Darkheart's Guide to: Parcel Privacy And Security

Visualise it: You are having a movie night at your place with some friends and…BAM! Mr. K0n4n Th3 B3rb4rian11! (a 0 days old user) shows up in your living room with a ‘hi lolz’. Sure, you can eject him from the parcel, but you are already mad. It has happened to me too many times, in other virtual worlds too.

In other virtual worlds you might not have all permissions required to prevent it, or covenant doesn’t allow it – so you have to resort to alarms, and 15 seconds of awkwardness.

All Darkheart’s Playground rentals, including free ones, come with full ownership permissions so you can proactively set the right privacy & security settings.

Most of the parcel-related settings can be found in the ‘Land’ window. You can access this either via the ‘Land’ button if you are in the parcel, or right clicking on terrain of the parcel > ‘About Land…’

Privacy

Privacy when it comes to parcel can be boiled down to two items: visibility and media. It is not just a safety feature, but also a courtesy one to restrict them to your parcel.

Visibility: In Land > Options you will see the option ‘Avatars on other parcels can see and chat with avatars on this parcel’, un-checking this box will:

1. Render your avatar ‘invisible’ to anyone outside the parcel as soon as you cross the parcel boundary.
2. Prevent people outside the parcel from reading the local chat.

Here's a video show you how.

Media: In Land > Sound you will see different options to restrict media to the parcel. This will prevent gestures, media (videos, etc.) and similar intrusive feeds from permeating into another parcel. 

Privacy tip: It is easy to start creating picks and accidentally setting the location of the pick to your house. Choose a public place to set the location of the pick unless you want people to actually visit it!

Security

Having walls, doors, and blinders is great…but not very effective if any stranger can walk into your house and catch you mid shame walk with your pants on your ankles because previous person forgot to change the paper roll (we’ve all been there…). Same goes for virtual worlds.

The best way to restrict access to you parcel is by creating an in-world group and restricting access to it.

You can create a group by going to your conversations window, Groups tab > Create…

In order for any of the group-related parcel setting to work, you need to SET the group in the General Tab of the Land window first.

Here's a video on hwo to create a group and SET it to your parcel.

Access: You can restrict Access to group members only by navigating to Access and un-checking ‘Anyone can visit’. It should automatically check ‘Allow group XXXX with no restrictions.

Always allowed/Banned: These 2 lists allow you to set individual exceptions to ANY other rules. 

‘Always allowed’ people will ALWAYS be able to access your parcel regardless of your settings. 

‘Banned’ people will ALWAYS be banned from your parcel, regardless of your settings.

Parcel permissions: You can restrict object entry to Group members only via the ‘Options’ tab.

Tip: There’s no need to ‘Deed’ the land to the group. This only enables some further functionality in terms of parcel management permissions.

Region 

Region owners can mirror these security behaviours at Region level. This is only encouraged when there is single ownership over the full region. 

Here's a video on how to quickly find the region settings.

Parcel owners under a region can be more restrictitive, if allowed, but never more 'open' in their privacy setting.

All of the above should be the first steps you take when acquiring a new parcel or region. At a region level you can be more original, parcelling out different area based on the level of privacy your want in them.

For instance: you might have a home with an open shopping area in it that you want everyone to access, but also your own house. Or you might want to allow people to navigate your region by boat, but not 'land' at your place.