Grief & Accounts & Verification

Hi,

Like a lot of people posting right now (and I imagine few of us are expecting written answers as we assume you're all a bit busy with other things) I really would like something done about the grey goo, the griefers and all the other things that are spoiling my personal SL experience and putting the brakes on my educational project.

But consider for a moment if you're in education - you can't ask all your students to come up with a credit card number before they get to use SL as part of their studies (and it does have some fantastic potential in education) - and there are plenty of other cases where people just don't have credit cards, but have a lot to bring to SL. Surely it's not just about money - I disagree entirely with the person who suggested that if people don't bring money into SL then they have no right being there. What kind of society is that?

But clearly something has to be done to improve security. You need to be collecting data about the people who sign up - data that is verifiable. A million residents would be great (infrastructure permitting), but a million decent residents - whether they buy anything or not. Do we want to stop people hanging out and having a good time simply because they don't have a credit card? Do people seriously believe the griefers are people with no credit cards? I think not - and until someone has some concrete proof, then this is a moot discussion.

So what kind of data - and how should it be verified? Perhaps that's what we need here - positive suggestions of how the registration process can be improved. Clearly email addresses are not good enough on their own...

DG

While I'm still not convinced that removing the unverified accounts will magically make all of the griefers disappear (there was grief before we switched the account registration), we are always looking for better ways to verify identity and prevent griefers from re-entering our world.

The recent grid attacks have been very difficult for everyone within the community and also for us at Linden Lab. We agree that it is unacceptable to have this type of malicious activity within our world. In response to this situation, Robin has outlined our security plan in this blog post, please take a moment to read about our plans which are already in motion.