Yesterday, we discovered that bug in the migration scripts was failing to properly migrate the “Banned” status of accounts from original There.

Specifically, “Banned” accounts were not getting their “Banned” status, and were free to reclaim their accounts, get their stuff migrated, and use ThereIM.

To be exact 230 of the 11,845 banned accounts reclaimed their avatars and possessions (yes, out of the millions of Avatars in There, only 11,845 were banned. So much more the “most the members of There were Banned” theories).

We’re now re-banned these 230 members.

I know that at least 230 of you are disappointed by this, and would like a “Second Chance”. And, I believe that those whose accounts were closed due to Account Problems, and things like swearing, may deserve that second chance. However, some of those accounts closed due to exploits, cheating and/or stealing from There, threatening others, stealing There’s IP (yes, I’m looking at you, my little buddies overseas) etc, etc.

We can’t unban 11,845, or even 230, accounts without filtering out the latter (oh yes, “exploits” is not a “public service” to There, and yes, I’m talking to you). When we get some C/S in place we’ll be able to review the bans and re-instate people who should be re-instated. But we have enough things to do right now that handling the genuine bad apples is not what we want to be doing.

On other fronts this week is dedicated to:

Finishing setting up the servers for the first live parts of the world, including the ocean

Loading the Scenes for the Welcome Walkway, Dune Valley, and the Dx9 text scene

Picking the In-World GPs and figuring out how to allow them controlled access.

Just to remind some folks, the size of the world doesn’t drive the cost of running There. The ocean is all on one server, no matter how big it is.

Finally, those mischievous bannees who plan on finding their way back in, we will catch you and I guarantee there will be no second chances.

Here’s are some of the folks we’ll have assisting us. They don’t sleep much:

P.S. I’m pretty sure we will be doing work on the cluster so you can expect occasional outages of varying lengths.