Griefers, Abuse Reports and Land Owners M.I.A.

[Spinwilly Saiman]

Maybe somone has some ideas or insight here.  I run a business on numerous mainland parcels where griefing attacks with massive particle spammers are occuring on parcels nearby where the land owners allow everyone to build... yet autoreturn is enabled.

Autoreturn is being defeated however by the fact that most of these objects are self replicating.  I understand the quick and easy fix is to block the object or avatar, or set max particles to zero.  Ok.  But now try telling that to all of your unhappy customers.

I have found multiple problems with trying to remedy this situation:

1.  Abuse Reports -  LL seems to have completely stopped responding to them.  I can understand a day maybe two but some of these AR's have been unresolved for WEEKS.  To be even more perplexing, some of these particle spammers have been placed on the parcel borders of Governor Linden Land.  Does anybody know why LL is not resonding to, or resolving to AR's lately?

2.  Land Owners - I see lots of parcels where land owners allow everyone to build.  The only way to stop these types of griefing attacks it to uncheck the everyone box as autoreturn is rendered useless.  The problem is in contacting these land owners.  Many of them have sort of abandoned SL and never log in yet keep paying a yearly membership fee for their 512 plot I guess. Does anybody have any ideas on how to get a MIA land owner to change their parcel settings?  Is there any way LL support would do this (I doubt it)?

3.  Technical - Many of these particle spammers are placed dead center on parcel boundries where one allows everyone to build and one does not.  I'm dealing with one now where none of the parcels allows everyone to build yet the objects are on the boundries with one of the parcels being GL land.  Is there some LL bug that is being exploited here?

Any insight or suggestions other than blocking, filing an AR or buying a private island would be appreciated.  However my sense is that private islands are the only sure long term solution.  If you buy an entire sim on the mainland, you can't stop adjacent sim griefers and these particle spammers send out garbage for several hundred meters in all directions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Lisa006 Baxton]

You have already came up with the only solution there is to your problem: Invest in a private region. Sorry to hear you are having to deal with this. 

[Vulpinus]

As already said, there's only one real solution unfortunately, given the lack of care LL seems to have about such things.

I do wonder though if you could insert your own self-replicating object into the problematic parcel. The sole purpose would be to keep the parcel full by replicating, thereby preventing the griefer's object from replicating. When the griefer's object is returned, yours would take up the slack space in the parcel.

The griefer would have to manually replace theirs, in just that moment when one of your objects is returned and before your replicators could fill the parcel again. Possibly tricky to catch if you time your replication well.

Might be a rubbish idea - it's 4am and I haven't slept for a while!

Anyway, it would likely just start a war of escalation. As soon as 'they' get in the parcel again, I guess things wouldn't be pretty.

[Derek Torvalar]

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Vulpinus wrote:

As already said, there's only one real solution unfortunately, given the lack of care LL seems to have about such things.

I do wonder though if you could insert your own self-replicating object into the problematic parcel. The sole purpose would be to keep the parcel full by replicating, thereby preventing the griefer's object from replicating. When the griefer's object is returned, yours would take up the slack space in the parcel.

The griefer would have to manually replace theirs, in just that moment when one of your objects is returned and before your replicators could fill the parcel again. Possibly tricky to catch if you time your replication well.

Might be a rubbish idea - it's 4am and I haven't slept for a while!

Anyway, it would likely just start a war of escalation. As soon as 'they' get in the parcel again, I guess things wouldn't be pretty.

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ROFL

Sleep first, then post.

[Vulpinus]

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Derek Torvalar wrote:

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ROFL

Sleep first, then post.

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Yeah, that's probably good advice.

[Aethelwine]

Are you reporting it as an offline region?

You might find arguing it is offline because of griefing (even if technically not quite true) will get a faster response. Because when I have reported offline regions the response has always been pretty prompt. Maybe check with live support too for their advice on which category to use for something you want seen as a high priority,

[Qie Niangao]

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Spinwilly Saiman wrote:

3.  Technical - Many of these particle spammers are placed dead center on parcel boundries where one allows everyone to build and one does not.  I'm dealing with one now where none of the parcels allows everyone to build yet the objects are on the boundries with one of the parcels being GL land.  Is there some LL bug that is being exploited here? 

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Possibly, although I've only seen it on *region* borders, not parcel border, and it seemed to be fixed a few months ago, so maybe this is something new and different. Or, more likely, it's just coincidental that it appears to be on a parcel border, because there remain many ways for objects to come to be on land that's no-build and no-object-entry -- and that's why auto-return is still by far the most effective single setting to pre-empt griefing.

But yeah, once in a while, the lamest of griefers will stumble upon an old self-replicating script, and if they don't screw it up with other junk, it can make quite a persistent mess. As you've already observed, other land settings (no-build and no-object-entry) are ineffective if the griefer isn't a total newbie, and no-script is just annoying, but fortunately there's a relatively recent scripting function, llReturnObjectsByOwner(), which can augment autoreturn to help landowners if their parcels are drawing repeat griefers.

None of that helps your situation, unfortunately. You can file a support ticket, though, to follow-up on those dead-letter ARs, after you've given it all the time you can afford. (Also, just in passing, I have gotten some response to a repeat AR by writing it to show all the offense I took at having to stare at the spinning, spamming "DEAD N1GGER STORAGE" cubes that governance hadn't bestirred itself to do anything about for over a month. I don't recommend this, and I personally hate to show any emotion in an AR because it's so easily exploited and escalated for effect, but sometimes, honest to god, lack of response from Governance is more annoying than the griefers they're paid to clean up after.)

[Markham Weatherwax]

The only thing I can suggest is that if abuse reports are getting you nowhere, take some snapshots of the issue, go over and get the exact SLURL and other information, then file a support ticket. Keep updating that ticket too, adding to it. Not every day of course, but after reasonable periods of waiting. Give LL a chance to do something.

Try to contact the land owner first, though. Every time you send them an IM send it with full details of what you want and why you want it. Don't send "We need to talk" or "I want to discuss something about your land" and the like. You'd be surprised how many people do that. You want to write that you are having an issue, this is what it is, and suggest how to fix it. If anything is going to get you a response, that will do it.

If you don't get a response within a week or two file a support ticket, and in it state that you've tried to resolve the issue by whatever means.

If LL doesn't fix it the only thing you can do is buy an Estate or leave SL for someplace else that's better supported.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Spinwilly Saiman]

Thanks for the responses.  I have exhauseted all reasonable and appropriate avenenues.  Contacting land owners is a lost cause as the subject line states, they are missing in action.  Land owners, groups, members of groups who may be able to contact the owners, every possible angle you can imagine, very detailed, specific, to the point, IM's and Notecards.

Zilch.

3 entire regions, basically crashed for weeks and nobody logs in.  Amazing.  My region is fine except for the spam.  LL does nothing, a month goes by with multiple AR's.

Zilch.

I see now what so many have been complaining about.

Through some experimentaion, I also see now how easy it is to get objects onto land without build permissions.

LL could fix this with some policy changes but from what I gather from reading all the rants and witnessing the management of SL, my sense is that they are not in any position to do so.  I guess they just run with a skeleton crew nowadays.

The sad part is that the community of users have great ideas, and offer many good solutions to problems that could be implemented.  It's too bad they can't somehow be empowered by LL to develop and implement some of the best solutions out there.