SignpostMarv's Blog

Personally I’m against it.

You generally don’t have (thing) with the same name the same (other thing):

• street in the same town.
• town in the same county.
• county in the same country.
• country in the same continent.
• continent in the same planet.
• planet in the same solar system.

• domain name in the same network.
• book by the same author.
• album by the same musician.
• musician on the same label.

Why should region names within the same grid have the same name ? Well the only advantage appears to be if they’re clones of each other, but historically cloned sims generally have numeric suffixes. All of Linden Lab’s customers and even Linden Lab themselves follow this pattern when cloning sims.

origin of issue.

Non-unique region names appear to be an accidental bug, or lack of foresight. I originally noticed non-unique sim names cropping up on Linden Lab’s webmap API back in January. Yoz Linden looked into the matter, and surmised that before regions are rezzed, they have the same name, and that the non-unique names (of as-yet non-existent) were being leaked out into the webmap API. However, more recently it seems that the regions are retaining these non-unique names when they are brought online, which causes problems.

problems with non-unique region names.

1. Usability

   Currently, you can’t select which instance of a non-unique region name you’ll find yourself in if you click a teleport link or SLUrl.

2. Navigartion

   While a SLUrl opens the map to the region it’s named for, you’d have to remember to manually select the right region (though that assumes you know which region is the right one you want to go to)- though this is generally only a problem when the non-unique region names aren’t for cloned sims.

3. Phishing

   If non-unique region names are allowed, then a mechanism needs to be put in place so that non-unique sim names can only be registered by the original registrant.

   Of course, if the sims have long-since expired, then any claim over such sim names should expire as well- the point is to prevent situations from occurring whereby asshats can steal customers or make your customers think you advocate certain objectionable materials.