how to stop a competent harrasser?

[Electorite]

a few groups i know have been having a problem probably with a single person who creates avatars and uses these new avatars to harass people and file abuse reports.  this makes it hard for SL to stop because i was told something i believe was false.  someone told me i am not allowed to even discuss other avatars a person "might" have.  i don't see why this would not be allowed.  i asked this person to show me where a .Linden wrote or said that users aren't allowed to discuss other avatars a person may also have.  

so anyway the bottom line is i don't have a good answer to how to stop someone who has been doing this in dozens of sims over months or years.  the best solution i have is to put up a sign with instructions at the landing point of the land i own so people can report harassment easily.  the harassment by this person should have been stopped by the second life abuse report people figuring out who created these avatars the first time the person impersonated a .Linden representative and somehow making sure this person never did it again.  i think this harasser signs up for second life in different locations to make it seem like it's different "households" creating these avatars.  i guess this is one of the biggest problems in second life because sims and .Lindens are simply banning avatars and not stopping people who create these avatars from making more avatars.  

 

i have a theory to require people to use facebook or twitter logins to sign up for second life, because somehow facebook manages this kind of thing a little (remember when facebook deleted so and so's second facebook account?).  i don't think facebook is 100% at it, but it seems like second life doesn't manage anything beyond avatars at all, so second life only bans avatars and not people who make the avatars.  this is causing a big problem with "counter" abuse reports and harassment without accountability in dozens of sims (i will not name which sims to protect those groups and businesses from even more harassment).  someone told me this person has started doing death threats in instant messages.  i told the victim to report it to SL.  should they also report it to the police?

[Sassy Romano]

 

• Disclosure

  Residents are entitled to a reasonable level of privacy with regard to their Second Life experience. Sharing personal information about your fellow Residents without their consent -- including gender, religion, age, marital status, race, sexual preference, alternate account names, and real-world location beyond what is provided by them in their Resident profile -- is not allowed. Remotely monitoring conversations in Second Life, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs without the participants' consent are all prohibited.

From https://secondlife.com/corporate/cs.php

 

 

[Electorite]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

 

• Disclosure
  Residents are entitled to a reasonable level of privacy with regard to their Second Life experience. Sharing personal information about your fellow Residents without their consent -- including gender, religion, age, marital status, race, sexual preference,
  alternate account names
  , and real-world location beyond what is provided by them in their Resident profile -- is not allowed. Remotely monitoring conversations in Second Life, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs without the participants' consent are all prohibited.

From

https://secondlife.com/corporate/cs.php

 

 

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yes i see those are the rules you posted.

so back to the problem at hand... if land owners are not allowed to discuss avatars in 1 to 1 ims (which are also considered private) between each other a person might have, how is this problem ever going to be solved or even slowed? this harasser has repeadedly broken just about every part of the "rules" in this quote, so is the solution simply to file single abuse reports against 1 week old avatars and hope second life handles it? what should we do until then, allow avatars like abuser1 abuser2 abuser3 to keep coming into the land harassing people, or ban these avatars from our land?

i don't understand how this passes as "ok" to let people harass other people like this.

[Sassy Romano]

Mute, de-renderer, ignore work perfectly.  Stop playing the victim, it only empowered the abusers.

[Persephone Emerald]

Second Life runs in a different model than Facebook does.

Facebook basically sells the user to advertisers. These advertisers don't want to market to multiple fake personas, so FB requires their users to verify on some level that they're a real person.

Second Life, on the other hand, doesn't really care if their users have multiple accounts or who they really are in RL. We users value this anonymity, but it comes at a price. Greifers can also remain anonymous & have multiple accounts. Griefers can't usually do real physical or monetary damage to us, so we have to remember that & try to detach from our feelings of being abused by them. Report, ban & mute them, over & over again if you have to do so.

Sim managers can & do discuss griefers & potential griefers, but have to do so carefully & discreetly. One way is to have a separate group for managers. Management discussions can then be held separately from general group chat, without the need to copy & save private IMs to notecards. You can copy a private chat for your own use, but don't share these with anyone else without their written permission. If you do, you open yourself up to being reported for a TOS violation.

[Electorite]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

Mute, de-renderer, ignore work perfectly.  Stop playing the victim, it only empowered the abusers.

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this isn't a problem with harassment to "me" . this is a problem between people in the group i am sole leader in my land. i don't care if someone tries to harass me (ow my eyes hurt from harassing text), but i can't let this go on between people who visit my land at the level it has been the last few weeks. the things a land owner can do to stop some of these things like make it so avatars only 6 months old or older can come to the land works "perfectly" but doesn't perfectly solve this problem.

a leader of a large group of sims told me that i could not even talk with her about the possible other avatars this .Linden impersonater has (even though she probably already knew the other avatars). it wasn't like i was copying and pasting ims or repeating something told to me in confidence. the other avatars i thought this griefer owns was based on the way most of the avatars are dressed (in furry females) and using the same type of wording in nearby chat with caps. even the amount of time between when this "griefer" logged on and off between avatars was always about the same amount of time. the reason i was talking with this leader of a large group of sims is because the griefer tried to pit that sim group against me. that's why i was talking directly to the leader of this other sim group, in order to clear up the things which were told to her which were lies about things i wrote.

thank you for the clarifications with the replies. this thread helps clear things up for me (i'm relatively new to SL being only "8 months old"). i think part of the problem is i read second life stopped verifying credit cards 7 years ago. i guess the abuse reporting was set up to handle reports from a community with verified credit cards. it doesn't do well when second life keeps the same type of abuse report system after removing credit card verficiation.

