Mandatory e-mail validation for new accounts! Woo hoo!

Well, let's hope they get better on those things, too. But this is a start - and something that EVERY OTHER place does as a matter of course. Therefore, it is truly the least they could do! lol

coco

They could ask the question "Do you promise not to be naughty?" on the registration page.

It's a start. A small start, but a start.

They also bring back the more/less five active account limit by valid email address. Does LL finally learn form their mistakes and start doing things right? Let's hope so...

I'm definintely in the 'It's good to see LL finally doing something about sign-up verification' camp. It's a first baby step and full of holes, but it's a start. Thanks, LL. Don't be afraid to enact a real verification program. Everyone will thank you for it.

That is precisely why this makes me happy, Raudf!

It isn't that it's all that great a deterrent, in itself.

It's that it is the first move back in the direction of validated ID that LL has taken since the middle of last year, when they basicly decided to do absolutely nothing to validate new accounts.

LL's attitude on Account ID for most of the last year has been as stupid and short-sighted as saying "Some people can kick in a locked door, and it's really not that hard to do. So we are going to remove all the doors and locks on our offices in San Francisco, since they are worthless at stopping people from entering anyway."

How long do you think they would have anything worth stealing in their headquarters if they took all the doors off the hinges and left the doorways wide open and the office unattended every night? Making no attempt at all at account validation is just that stupid.

Validated e-mail is a flimsy door and a cheapo lock, but it's better than none at all!

Anything they can do, especially, to prevent underage people on the grid is a good thing. It's a giant lawsuit waiting to happen. LL might win that lawsuit but it would get real nasty in the media if a 16 year old girl or boy met her/his "friend" in RL because of SL and got raped and/or murdered. Remote chance, yes, but still a publicity nightmare.

You're right that it's a mistake to think that griefers are stupid, but it's also a mistake to think that they're all smart and sophisticated.

If this only reduces 5% of the griefing, by getting rid of those griefers who understand SL but not SMTP or anonymous accounts, as well as those for whom it's now too much trouble to take for their childish fun, then it's worth it.

Even if it only reduces 1% of the griefing, but the next step is to deploy exclusion filters on mail accounts from free services or services designed for multiple accounts, it's worth it. The benefits may take a while, but deployment in stages is a perfectly reasonable strategy.

This mechanism is an establshed mechanism, used by many sites. Chances are they got much of the code from somewhere else (lots of content management systems have modules for this). It only involves the account database, not the full SL world, so it's not their most difficult set of code. In other words, deploying this is pretty cheap. It doesn't have to get tremendous results to justify a relatively small cost.

Do they have to be unique email addresses or just valid?

I haven't tested that, but I suspect it is just that it must be a valid address.

What happens is that you get an e-mail at that address, and you must click that link to go back to the LL website and complete the registration process. If you don't click on the link, available ONLY in the e-mail sent to the account that you specified, and as far as I can tell, unique for each registration, then the account doesn't get activated.

It does not require a reply by e-mail from the same account - just clicking on the link in the e-mail that you received. So yes, it could still get forwarded on its way to you. Mine did go through a forwarding link, because the unique e-mail addresses that I use for each of my alts are for an Internet domain that I own, and any mail sent to that domain gets forwarded by my domain hosting service to my main real e-mail account, where filters then split it out into mail folders for each alt.

However, as I said before, that still leaves a trail that can be followed, through the mail provider. And yes, I could see LL possibly prohibiting hotmail or other free mail services, as many other Internet services do when it comes to validation.

Right now, I see this as more an admission on LL's part along the lines of "Gee... maybe removing all the doors from our corporate HQ building wasn't the smartest move. They did, after all, keep at least the most casual thieves from trying to burgularize us."

Admitting you're on the wrong course is the first and most critical step to getting back on the right one.

So if the email addresses don't have to be unique, troublemakers that get suspended or banned don't have to bother getting a new email address when they create their new account. Just use the same one they used for the newly suspended or banned acount.

Perhaps LL just wants to have more email addresses to sell.

Or perhaps, more seriously, they are planning on going to more email based contact with residents in connection with the upcoming problem ticket system.

Errr, or just ban that e-mail address from making new accounts? That seems to be a no-brainer, ban an account, ban the e-mail address from creating new accounts... so play nice with your alts, folks

Which means that griefers would have to go to the trouble of creating/using another e-mail address.

Methinks that's what I would look at first...

Max

I need to ask this? What are you talking about? Yes they can get a new e-mail. But as we all know they come right back in in the matter of a a few moments. I thought i had problems commucating...

Perhaps LL just wants to have more email addresses to sell.



I need to ask this again? What are you talking about? anyone can chat about any issue at any time. But come on even me can`t be this confused when TRYING to talk about a issue about this.

Many have been saying this for a long time now, but LLabs says they are not held accountable. ON 6/6/2006 when the game was open too all sort of griefts, underage kids, etc. That is when LLabs Legal team step in a distance LLabs accountablity for any wrong doing and or illege actions. At that time LLabs "CLOSED" its self making sure any problem type people were shutup and and POSSIBLE links to them and any possible issue were either removed and or dumb downed. Many people got caught in LLabs cage and never recovered. Others moved in to other avies to start new lives. Many good reps of good and honest people had their lives on sl hurt, because llabs is so scaried what they might say. Even tho they did not wrong.

Usagi

Not using black text on dark gray is a no brainer to me, but that doesn't stop LL from doing it.

Making a sleek object editor like the property editor in CorelDraw instead of a giant rectangle that is always in the way of something because it's too big not to be seems like a no brainer to me, but not, apparently, to LL.

No system will be perfect. Any barrier can be circumvented.

If you put up enough barriers for a griefer, though, the time and money investment will become too much to justify continued griefing. This kind of thing can deter the casual griefer.

Private sim owners might be given the option of banning users who verified using free accounts like hotmail and yahoo.

Are you talking an outright ban on all avatars created using a webmail client? This would be ludicrous. Many of my relations and friends, mature adults, only use web-based clients. It's the perfect solution for people who move around a lot.

I am worried about them making this retroactive. I made an alt, and I have no idea what email address I used. Does anyone know how to retrieve that information? I would hate to log in one day and have no access to that account.

Come here to the forums. See the link named "User CP", in white text at the left of the blue bar, about 1.25 inches down the left edge of the page? Click that.

On the page that comes up, select "Edit Email and Password" in the left menu.

On that page, you can see and change your e-mail address.

I can't visit the forum on that account because it has no payment info on file.

EDIT: I found I can get my account info by entering that character name and password on the update payment screen. The subsequent screen had an email option link on the right side, and when I clicked that it displayed my email for that account. Thanks for steering me the right direction!

Not web-based clients. Free e-mail accounts, which are easily abused.

It would be up to the sim owner to decide the balance between securing against abusers vs. allow as many people as possible.

I've been using free web-based email as my primary email address for years, since I was about 14. I imagine this is a pretty common preference, since colleges and jobs come and go....and it's nice to have access to my emails going back a long time. I can't think of any real life friends who use a regular email account. It's all yahoo or hotmail or something along those lines.

Naturally land owners can do what they want, but they should be well advised that simply banning free web-based email accounts may have a much much larger impact than they likely imagine.