The Great Purge of 2016…

What’s with the perma-bans we are hearing of?

Drama free Gnome

Drama free Gnome

I’m seeing reports of long time users with big shops, whole regions, and massive marketplace stores being perma-banned. So, what’s up? 

There are conversations at SLUniverse and in the SL Forum. After some reading, it starts to appear we have an answer. But, no conclusive or single answer. Isn’t that how it goes with drama  in SL?

One of the things that happens in these threads is people start to pull in off-topic subjects/accusations. There is a small collection of its Firestorm’s fault for building copybot viewers. I suspect a number of people note those posts to Jessica Lyon, team leader of Firestorm development peeps. So, we often get a quick response countering the bogus information.

Quoting Jessica Lyon:

Quote: (reference)

Originally Posted by Gavin Hird
Unless this is a different Skills Hak I am talking about all the controversy around the Emerald viewer that involved Skills Hak, and the fact that virtually all the copybot viewers are based on the Firestorm codebase which has a direct lineage to Emerald.

I’m getting all my businesses in order now in anticipation that I’ll be next to get banned. Surely I must be next because… well.. I was on the Emerald team 6 years ago.

But for the very few who don’t already understand this I’ll state that… Firestorm is open source. People fork our code and then modify it to include copybot capability. In fact all the viewers are open source and from what I understand there is at least one copybot viewer for every popular third party viewer out there. They do this so that their presence on a copybot viewer is masked by looking like they’re on a legit viewer.

Finally one last addition. True fact, the first copybot ‘viewer’ was based of LL’s own viewer. So in that same logic, LL must be banned too lol.

Seriously though, just throwing some fun into this. In fact I really don’t know what’s going on with all these bans all the sudden.

Jessica Lyon

Tonya Souther, a Firestorm team member, also chimes in:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gavin Hird
Unless this is a different Skills Hak I am talking about all the controversy around the Emerald viewer that involved Skills Hak, and the fact that virtually all the copybot viewers are based on the Firestorm codebase which has a direct lineage to Emerald.

Every line of code in the Firestorm codebase that was ported from Emerald was at the very least examined in detail by a member of the Firestorm team, and more often than not rewritten. All of that was done in public, with people who would have just loved to hammer us as coffeepotting gleefurz watching every one of the 48,701 (as I write this) commits to our source repository. We know damned good and well we have to earn and keep earning people’s trust.

There’s not a thing we can do about copybot viewers, whether based on Firestorm or not. People can grab our complete source code and do whatever they damned well want with it, and we can’t stop them. If someone wants to make a copybot viewer based on Firestorm, that’s on them, not us.

By your logic, LL is responsible for copybot viewers, too. After all, they’re all based on LL code!

To the very best of my knowledge, Skills has never been involved in or contributed any code to Firestorm. As with anyone else, we would not accept a contribution from her without giving it a good going over to make sure it was on the up-and-up.

So, Gavin…you’re completely, 100% full of USDA grade A unpitted prunes.

…I’m still thinking about the unpitted prunes thing…

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6 thoughts on “The Great Purge of 2016…

    • Wake up and look at how it is being used. It was sold using ‘good intentions’ as marketing. Those of us digging deeper see what is happening. Just today: Washington Examiner: FEC decision would end witch hunt of Drudge. Without Net Neutrality there wasn’t even the possibility of such a witch hunt. It was all and only First Amendment freedom of speech. Net Neutrality preempted that and thus the Freedom of Speech lawsuit in progress now.

      This is another reason a strict Constitutionalist is need for the American Supreme Court. Progressive judges are allowing the removal of Freedom of Speech in numerous places and over riding existing rights.

      While the FEC currently looks to be exempting aggregator sites like Drudge, they are proceeding with looking to control other news sites creating original content.

      You need a better source of news…

  1. This PURGE makes no sense…..Though, based on other evidence, I don’t think it is over content….

    There have been other recent bans that have been under the radar, one that comes to mind that was permanently suspended was found after appeal to be due to irregular activities with lindens earned inside SL, moving large sums of lindens between accounts.

    It is suspected that the bans were over selling of lindens privately outside lindex. Remember sl makes a good amount of money off the sl exchanges, plus there is government pressure for proper taxation for money taken out of sl. The thing is, not many will actually own up publicly to their actual violation… so take that into account.

    none the less…What this has done is made anyone who has put many years into sl, and has created content or grown some biasness is now in fear of getting a random permanent ban with no explanation and little recourse.

    these cases we are not talking about greifers, or Thieves, we are talking bout long term content creators. High profile persons who participate in the sl community.

    Just the fact this was done and no public word from sl, and these persons having no explanation as to why they were banned just highlights how much sl has lost touch with its actual user base. Though the lack of explanation to those banned doen’t not surprise me.

    I have gone thought he appeal process myself. I had the unfortunate experience of having my account suspended for several days. after which I got access back… I did follow up with an appeal, even though I had access back, as there was no explanation as to why I was suspended other then I violated a tos. In that the responses I got back on appeal were extremely vague, referring to violations in which I had no knowledge of. There were no specifics, just that I had violated a rule, with no explanation of exactly what it was that I did.

    It took months to get details and Linden Labs was not very forthcoming what the details, they just assumed I knew why I was suspended. Frankly, I think the persons replying to my case actually had no idea why I was suspended.

    As it turns out, the violation was actually a false report on something the person handling the violation did not fully understand.

    If those banned int he purge broke some TOS, and did receive warnings. The way sl communicates there would be no way for them to know what it is that they were actualy doing wrong. It is a system that’s set up to not correct the problem.

    The strange thing I have noticed is that SL hasn’t taken down the stores these animators have. if it is there content, they why is it still being sold on MP

    SL would be best served putting out a pubic statement on recent rash of high profile bans, This is a public relations nightmare for sl, Word has gotten out. Most regular users of sl know someone who was effected.

    Personally, having grown my own little business in sl, i am defiantly exploring my options. and as someone else pointed out, this isn’t doing sl any good for promoting their new platform. if were going to change platfoms, then why go with a company that treats there members this way.

    • We have past experiences of vigilantes and griefers targeting people to cause them problems. We have experiences of businesses falsely attacking their competition and some of those cases have made it to RL courts.We also know we have griefers, pedophiles, thieves, and others that should be expelled. Mix in the people and computer system dealing with these people in what must be a depressing job… I’m surprised SL survives.

  2. With the amount of Drama Skills Hak created releasing a fake CopyBot prevention system CDS, and Data Mining, I am glad this person got banned, they ruined my life, and life of my friends many years ago getting falsely banned for using Neil Life, when using Emerald Viewer, Refused to remove bans, So basically I did end up copybotting, and I never got banned for it I created accounts for the sole purpose to get revenge on many merchants running CDS…

    Today if I ever got banned again for any reason by any network ban system that is supposed to prevent Copybotting I will do it again, and I do have the ability to clone full meshes, re-upload to SL and give it out as freebies, as well as use false information and payment info and there is nothing anyone could do about it…

    Simple Answer, I respect Merchants, I spend thousands / hundreds of Dollars, but my Group of people will not put up with Evil People in SL and anyone who is warned to cease actions and refuses.

    Its Great Linden Lab Banned Skills Hak for this reason, and Zfire Xue, Now they need to ban Ash Qin for re-listing the stupid thing on the marketplace.

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