Limit the access restrictions!

I don't care if they look. They can look all they want. That is all I will allow them to do though.

As are many of us. However, that isn't the issue. It's an issue of forcing other people to open up their land because you're comfortable with letting people on yours.

It's just not fair to force your mindset on others and taking away the freedom to do what they want on land that they have paid for, especially since part of the deal is that we CAN do what we want on our own land, barring certain rules that we've already agreed to.

I'm sorry, folks, but my land is my land. If I want to ban people from coming onto it, then that's my right, not yours. I paid for that right. You didn't.

Personally, regardless of my views on this (which are, by the way, COMPLETELY against this proposal), it's a futile excercise.
If it DOES go through, I'd estimate about 20 minutes before a whole new set of security scripts are written and somewhere near 2 hours before gigantic, ugly megaprims are being used to completely box off the land, up to several hundred metres.
THAT will be the result of this proposal, in my opinion.

why not have a setting to make your land invisible to others. so, they fly through and see nothing. and then maybe theyd be invisible to you. i think there are possibilities here to make both sides happy. i dont think it has to be such a black and white issue.

I would rather they fix the current problems with the grid before trying to add more features which historically cause even more problems.

But it IS black and white. No one else paid for the land, thus no one else gets to tell me what can and can't happen on it. No one else has any right to enter it and are welcome only at my pleasure. That shouldn't change whether I'm there or not.

That's all there is to it. You didn't pay for it, you don't get to tell me what happens there.

Pushing this through WILL cut off even more land, because people will start making prim spawning boxes to cover their entire plot up to about 1000 metres, blocking anyone from using the land, just on principle.

The vast majority of people would never shell out 250 to 300 rl bucks for a piece of public land and thats exactly what you are trying to do. Make the whole grid available to everyone with no privacy or ownership priviledges and rights. Wouldn't even be a consideration in the Linden Labs Finance Department. Gotta pick your fights Ben and this wasn't a very good choice. Anytime people pay real money for things, they like to own them or at least have exclusive rights to use their copy as they see fit. I would like to see some technology to allow constant flight as I enjoy that and hate the barriers. Some sort of tractor beam that would allow you to fly across banned property without smashin your face into invisible walls because the ban lines are invisible. Not a whole lot of thinking going on about the ban line technology I will admit but people not being able to ban the world from a piece of VR property they paid cash for out of their own pocket is simply never gonna happen.

Believe it.

I'm paying L$xx,xxx a month in tier and rent for my land and my share of our group land, and I'm in favor of limiting access controls. And it's got NOTHING to do with letting people "use everyone else's land and facilities for free".

I guess I'm not enough of a cranky antisocial old codger yet.
That's not the deal.

If nothing else... the grid *is* available to everyone with no privacy, except for private islands with group-only access.

I'm not convinced that the proposal you're making is the right balance either. What are you suggesting be on the table to compensate the cranky old codgers>

That's not the deal.

First, the grid *is* available to everyone with no privacy, except for private islands with group-only access.

Secondly, there are no rights without responsibilities.

To throw the often-used excuse right back: if you want to fly or walk around without restriction, get your own sim(s) and you can do whatever you want with your land.

Vehicles are a non-issue when it comes to "ban" lines: turning off object entry causes far more inconvenience than access restriction does.

Flying is also a non-issue because access restriction stops at about 40ish metres above ground level. All it takes for you to enjoy open air space is to fly up a little higher.

I'd love to know why some people seem to be obsessed to be able to trespass when there is absolutely no valid reason for wanting to do so. If people weren't constantly littering, harassing, and not only feeling entitled to use my house but send landmarks to it over to all of their friends as well, I wouldn't need access restriction in the first place.

Your land is a set of entries in a database on a server that grant you the right to a certain number of the scripted objects that server is capable of supporting. What you're allowed to do with those objects and what geometry settings they're allowed to have is defined by those entries. And they're real limited.

You can't dig a hole deeper than four meters, build a wall people can't look through, plant a tree that isn't in a short list of trees Linden Labs provides, plant grass if your land isn't "green" or dig up the grass if it is, keep people from flying over it, dropping stuff onto it, or blasting it with particles.

And god forbid your neighbor across a sim boundary sets up access controls. You'll have to use part of your prim allotment to wall off part of your own land lest you get accidentally blown hundreds of meters away by walking across an imaginary line.

Because the way SL works, you can tresspass with impunity and the landowner never knows you're there, but when you have no intent of tresspassing... and no way of knowing ahead of time whether you are... the controls people put up to create the illusion of privacy will reach out and blow you out of the water/land/air. EVEN WHEN YOU STARTED ON THE LAND YOU YOURSELF ARE PAYING FOR.

You don't need access restrictions to keep people from littering or creating landmarks to your house, and you can't use access restrictions to keep from getting harassed.

Unfortunately, the access controls in SL are more useful to griefers than to people who want protection from them. Until that changes, people will have every legitimate reason to want them reduced. You don't like that, then get on the horn to Linden Labd with the rest of us and tell them you need something better.

