So, this is not a question, but a suggestion
Recent clever hackers/griefers have been repeatedly using modifiable freebies, often from notorious residents (Philip's items are a common target), breaking them into parts and modifying them to become new items, and then spreading those around the grid, either for practical jokes or for griefing/hacking purposes.
If this is done carefully, you'll be able to create an item that has (nobody) as the owner (apparently, all you need is to place one non-modify texture from another person inside your own item) and "Philip Linden" as the creator. This naturally makes people accept those items, since they come from a popular or well-known person.
People having been in-world for quite a long time will know each other by reputation, and naturally never accept that Philip, for instance, would spread prims with rotating textures of a very bad taste, or create self-replicating items to destroy the grid. Newer users, not aware of what you can do with a freebie with full mod permissions, would simply visually confirm that Philip (or any other "famous" person) has created that item, and become furious about what naughty Philip is doing with the world he has created!
Now, this is the sort of thing that one cannot change — the permission system works like it should, and it's obvious that one should continue to encourage people to freely exchange full mod items to break them apart and learn how they work. On the other hand, there should be a mechanism to prevent such an easy form of griefing, or of tainting someone's reputation.
I suggest that you create a "last-modified-by" tag with a timestamp. This would mean that as soon as someone breaks a full-mod item apart, and changes but a single pixel, the "last-modified-by" tag would show the new owner's name, even if the owner would still be listed as (nobody) due to multiple creators inside the object. Best still would be to add a timestamp to that tag.
This would mean that if you'd get an item shown as being created by Philip Linden in 2003, owned by (nobody), but last modified by Griefer Overlord in 2006, one should be wary
"Last-modified-by" tags are used so very often by most major OSes and applications. Each has a very different explanation on the reasons why they've implemented that. Most, however, have to do with a track record. While listing all possible changes on a single object is too heavy on the database — and mostly irrelevant — being able to understand who has created the original object (ie. whose intellectual property it originally was), who has last modified it before it was sold, and who currently owns it, seems to me to be a good compromise between not too heavy database queries (the last-modified-tag would just be updated while the object was in "Build mode", and rarely, if ever, employed, by, say, LSL, or the land/group functions checking on objects — it would be just a "descriptive" field) and a way to visually confirm that the object is indeed what the original creator intended it to be.
Let me know what you think about that proposal. And no, it's pointless to post that feature request on the feature voting list. It's a very obscure feature that is possibly only understood by a handful of people worried about improper use of objects, and a handful of griefers/hackers that would be blocked as soon as this feature is implemented
So I'll leave it in the hands of your development team to think about how important and how much impact this might have — as well as how long it would take to implement, and change the whole assets database to add a further field — to see if it's worth implementing. You should also look up all the abuse reports to check how often this "exploit" has been in fact used — many griefers/hackers simply create an account to do their objects and cancel the account immediately afterwards. Practical jokers, however, are prone to abuse this, relying upon the "it's just a joke" statement to cover their tracks Take care,
- Gwyn (so far, enjoying 1.12 very much!)
