Banned on 4 sides! Responsibility for lost prims?

I don't post to the forums much, and usually when I do its because I feel the need to complain. I don't like to just complain though. I like to think of solutions for the problem and offer them along with the complaint. Sometimes I get to philosophizing and then I get lost in my thoughts.

What was I complaining about? Oh yeah.

I just went back to my parcel after being gone from it for 2 days (since Friday) and found I'm banned on all 4 sides. One side I was already banned on from some drama that is months old and not really important. Even if I wasn't banned on that side, it has an access list. Red lines are red lines regardless of why.

The ban on the other 3 sides is new. I spoke to one person in the group that owns the land and was told (hey look how I left out the name and gender of the person!) that I was banned for leaving prims on the group's land. Prims? What prims? I asked. The person said that was unknown. The person declined to say how many. 5? 100? 1000? I do not know. They must have been there for 2 days though (at least) and had not given any obvious harm to the land or its owners.

The person was very self righteous and told me I was using the land paid for by this person and that was not right. I would agree, except for two problems. I was not using their land for anything and the person has a minority stake in the group's land allotment, so technically this person does not pay for the vast majority of the land.

Anyway, as we all know land owners have great freedom to ban or allow anyone they want, except for surrounding someone's parcel with red lines, and I'm fine with that. Don't blame it on stray prims, just tell me you hate my guts in IM, publicly, or maybe on the side of a blimp, and ban me. I prefer honesty to weak excuses.

Then I got to thinking: Are stray prims a reason to ban someone? What communal responsibility do we have for keeping the prims we own under control at all times?

First of all even if someone built a castle on your land above the red lines, banning them isn't going to stop them from doing much except sitting on their castle. If you don't like stray prims, can't you just set your auto-return to 1 minute? I have mine set for 1440 because I don't mind if people want to play on my land when I'm not around.

How many of us builders and scripters lose prims? I think its safe to say all of us. One slip in the edit box and *poof* your twisted cut shiny textured torus you spent 3 minutes configuring is...gone. Usually its faster to make another rather than hunt down a lost one.

How many of us scripters have lost prims to any number of odd problems? A bug in movement code, a miscalculation of vectors, too much push energy, and *poof* your prim is gone, sometimes out of world, sometimes not. Anyone ever had a vehicle delink during a sim crossing? Talk about a mess! If you are curious as to what its like, try delinking a physics enabled vehicle at high altitude in a sandbox. You will get returns for days from a half-dozen sims in a 6 sim radius.

Any pilots ever get tossed from a vehicle during a sim change, relog in your home location, and have absolutely no idea where on the grid to retrieve the vehicle? Or for that matter, teleported home by a script with the same problem?

My thought is that its difficult to keep track of all your prims unless you just never build or rez anything. Everyone will lose something in the world periodically. I believe that the auto-return and no-rez options for land owners are meant to address this problem as much as possible. I think that banning someone for losing prims on your land is infantile at best, especially since it doesn't stop their prims from coming on to your land. In other words, it doesn't address the problem.

Now, if I do lose something on my neighbor's parcel I suppose I won't bother tracking it down and deleting it because the red lines indicate I am not wanted there. In the end that will save me time because I won't feel the need to clean up after myself as much anymore.

Thoughts appreciated.

- Flyte

I don't know what they expect to gain by banning you from their land. Kinda stupid unless you are addicted to something on their land and must be on their land LOL. Otherwise what's the point? You can still move your primes on their land banned or not.

People are sometimes just power hungry anti social whining bitches that can't stand for something to not be absolutely perfect.

Banning someone for some primes on their land is just pathetic when they can simply ask you to pick them up or they can simply return them to you. The only time it bothered me is when the prime overlaps your land and can not be returned as it is rooted on the other land and the owner dosn't care. One of the reasons I gave up on owning land.

Without knowing the situation it's really hard to comment about escaping prims.

