How to deal with Griefers?

[Evil Littlepaws]

I wonder how people deal with Griefers on SL. I love taking pictures in Second Life. Whenever I move my picture location (left), someone next door always puts up several empty boxes (right) to block my sunlight and impact my photos. He has been here for over 15 years, and I am unsure how to ask a griefer to stop politely. I have asked a dozen times, and he adjusts it every time I move it. Do you have any recommendations?

 

[Solar Legion]

There are TPVs that allow you to derender/blacklist objects. Short of moving (you can file an AR if you wish, I do not know if LL will bother with something like this) ... a TPV with such an option may be your only option.

I use one myself for similar reasons (general removal of things in view from my skydome home on a PI).

[Ina Fairport]

Firestorm has a derender/blacklist option. Works fine for me.

[Orwar]

   You can also change the direction (or rather, position) of the sun with the environment settings. Not sure where/how you'd do that in the standard SL viewer though (in FS it's under Phototools - Alt + P - Env tab). 

[Ceka Cianci]

Ya if you are in firestorm you can right click the object and in the pie click More, then click More one more time and you should see Derender show up in the pie, click that and it gives you the option to Temporary Derender or Black list the object..

[Coffee Pancake]

This kind of low key harassment is effective and LL will do nothing about it.

Derendering is not a solution, he can just shift drag new prims and they will be right back.

It's not worth the stress or trying to win, his end game is perfect and can't be countered, you have lost.

 

Sell your land and move.

[Ceka Cianci]

2 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

This kind of low key harassment is effective and LL will do nothing about it.

Derendering is not a solution, he can just shift drag new prims and they will be right back.

It's not worth the stress or trying to win, his end game is perfect and can't be countered, you have lost.

 

Sell your land and move.

That's probably the idiots end game is to get them to move.. That or they really are just that hopeless and have nothing better to do..

Myself I would derender and just stop moving and do like Orwar said, which was a really good suggestion.. Move the lighting to the other side where they can't block it..

 

 

[Caeruleiae]

10 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

This kind of low key harassment is effective and LL will do nothing about it.

Derendering is not a solution, he can just shift drag new prims and they will be right back.

It's not worth the stress or trying to win, his end game is perfect and can't be countered, you have lost.

 

Sell your land and move.

They won't know you've de-rendered their stuff if you don't tell them, so you're using a sledge to crack open a walnut for no reason. 

[Coffee Pancake]

18 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

That's probably the idiots end game is to get them to move.. That or they really are just that hopeless and have nothing better to do..

Myself I would derender and just stop moving and do like Orwar said, which was a really good suggestion.. Move the lighting to the other side where they can't block it..

Being stubborn is self defeating in the end .. this problem can go away for good in an afternoon by just relocating.

The fight is constant stress and aggro. 

14 minutes ago, Caeruleiae said:

They won't know you've de-rendered their stuff if you don't tell them, so you're using a sledge to crack open a walnut for no reason. 

It's been posted on the forums. 

It can also escalate in ways that completely and autonomously defeat local derendering, The neighbor has already demonstrated their intent, bailing out and selling the land now is easier than if there ends up a temp rezzor on the parcel next door .. and from experience, LL will do literally nothing so long as their BS stays on their land.

 

If a battle cannot be won, do not fight it. ~Sun Tzu

Edited March 5, 2023 by Coffee Pancake

[Ceka Cianci]

1 minute ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Being stubborn is self defeating in the end .. this problem can go away for good in an afternoon by just relocating.

The fight is constant stress and aggro. 

It's been posted on the forums.

That's if it even does escalate farther, they don't always escalate.. If it escalates then ya, but if this is as bad as it gets then it's easily overcome..

A lot would depend on how much I wanted to stay there or if it's not a big deal to pick up and move..

 

 

[Rick Nightingale]

29 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

This kind of low key harassment is effective and LL will do nothing about it.

Derendering is not a solution, he can just shift drag new prims and they will be right back.

It's not worth the stress or trying to win, his end game is perfect and can't be countered, you have lost.

Sell your land and move.

Sums it up.

In the early days I had one that had figured out temp rezzers - his stuff just kept re-rezzing. No way to derender that. Turned out he was miffed at a previous occupant of the parcel, and he thought I was an alt of that person when I moved in so he put all the griefing stuff back out. Still totally childish behaviour, but that's people for you.

At least in my case I was finally able to contact him and convince him I wasn't. Took two months though and I nearly sold up, but I really liked my bit of seafront land.

