Easement access for private land
Thunder Rahja
Security orbs have frequently been mentioned in Server User Group as a problem for residents who like to use vehicles to explore the mainland. Some residents have asked for restrictions or bans on security orbs to limit their impact on residents passing through private land, but security orbs are a Resident-created construct and their functions overlap with other land enforcement scripts, making it difficult to distinguish them on a technical level.
Instead I propose new land access settings to allow residents to enter private land for a limited time before ejection, in order to facilitate vehicle travel while still protecting the privacy of land owners. A minimum time of 60 seconds should be sufficient to cross most parcels, provided there are few to no obstacles. A timer could be displayed on the UI for residents to inform them of their remaining allowed time on private land.
The time limits should be cumulative for residents who recently exited that parcel, as to prevent abuse from repeatedly entering and leaving to extend the time they spend on private land.
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Impresario Beaumont
I have no new suggestions to the ones already listed, except to say that land ownership rights should be balanced against everyone's ability to enjoy traversing the incredible variety and beauty of the mainland.
I've raised the issue in the SL forum and was met with surprising invective from land ownership purists, so I know this is a highly divisive subject. I guess I simply don't understand how my traversing someone's land at 500m for one or two seconds somehow crushes the owner's privacy.
In my mind, the approach in Bellissaria strikes such a balance. Restricting travel to a certain altitude range and imposing an ejection minimum warning to 15 seconds would accomplish this.
Kadah Coba
Too many orbs ignore the required dwell period before and start to act the instant you touch their land. The intent of that rule was to allow passing/flying through.
Instead my average experience every time I've gone exploring mainland in the last few years is getting a constant barrage of prompts from orbs in 0-3 seconds and usually at least a few that will instantly TP me home the moment I cross a corner of their parcel. Even encountered a few abusing some common-ish experience keys to do instant an TP from an Adult region to PG region.
Ground level mainland has become pretty active-aggressively hostile. I rarely do any exploring anymore. Its just not fun getting TP'd home every 10-15 minutes because I took more than the minimum interval for llGetAgentList to cross a parcel's corner that overlaps under what looked like public road.
Kadah Coba
> Instead I propose new land access settings to allow residents to enter private land for a limited time before ejection, in order to facilitate vehicle travel while still protecting the privacy of land owners.
AFAIK, TOS requires a minimum of 10 seconds before taking any action. Most orbs appear to ignore this and default to 3 seconds, with many that I've tested in the past allowing 0 seconds as an option against all avatars at all altitudes.
Gabriele Graves
Kadah Coba: There is nothing in the TOS that prevents anyone from operating even a zero-second orb on Mainland.
Gabriele Graves
I disagree with the premise of this proposal and many of the other proposals below. It is a huge breach of faith to existing land owners to expect them to allow accounts through their land at this point if they have decided to allow no access.
There is enough public travel space on mainland to use without people expecting to use private parcels as well.
If anything like this goes gets the go ahead, I can see affected land owners asking, at a minimum, for a big tier discount for having to allow it or, more likely, for LL to buy their land from them.
Thunder Rahja
Gabriele Graves: This isn't a request to change existing land access, it's a request to add a new land access setting that can be enabled by land owners as they see fit.
Gabriele Graves
Thunder Rahja: This isn't very clear from your description. If that is truly what you are proposing then I have no objection. Please make that clearer if you can in your description.
Thunder Rahja
Gabriele Graves: With Canny, unfortunately, I cannot edit my submission after posting it.
Skyhook Arkright
Gabriele Graves: I've always wanted to go exploring over mainland etc, it's funner in a vehicle, but it's not practical, due to so many parcels allowing no access at all.... a vehicle flying through at a reasonable altitude is no impingement on a land owner, and is very realistic, it's what one would expect. I just wanted to point out, that while there are areas for public transport, that likely isn't the key issue. Not all want to just fly a vehicle in those areas, the purpose for many is exploring the grid, it's rich and diverse, and it's a massive shame that travelling over it is so impractical at times. We own land yes, but personally I'm not really convinced we should also own the airspace to the heights to which we currently do. Just imo I think it's fair for a vehicle to pass over without any due lingering ofc.