Yes, we've all done it... and 2 prims for a couple of days I suspect most people would say, yeah, so... but if it's 2 prims today, another 2 on Tuesday, another 2 next Saturday etc. sometime I'd get less and less tolerant.

Return is a wonderful function for land owners too!

The other side is that people don't actually need a reason to ban you... I know people who do it just because - and sometimes it's really, really irritating, particularly when you're trying to cross into a sim and the location just on the other side is banned, you don't tend to get the ban lines until they've bounced you!

So whilst I sympathise with your plight, and from the description you've given I would feel you've been hard done to (someone I know once had a building accident and returned half of their neighbours build by overloading the parcel's prim count - it was all resolved amicably though) sadly you can be hedged in by bans entirely legally. p2p might make it even more common.

There actually are limits on access lists and bans. For instance if you own the land on 3 or 4 sides of a parcel you cannot ban the parcel owner on more than 2 sides. I know this to be true because the person who owns the 4th side used to own 2 other sides and Access Listed it and then banned me when I complained. I filed an abuse report and soon I was only banned on 2.5 sides instead of 3. Later the person sold the land on both sides of me to the current owners but kept the ban on the last side.

It seems history is repeating itself.

If anyone can find this rule anywhere I'd appreciate a link so I can pass it on to my neighbors. I've been looking but haven't found it, yet.

In case its not obvious, the reason for the rule is to keep people from trying to run off neighbors with red bars so they can buy up the land.

- Flyte

Lost prims are certainly no reason to ban anyone, and they are quite easy to return. Either they are just ignorant or they are griefing you.

There's only one reason I can think of for putting someone on a ban list (either Linden supported or via some "protection" script): misbehaviour while they're on your land and you're present.

Anything else, the ban is not protective, it's simply punitive... because the only thing that physically keeping someone off your land does is physically keep them off your land. It doesn't stop them looking at your stuff, using your scripts, or leaving trash there.

BAN THE BAN

Because we don't want certian people on our land (I have a few like this).

BAN THE PEOPLE WANTING THE BAN GONE

Because they misbehave while other resis are present? Or what?

Because I don't want them on my land and the ban helps prevent them in at least a small part from bothering me.

They put the TV on the wrong channel, leave greasy marks on the glasses, don't use coasters, you know the sort of thing.

I suppose its liek this:

I don't want these people on my land..a ban helps prevent that. When I am not home irl I don't want people rummaging through my house anymore than I when I am home.

So, it doesn't matter if people are present.

I tend to agree with Eloise... without knowing both sides of the situation, its hard to make a judgement call.

Banning an individual simply for leaving stray prims around once seems awfully excessive to me. Now, say this was a chronic problem, and you'd been asked several times - and this was the last straw.... ok, that's another matter altogether.

Likewise if the 'prims' being left behind are ones that could be considered to cause grief - such as a bomb, or something incredibly large with the purpose to disrupt.

Short of the above, however - I just can't see anything good coming from banning an individual soley because they left some innocuous prims laying around as an isolated occurance.

I try to avoid their land because if I get too close I get bombed by a scripted greeter. For a while it was greeting me on my plot too but I calmly explained the problem to them and worked it out instead of banning them. If I am ever on their land, its because I'm standing within 2-3 meters of my own plot but mostly I stay on my building platform in the sky.

Its starting to dawn on me that this really isn't about lost prims after all but is an attempt to drive me off my plot. The group has tried to buy me out a number of times and is never happy when I turn them down.

And people wonder why I don't like to leave the sky...

- Flyte

How?
A ban doesn't prevent them "rummaging through your house", leaving "practical jokes" for you, and so on.

it -helps-

so quit beating a dead horse

For a long time banning was nothing more than a rude "neener neener" from land owner to whomever annoyed them that day. (back when it only extended 20m up from the ground. As 'voice' carries 20m, and avatars center of gravity is above ground, that meant you were guarenteed no privacy even if you blocked everyone from you land, because there'd always be a way to get into hearing distance.

