what do you think of this....

hallo...
i am considering submitting a proposal but it says to try it on the forum first. i did not see a spot to put it so i will put it here...

i would like to propose that some residents be appointed to police the sand boxes. not to fight griefers, i am not suggesting a bunch of armed vigilanties, but to act as sanitarians or grounds keepers. they would be given powers to delete spamming things, huge prims, abandonded vehicles, the pointless multiple copies of things, the obscene or hateful builds, the items for sale and the general litter that lately has gotten much much worse.
sand box wipes do not take care of this things and IF a linden or liason or what ever comes to delete some thing, they delete it and they do not pay attention to the other chaos around them. maybe they are too busy, i do not know.
i think that a dedicated group of residents who were willing to keep the sand boxes free of the general idiocy and once again make them the places for builders that they were meant to be and not dumping grounds which they have become, would be a great help.
i would like to know what others residents think about such a proposal.
thank you.

/me eeps and jumps into the nearest trench, pulling a cement block over for added safety. "Here it comes!"

Search the forums for threads about Police in SL, your answer will become very apparent.

What I'd love to see is a Linden who is stationed in at least the Sandbox Island, no citizen policing required. Heck, a Linden Liaison who was there would be great PR for the Lab, because they'd exchange build tips with people, showing each other what they can do.. But I'll assume there aren't enough Lindens to do that.

..or Lindens who actually know how to build and/or script and/or texture...

I actually had to teach a Linden how to unpack a box once, they didn't even know there was a right-click open, or single click open. True story, I have witnesses.

The forum for suggesting new features or changes in policy is the feature suggestion forum, near the middle in the picture below:


This proposal involves giving a group of people who haven't entered into a binding contract with Linden Lab the power to delete anything in the sandboxes using their own judgement as to what is spam, what is obscene, etc. This is not likely to go over very well.

A problem with having a paid staff person with their avatar in each sandbox to supervise is that it costs a lot.

24 hour per day seven days a week at a rate of, for sake of coming up with some kind of number instead of none at all, twenty dollars an hour, comes to 1,226,400. A million dollars a year to supervise one sandbox with a dedicated employee around the clock.

So Goguen, Cordova, Newcomb, Wanderton, Sandbox and Extension come up to 7 mil two hundred thou to look after with a dedicated employee for each.

Now one might have one employee with two computers, each with four monitors, and they could be the "main sandbox police", but that isn't likely to be the best use of Linden money - LL is the estate manager for mainland land, they have paying customers to take care of, customers that might feel that dealing with their problems takes precedence over sandbox supervison.

Due to scarcity, you can't just decide to supervise the sandboxes, you also have to decide what not do to, what to cancel that you were already doing in order to free up the resources needed to impement the new plan.

20 bucks an hour seems rather high....maybe 20L?

I do not want to see Citizens "Appointed" to anything. Sandbox owners should manage their areas.

*grins* Well, I didn't mean that they had to STAY there. I mean, they'd have to respond to other things, but they could call the Sandbox their "home" when they aren't dealing with other issues. There are sometimes lulls between the storms, even in Second Life.. I hope.

Actually, with some of the building bugs, dealing with griefers (and other issues) would be a good way to blow off steam!

The aspirine may take the pain away but it won't cure the problem.

Agree with Sue on this. There are complications involved with extending Linden powers to non Linden Lab employees. I suspect that the closing of Live Help was (partly) for similar reasons. The idea of volunteer help was a great one, but the world has gotten too big to manage it. Too many people assume that the actions, statements, decisions, etc on the part of volunteers are official Linden Lab representations. Just not a generally good direction to go, for liability's sake.

What I think COULD work, however, is if Resident sandbox regulars formed a citizens group, and Linden Lab assigned a Liaison or two to interact with this group. Then you'd have an official channel for keeping things in check on public sandboxes, without the need for Residents being granted powers that have the potential for being abused.

this would not be some constant supervisor job. not some 'nanny' to baby sit. some people would make regular tours of the sand box and sweep up the garbage perhaps once an hour. they might answer to a linden. and it would be a volunteer job. i think there are enough people i think who care about the sand boxes enough to do the job. or maybe not. maybe it is not so important to people.


well, it is only a thought. it is just such a shame to see the sand boxes become toilets and none does any thing about it.

zaphod, your second paragraph puts it better than i was able to. this is the kind of thing would be perfect. then the lindens could make a desicion what to do.

I believe the best idea is that when someone has left the sim for a certain length of time, say 30 minutes, their prims are deleted from the sandbox. Is that do-able?