Yes, and I was aware of all those limitations when I purchased the land.
Those limitations were put there by Linden Labs, who created the land.
They have reasons for those limitations.

This has nothing to do with what we're talking about.

What we're talking about is putting limitations on me, as a landowner, simply because someone wants to use that set of entries in a database for free. I paid for that set of entries. Part of the deal when I bought it was that I can do as I please (ugh, I can't believe I have to add this, but...) within the preestablished limitations.
Owning land that's on top of impenetrable bedrock, which is ostensibly the "You can't dig deeper than 4 metres" argument, has nothing to do with whether I should allow people to walk over it and bringing it up is, quite frankly, disingenuous.

No, this would be horrible.

People who run shops, and other businesses, depend on them functioning while they are not online. If anyone could come into my shop, fill it with adverts for other shops and push all my customers out of the door, and then I would be powerless to ban them because they'd just have to wait for me to log off and the banlines would go down, then - well, I'd probably have to start trying to program a bot, or just not go into business after all.

I agree that there might be a market for genuine timesharing on land though, especially while the market is high

And what happens when you want to block use of your objects?
As it is, a camera is not the only thing that can go through walls. Try it yourself. Add anything with a sit target inside a walled room, zoom the camera through, click and sit. You will pass through the wall and into the room. Anything that can be seen onubstructed with the camera can be used as normal.

Fair enough it wont matter much with your sexgen bed, but what about the TV set I created that streams from my server at a high bitrate. The way I have it set up, it can be viewed while sitting on my neighbours land so me an the neighbours can watch things. If you can click it, you can watch it. Simple enough to add a few neighbours to the internal access list. Thing is, I also want everyone with access to my land to be able to watch it without having to read a massive notecard that needs changing every time I add someone to the land access.
So, llOverMyLand() works to limit those who can zoom a camera through banlines and click the thing, but not if this goes through.
For some reason I don't feel like paying massive bandwidth costs for strangers to spend all day sat on land that I already paid for.

As mentioned already, you want to go flying, get a flight feather and fly higher. No banlines to bother you and you wont be bothering anyone else.

That's not the deal.

If nothing else... the grid *is* available to everyone with no privacy, except for private islands with group-only access.[/QUOTE]

Yeah Right... Good luck on your quest gents. lol

The only possible two things a script outside your land could do to you is either push, or annoy you with dialogs which setting your land to no push and muting the object respectively will happily counter.

Obviously I have a problem with people wandering through the house and making themselves at home and access restriction takes care of that quite nicely . As far as harassment goes, it helps with that quite a bit, because as it turns out, the number 1 reason it happens in the first place is because "you're sort of intruding, would you mind leaving?" is what causes it to happen in the first place.

It's also ironic that you would favour object creation and object entry turned off for littering as opposed to having the land access restricted. Restricted means you can fly your vehicle at 40m AGL with no problem, object entry means you'll have to avoid a barrier you can't even see.

I'm not sure there should BE a compensation, Argent, since the way the ban system works is unreasonably restrictive to begin with. I'm sure that if the way it worked were even more paranoid, like for example automatically ending your account on SL for the "crime" of "trespassing" when you entered banned land despite warnings, then some people would use that, and consider it their right to do so. The available tools steer one's thinking to a great degree.

I'm not sure that a player's "rights" regarding bans are spelled out in a contract anywhere, and like a country can change unreasonable laws, that can happen here.

*sigh* I wish I understood why some feel the need to ban people from crossing their land since passer-bys have absolutely no effect. When the owner is online, sure, ban it! But when you're offline? Why?

Bisham, do you not see the other side? Do you not see that taking away freedoms that we, as paying customers, have been given, is just wrong, or could at least be seen as such? Do you not see the possible repurcussions of this if it goes through?

How is the existing policy restrictive? How is it impeding you from doing anything that you've paid for? You mentioned before that it was allegedly being "abused". You haven't explained how it's being abused.
How is this an "unreasonable law"?

You say that you don't think there should be compensation... how is that even possibly fair? You want to use my land for a purpose, to get from a to b. I pay to have that land there that happens to be en route to point b. Why should I have to pay for YOU to get to where you're going? 'Cuz I AM paying for it.

I'm sorry, but this is just not fair. In the real world, are trespassing laws unfair? Are all those people that have guard dogs to stop "those damn kids" from using their empty lot to get to the mall in the wrong? I'm not talking about littering, I'm talking about right of way.
How about if I own a vacant lot that's in the way of a highway? I never go there, should they be allowed to just build the highway on it? A bike path? If I own land in the woods, should I be stopped from putting up a fence to stop people from hiking through it? Or should it be only when I'm there and, if I go home to the city, I have to take down the fences and trespassers aren't breaking the law.

Right of way is a VERY important thing to many people. Just because it isn't to you doesn't dismiss us. And, quite frankly, our voices SHOULD count more than yours, because, well... we bought the land. We spent the money, you didn't.

Tell you what. I won't tell you what to do on your land, you don't tell me what to do on mine.

