New Registration Policy Concerns

Hi,

I was wondering if you realize that without credit card, people can just make however many accounts they wish and grief with them, as well as teenagers creating them to log in to the mainland.


The "verification" of entering your real name and email address is worth nothing; after all, many sites and forums require registration and entering your real name.
I'm a member of many such, as well as owning a few hotmail and yahoo accounts for the obvious spam (after all, email addresses are easy to acquire and throw away)...
I've NEVER, NEVER EVER entered my real name into any of them !!
And most people I know do the same thing.
After all, who can confirm the correctness of such data ??
Credit cards form the ONLY barrier on the internet; the only way to confirm both real life identity AND age (to a degree, as long as people don't use their parent card)


For me, not entering my real life name and information (on free sites that do not need my credit card or other...) is driven by privacy concerns.
Most US based sites do not offer the same privacy protection as EU based ones.
Companies that I have no relationship with (ex. as a consumer) do not need, nor get, my real life info; if they ask for it in order to get on their site/forum, I'll just invent some...
As long as there's no interaction with my real life person, there's no reason for me to enter my real life name. It's "none of their business".
I am a consumer of SL, they have my card info, so I gave them my RL info; fine, no problem. If I didn't trust you guys, I wouldn't have signed up.
But in a day and age where just about everyone wants to have your data just to be able to use or sell it, hell no...


But whereas I don't abuse this, you can be assured any gap in the system will be exploited and stretched as far as people can.
You can bet your life savings on it most people won't enter their real name on free basic accounts (without credit card confirmation), and the potentially unlimited number of free alts; especially not the griefers...


Have you thought about the evidence, present on the internet, of the complete and total failure of the "honor" system of entering your "real life" information, without any means to confirm it ?
In a world where email addresses are easily created and real life information is not verified, we'll be absolutely flooded by free alts, teenagers on the main grid, and griefers, not to mention grid attackers (can we say "self replicating objects" ?)



I for one believe a minimal barrier is needed to keep the idiots out; if that barrier is credit card (or other effective forms of identification), and a steep learning curve, so be it.


I hope Linden Labs has foreseen these HUGE potential risks to the system...
Have they ?
Can they assure us there are other, equally efficient ID systems in place ?


PS: the learning curve thing is a bit off topic, but basically I believe that making SL too simple will attract the noobs (derogative term); the need to invest time to learn the system and UI is a good thing in my book; it acts as a filter.

Hello Will. Like similar questions you may've already seen in SL Answers, you're not alone in your concerns.

It's also important to remember that if someone's determined to grief, a "minimal barrier" won't be much good at stopping that--and at the same time, increased friction does deter many friendly people who want to join SL. You may have seen some of those questions on here before too, especially for our internal would-be Residents... because many in Europe don't have a credit card, and the SMS doesn't work where they're at either.



This has already happened, sadly, even with the prior system. Someone bent on dishonesty can't be forced to be honorable, but we can make the registration flow easier for those who are looking forward to experiencing Second Life.

We still retain account info for security purposes, as Chris Linden mentioned earlier. And if there's significant troubles, we'll change and adapt. Technically, nothing stops us from going back to "the old way" if that's needed.

Thank you for your concern.