Part of the problem with this is in Sandboxes most people generally feel that "All accounts are created equally" to a certain degree. If I am building in a sandbox, and someone who is part of a group policing the area starts deleting my stuff, using his or her apparant "best judgement" in the matter, and I dispute the situation, I could quickly find myself on the wrong side of the situation. There's no way to appeal their decision, and in some cases once they've deleted your work they've ruined possibly hours of work. Sandboxes are like any place; you get griefed, attacked, whatever, you go through the proper channels to get it dealt with. Everyone hates getting griefed, but no one wants a Sandbox to be restricted; you can't do your work that way. It's the price we pay for having spaces that are completely free so that we can work and test any sort of thing we want. Police forces oftentimes quickly just become griefers with authority.

What would the function of the resident sandbox squad be? Anyone can file an abuse report. LL has gone to considerable pain to replace their inefficient old system with an automated system for dealing with abuse reports in a rational manner. What is to be gained by having Linden Lab have to evaluate the merits of resident groups claiming to be sandbox police, thus giving privilege to that group's members denied to others, and then diverting their actions from responding to the normal flow of abuse reports in order to respond to the group's messages?

I'm grouped up. Anything that requires that I join a group to obtain a benefit from LL, such as listening to me if I don't like the hundred flapping penises following me in the sandbox, or the new annoyance, the big wood ship follower, etc., means I have to give up a membership in a group.

My abuse report's merits, or what I say in an IM to an online Linden staffer, aren't increased in truth, accuracy, or conciseness by joining a resident group.

======== hey Strife, Cybin, etc, how bout moving this thread to the feature suggestion forum where it belongs? ==================

Could not Linden sandboxes have a 120 minute object return time?

When that someone is a griefer, filling the sim with.. just.. crap, so that it isn't usable for others, that's 30 minutes that nobody else can use the sim for what it was intended for.

Let's look at the definition of the word Liaison.

2 a: a close bond or connection : interrelationship b: an illicit sexual relationship : affair 3a

Oh.. crap.. sorry.. let's look at a more fitting one:

3 a: communication for establishing and maintaining mutual understanding and cooperation

What would be wrong with residents establishing mutual interest groups, and soliciting Linden Liaisons to represent those groups in some official capacity? There would have to be standards, of course. Rigid ones.

To my way of thinking "a certain length of time, say 30 minutes" is a good deal better than many, many hours when the sandbox isn't useable, which is the case now.

I think it would be useful to have several different types of solution tried out for a while, one type in each sandbox. It could wind up with something clearly working well, a combination approach being best, or just a different approaches in different regions.

I like variety, though.

My only problem is... And this is just coming from someone who goes to fairly deserted sandboxes and has never gone to one where he found it unusable, is... 30 minutes isn't long enough. When I am building something, I take my time, I'm not the world's most adept builder, and 30 minutes is too short for an auto-return for me.

Forgive me if I question your math skillz, Sue.

24 hours x 7 days = 168 hours

168 x 52 weeks = 8,736 hours a year

8,736 x $20 = $174,720.

P2

I suspected I'd screw that up but didn't feel like checking it.

However, more accurately, 20 * 24 * 365 = 175,200 .

175,200 times seven is 1,226,400 . I must have stuck in times seven days a week for no reason.

The end result is the same despite being nearly an order of magnitude off, which aside from sheer laziness is one reason I didn't bother to check. The twenty dollars an hour figure is not likely to be very accurate either. I have no idea what liaisons make, or what benefits they get, or what proportion of them work in the office, and thus have physical overhead expenses, versus at home.

It's a lot of money to spend, money that could be spent on something else, such as at least one more programmer working to fix bugs.

Thanks for the correction.

==============

There's already resident created groups with Lindens as members, the Mental Volunteer group, for one example, has Torley, Chihyo, Beast, Brent, George, Amber, Mia,
Spike, Heretic, & Hermia in it, and the Mental Mentors group, which has at least Spike and Heretic as members, with a membership of 188 people. That's just the two I know of because I'm in them both. Anyone that's a member of the live help, mentors, greeters, or instructors can ask for an invitation to join the mental volunteers and use the group IM to report problems in the sandbox or anywhere else that can be heard by any of the above listed Linden staff that are online, and hang out in the sandboxes, waiting to report problems in the group's IM. The Linden members may not respond, of course, because they are supposed to be dealing with problems described in abuse reports and other channels received from all over the grid, and other duties, not giving preference to problem reports made in IM by members of certain groups.

I doubt Liaisons make 20USD an hour anyway?? Unless you meant 20L?

I don't get it. There's, like, a million sandboxes. If you're having trouble at one why not just go to a different one?