Sometimes I Despair of the Mainland

[Rufferta]

Last night I was exploring an historic Mole Build, and I saw this huge sign on the edge of an adjoining sim.  When I flew closer to see what the sign was protecting a teleport orb gave me a 15-second warning. It made me sad to think how many new residents, exploring the Mainland, had probably run into something like this. I'm used to it by now.

When I checked for the owner, and started to add a note on their profile, I saw that I had been stuck on a ban line* on one of his properties in Corsica a few days before - again, the owner was within his rights, but this was in a narrow public sailing channel, and the banline (while on the edge of their property) was a few meters from an obvious property barrier. I did IM suggesting that the owner put up a marker buoy, but I'm not holding my breath for a response.

I love the Mainland, and I'm not leaving it, but sometimes I despair...

*experienced sailors probably know this, but I found that I could get out of the banline by editing my sailboat and moving away, then restarting it. 

 

[animats]

I know. I'd like to see the security orb and ban line rules of Bellessaria applied to more of the mainland continents.

It's possible to make vehicles bounce off ban lines, the way avatars do, by suitable scripting. My own vehicles do that. When you hit a ban line, physics turns off, and scripts can detect this, position back to the last good point, and re-enable physics. Nice to have in tight spots.

Kelly Shergood (Shergood Aviation) has a map of hostile security orbs.

Aviation-hostile areas detected by Shergood Aviation systems. An exclamation point in an orange circle indicates a trouble spot. Blue with a slash is an airport.

Some aircraft carry detectors and contact a server when they find something. That updates the map. Coverage is not complete but most major air routes are mapped.

Doesn't Bellessaria look nice?

Edited January 14, 2020 by animats

[ArgontheDevil Ormega]

My security orbs are hostile because I want them to be.  The Bellissaria restrictions are one of the reasons I want no part of Bellissaria.  (I hate the architecture and layout too.)

[Coffee Pancake]

Always private regions for the paranoid.

[belindacarson]

Always public roads for vehicle users, Public waterways for sailing, and open airspace for fliers.

 

 

Yet still moaning about people who pay for their small part of SL who want their privacy.......................

Edited January 15, 2020 by belindacarson
typo

[Qie Niangao]

It's far too late to change Mainland -- even a single continent -- to the Belli rules, despite their great success on Belli. Sure, there are folks who don't like those rules, but they have plenty of other options, so griping about the Belli rules isn't a big draw.

Really if all of Mainland had started with those rules since the very beginning, only adding to Estates the whitelist banline feature and only allowing hair-trigger security orbs there, nobody would be complaining. But at this point it would be too disruptive to change the rules for existing Mainland landowners.

On the other hand, Estates aren't going away any time soon, so they could remain an option for new landowners wanting those "privacy" measures, even if they were permanently disabled whenever a Mainland parcel changes ownership.

The Lab won't do that, though, at least not any time soon. Mainland still sells - even to vehicle users endangered by those features - so it's just not a pressing enough business problem for LL to take seriously. We'll just have to keep muddling through, risking a teleport-home each time we cross a region border and drift ever so slightly out of control onto somebody's Let's Pretend pixel property / webpage.

Edited January 15, 2020 by Qie Niangao
"ever" not "every"

[ChinRey]

8 hours ago, belindacarson said:

Always public roads for vehicle users, Public waterways for sailing, and open airspace for fliers.......

The problem for sailors isn't ban lines as such, it's unmarked ban lines and also the "broken" waterways like the one sim in the Sansara-Heterocera channel that was sold off, the mess of public and private water along the east coast of Sansara and this mindboggling example of a 4 m long private stretch between two large bodies of public waters.

And the problem with mainland as a whole are overkill "solutions" like that ugly sign the OP showed us. It's a textbook example how relatively small issues are escalated into major conflicts (and eyesores).

There's never going to be any ban lines along the Windermere-Coniston-Langdale coast as long as I own the area but we do have a sim edge there and also of course sim borders and they cause similar problems. Here's my solution:

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/mesh-navigational-buoys-boxed/6354579

and

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/SIM-CROSSING-BUOY-2/3567682

 

 

Edited January 15, 2020 by ChinRey

[Aethelwine]

I am not so sure changing the mainland covenant is so impossible. The shergood map shows less than 100 parcels with antisocial settings,  that is a tiny proportion of the many thousands of parcels on mainland. 