[Caeruleiae]

3 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

The fight is constant stress and aggro. 

Only if you let it be that way. You can de-render things really quickly, without the need to be overly aggravated by them. People choosing to stress themselves out over issues that are pretty easily solved in a matter of seconds are what make the problems worse. How does the neighbor know you've de-rendered it? He might guess, if you choose not to move it, but he also might not. Even if he does, it takes seconds, at best, to de-render and move on. Move the sun position like Orwar stated and the entire problem disappears, and the stress along with it.  We don't have the same approach. If it works for you, great, it wouldn't work for me. It would be even more stressful for me to take your approach.

Of course ll doesn't do anything, they rarely act on anything I've noticed. Still wouldn't take that approach when it's super easy to remove all stress. 

[Island Granville]

Just curious... do you know if that might be a business logo of his on the boxes?

 

[Polenth Yue]

I've had neighbours try to grief me in the past. I still live on the same bit of land. They don't. Most people don't stick around for long. Also, if they do escalate, they'll end up doing something reportable and it can be clearly demonstrated that it was malicious.

Anyway, in this case, derender the objects and reduce your draw distance. It only needs to be enough to see your own stuff.

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Polenth Yue said:

I've had neighbours try to grief me in the past. I still live on the same bit of land. They don't. Most people don't stick around for long. Also, if they do escalate, they'll end up doing something reportable and it can be clearly demonstrated that it was malicious.

Anyway, in this case, derender the objects and reduce your draw distance. It only needs to be enough to see your own stuff.

.. and I sat on horizons parcels I couldn't use for a year while a guy temp rezzed his entire build, buried the region and hammered viewers with object updates. We couldn't move without eating a huge finical loss.

The most we got out of LL was a visiting developer Linden commenting "Oh thats really bad" with regard to the imposed load, which gave us the false hope that something might happen.

In the end, he moved, because a land baron sitting on quite a few parcels on the same region, that were completely unsalable due to the guys activities, offered him a better plots of land on another region as a trade / business opportunity.

So assuming the OP is on regular garbage tier cheapo mainland, walking away works and is cheap.

6 hours ago, Caeruleiae said:

Only if you let it be that way.

The OP is posting on the forums in frustration following reaching out. It's clearly bothering them.

[Bree Giffen]

You can try setting the draw distance down to the lowest setting. 

Another thing to try is simply not use SL sunlight as a light source. You can set a prim as a spotlight/floodlight by editing a prim, go to the features tab and check the light box. You will need to add a texture to enable the spotlight feature otherwise it will only work as a point light. Upload a blank white jpg or png file to SL and in the same features tab you can pick the blank texture. This will create a spotlight that shines out of one side of the prim. You can resize the prim to create a large light emitting surface and there are options in the features tab to control the light. Then, you can simply duplicate the prim and create several spotlights which all create shadows if you have shadows turned on. This allows you to create sunlight inside your studio and have additional light sources. You can also turn these prims invisible to not get in the way of your photo.

[Quistess Alpha]

1 minute ago, Bree Giffen said:

Upload a blank white jpg or png file

there's a specific button in the texture select menu to select a default 32x32 full white texture, next to the buttons for the default and transparent textures. There's also a white disk texture in the library folder intended to be used as a sun image that works pretty well for spot lights.

[Ceka Cianci]

12 hours ago, Evil Littlepaws said:

I wonder how people deal with Griefers on SL. I love taking pictures in Second Life. Whenever I move my picture location (left), someone next door always puts up several empty boxes (right) to block my sunlight and impact my photos. He has been here for over 15 years, and I am unsure how to ask a griefer to stop politely. I have asked a dozen times, and he adjusts it every time I move it. Do you have any recommendations?

 

From the image it looks like they are kitty corner from the platform..

I would definitely just move the sun to the other side and just not even pay attention to that direction.. From the sound of it, they react when you do..

I would stop moving up and down and  sit your things where you want them and move the sun to the other side where they can't block anything.. you could even put up a pavilion in that direction, so you don't have to see those blocks and use it as a backdrop area for photos also..

When someone tries to get a reaction out of you don't give them one, that's what they are expecting and looking forward to.. Leave them standing there waiting..

They'll either end up breaking the rules or get bored and realize they are wasting their time..

 

 

[belindacarson]

@Tommy Linden

@Kristin Linden

[Caeruleiae]

12 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

The OP is posting on the forums in frustration following reaching out. It's clearly bothering them.

