Fifteen or so region owners were at the Server & Scripting meeting Tuesday. They are having horrible griefing problems and are looking for help.
Post Server & Scripting Meeting 2013-21
Seems repeat griefers are plaguing SL. That is not news. If you have looked at these problems, you know there is no easy way to get rid of repeat offenders. Those not familiar with the technology of the Internet always think there is a technical solution. Griefing is a human nature problem as in many cases the solutions are not technical but a matter of law enforcement. We see that in games, forums, and real life where problems of violence and hate are ongoing. Humans bent on anti-social behavior find ways around the technical solutions and legal restrictions. Technology is not going to stop humans from misbehaving. Nor is government, even when it has its foot on everyone’s neck… the complete removal of freedom. People misbehave.
I think the Lindens registered an up tic in the resident dissatisfaction with things. Simon Linden did make some comments I think are worth repeating. I’ll take some of his separate comments and combine them into a more coherent… something…. to avoid the disjointed chat log chaos and have it make sense without including all the other people’s comments. So, this is not quoting in the normal sense.
OK… so this is not the first time dealing with griefers has come up here. There are a few things that I’ll mention that will hopefully make this a productive conversation.
First, the Lindens here are developers, and we mostly work on the server. We’re not part of support or the governance groups that actually deal with abuse reports and such. We do, however, look at and try to have technical solutions to problems like this.
So we can’t help you with specific cases like [these individuals] … it’s unfortunate, but really the best thing to do is keep kicking, banning and reporting individuals. [All the]reports are looked at.
About the most I can to with the info [you – plural you – are providing] is to pass along the message that we have unhappy customers who have to deal with chronic griefers. That won’t be news to anyone, but I can tell managers and execs and pass along that info.
Now, there’s also a big issue central to SL … [the solutions] you are talking about [are] imposing restrictions on a system (SL) that is designed to be open. You know the deal: anyone can make an account. So if your groups, land, etc. are open, anyone can return. If you want to change, that, then the land needs to be locked down and restricted more. That’s ugly when you are trying to be an outreach or get more customers, like newbies.
We definitely want to see bug reports about events where someone manages to bring a region down.
We’ve seen those [large event where large blocks of people disconnect] too and I’ve looked at some of the events. Often that is a network issue, or some attack that causes very bad lag that ends up breaking the sim-to-viewer link but the region manages to stay alive and come back.
[We cannot block specific viewer models] since the viewer is open source, they are un-trusted. We have to rely on info the viewer itself sends to identify it.
What venue operators are seeing is technical attacks that bring a region down. In addition they are seeing their builds returned leaving empty land. Some are crashed repeatedly until the system rolls the region back to a much earlier state, thus removing recently built features of the region.
Extortion is continuing. Some weeks back Designing Worlds and others were writing about extortionists in SL. They are still here… just like in real life.
For one this is particularly disturbing as the sim owner is operating an outreach to people with Parkinson’s. That is exceptionally sick of the griefers.
Yes Nalates, you are correct that its near impossible to completely stop a determined deviant anti-social trouble-maker with technology. Sadly misfits are also often smart and/or are good at taking hacking/griefing techniques from others to subvert protections of any system – including that of the SecondLife environment. The only effective solution is hunting them down and prosecuting them.
BUT that aside, what was missed on your blog was what the large representation of SL Residents demanded from LL and what LL has yet to show ANY signs of life to deliver.
So many “CUSTOMERS” of Linden Lab that take very active leading roles on the grid to substantially enhance the SL experience (by hosting / coordinating live shows, art/culture, and humanitarian fund raising events, etc.) were demanding that LL Senior Management finally step up and take some action against this OUT OF CONTROL level of griefing that fundamentally damaging the SecondLife experience.
I have never seen 50 residents attend a weekly LL Sim Open Office session. Enough is enough. And yes I agree that unfortunately this forum with Simon, Andrew, etc. is not where these problems will be solved since technology will not be the major factor to stopping these misfits. But sadly, unlike this small LL team, no one else from LL Sr. Management seems to care at all about this out of control grief that is plaguing the grid.
To show how little LL is aware of the level of grief, when the owner at the meeting provided countless examples of some of the attacks that these griefers are accomplishing, Andrew didn’t know of any these types of attacks. This is telling me that no one at LL is even aware what attacks are occuring on the grid / service they are responsible for.