[Coffee Pancake]

Unless the shergood map is updated by bot, it's out of date and worthless.

[animats]

6 hours ago, Aethelwine said:

I am not so sure changing the mainland covenant is so impossible. The Shergood map shows less than 100 parcels with antisocial settings,  that is a tiny proportion of the many thousands of parcels on mainland. 

Only a very small percentage of parcels have aggressive security bots. Zero-time eject bots are rare, but really annoying. Applying the Belli bot rules to all mainland would impact maybe a few hundred parcels.

Again, if you want total isolation, there are landlords which offer it. Look for those areas of the grid that look like checkerboards.

A non-continent. You can't see other regions. You can't walk to other regions. You can't hear other regions. There are landlords who will rent you parcels in areas like this. If you want total isolation, SL offers it. Mainland is for people who want neighbors.

 

[MoondustMaia]

1 hour ago, animats said:

A non-continent. You can't see other regions. You can't walk to other regions. You can't hear other regions. There are landlords who will rent you parcels in areas like this. If you want total isolation, SL offers it. Mainland is for people who want neighbors.

Mainland is also for people who want to rent directly from Linden Lab, paying monthly tier payments direct to LL rather than having to pay a rental box in-world or divulge a PayPal name to an SL landlord (for those estates which allow monthly payments via PayPal).  

'Wanting neighbors' also doesn't automatically translate to mean no security orbs or no ban lines. 

[Beth Macbain]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Mainland is for people who want neighbors.

Says who?

1 hour ago, animats said:

Again, if you want total isolation, there are landlords which offer it.

Again, if you want HOAs and covenants, there are landlords who offer it. 

Why do people want to change what the mainland is? It's like knowingly moving into a poor neighborhood and wanting to gentrify it, then getting mad when the "undesirables" who were there first refuse to move out. 

[karynmaria]

6 hours ago, animats said:

 

A non-continent. You can't see other regions. You can't walk to other regions. You can't hear other regions. There are landlords who will rent you parcels in areas like this. If you want total isolation, SL offers it. Mainland is for people who want neighbors.

 

Totally disagree, mainline is for those that want their own land to do with what they want.  They don't want a covenant and if they want one that is when you go rent on a private estate.  I bought mainland because I wanted my own property and wanted more prims to decorate with.  Had nothing to do with me wanting neighbors. However if you bought mainland because you want neighbors then that is reason enough for you, might not be a reason someone else might want mainland and shouldn't be the only reason.  There are many different reasons people want mainland.

I personally have never used ban lines or orbs on my mainland or LH and I most likely never will.  But as long as LL lets people have the option of using them,  they have every right to use their orbs or put up the ban lines.

[Qie Niangao]

9 minutes ago, karynmaria said:

Totally disagree, mainline is for those that want their own land to do with what they want.  They don't want a covenant and if they want one that is when you go rent on a private estate.  I bought mainland because I wanted my own property and wanted more prims to decorate with.  Had nothing to do with me wanting neighbors. However if you bought mainland because you want neighbors then that is reason enough for you, might not be a reason someone else might want mainland and shouldn't be the only reason.  There are many different reasons people want mainland.

I personally have never used ban lines or orbs on my mainland or LH and I most likely never will.  But as long as LL lets people have the option of using them,  they have every right to use their orbs or put up the ban lines.

But that part I bolded is the topic at hand, right? Whether LL should continue giving people that option?

I prefer the easier topic, though: Whether LL should have originally given Mainland owners those options. If Mainland had never permitted hair-trigger security orbs nor whitelist banlines on Mainland, presumably demand for such high-security land would have generated supply on Estates. It's not as if folks couldn't have gotten what they wanted, they'd just have hired Estates for this particular use, and in exchange Mainland would have satisfied some demand currently supplied by those Estate channel partners. Pretty subtle difference in business model, in the cosmic scheme of things.

Some customers might have wanted both high-security parcels and direct-to-the-Lab tier payment, a combination not available in the hypothetical case. If it were never an option, though, maybe not many folks would think it a hardship, instead just going with whichever feature was more attractive.

In contrast, there's no way for Estates to offer real continent-scale vehicle travel, which is how strict parcel security causes trouble. That one is Mainland or not at all. There's a real asymmetry there, and that's probably why this topic keeps coming up.

