landowner next door. I pay for my land, why should I suddenly start being hurled across the sim because lag made me wander into their ban lines across a sim border?
If neither they nor anyone they know visits their land, then they are not in any way hurt because their ban lines went off a week after they went on vacation until they came back.

SL is full of parcels where someone has set up ban lines and then NEVER come back. We had one parcel like that next door to us for SIX MONTHS. For six months I had to keep a prim wall up on one side of my property, and I had to abandon my airstrip construction because the only take-off route was over the banned parcel.

I'm not talking about taking down explicit bans against specific people if those bans are not used, I'm talking about those global "everyone but members of my group and these three friends" bans that are everywhere in SL these days.

If they never visit the land, there's nothing that can happen to it that ban lines will protect them from while they're gone. MOST people probably won;t even know... they'll come back, the lines will come up again, but while they're absent they;ll fade away and stop throwing people across the grid, destroying airplanes, disabling teleporters, and otherwise screw up the grid.

And it'll cut down the load on the sim by cutting down the number of things it has to check against.

And it'd be cheap to implement. Just keep a record of the last time someone was allowed into the parcel (the access check it's performing already) and ignore the access control settings if that time is more than a week old. The time could be kept in the sim, it wouldn't have to touch the db at all.

I can sympathise with your predicament Argent. I used to own land on the mainland, before my neighbours annoyed me sufficiently I moved to islands. I was so happy I never looked back, and have never owned another sqm of mainland since.

If you can't bear to live near those who use access lines, why don't you do the same? Move to a private estate with a trustworthy owner who prohibits access lines. You might even save money by doing it, or make some money selling your mainland (given the price mainland sells for right now).

I can understand your frustration, but you did choose to live in an area where people have the right to put up access lines and leave them up till they lose the land. That's part of the way mainland works. If you don't like the rules of the neighbourhood, leave the neighbourhood for another one that has rules you like better?

It strikes me as a little unfair that you're essentially asking that ALL landowners on the mainland who paid good money for the right to have access lines forever should have to lose part of their rights.
You both bought into it knowing the rights you had (or, at any rate, had the opportunity to find out before you bought the land). You agreed to the rules when you both got the land... so, why change them now?

If you really don't like those rules, why not move to somewhere else that has rules you like?

I can sympathize with your situation - my neighbours back on the mainland made my life a pain too for the short time I had my store there. I was damn careful with how I picked my mainland parcel... and I still ended up with a lot of hassle.

It just seems a bit unfair to ask for the rules to be changed for everyone - because you signed up to something involving a set of rules you no longer like.

So....despite the fact that nicotine is one of the most addictive substances on earth we can't ban cigarets because the complanies have already invested a fortune in the product?

1) Cigarettes are addictive. SL is arguably less addictive
2) Cigarettes are single use. You have to keep buying more of them to keep using them. With land you buy it once and pay the upkeep to keep the rights you had when you bought it. Stopping the future sale of cigarettes is one thing. Selling someone a cigarette and then changing the rules so they can't smoke it is something else.
3) There is a difference between banning the *sale* of a product (e.g. banning the sale of cigs), and restricting how a product can be *used*. In the land case it is a question of justifying the act of reducing the rights of landowners after they have paid for the land on the assumption that they will get a certain set of rights as a result. The cig case is talking about stopping the sales of a type of product, whereas the land case is talking about restricting what can be done with a product after purchase.
4) There is a difference between the seller's investment and the buyers' investment. Banning cigs despite the companies already investing a lot of money is more like banning the sale of land after land dealers have bought the land. To construct a better analogy with cigs, you'd have to talk about restricting what cig smokers can do with the cigs they have bought after they have paid for them.

I'd support dropping global bans whenever nobody on the access list is signed in. What purpose do ban lines serve when nobody is around to benefit from the privacy?

If I owned a house and I banned somebody from it, I would rather not have them in my house whilst I was away, for the same reason that in RL I locked my door I wouldnt want people breaking in and snooping through my things.

Unlike RL I can snoop around your house from across the sim, with or without ban lines.

True, but your not actually there, walking in my house, using my items.
Also, if someone I banned was allowed back into my house, whats not to say they will rez spy prims to listen in on private conversations?

I own a store in SL, and I ban people for griefing, I would hate to see they got back in and orbited my customers and covered my place in porn.

Yes, that reminds me of a rule I learned about recently if you rent from Dreamland. If you have a security system on your land, it can only operate when you are present, otherwise you would be in violation of the covenant. I find that to be ridiculous, probably the one time I would want my security system working IS when I'm not there to police the land.

If access lines stopped working when people were not there... I'm sure some people would use orbs that auto-add anyone wandering onto their property to the parcel *ban* list for a few hours each time.

I've already seen orbs like this - a resident on one of my sims uses one.

Crippling access lines would only encourage the deployment of security orbs like that.

Fundamentally, crippling the protection that landowners have on land that they pay for is not the answer.

The answer is choosing where you live so that you don't have to live next to neighbours who do things that tick you off.

That's not the only thing it would do.

It would also mean that people that owned parcels next to restricted access land could stop seeing the ban lines when they get near the edge of their own parcel once the ban line times out.

you'd have to get access to the island first no?

why should that give you right into my land if i ban you and i decide that rl has taken over for ohhhhh idk emergency surgery i'm gonna be gone a while, umm death in family i'm going to be gone a while....does that mean you should have right over what i pay for on MY land?

I've got both mainland and estate land, for different reasons. And I've had problems with ban lines (and assholes with aggressive security orbs) on estates too. This is not restricted to mainland.

And I know that my mainland sim's not going to get sold out from under me, as has happened on estates.

Nobody has paid good money for any such right. They've paid money for the land, and what they get with the land is and always will be subject to whatever LL gives them... and none of it is perpetual.

That is such an appalling distortion of the facts that I'm not going to try and answer it. I might say something I will regret.