Prokofy Neva

@animats No, you're just not informed sufficiently about this and haven't done it enough -- but then, no one requires a hall monitor on these issues, the Lindens and the TOS are sufficient. I'm putting this answer here for public information for those who live and work on the Mainland, and who don't just have offices here, for those who want to live a virtual life as it is on a sim, and not make a meta game out of platform features without regard to the lives of others. It is not where "most of the parcels come from" -- again, one has to see this over time and have sufficient experience. Most of the parcels come from the Lindens' arbitrary placement of land on the auctions when/as they see fit, for any reason or no reason. If they have criteria, they don't make them public. Those of us who have watched this for years know it is arbitrary, capricious, and sometimes curiously punitive. The Lindens do not have a policy of selling abandoned land to anyone who asks. It would be great if they did, there would be lots less of it. They don't. Instead, they will sell you abandoned land *most of the time but not always* if it is adjacent to your land, usually on 3 sides. *Sometimes* if it is a small parcel, they will sell land on the same sim where you have land if it is larger, but NOT ALWAYS. And this is the problem that vexes many people who just want to have more prims on their sim and stop blight on their sim. They do not sell it on demand. The Lindens have a policy that many of us condemn -- and which you are not involved of without sufficient experience with them -- to NOT sell abandoned land if you ask for it, especially if it is desirable, i.e. nice waterfront. Instead, they put it on the auction, because they feel that it is "more fair". What is more than one person wanted it? The "only fair" way would be to auction it. Of course in reality, most people never follow the auctions, don't want to play them because they get bid very high, and don't want the stress and confusion. The auctions actually don't have that many participants. As far as I know (but they don't tell us) the auctions is a *sink* and not a *source* in the LindEx system. That is, one can't really say the Lindens "earn money" by selling the land at $10/m instead of $1/m directly to you (their price for that transaction). But they get more Lindens taken out of circulation, and thus keep the Linden at a certain value, so it's part of their system. HOW they do the formulas on this we don't know. THAT it might in fact be a source and not a sink is always possible -- we do not know. They do not tell us. They should. The Lindens used to have their own software for the auctions that revealed a) who bid on them, and how much, and how many times b) who won. That way big landlords and their alts, that people came to know, would be outed for jacking up auctions deliberately. People would stop buying from them when they did this. I'm not for controlling prices or setting caps or preventing people from bidding freely. I am for making the information about the bids known. People often don't realize they are bidding fiercely against a mere neighbour on their sim who just doesn't want blight and malls and clubs to go up next to them. Had the Lindens let PEOPLE ON THE SIM first have the auction among themselves all this would be different. They don't have software that does that and won't make it. Instead, they bought e-bay software which related I believe to a board member at one time or something, and so no more transparency, no more news. Nothing. Only gouging by mysterious buyers with only the inworld sale the visible result -- but no one can stay away 24/7 to see how the land changes hands. Another thing the Lindens could do -- if they wanted to solve this problem of abandoned land, which they don't -- is to ask people to put in requests to them in a ticket. If the Lindens saw multiple tickets, they could even manually take a bid or use software to have that bid only among those on one sim. If they had transparency, they could even post the notice that X, Y, Z avatars showed interest in a piece of land, and that might facilitate, say, 3 neighbours agreeing that the one who really wants it will buy it, and the others won't bid because now they are secure in the knowledge that their view won't be ruined. Of course, that doesn't always obtain, Mainland life is cruel and vicious, but it would work in some cases. No, Lindens cannot manage high-maintenance governance systems. But they won't automate it in creative ways -- self-start auctions for only those who can show ownership on a sim which is easy to scrape from their own land ownership page on their account at secondlife.com Why is this so hard? Where there is a will, there is a way. There isn't a way. How else can this be fixed? After awhile, you get to know the big bidders. You IM them when you want some land and ask them not to bid -- guess what, they won't! They have enough!

You can turn off "everyone" but if you don't leave on "group", scripts do not work. The end. Some people do this and then realize it is backfiring on them and making life unliveable and not getting rid of griefers/trespassers. That means: locked doors -- they won't open for anyone now; visitor trackers -- which some people use to ban trespassers; any scripted thing. So don't turn off group. If there is a closed group, then you shouldn't bother with "everyone" turns off. If there is an open group, you should. But really, why all this turning off scripts? The real issue is that you need to be bold, right-click, eject/ban -- these are what the tools are for. No discussions, philosophizing, reasoning with trespassers, worrying that their feelings will be hurt. Ban them. You can type their name into the "access" list as "ban" also if you are having trouble catching them flying around so as to click on them.

