CW: strong language (and a lengthy rant of over 10½ times the character limit of Mastodon)
Some people really don't seem to be qualified to have their sims listed on #
OpenSimWorld. Why? Because they're incapable of properly setting up the beacon, and they're too indifferent to maintain it.
For starters, I guess they get themselves an OSW beacon and expect it to run perfectly right after rezzing it on their sims. But then they discover two things. One, it doesn't. Two, there's a notecard with a manual. And they're like, "lol cant be bothered to read shit" and dismiss it. But they want their sim on OSW. For that, they need the beacon to work.
So they open the notecard, and they try to skip right to what to do to get the beacon working. Then they try to do that with an absolute minimum of reading.
Some also try to set up the OSW page for their sim without reading up on anything and thus never have it shown as online. But let's put this aside.
Once they actually get the beacon and the connection to OSW working, they say, "My work here is done," and walk away again. It works, so what else should they have to do?
What else? Well, that's in the notecard, too. Make the beacon non-copyable. This is not optional. Even if this isn't required for the beacon to work, it's still
mandatory.
Otherwise, people may come and copy the beacon and plop it down on their own sims. As it is. With someone else's beacon key in it. Because they don't know how it works. Because they don't really know what it
is in the first place. Because they take it for nothing else than a cool and nifty #
Hypergrid teleporter. Because they've never heard of the
the website OpenSimWorld. Even though the beacon rubs it into their faces.
I'm not even kidding. I myself took more than a month of using OSW beacons as teleporters, also because nobody was there to explain to me how to Hypergrid using the map (#
Metropolis had exactly zero newbie guidance), before I discovered the website. And someone I got to know later had been in #
OpenSim for seven years, had seen dozens upon dozens upon dozens of beacons and still didn't know what OpenSimWorld was and what the beacons were.
Okay, so what's so bad about copying the beacon for your own sim? It's so bad because if you copy the beacon from sim Foo and put it on your own sim named Bar, both beacons will submit data to the same OSW entry. OSW will take both sims for Foo. It will mistake your sim Bar for Foo. The beacon you've rezzed on Bar is still set up for Foo.
The consequences: At least for some time, again and again, OSW will list "Bar" as the name of Foo in Foo's own entry. And it will also replace the "Foo" in the Hypergrid address with "Bar" then, making Foo inaccessible via Hypergrid address. People who blindly copy-paste Hypergrid addresses into their maps will come complaining to the owner of Foo that their viewers can't find Foo.
And why is that so? It's because OSW relies on so-called beacon keys. As a sim owner, you generate the beacon key for your sim in the entry for your sim on OSW, and then you go in-world and enter the key into your beacon. This establishes the connection between the beacon and the OSW entry.
This is necessary because the beacon can read sim names, but not grid names, so it can't uniquely identify sims by their addresses. This is because the OSW beacon is scripted entirely in #
LSL so it even works on sims that don't allow any #
OSSL for whatever reasons. And LSL was developed by Linden Labs for #
SecondLife, so why should it support reading grid names if it was made for a virtual world with only one grid?
So, back to the issue: The beacon key establishes the connection between the beacon and the OSW entry. Problem: The beacon key establishes the connection between
any beacon with this key in it and that OSW entry. Regardless of where the beacon is. It can be on an entirely different sim and still connect to that same OSW entry and submit data to it. There can be copies of this beacon with this key in it on
dozens of sims, and they'll all report to the one same OSW entry, completely confusing both OSW and its users.
Satyr Aeon says the current version of the beacon has a built-in safeguard against this. Once you rez it somewhere, it resets and deletes whatever beacon key may be inside it. But there are still plenty of misconfigured (or not sufficiently configured) older beacons out there. And every few days or weeks, one of them is copied by someone.
I've lost count on how many times I've told sim owners that just this has happened to them, that they have to get themselves a new beacon key, and that they have to make their beacons uncopyable. And I've also lost count on how many times sim owners got new beacon keys (or outright deleted and re-entered their sims on OSW because they didn't know how to make a new beacon key) but left their beacons free for everyone to take.
Why do I still do that? Because most sim owners who have this happen to their sims won't notice. They only ever visit their own OSW entries if they want to post something. And because I guess nobody else would notify them, much less also tell them what to do to fix the situation and keep it from re-occurring.
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OpenSimulator #
Metaverse #
VirtualWorlds #
PetPeeve