Gabriele Graves
Skyhook Arkright: Controlling all of the airspace is the status quo. I'm not interested in debating that here.
Skyhook Arkright
Gabriele Graves: ofc not, I'm certainly not wanting to debate anything, just putting my own opinion forward, which I'm sure you'll agree is what this process is all about.
Gabriele Graves
Skyhook Arkright: This proposal isn't about forcing anyone to allow travel over their land or changing the rules to allow that to happen though. I made my original post due to a misunderstanding about the proposal here and Thunder Rahja has stated in his follow up that this proposal is about adding a new option, not changing existing options.
I think the intention with these feature requests is to try to keep things on topic as much as possible and this seems to be veering off-topic to me.
Skyhook Arkright
Gabriele Graves: gosh I will leave you to it, life is too short.
Jennifer Boyle
I wish LL would apply the same rules they have for Bellissaria to the whole mainland. When I read the Bellissaria TOS the first time, I thought, "The Lindens are correcting all the mistakes they made before with mainland." I've wondered if the same restrictions could be enforced via technical limits instead of rules.
Bleuhazenfurfle Resident
I was thinking about this during the UG, and one good point was raised; SL doesn't know WHY the eject is being performed — sometimes, it is appropriate to eject fast.
Which gave me an idea; Introduce a new eject function that includes a reason, and attach a forced delay to the old commands (not a script delay — the command runs, and the eject is registered on a timer). Existing orbs and stuff will gain this additional delay, but new/updated ones can simply switch to the new commands, and old orbs currently set with a reasonable delay can have that delay reduced to compensate until they can be updated, so mostly the only ones that would be negatively impacted, would be abandoned orbs — I don't consider that a bad thing.
As for the new command, the reason should come in two parts:
* A numeric constant identifying the general class of the reason. eg. repeat rules violation vs. simple privacy orb. This determines the minimum delay enforced by the command, and should probably be visible to the person being ejected (so it doesn't just use "ToS violation" for _all_ ejects, just to be able to do immediate ejects). This would also be taken into account with the idea of "this parcel does automated ejections".
* It should also have an optional text reason which gets logged, visible to estate managers and above. (Optional because otherwise it'd likely mostly just be "The Security Orb Dun It".)
* I too think the timer should be visible on the viewer, and thought that the timer should only pause, not reset, when the person leaves the parcel.
* The timer could also be cleared after a proportionally longer time, perhaps ticking back by a second per five minutes or something, multiplied by the number of times they've been ejected over some long period. (Like, if the region remembers the last 1000 people to be ejected over the past year.)
* This means there should also be a way to cancel a pending eject; like, either though another command, or just by giving a reason code of 0. It should also be possible to adjust the timer by reissuing the command (except that you still can't set it below the floor for the stated reason).
I don't think all this is needed for the ban commands, they can keep their new forced delay — I also wouldn't object to parcel bans having a longer forced timeout, either. They can just be combined with an eject.
Peter Stindberg
I read the notes of the meeting where this came up. Modern SL bots scan a while region in under a second. 0-second-banning tools are needed for those highspeed bots. And while in theory the time delay could be different for scripted agents, some of those bots go rogue and do not have the scripted agent tag.
Coffee Pancake
Attempting to force unwanted entry into privately owned parcels results in parcel owners escalating their efforts to maintain privacy.
This breaks parcels with any explicit access permissions.
This is how we get more ugly 'spite' walls all over mainland, aggressive security, orbs, invisible obstacles blocking common points of ingress, including randomly in the sky, up to and including active prims that deliberately place themselves in an "explorers" path.
Ban orbs from ejecting and you get orbs that manage a parcels ban list to pre-emptively ban near by avatars before they enter the parcel.
