There have been some signs, such as
this post by Robin Linden that LL will give parcel/estate owners the ability to ban by group membership.
E.g. I could ban the "Griefers United" group (fictional AFAIK), and all members of that group would count as banned.
Two questions related to bans by group :
1) Will the message given to users when they are banned due to a group ban tell them which group membership is causing them to be banned? I hope not as this will be too easy to dodge, as people will just find what group membership is responsible for their ban, then leave that group.
2) How will invisible groups be handled? After bans by group come into place, I imagine many of the griefer groups will suddenly choose to become invisible/private so they can't be added to ban lists.
How are we going to work it so that people can keep their group list private, but parcel/estate owners can still determine when groups of, say, griefing alts are all in the same, hidden group? How will we then ban by that group, if it is invisible?
I ask this because I'd like to see group bans because they'd be useful, but I worry that the really bad groups would just become invisible and stop this working. I'd like to know how you plan to make bans by group effective given the ease of making groups invisible in profiles and search->groups.
And a few other questions relating to bans :
1) Do LL plan to make parcel/estate bans affect known alts of the person banned?
2) Do LL plan to make the *estate* ban list scriptable (add, del, list)?
3) Do LL plan to increase the limit of estate bans per estate from 63 to something more reasonable, like 300?
4) Do LL plan to enable bans by group for BOTH parcels and estates?