I think you can relax, because it is unfortunately unlikely to be implemented. That aside, I don't see that tweaking rules is wrong, if it is for the public good and of no practical (as opposed to psychological) consequence to those affected. Rule-tweaking happens all the time -- in the real world as well -- in the form of changes in laws and policies. As a matter of principle, this has ample precedent.

If you are concerned with the rules suddenly changing on something you have already bought, then I'll point out that there was no (I don't think) contract that detailed what rights you had on the land you bought, just a set of tools with no promise of future functionality. Still, I can see the other side of it, so a "grandfather clause" could always be applied to the effect that only newly bought/sold land would work in the new way. Not an optimal solution, but one that would get better over time. Then at least you would know from the start what you were buying.


Abuse is in the eye of the beholder, so it is up to the user of the expression to explain what he means. Don't get hung up on the word. What I personally mean by ban abuse is that most of the time (i.e. when landowner+friends are not logged in), the general bans are an annoyance to everyone, while being of benefit to no one. That leads me to the conclusion that such behaviour should be discouraged and preferably disabled. The only reason I can think of to ban access to an empty parcel is the possible smug satisfaction a landowner may get from the knowledge that no-one can access his land.


Comparisons with the real world don't necessarily make sense, since SL works very differently from the real world when it comes to theft, littering, and how easy it is to eject people who suddenly become undesired (as when the landowners log in). Still, in your highway example, definitely yes! The government routinely force-buys land for infrastructure development. And in e.g. Sweden it's allowed for anyone to pass through privately-owned woods as long as they don't disturb anything. So apparently in real life, even though it is far easier for visitors to ruin stuff than in SL, there is a balance struck between public and private interests. I think a reasonable balance in SL is to enable bans as long as the landowner and friends are present, but enable access when they are not, since that access would have no practical consequence for the landowner.

I am not trying to convince you anymore, I'm just stating how I see it since you asked me. And I don't think I can say it more clearly, so I'll give it a rest here.

i can see a few reasons that aren't related simply to privacy to deny access to all excepted...

If you happen to be in a group that has lets say a facility dedicated to them (whether you are an rp group, war game enthusiasts or whatever else, that is on membership, i don NOT see why it would be that terrible that they only allow access to the facility to their members.

Even more if they share the tier bill. After all why should they give free access to something they share the bill for?
If i want to access my local paintball field i have to be a member of the club that pay for the field, else , all i can do is stare through the protection nets.
Doesn't looks that different to me in SL.

People repeatedly throughout this thread have been telling you multiple reasons why they restrict access to their parcels, and yet you keep coming back and asking why, and saying you see no good reason for it, I can't even count how many times now. Are you not comprehending what people are saying, or do you think that your opinion is so important that other people's reasons for wanting to do what they want with what they have paid to use are inconsequential?

Just wondering.

You can't *stop* them from using those entries for free. All you an do is prevent them from temporarily adding their own set of entries to the database. Personally, I think we'd be MUCH better off if you could keep people from accessing those entries at all.
No, honestly, I'm serious. There are all kinds of arbitrary and often stupid limitations as to what you can do with your land, and whether they have real-world analogies to back them up or not they exist. Arguing that you have any kind of absolute universal right to anything might not be "disingenuous", but it sure seems silly to me.

Now I'm not saying that you should lose that ability. I'm just saying that arguing about it based on some absolute right you imagine you have is pointless.

I agree that if you explicitly ban someone from an area, they should never be allowed in that area.

The "ban lines" that most frustrate people are not the ones raised by putting someone on the ban list. Most people in SL are never subject to that kind of ban, ever. The "ban lines" we're talking about are the ones raised when a space is restricted to people on a list or members of a group. I try to use "access control" to refer to this, because its so easily confused with the explicit banning of troublesome people, but even Linden Labs makes this mistake (when you hit ban lines on a sim border, the message you get is "... you are banned from the area".

The current system is not working. It doesn't provide the protection that people using the ban lines need, and it causes far too much disruption for everyone around them. It needs to be fixed. The proposal in this thread is too simple, but the way people react to any suggestion that it be changed with "it's my land, I can do what I want" without even considering how things could be improved is horribly horribly counterproductive.

That's beside the point.

Look, you're trying to change the status quo. You're trying to convince people that the status quo should be changed. Unless thing are so bad that only a few reactionaries are willing to defend it (like, for example, when access controls extended to an effectively unlimited height and couldn't be flown over without some kind of booster) you're not going to make any progress without being willing to give as well as take.

For example, how about "Permanent access controls are limited to the area of the parcel to an altitude of 10 meters over ground, or over any 10 meter altitude range in the parcel. Making the access controls temporary extends this to 50 meters, again over any range or starting at ground level, while any permitted person is in the parcel. Specifically banned individuals are blocked from ground level to 768 meters, whether anyone is on the parcel or not. Permanent access controls are marked in red on the mini-map."?

Benefit for landowners: they can block access to their skybox, and they can block access to a larger volume while they're on the parcel.

Benefit for everyone else: no more surprise ban-lines, fewer ban-lines to run into.