[Persephone Emerald]

Might it help if you had a friend to help monitor your sim when you're not online? One thing you learn from trying to run a sim is that managing is work. That knowledge helps you appreciate the folks who are willing to spend hundreds of dollars and a good portion of the time and patience on running a sim. 

Is it possible the person who didn't want to get into details with you about who these griefers might be, mostly wanted an excuse not to get dragged into the drama? Maybe she wanted to just enjoy her SL without having to work at getting rid of potential griefers? Were they bothering her too? Maybe her response would've been different if they had been?

I agree that one can often tell intuitively when avatars are alts of each other, but that's still not proof as far as Linden Lab is concerned, so you can't report someone just for being a furry female who chats in caps. I'm sorry, I can't be more helpful, but sometimes you have to kind of "wing it" on an incident by incident basis. Staying calm enough to use Freeze, Eject, Report & Ban can help. Also remember, you don't need to give a reason for ejecting & banning avatars, but you don't want to act like a jerk about it either.

[Chris Frentis]

Just like any social media thing arguing is what they thrive on as they do it for attention, the more you feed it the more you give them what they want. Mute, block unfriend, ban from land etc is the only way, your arguing wont save everyone else that is thier job,  horrible words are plain to see for everyone anyway.  Hope that helps a bit.

[Deyadora]

As others have stated - ban and block and don't give this person power over your joy.

On a side note, if SL ever took up your suggestion and demanded everyone must have a FB or Twitter acct before they could join (which I seriously doubt), then, despite the fact that I'm enjoying SL a great deal, I'd close my account without a moment's hesitation;  I loathe social privacy invaders media monsters and all they stand for - I deliberately don't use them for a reason.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

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Electorite wrote:

 

i have a theory to require people to use facebook or twitter logins to sign up for second life, because somehow facebook manages this kind of thing a little (remember when facebook deleted so and so's second facebook account?).  i don't think facebook is 100% at it, but it seems like second life doesn't manage anything beyond avatars at all, so second life only bans avatars and not people who make the avatars.  this is causing a big problem with "counter" abuse reports and harassment without accountability in dozens of sims (i will not name which sims to protect those groups and businesses from even more harassment).  someone told me this person has started doing death threats in instant messages.  i told the victim to report it to SL.  should they also report it to the police?

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I don't use Facebook or Twitter and a lot of SL people don't.  I'll leave SL before I have to sign up for either of them.  Facebook in particular is a huge invasion of privacy.

You are wrong that SL only bans avatars and not people.  If the TOS violation is serious enough or the person causes problems constantly, SL can ban the person.

[Innula Zenovka]

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Electorite wrote:

i think part of the problem is i read second life stopped verifying credit cards 7 years ago. i guess the abuse reporting was set up to handle reports from a community with verified credit cards. it doesn't do well when second life keeps the same type of abuse report system after removing credit card verficiation.

 

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 I'm sorry, but I think you are mistaken there.   I asked LL about this quite recently because I was having problems with the function llRequestAgentData.   The service LL use do, it seems, verify credit cards in the usual way -- sending a small charge to the account and cancelling it immediately.   However, there's a bug with llRequestAgentData(DATA_PAYINFO) which means that scripts don't return accurate results for PAYMENT_INFO_ON_FILE.    

So, for all practical purposes, you can check only for PAYMENT_INFO_USED.   

I don't know if this affects the land setting to restrict entry to accounts with Payment Info On File,  but I suspect it will do.   However, if it works the way llRequestAgentData does, it would restrict entry to accounts where payment info was not only on file but had, in fact, been sucessfully used at least one.   That might be what you need.

Certainly, if the land setting doesn't work for you, you could, if you wished,  use a script to restrict access to your land to accounts that have actually registered a credit card or PayPal/Skrill account with LL and actually used it to buy L$ or on the marketplace.    Any competent scripter who knows how to make a security orb could do that for you.  

Would that solve the problem?

[Chris Frentis]

I had to block somebody today who said something derogatory to me. I don't like doing it but if you don't you run the risk of becoming like them if you interact with them.

[Bobbie Faulds]

First thing for griefers..Make a land group. If you rent out part of your sim, everything has to be rezzed in that land group. Then turn on your auto return set at 1 minute. That stops griefers that us prim/particles or cagers, etc cold. As for those that verbally grief, mute and eject. Your land group is only for those that actually need to rez things on your sim. You don't have to justify yourself to anyone that you eject. Your land, your rules.

[Bree Giffen]

Is it the 90s here? Go to sluniverse make up an account and discuss away.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

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Chris Frentis wrote:

I had to block somebody today who said something derogatory to me. I don't like doing it but if you don't you run the risk of becoming like them if you interact with them.

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You did the right thing.  That's what Block is for. 

I have no problem blocking people who can't be civil.  People don't have to like me, because there are people I don't like either.  But I show everyone basic respect because everyone deserves it and that's what adults do.  If someone isn't willing to show that to me, they basically give me permission to not hear anything they have to say.