llAddToLandBanList question

I've been asked to make something that will, if necessary, ban people from all estates owned by my customer.

Am I right in thinking that the only tool available is llAddToLandBanList?

And does this function work only at the parcel level, so I will need a unit in each parcel on each sim he owns? That is, I use llRegionSay to tell the units on the sim to ban someone from their individual parcels, and also use llEmail (or possibly llShout if the sims are contiguous) to tell a master unit on each other sim what's happened, which in turn uses llRegionSay to ban the avatar from all the individual parcels there?

Yes, I know it would be far simpler to use the estate tools, but he wants to restrict access using criteria -- avatars are banned if they are BOTH under 30 days old AND have no payment info on file -- that you can't replicate using the built-in tools.

Wow, doesn't he realize that he'll have to weed through all the names on that list constantly to take people off because they are now over 30 days old?

I guess he figures that so doing will be less hassle than dealing with the griefers using throwaway alts who are bothering him at the moment.

When you add someone to the ban list, you can set the length of time. So you could find out how many days old someone is and subtract that from 30, and use that as the ban length.

Hmmm... It makes you wonder what the griefers' next step will be in this arms race .....

Writing code to remove someone more than 30 days old (or who has added payment information) from the ban list shouldn't be too hard. If you have to make a lot of llRequestAgentData queries to verify a huge list of names, however, this is going to be a slow script, especially since you have to ask for DATA_BORN and DATA_PAYINFO in separate calls. Those 0.1 second delays are going to pile up.

I agree, and I'm going to suggest we include something to remove people from the ban lists after a while. As to the arms race, I think he hopes they'll tire of this and go and find something else to do/someone else to annoy if he makes it too difficult to get onto his land.

Meanwhile, am I right in thinking that this has to be on a per-parcel basis?

That's the way it looks to me. Frankly, though, this is outside my personal experience. In three years, I've only had to ban a handful of people.

I don't know a thing about your client, obviously, but especially if he has businesses on his land, he ought to think about ways to remove people from the ban list if their payment info changes in the first 30 days. I deal with a lot of newbies. It's reasonably common for someone to enter SL without giving payment information and then realize within a week or so that they need to go back and add it if they want to bring money in world. If he doesn't think about those folks, he could lose potential customers. He'll also be losing a lot of newbies from outside the U.S. who typically have a hard time getting credit cards, but that's a separate issue.

Actually, I see that llAddToLandBanList takes an argument for the number of hours for which the ban is imposed (0.0 or a negative number are indefinite). So it looks like we can handle this automatically.

I would consider using something similar to a home security script to give anyone who meets those conditions 10 seconds to leave or boot them. No list to keep and maintain that way. You could also inform them why they aren't allowed in a more polite way also rather than just banning them. Not many people are going to want to return if they get banned on their first visit. I would be a bit annoyed

The problem with that is that it takes considerably less than 10 seconds to crash a sim if you know what you're doing, as my customer's tormentors seem to. I know in general terms how it's done, because Spike Linden once explained it to me when we were investigating the reason one of my sims was crashing several times a day, and there's not a lot you can do to stop it other than hope LL manage to track down and machine ban the culprit(s), apart from make it difficult for them to enter in the first place and hope they get bored with repeatedly having to roll up new alts.

I'm not too keen on my customer's plan and have already raised all the obvious objections with him, but he wants to do it this way and, having talked to him, I can see why.

But you don't have to give them the 10 second warning. 4 sensors are enough to cover a sim, one if you constantly reposition it. Scan for new arrivals, check their data, eject if under age & NPIOF. That way the only lists you need to maintain are 'here and checked' and 'here and pending'. Sense and Eject will work across parcels, so no need to have a detector in each one. I think processing this will be faster and less laggy than maintaining the land ban-list.

Yes, it's per parcel not per estate. So unless you have a bot that can add to your estate ban list, you'll probably want to have an object on each parcel and have them all work in concert. You may want to do a llTeleportAgentHome() as well as llAddToLandBanList(). Adding to the ban list for even a short period of time is usually sufficient, since each time a resident comes back to the area they'll get re-banned dynamically and you won't run much risk of overrunning the limit on the size of the ban list. This is the essence of the way the old BanLink system worked, except that it additionally allowed information to be shared between different estate and business owners, so you weren't on your own trying to figure out who should and shouldn't be banned. There was also one that did it by account age, but I can't remember what it was called and have no idea if it still exists. Something with "rat" in its name? Ah well.