[MoiraKathleen]

Does anyone know the percentage of mainland parcels that have "hostile" security orbs or ban lines?  And are the "hostile" security orbs shown on the map Animats posted 0-second orbs? or just parcels with active orbs in general?   I'm just wondering if there is a way to categorize the size and severity of the issue.

Whether it's mainland or renting on an estate, I like to be along a road or a waterway where I can travel around outside of and away from my parcel.  I've tried some of the estates like in the picture above where you have your parcel and it's all blocked off from others, and you can't wander along a path or road or walk to a community area (even if it's just a single region) - I've never been able to stay at one of those type of parcels more than a few weeks - I get claustrophobic feeling. 

On my mainland I don't use ban lines or security orbs, I have the 'avatars on other parcels can see and chat..." box checked, so I'm not completely un-neighborly.

[karynmaria]

1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

But that part I bolded is the topic at hand, right? Whether LL should continue giving people that option?

 

yes, I lost my train of thought and went another way.  Guess I should make my mesh head a little bigger! 😁

[Qie Niangao]

13 hours ago, Beth Macbain said:

Again, if you want HOAs and covenants, there are landlords who offer it. 

(I'll try to be briefer than my previous post.)

The Belli covenant* is largely for the convenience of long-range vehicle users, who can only use Mainland. The "privacy" themed, no-covenant feature could be on either Mainland or Estate, but it's a problem on Mainland because it interferes with a use case that's only viable on Mainland.

14 hours ago, Beth Macbain said:

Why do people want to change what the mainland is? 

It's business. Although there have been threads like this for a long, long time, it got more serious after Belli proved such a huge success and travellers came to appreciate just how great it is to finally go long distances without danger of script sniping or banline entanglement. The idea is that the Lab could turn a profit enabling this on more of the Mainland: more demand for the land, sure, but also commissions on more vehicle sales and all the dress-up items that go with them, and maybe more users now able to travel long distances without fear -- just more life in Second Life.

(Again, I'm not personally advocating that this change be imposed on existing owned Mainland parcels. I don't see any real downside to restricting new Mainland ownership to the Belli covenant, though.)

_______________
* The covenant allows security scripts, but with pretty tolerant limits: 15-second warning, eject-only, and a 400-2000m altitude safe zone. It does forbid whitelist banlines but still allows blacklist bans.

[Alwin Alcott]

been on Belli for a while now, but seen only one balloon comming over .
There are very few real travelers  out of the bigger roads, the only thing is they are so loud when feeling limited in their wishes.
I see no reason at all to limit freedom for such minority.

[Qie Niangao]

Admittedly, I never go to the land part of Belli, only the parts along the water. There are boats going by my houseboat all the time and often planes overhead. I also see vehicles going along my Mainland parcels all the time, too, but admittedly I picked my locations for their vehicle appeal.

(Also "freedom" is tricky. Slave owners considered emancipation an unjustifiable government restriction of their freedom to own property.)

[Sister Nova]

As long as there are sufficient protected waterways and roadways, travelling the grid can be a delight.

A lot of mainland regions were just parcelled with no gap in between and made for very congested living spaces. But there are many road and waterways that can be seen and used. The fact that the mainland is no longer as densely populated, and that there is a lot of abandoned land also makes travel easier.

Bellisseria was designed from the outset in having protected land between parcels, and its only in the Houseboat areas that you’ll see parcels side by side, but even in those areas at least one side of the parcel (it’s usually two sides) will access the protected areas (with sufficient space for a vehicle). This makes it very appealing to those that wish to be able to leave their home and be able to travel their neighbourhood.

The Firestorm viewer has a very handy feature in that you can have parcel borders show on the mini map which enables you the ability to plot your course and keep to the protected areas. In the regions where the protected areas are narrow, it’s advisable to choose your craft and speed accordingly. If you’re wanting to travel fast and far, best to stick to areas with large protected areas, such as the Blake Sea.

Travel has always been a major part of my Second Life, and I can still be seen travelling between my properties in Sansara, Bellisseria and Jeogeot, with the occasional trip up into Heterocera. And in all those travels, trying to keep off privately owned parcels reduces encounters with orbs and ban lines, but accident DO happen, but you just have to brush yourself off when it does.

The point to remember though, is that everyone is entitled to the privacy of their own parcel, and can protect that with the legal tools available to them (within covenant where applies), and no one has any entitlement to have access to or through another person’s land. If we can travel and live with this in mind, and have tolerance for the occasional mistake, it will make the grid a much happier place.

