Offer teleport without calling card

Currently, if you access someone's profile in the find dialog you can offer a teleport to your current location. In the last town hall, someone complained that this feature was open for abuse from people offering teleport to everyone and her brother.

Our first knee-jerk reaction in the office was to only enable offer teleport if you have already exchanged calling cards. If we did this, would it cause problems in the ways you use Second Life? What if you could send a beacon to someone but not directly offer teleport? Do offers of landmarks cover this issue?

I think the problem is just unwanted spam. Options you describe would prevent people from accidentily accepting the offer and being teleported away, but it would not stop the unsolicited spam by others attempting to get you where they are.

I think it would hurt overall if you took the ability to teleport others where you are. Many new players teleport me to them to help them with issues. It would be a drag for me to have to follow a beacon to them to help them out. I think better education is the key, please dont take away the current functionality.

Please - leave it as it is!!

People spam the IM systems hourly - we've complained, but your not thinking of crippling the IM system.

We need to be able to send TP's to anyone we want too the way it now works.

Leave the TP system as it is! And no offers of landmarks does not cover this issue.

Excellent!


Leave as is!!


Please!!!

!!!!

Yeah, it doesn't make sense to me to exclude the many for the grievious errors of a few because as we all know, the needs of the many... uh... anyhow...

Teleporter spammers should be deal with politely but firmly on an individual basis. Repeated violators will not be dealt with so politely, I can imagine.

Speaking along the lines of what Loki said, will a "tagalong" mode be available? Like, if you want to do a group tour for newbies and get everyone from one distant location to another? I've been on some nice virtual balloon tours but since the locations are relatively close to each other and everyone's in the same vehicle, it's not a problem. But if in the future, there was more "SL tourism" and you had groups of, say, a dozen people all going from place to place, it'd be handy to have more of an "RPG Party" follow-along.

(Obviously, the possibility of abuse arises with the aforementioned as well.)

I agree. Leave it as it is...but what about having an option for people to receive teleport offers? So a checkbox in their preferences would say:

X Allow TP offers?

Then if someone feels they are being spammed by TP offers, just shut it off. If they need to get a TP from a trusted source, temporarily turn it on. You could even have an option to only accept teleports from a list of people that you setup.

Using calling cards is a bad idea. First of all, I don't necessarily know or trust all the calling cards I have. Second, it would defeat the purpose of TPs since you have to first be face-to-face with someone to get a calling card.

I could see this affecting Live Help as well. Someone could need help that requires a Live Help volunteer to TP to them, but if they don't have their card, they have to travel.

Just my L$0.02

I think it would work very well if this was made an option that can be set in preferences.

"Allow teleport offers from anyone"

So that if the option is NOT checked, only people in your contact list can offer a teleport, and the rest are ignored.


Otherwise, please leave it alone. I use this functionality often.

You know, Apotheus' suggestion makes me wonder...

Right now calling cards to me are useless. Why? Because they are tied to the high score calculations...or at least they were in the past. And that meant people were going around clicking on any avatar they saw to exchange calling cards. So, as I said before, my list is useless.

BUT if calling cards were tied to TPs AND NOTHING ELSE but online notifications and IMs, then I would simply go through my list and remove 90% of the names, in essence creating my own buddy list that is truely a list of buddies.

There's $L0.02 more.

I'm with everyone thus far. Do not cripple teleport requests. Add filtering or additional functionality, yes definitely; but cripple, no.

Thank you for the feedback.

One thing I failed to mention is that this was a short-term fix (ie, the next patch) for a problem that deserves a more complete solution in the next revision. Calling cards, ratings, and visibility is being reworked for an upcoming version of SL.

You can add people to your mute list which will turn off TP offers from those users. Calling cards are no longer used for the calculation of 'score', and have not been for a long time. Calling cards are an 'instant access' mechanism so you should only exchange them with people when mutual trust has been established.

Thanks for the clarification, Phoenix. I wassn't sure about the "score" being tied to calling cards anymore since the Leader Boards on this site still mentions calling cards.

I've always looked at calling cards as a friends list, simple as that.

But on the subject of this thread, taking away teleport offers to people who you dont share cards with would definately be a bad thing for all the reasons stated above

Ok, seriously, 'temporary' fixes have a VERY nasty habit of becoming more permanent than we'd like. Do not cripple any functionality, even "temporarily". I don't exchange cards. About three months ago I stopped, and about a month ago I deleted 95% of the cards I did have, leaving me with maybe six. I offer teleports to people often, and when helping newbies I often have them offer me one. Crippling functionality, even in the "short" term, is a BAD IDEA.

It'd be nice to have an 'ignore' button on TP offers, but the problem with THAT is all those buttons are hard to miss and/or easy to hit the wrong one. Any ignore feature should have a confirmation dialog, ESPECIALLY since REMOVING people from ignore is a process that is unknown to most, and something I've used so rarely I can't even remember where the option is (but I could find it... eventually). With the confirmation, if you suddenly "change" your mind, the offer should pop back up.

That said, if you're going to add in those features, don't forget to try and XMLify what you're adding in. We do want XML-UI support eventually.

This is exactly why I was asking if anyone used this particular feature. Several people at the office thought this was unused and two of us disagreed.