And there is a simple, cheaper, solution already given. Your experience was awful, I'm sure, but it's not the same. Ll did nothing in your case, which is exactly what I'd expect them to do, just by reading the things I have, because they rarely act on anything at all from what I can tell. They should have done something, on that we agree, but I'm not surprised they didn't. 

Your experiences are not the same as everyone else's, though. You didn't have the same options as the op, and definitely not an easy solution. Your belief that just up and moving is cheap for everyone else is probably off the mark. Maybe it wouldn't be cheap for the op to move either, we don't really know. Best to go with the cheapest and easiest solution to the problem and not beat it with a sledgehammer. 

[animats]

You can move the sun, at least for yourself. Then you can take pictures. You can also get a skydome so you can't see other people's sky junk.

Sky junk is a problem. There are much worse cases. Huge low-altitude skydomes can devalue land for some distance around. It's considered polite to put your sky builds above 1000 meters, but it's not currently required.

There are some landlords which offer 1/4 or 1/16 of a region with rules that prevent annoying your neighbors. LL itself has no such offering, other than Bellesaria.

I'd like to have the Bellesaria restrictions on sky junk, ban lines, and security orbs apply to mainland, too, but this is an unpopular opinion.

[Aethelwine]

If before taking your photos you just have a basic platform out on which you are going to rezz your backdrop then moving it up or down away from their shadow is really quick and simple to do. Just r-click the platform, select edit and you should see numbers you can set for location. Add or subtract a number like 500 from the z value. Click elsewhere and it will have moved. Then in firestorm type "gth" followed by the z value you set plus 10 and second later you are on the platform you moved.

The trouble they are taking to irritate you is much more work for them than it is you 

Edited March 7, 2023 by Aethelwine

[Adam Spark]

If you are using Firestorm, and you are not photographing any objects that do not belong to you - go to World-Options-Show only my objects

In this case he could spend all week tossing stuff out and you'll never know the difference.

If you are photographing others objects in your scene, take it somewhere else like a sandbox. You might get griefed there too, obviously, but its a good play to escape this person and there are many you can visit, some with very low traffic.

[Gwin LeShelle]

I really had LL act fast on my neighbor that had a temp rezzer for his noisy and huge helicopter. On mainland. So maybe there is a little hope that they start caring about such things. They should tho, because the people get get annoyed and harassed sooner or later always left because LL doesn't seem to care. And what stays? The nice people that are harassers...so actually SL is a pool of ... well we know the answer XD ...at the end.

But don't be bothered here, just derender and stay there, he won't notice and yes change the sun...that's the awesome part in a world like that 😊 Or maybe he wants you parcel? Offer it to him at a very very huge amount and buy yourself a really nice new one...and a new house😂 I wouldn't give in tho...to stubborn >:D I had neighbors like that too on mainland they are gone I am still at our parcels 😂 don't react to their stuff that's what bothers such people the most.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

On 3/5/2023 at 12:15 PM, Evil Littlepaws said:

I wonder how people deal with Griefers on SL. I love taking pictures in Second Life. Whenever I move my picture location (left), someone next door always puts up several empty boxes (right) to block my sunlight and impact my photos. He has been here for over 15 years, and I am unsure how to ask a griefer to stop politely. I have asked a dozen times, and he adjusts it every time I move it. Do you have any recommendations?

 

I have a neighbour who has put up a giant, ugly grief photo and kept it for years because I and others asked him to put "clear" on the side of his photo-real board facing us.

So I was forced to put up a big Felix waterfall wall and he would move it up or down accordingly. He tired of that after months but kept the ugly photo up which rezzes first when you land on the sim. Abuse reporting does no good.

So make sure at least he faces a ban wall on your side. Don't move unless you are utter philosophical about SL, and trust me, I've gotten more that way after years of life in the trenches, there's always another piece of land somewhere, abandoned.

You can go to a sandbox to do your photography, up in the sky.

You can fight back by putting up something ugly for him to look at.

You can log off and take a break the minute he does that.

Everyone says "don't feed the trolls" and that if you ignore them, they go away and they thrive on attention, and while true, it doesn't work always to deprive them of attention. This isn't even so much griefing as the kind of deep spite that some people develop that they maintain for years because they are unloved cranks.

Stay on the account he noticed and don't move, then log in an alt and put the alt on another level while he doesn't notice and do the photography.