Solutions To Saving The Public Sandboxes

[Edfred Jungsten]

In the almost 4 years I have been in SL, the public sandboxes have been under constant attack by griefers and assaulters. The few selfish people are ruining the sandbox experience (building, trying out products, social, learning) for the rest of us. There must be a solution to keeping innocent residents safe from these menaces.

The griefers have their method worked out. They make multiple resident accounts and transfer their harrassment tools to the other accounts in an endless cycle of being banned and starting again with the next anonymous account. Nothing stops them from continuing this easy process.

Following up the every day incidences through Abuse Reports, the Lindens come and clean up the mess, restart the region, and ban the griefers. They have been good about it. But I a sure that there are just as sick of having to do this as vigilant residents are at having to report incidences multiple times a day.

Turning off scripts for an extended period of time has been another solution the Lindens have implemented int he past. Buty this severely hinders builders, content creators, and product testing.

What is the solution to this ever present problem?

One obstacle could be "only allowing residents with payment info on file" (what connects them to their real world identity) be allowed to create objects on these lands. It doesn't mean you need to be a paying member, it doesn't mean you can't come there and be social or visit other areas of Second Life. It means that for the right to use the sandboxes for building and rezzing you need to be accountable for your actions. If someone is really into using this resource in a productive way, they will find a way to get payment info on file with the Lindens. Buying a few linden currency is all it takes. Currently there is no real accountability for peoples actions in sandboxes, and chaos runs amuck.

We cannot expect The Lindens to have "sandbox babysitters" constantly monitoring the public sandboxes. It's a waste of their time and energy. Giving chosen residents the powers to delete and ban is a risky venture as everyone knows that power has the potential to corrupt. I think that my solution of only allowing verified residents to create in these regions is the only way the sandboxes can be a safe and productive place in the future.

 

That's my two cents, what say you?

[Knowl Paine]

I submitted a ticket for support requesting a PIOF sandbox only. The response was NO and the reason stated was that the Sandboxes are for All Residents. (never hurts to ask)

I decided to count all the Residents using the Sandboxes and I discovered that the majority of Residents actually using the sandboxes are not "All Resident". The majority of users do not have payment info on file.

Solution one as you have stated is a PIOF only Sandbox.

Second is a Market Place Sandbox with a LM included in every Item sold.

Buy a pass Sandboxes.

Task specific Sandboxes, scripting only, vehicles only (building not joy riding), structures only, ect. Task specific Sandboxes would have all abilties enabled but builds and activities in that Region must align with the Sandboxes intended purpose.

What really troubles me Edfred, is the possibility that undesired behaviors are being allowed to occur, in hopes that griefing will prompt retaliatory purchases at MP. An independent research project to observe the responses of Residents.

The Sandboxes are LL's property. Mismanagement of the land should carry repercussions.

Special treatment is when one of two parties is given advantage over the other party despite the fact that both parties contribute equally. When the party contributing the most is given favor that is called getting what you pay for. When the party giving less is favored that is just wrong and is an injustice. 

[Liisa Runo]

LL really should go back to the old system of responding to AR's 24/7. Not only for keeping sandboxes clean, but to react to abuse of all kind in reasonable amount of time. Not fun to send AR and know LL will not read it untill 8 hours later when they wake up.

The griefing situation got lot worse since they merged the old boxes. Before the merge, there were about one griefer attack/day. Sometimes 2. And all sandboxes had off-world border so friendly residents used special gadgets designed to throw the physical goo off-world. I made a JIRA request to fix the old sandboxes: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-7033 Nowdays the boxes spend more time under attack than not.

We actually do have LL sandbox where anonymous accounts can't enter: "Zindra Vortex" Very peacefull place.

Not sure if it is good idea to prevent anonymous accounts entering the sandboxes. The griefers will just find another place to rez their goo. Different thing if LL prevent anonymous ppl from entering to SL alltogether. But i dont like this idea. I have a feeling most people are not willing to give their RL details just to try out something new. It might work if LL would create new small continent and anonymous accounts could log in there, get to know SL a bit. And after a period of time they could choose if they want to see the rest of the SL if they give their RL details. Inventory and money transfer shold maybe be limited between this noob continent and real continent to finally get rid of all the copybotting and scamming. Then again, not at all sure if this is good idea either.

LL make tons of profit, untill LL make their accountancy public, i say they make 10 times the amount of profit they claim to make. Even with their current puplic profit, LL has money to hire more staff, and pay them enough to stay up all night to respond to AR's and tickets.

LL has told me that they don't care much about the mess going on in the sandboxes. But LL should realise that if they don't clean the mess in the boxes, it will start to spread to neighboring resident owned lands.

