Involuntary Addition to a Subscriber List & Other "Spam"

[Dainie Fraina]

Hey everyone!

I was wondering if anyone has had these experiences and what they do in each case:

What do you do when you find you've been subscribed to a subscriber list that you didn't sign up for? Is this against Terms of Service?

What do you do when you can't find an option to unsubscribe yourself from a subscriber list without having to do some detective work to find out who is sending the message?

What do you do to prevent yourself from receiving unsolicited conference chats and teleports all the time, but still stay social and informed about community events?

I don't want to be a jerk or seem anti-social, but sometimes these messages become overwhelming. Does anyone have some good suggestions on how to manage these issues? Even as a resident for over 13 years, I've yet to find a way that feels comfortable and effective.

Thanks in advance for your input!

[DilliDallagio]

The Firestorm viewer has an option to ignore ah-hoc conferences unless they are from people on your friends list. That helped curb the "spam" conferences for me. That is, until I am running on a different viewer that does not have that option. In those cases I figure out who started the conference, pull up their profile, close the conference, then mute the originator. That usually works (until they use an alt to start up another spam conference).

As for the subscriber list, I have no idea if it is against the LL T.o.S. I do not get that many of them so I just close the notification floater down. For those instances I can figure out who is sending it, I either go into their in-world location, if they have one, and unsubscribe from their board or contact the sender of the spam in IM and request deletion from the list. Sometimes that works, sometimes not.

For prevention of being on subscribed mailing lists, not sure it can be done. Many spammers troll various groups' member registries and just start adding names to their own mailing lists. Others use "AFK/bots" to gather names from any local chat they may be recording (in that case this MAY be a violation of T.o.S. or it may not be... depends upon what the alts do with the chat histories).

So... just as in RL, spam in SL is just as annoying and just as hard to avoid/prevent. Or so it seems.

[Alyona Su]

16 hours ago, Dainie Fraina said:

What do you do when you find you've been subscribed to a subscriber list that you didn't sign up for? Is this against Terms of Service?

It absolutely is against TOS - if you complain about it. I always do. When I get spam from a marketing list I never signed up for, I always IM the name that owns the machine that sent it and I send this IM (Copy and save it for your own use):

Quote

Hello, I am in your automated notification list that I do not remember ever opting into. Can you please remove me from all your automated notification or news lists per this section of the Second Life Terms of Service and Community Standards:

Disturbing the Peace/Global Attacks: Examples of prohibited attempts to disturb the peace include, but are not limited to: 
- Repeated transmission of undesired content;

Thank you.

It almost always works. The key is to be polite about it. If you do not get a reply within three days (give benefit of the doubt) then find the group for that avatar, and send the same message to the Creator (Founder) of that group. If you still do not get a reply within three days, block them and AR them. In your AR, paste a copy of the spam message you received, quote the line of the TOS they are breaking (and the category is Disturbing the Peace), and give the date when you received it.

Edited December 2, 2019 by Alyona Su

[Dainie Fraina]

Thank you for the great advice and for sharing the TOS citation. That helps a lot!