Edited January 16, 2020 by Walpurgisnacht
Submitted before I finished :P

[Marianne Little]

It isn't a feature in Firestorm or another viewer that set abandoned land in another color? I know land for sale is yellow, and auctions purple. Or is it possible to script something that shown abandoned land?

LL is now going to force people to move from old LHomes. I have not read what will happen with those regions. Could they be turned into a Mainland 2.0 with some rules?

No one is forced to move there, so that will please those who want to keep banlines and skyboxes 50 m above ground. They stay in heritage Mainland.

If all Mainland 2.0 is taken, the continents with more than  - - let us say more than 75 - 80% abandoned land could be treated like the old LHomes. The owners given land on other continents. LL can do it if they want to. I know someone will be outraged to read this, but LL is a business, not a kindergarden. If they benefit from it, they will do it. You will have the usual "I am quitting SL and never coming back" posts.

Has anyone mapped out how much abandoned land it really is?

Edited January 17, 2020 by Marianne Little

[Pussycat Catnap]

On 1/15/2020 at 6:29 PM, Qie Niangao said:

I prefer the easier topic, though: Whether LL should have originally given Mainland owners those options.

It gets us nowhere to worry about what should have been done. That is water under the bridge already.

All that matters is trying to influence the lab over what should be done NOW or LATER.

 

I don't see a problem with changing rules on existing users where needed. MMOs and other Social Media platforms do it all the time. It does filter who's an active user and who isn't... but the inactive users are paying their bills without looking anyway... If a change is chosen that can drive up subscriber numbers - then do it.

If we do reach that step, and I feel we should and even need to to prevent subscriber numbers from dropping; the question then becomes... what change is ideal?

 

I believe the existing mainland system is driving Second Life usership DOWN... both in premium and free-2-play members... and that is not just a bad thing, it's toxic to the platform.

 

Edited January 17, 2020 by Pussycat Catnap

[Prokofy Neva]

On 1/14/2020 at 1:14 PM, Rufferta said:

Last night I was exploring an historic Mole Build, and I saw this huge sign on the edge of an adjoining sim.  When I flew closer to see what the sign was protecting a teleport orb gave me a 15-second warning. It made me sad to think how many new residents, exploring the Mainland, had probably run into something like this. I'm used to it by now.

When I checked for the owner, and started to add a note on their profile, I saw that I had been stuck on a ban line* on one of his properties in Corsica a few days before - again, the owner was within his rights, but this was in a narrow public sailing channel, and the banline (while on the edge of their property) was a few meters from an obvious property barrier. I did IM suggesting that the owner put up a marker buoy, but I'm not holding my breath for a response.

I love the Mainland, and I'm not leaving it, but sometimes I despair...

*experienced sailors probably know this, but I found that I could get out of the banline by editing my sailboat and moving away, then restarting it. 

 

Wouldn't it be great if all ban scripts were effective only up to 16m before the border of the property. Or better yet, 32. 

Failing that, wouldn't it be great if people who insisted on having ban lines would voluntarily make a strip of easement around the property if they are on waterfront and then the rest of the parcel they could have their ban lines/orbs -- surely that's sufficient.

In Keuka, someone has deliberately terraformed up their land to block a creek and put access-only ban lines up so that you literally cannot navigate the creek. I asked the Lindens if they would be willing to push down the edge of their land (a steep hill) on this creek to make it navigable, but they wouldn't. And I understand their reasoning -- if they give into one request for Linden land to be changed, they'll have a zillion.

On the other hand, it's their poor terraforming and bordering in the first place that created these waterway horrors. They could have made it wide enough to boat through and not have any of the land in the creek sell to individuals like that. 

But since none of this is likely to change, it's portage or do without...

[Pussycat Catnap]

On 1/18/2020 at 6:03 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

Wouldn't it be great if all ban scripts were effective only up to 16m before the border of the property. Or better yet, 32.

I actually think they should work the other way around: banlines should work only at max-build-elevation - 1000m up to max-build-elevation.

Avatar removal code below that height should only function after first sending the avatar in question a preset message 15-seconds earlier.

as in, the code that removes an avatar should be changed on the backend to, if height is below (max-build-elevation - 1000m) instead send a warning message (preset as in written by the lindens, not the users), and then start a counter. 15 seconds later it will do a removal if the avatar is still present.

 

[Cinos Field]

What I wouldn't give for Bellisseria style mainland but without the linden homes. :(