We can prolly never get rid of the griefers. But we can do a lot. First step after going back to the 24/7 g-team, would be automating detection of grief in the server code. Some part of it is already in place. When the sim detect too many lag from objects of certain person, the sim freeze the objects. But freezing does not solve anything, sometimes makes it worse. Instead the sim should just return the objects that cause trouble, and maybe even freeze the owner of the objects and summon a linden to see what is going on.

[Qwalyphi Korpov]

The resident who provided the previous content, if any, has replaced it with this generic statement.

[Knowl Paine]

My ideas include for additional Sandboxes to be created. None of the current Sandboxes would change, except in the fact that there will be fewer Residents peacefully working to harass and annoy. I will admit that this will take some of the fun away from the current Sandboxes.   

 

[Edfred Jungsten]

Perhaps you should post a productive suggestion rather than criticizing others posts? Oh ..yea..you have no idea how to do that.

[Edfred Jungsten]

"What really troubles me Edfred, is the possibility that undesired behaviors are being allowed to occur, in hopes that griefing will prompt retaliatory purchases at MP. An independent research project to observe the responses of Residents."

Yea, It's been discussed about hidden motives of the Lindens with regard to griefing, I've heard alot of conspiracy theories being discussed regarding what you said "retaliatory buying", and to stimulate land sales. But if this truly were the motives then Lindens would never clean up anything or ban anyone which I know isn't the case. The Lindens do try to keep control of the sandboxes by responding to ARs. Also, in many cases (less now though), private land borders these sandboxes and they can be affected as well.

[Edfred Jungsten]

You make alot of valid points Liisa. Thank you for sharing your ideas on this subject.

[Elisha Richez]

Wouldn't hurt to only allow certain amount of physical prims rezzed at a time by a single person. This still wouldn't stop them from rezzing heavily scripted objects to kill a sim. It would however help since most griefs are done by noobs using old replicating physical prims they found on griefer sites.

[Scope]

I'd leave it as it is greifers and all. A lot of learning and testing gets done there besides the other stuff. The simulators are pounded and I would assume (yeah right) that the error logs are being watched to help improve performance much like the beta grid but smaller on main. I started there as did many, on my first day to see what this building thing was about. If I had to be processed first I would have left. Period.

 

[Bree Giffen]

Once a resident has payment info after buying some lindens they can pretty much just buy or rent some land and build in peace. There is a need for having places to build and rez for people who just don't want to pay. So right now we have a system where you can build for free but deal with griefers and we also have where you can invest some money and build without hassle. Limiting to piof for sandboxes would take away one option. There are a lot of sandboxes out there. Some are totally empty. I even still use a public sandbox and I rarely run into griefers. Use a sky platform and let those on the ground deal with griefers.

[Knowl Paine]

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Edfred Jungsten wrote:

"What really troubles me Edfred, is the possibility that undesired behaviors are being allowed to occur, in hopes that griefing will prompt retaliatory purchases at MP. An independent research project to observe the responses of Residents."

Yea, It's been discussed about hidden motives of the Lindens with regard to griefing, I've heard alot of conspiracy theories being discussed regarding what you said "retaliatory buying", and to stimulate land sales. But if this truly were the motives then Lindens would never clean up anything or ban anyone which I know isn't the case. The Lindens do try to keep control of the sandboxes by responding to ARs. Also, in many cases (less now though), private land borders these sandboxes and they can be affected as well.

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Bots were allowed/needed for "testing purposes" and sure enough, product theft, land theft and missing L$ were some of the test users wanted to run. It worked great. When you allow bullets you need shields. The weapons race never ends. Linden Lab never intended for that to happen nor did they encourage it but they did enable it. This is the meaning of my words. It is not a conspiracy, it is the history of SL, it is all on record.

I am not here to demonize any group or persons, I would like to find a sandbox solution.

We are not asking for 10 Regions or 5.

1 Region!... Is that too much to ask? 

 

 

[Yevad Doobie]

I agree with everything said in the OP, though as for a solution, I have no idea.  In an ideal world, perm supervision by a Linden would be the solution, but I can't imagine this ever happening.

[Blot Brickworks]

Public boxes always get grief,it's fun for noobs.I regulary build on a campus sand box and seldom have any problems.I use a platform.

[Baloo Uriza]

Persuing computer tresspass charges against banned users would be a good start.  Send a couple of these people to federal  prison.

[Erwin Solo]

I think the public sandboxes serve to encourage anyone that can afford to do so, to buy their own land. Thus, the griefers contribute to the marketing objective.  Thus, everything is as it should be. 

If my analysis is correct, everything will stay as it is.  If my analysis is incorrect, some of these
other ideas will be quickly implemented. Time will tell.  Oh, maybe it already has?