Anyway, I don't use bans, but seem to recall hearing the zone extends 40m up now.

For bans to be effective, imho...

1) no objects in the parcel should be rendered to the banned player. Nothing but blank ground. No players in the off-limits parcel should be rendered. (leave them on the minimap though, as I'm sure the extra check would add more processing requirements for it than this would justify)
2) no prims or scripts from the banned player should be able to enter (or remain) on the parcel.
3) banned player camera movement should avoid being placed within the banned area just like the difficulty in trying to move a camera inside the current focus prim.

I don't like bans.. but if they're going to be an option for a land owner they will get used. They might as well be more effective if they're going to exist at all.

I believe the nail has been whacked on the head right there.

Its 40m now Jopsy, so you're sure.

Yes, when someone is misbehaving on your land when residents are present. It doesn't have any significant effect otherwise.

Add "and the banned player and his/her objects are not rendered on the parcel or to people on the parcel" and you wouldn't need camera restrictions or access restrictions. It'd be like the player and the parcel were in mutually exclusive planes of existence. It would probably be required that unattached prims be banned for efficiency reasons, but otherwise they could walk onto the land, walk around it, fly a plane over it, and it wouldn't have any effect on the residents.

If they could implement bans like that, the whole issue would be moot, there would be no need for ban lines, it'd be more like a Global Killfile.

It helps keep them off my land when people are not present too.

It does have significant effect to some people to know this. I enjoy knowing that these people whome I would prefer to keep off my land 100% of the time, present or not, are hindered by the ban lines. Just because its not significant to you doesn't mean i don't find it worth it.

Like my profile says: quit with the necroequinnoflaggetation.

I believe one reason the ban tools aren't so powerful is because the original vision was that people would establish builds on their land to welcome people (thus the Dwell/Traffic reward system) and that the bans would really only be needed for the occasional rotten apple. I don't think LL envisioned so many people logging into a world full of people and then wanting to ignore them all, similar to joining an IRC channel and then setting +b *!*@*.

Incidentally, I did some measuring today and it seems the red lines only extend up to 15m off the ground around my plot. I'm not sure where the 40m measurement comes from.

To update: I spoke to a Linden on the phone today. He said restricting parcel access on all sides violates one of the broad concepts of the Community Standards which is why I can't find it written anywhere on a web site. It seems it is now a matter of waiting for my Abuse Report to be processed which is fine with me.

Has anyone given any thought to my question about prim ownership responsibility? Do we as content owners and creators have any special responsibility to help prevent cluttering up the world, or should we leave it up to the land owners?

- Flyte

You are always responsible for your objects, content creator or not. You are not any more responsible because you create content but you are in a position where you will need to be more careful just because you can create so much more of a mess.

Mistakes, however, will happen. It is irrational for people to get unhappy about something they can so easily fix themselves and rarely, if ever, causes them anything more than a minor inconvenience. You have no obligation to humor the irrational.

If someone has banned you, it is clear that they wish you to not be on their property more than they want you to clean up stray prims. I would respect that; as was mentioned, it is little trouble for them to remove them themselves.

I find the red lines that my neighbors have around their property makes me feel fenced in. They had just one side when I bought the land and now they have another. I have a hill on the other two sides. So my view is red lines. YuK!!!

So what do they see? Red lines also? of course they do not use the land so they have no reason to be concerned.

That's terrible. Are you banned or just not on the Access List? Why would people feel the need to restrict a plot they are never on like that?

My current situation is the 4th time I've had this same problem with large land-owning neighbors to my plot of land. When I first moved in it was an assigned First Land plot. It was a great neighborhood but people left for various reasons.

After the first couple of incidents I built a sky platform and means to get there quickly and began spending most of my time there. The benefits are many, including generally being left alone while building and greatly improved framerate since there is nothing to render up there but the platform and whatever I'm working on. It was more of a help on my previous computer which never scored more than about 11 FPS.

- Flyte