This will be abused to enable harassment, especially targeting residents renting mainland who lack parcel powers.
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I propose that information about all parcels on a region is passed the viewer as soon as the viewer knows about a region. This would allow the mini map to highlight ban lines well in advance of collision, additionally the parcel flag for 'allow object access' could also be used to signal that passage is / is not permitted.
SL is built upon absolute land owner authority. This should not be deliberately broken or undermined as part of a sweeping change to allow always on access for a single minority use case.
I love sailing, driving, GTFO, etc .. This proposal does not help that cause of explorers & vehicle users, especially when mainland is crisscrossed with public routes easily viewed on the mini map.
Thunder Rahja
Coffee Pancake: I've been told that there are also highly aggressive security orbs that add anyone detected in the region to the parcel's ban list, in order to extend the ban lines to completely block overhead passing.
This proposal is not to ban security orbs, but to offer an easily accessible alternative, in addition to currently available land access options, that strikes a balance between privacy and travel. I don't expect it to take off quickly if/when implemented, but my hope is that land owners will consider it the more attractive option over buying and using aggressive access management scripts.
Coffee Pancake
Thunder Rahja: I don't expect it to take off at all.
Residents deploy aggressive security in response to the actions of other users. Once bitten twice shy. There is no world in which someone purchasing an orb following an incident, will later decide leaky security is favorable over the actual security they have purchased with cause.
The best we can do is to get vehicle users better information in the viewer about where they are permitted to travel and expand public (preferably linden) roads and waterways.
The point that's lost on vehicle users is that the landholder is king. All passage though private parcels is at the land holders pleasure. Being able to pass though someone else's land is a privilege, not a right or an expectation.
It really shouldn't be a surprise that aggressive security orbs are found near giant public runways or on the flight paths between them. Your fun is another users deal-breaking nightmare.
Trying to engineer ways to force access rather than listen to that user clearly stating "no" is not a solution and risks burning what little good will is extended already.
Woolfyy Resident
Coffee Pancake: Personally i have always left open my ground parcels to everybody, anyway with no rez rights. As far as i see from many other users they moved their private areas in skyboxes.
To my point of view SL should be valorized on ground as a pleasant area to travel through for anybody, have if needed a 2 mins delay to tell people not to stay for those who want to get rid of visitors and let only skyboxes be really private.
I'm sorry if this looks really permissive but i am against bunkers on ground as well as yellow ban lines appearing all the time even just because you went close to a bordering parcel.
MY CONCLUSION If people want to live in a bunker, then to my point of view it would be better to let them buy totally private regions surrounded by open water. A solution for that is to make homestead easy to rent without needing a previous full region.
ADDENDUM : A "soft" solution to avoid "squatters" = add a "no sit" option to lands, as those who stay do it often because some areas are nice to visit and stay sat on the beach or so.
Coffee Pancake
Woolfyy Resident: I appreciate your personal position but you can't expect LL to force that position on everyone by technical or policy means, or then stipulate that if they don't like it .. they should leave (to private islands).
Woolfyy Resident
Coffee Pancake: as far as i remember, there is a minimum timing for orbs requested by realtors. Moreover i remember a beach that i visited long ago where sit was just allowed to members of the group. As for users, if they want to live in a bunker, just group all those ones in what is named a ghetto, that way they will not impact those who want to freely visit SL.
More seriously, there is already general, adult etc. .. so why not add a category private ? for those allergic to socializing ...
ADDENDUM This is a quote of the public clauses from a well-known realtor on Second Life (just to say that conditions already apply and that it is just a question of clearly writing them down) :
"ORBS & SECURITY
Orbs are required to meet the following:
Orb scan distance must not exceed the coverage of the land exposed out of water, may scan no higher than 80m, may not ban, are NOT to eject to home, only off parcel & after 60 seconds warning period. must permit Estate Managers
Management reserves the right to return orbs in violation of ANY of these without warning.
We will help set orbs up to the standards required if requested."