Again, thank you for the feedback.

/me takes a big haul

like, do that thing your saying but let us trade cc's through the ctl-f thi*cough* *cough* *cough* the ctl-f dude

Change it to *Request* Teleport, instead of *Offer* Teleport.
That's pretty much how it works already anyway... I IM someone and say, "tp me".
It could pop up a box saying "Eggy Lippmann would like to teleport to your present location" and have Allow and Deny buttons.

Excuse me, but I think that's just f'ing brilliant.

Let's do that!

I'd like particularly stiff penalties tied to event sponsors and unsolicted teleports. If not 'fixed' within the teleport system, at least tie the two together when investigating abuse reports. Teleport 'harvesting' for events remains a scourge in SL.

I personaly would not change any functionality with teleports and how they work.

I think it would be *highly* annoying to have to trade Calling Cards with someone you probably won't ever see again, just to offer them a teleport. On various occasions I've teleported people on request and there would be no point other than that instance for me to have their card.

I would say rather than restricting teleports because of what some people do, take stricter action against those people, which is the *real* problem.

Btw, I'm happy to hear that those things are being worked on, they're all things that could use some fiddling with. Also the ignoring of TP's is also a good greatly needed fix and hopefully will help with the spam!

And thanks for asking for our input on this!

I can't stand confirmation dialogs and multiple clicks to do things. So for me, the idea of having to click, "YES, I MEANT TO CLICK 'YES'," or, "YES, I MEANT TO CLICK 'NO'," would be annoying.

To me, the best option is an option... as someone already suggested. Allow me to choose whether or not I want to receive random IMs from outside of my Calling Card list. For those who enjoy helping others, the option could be to accept all TP offers. For me, the option would be to block all but Calling Card offers. This would not prevent others from contacting me, nor would it entirely prevent others from TP'ing me. It would more or less require that person to be sincere in their request becaue they would first need to send an IM requesting that I enable them to TP me (not a special TP-request IM, but a regular IM sent the usual way.) I would then enable the option, accept the TP, then disable again. A hassle for me, but a hassle I accept because I believe there would be far fewer offers. In my world, this is ideal because I receive far more spam TPs than spam IMs(I can't remember ever receiving IM spam actually.) I'm sure those who receive more spam IMs than spam TPS will be against this idea.

Now, some other ideas I've thought of while typing. The popup window is the same light-blue color for everything. I believe it would help if they were color-coded. For instance, money issues could use a greenish tint, non-calling card TP offers a reddish tint, info dialogs the usual blue, and object transfers yet another color? The reason I make this suggestion is that I play on a 57" HDTV and the text on these dialogs is so tiny, I have to strain my eyes to read at times... depending how late it is. I could safely ignore the blues and reds, and be extra careful with greens.

Thats a great suggestion DoteDote, give users the option as to what they want, somewhere in the preferences maybe. A checkbox to "allow anyone to send me a teleport" if checked, would do as said, if unchecked, you would have to have that users calling card in order to teleport them. Defaultly it would be checked.

I also wouldn't mind having different colored dialogs. Keep in mind though that when skinning is possible (and even now with being able to change colors), some of these may change depending on the colors/skin set. As it is now, you can change the default colors of dialogs via the colors.ini file in your Second Life folder.

Most unsolicted TP offers seem to come after a group annoucement, why not offer in the IM's the option of "TP to Announcers Location"? That why, those who want, can, those who don't wan't can ignore, and would stop the announcer from getting multiple requests to TP peeps as well? Would solve the issue, and take the burden of having to TP multiple people if you announce an event, etc... Not to mention putting an end to the majority of the TP spam abuse.

How about hitting the source of the problem instead of crippling a useful feature? Just limit the amount of TP offers you can send out in a certain period of time. This would still technically allow someone TP'ing you to their club, but it would make it less useful of a "marketing" practice.

Eh, not that good of an idea, as some people either A) Run events and say "Just IM X for a TP" and I'm sure that person TPs a good 20-30 people in, or B) Run "private" events where they say "The first 20 people to respond will get a TP to the secret location of the event". The limit would have to be high enough to accomodate those kinds of requests, and a limit that is that high wouldn't inhibit spamming that much.

Basically when it comes to features in SL, I support the expansion of our capabilties, even if at the risk that some may abuse them. Abusers should be dealt with and removed from the system if they cannot control themselves.

To do as proposed in the initial post and remove our ability to offer anyone a teleport would go strictly against this, as it would be taking away an abusable feature instead of dealing with the abusers.

The problem is once you start cutting features to curb abuse instead of just kicking the abusers, you just perpetuate the problem. The real problem is the abusive personality type that needs removal from the community, not the feature. Cutting abusable features will just cause these people to move on to the next thing they can figure out how to abuse, and then that one gets cut, and the next, ad infinitum.

This happens in a lot of online games; they start out with a large set of abilities but those abilities slowly erode in their versatility or get locked down completely as the abusers and exploiters take advantage of them. Eventually you wind up with a bland game which functions more or less like all the others.

I support things like what Eggy suggests. Give us *more* abilities and *more* tools, and hold those who abuse them accountable. If necessary, improve the technology and feature set to more aptly hold people accountable when they abuse the abilities we are given.


Thank you for reading,

-- Kex