What the owner and venue coordinators want from LL’s senior management is for them to take some serious action. They should be bringing this issue to the forefront. Rodvik should be striking up a Taskforce and demanding that his team LEARN what is going on in their grid. Their engineers should be sitting down with owners, gathering data, evidence, and coming up with an action plan made up of technology, policy, and enforcement actions they will take.
Sadly, we know that LL really only takes Token interesting in the greifing going on in SL. They show they don’t really care about their customers nor the experience on the grid.
Personally, I think the LL engineers should be focusing on these problems and not trying to figure out what a Meeroo doesnt work well. Sad order of priorities at LL.
THanks for commenting. I empathize with you and the sim owners on this problem. I disagree on some points, but don’t see debating those as moving anyone toward a solution.
The people showing up at the Linden Lead meetings are a very small percent of the owners. While the meetings are the wrong place to protest, being there starts to wake up the Lindens. If done well, I see that as positive action.
I’ll reach out to people I know and see what I can do.
“The people showing up at the Linden Lead meetings are a very small percent of the owners. While the meetings are the wrong place to protest, being there starts to wake up the Lindens. If done well, I see that as positive action.”
You are correct that those that showed up to the meeting are a very small percent of owners, but does mean that a sample of these highly public venues and event coordinators and sim owners that are representatives of the MAJOR component that provides the entertainment and life to the SL grid would not be reflective of the major issues going on in the grid now related to greifing?
I can tell you that I am a HUGE participant in more large crowd public venues for both the popular live music scene as well as art community and I know countless sim owners from these popular venues. What was expressed that this meeting is a common message / concern by many of these venue owners.
In fact, the silent majority of this community of sim / event owners that put a ton of their time and money into providing the SL Residents with much of what makes SL fun to exist in are far too often afraid to voice their concerns publically for fear that their sims / events will be targeted by these greifers of which they all know that LL will provide them with very little serious support.
But I do agree that although technically this meeting was not the right place to get any direct answers or resolution by the Lindens that attended, hopefully if enough of these owners start making a large enough presence and come out of their silence, the message MIGHT get up to Rodvik and senior management that greifers are destroying fundamentally important aspects of what makes SL’s experience so great.
Personally I do not think LL management will take any notice and like they often do, they will keep their head in the sand and pretend there are no serious issues with the grid (like terrible stbility on the grid now, broken functions, and rampant greifers going un challenged / checked). The greifers know LL doesn’t care so its a free-for-all for them.
Just my thoughts.
When only a small percentage shows up, I think the Lindens tend to see it as a small percentage. You are right, it should be representative and taken that way. But, Linden experience is such they just don’t see it that way. If I were trying to organize a group to get something done and affect Linden opinion, I would organize shifts of people for each meeting, that’s only 4 per week. By doing shifts volunteer attendees would not be too burdened.
I have reached out. I do think Rod will get word and hopefully read the comments here. My friend makes no guarantees nor can I.
What happened to me just today is that I went to a popular sim and suddently my complete viewport started glowing white. I could not move anymore and could not take screenshots to report this. Shortly after my complete computer, not only the SL viewer, frooze and the only thing I could do was to click the reset button and restart the system. There must be a technical solution to this kind of griefing.
Another thing is the reporting. How many abuse reports actually does it need to ban an account? One griefer came to our sim over and over again and kind of trapped people so they could not move anymore. Don´t ask me how he does it, because scrips and building were disabled. So this was going on for months and we encouraged the people to report this griefer. There have been confirmed about 50 abuse reports from different people and the account is still not blocked by LL. We cannot ban that avatar because he then comes back with an army of alts and threatens to destroy our other sims and our business. Only if we leave him alone with his private war against vampires, he won´t threaten the owners.
Blocking the screen and crashing the computer probably does have a tech solution.
I am not sure why the same avatar can repeatedly abuse people. I can see the onwer of the AV getting back in, but the avatar should be gone. So, I’m not sure what is going on.
Have they allowed us to permanently ban people from groups yet?
The next article updates the status of that… Baker is working on something else but expects to get back to the Group Ban project in a few days.