I never understand why people engage in conversation with trespassers. Right-click, eject, ban. There never needs to be a conversation. Your land then never gets to be known as a "hang-out place". If you would just get really indifferent and really impartial about doing this -- right click, eject/ban -- then you won't suffer so and get into a place where you need ban lines. Ban lines are nasty to everyone else around you. Why make people who merely fly by and don't even come into your house suffer? Why make your fellow residents who live next door eat ban lines and bounce when more likely than not you could have a cordial relationship with them, as you seem willing to be nice to people? Once you get into this habit about not over-thinking it and not philosophizing with everyone who wanders by, you will feel better. Why on earth are you worried about the feelings of someone who has no respect, no courtesy, not even the most basic decency, and barges into your home and bothers you? Right-click, eject, ban. Spread this culture. Stop the philosophizing -- it only encourages them. If you ban a person, of course they can't get into your land after that. So do it more often! Be free! You can also uncheck "avatars can see me" so that anyone going by literally cannot see you.

No. And if your business model depends on "jinxing" others, it is immoral and likely a TOS violation can be found to report you. What you have to understand about a big operation like LIFE is rentals math, which I'm not sure you understand. To look at one piece of land and say about it "wow, they are losing money selling it at that price when no one buys it, why I can run circles around them selling my little 512s" -- it's just fallacious. Because you aren't seeing their HUGE operation. It's like in RL, companies buying in bulk and selling when the market warrants it, and warehousing it otherwise. It is cheaper for a big landlord paying bulk tier, especially if they have a further Linden bulk discount which many of them have, beyond the group 10% or the bulk discount available after $195 tier -- to simply leave land for sale at a high price. Why? Because the tier they have to pay on that land -- even for months at at time -- is NOT going to be higher than the high price they charge for land. So they can STILL make a profit. Look at ALL their sales on the many sims they own and you will see that the higher price they get pays tier and leaves them a profit; their keeping up prices also rewards them. That's why they do this; that's why they stay in business and others don't. Only very large operations can do this; Anshe Chung could do it. I'm not in the land-selling business but the occasional times when I want to sell a parcel, I can't afford to do that. Nor can you. To pay tier months on end on land that "yields nothing". To wait 9 months or 18 months for it to sell. It wouldn't be practical or advisible at my low level or yours. For a giant company, it is, as they help keep prices in general high when they do that, i.e on Zindra. There is nothing illegal about this; it is the market, albeit in the distorted form that SL takes as there are no longer any freely-available public data on these matters. You don't know who wins the auction often; you can't see if they bid up the price (you could see this before) and adjust your own purchasing accordingly, and encourage others as well not to buy from people who deliberately jack up auctions. That used to happen; now it can't, there is no confirmation or information. Seeing what you see in world is not confirmation as land can flip and change hands rapidly with many buyers after an auction. So again, the question is this: why the harassment of people who sell land in ways you don't like, and the implication you are going to "get them"? With a provocative post like this, and with the comments that pile up it? If you don't like those high prices, don't buy them? You have WAY more choice than we had 13 years ago. If the Lindens don't like this, then rather than allowing griefers and forums posters harass people, they need to make a policy and then deliver it. If they don't like large land holdings and monopolies, they can bar it on their servers for any reason or no reason in the TOS, the end. They used to try to "get rid of" Anshe by printing so many new sims they figured she couldn't buy them all. They were wrong. At this point, I would guess that anyone buying abandoned land appearing on the open auction is doing the Lindens a favour. I myself advocate that abandoned land NOT be put on the open auction until FIRST those who LIVE ON THAT SIM can bid for it in a local auction or simply request it. I believe the Lindens should just set any land to sale to anyone who requests it, full stop. Their notion that there are all these people who should fairly have a bid at land next to you is totally misplaced. You're the best caretaker of land on YOUR sim and you should imply get it on request. ONLY THEN should it go to auction. Lobby for reasonable policies like that instead of heckling people with signs, putting up nuisances to drive away buyers, posting harassment messages in the forums. It's not all your world, either. It belongs to all of us. The Lindens need to end their aversion to governance and put in a few simple policies to stop driving conflicts.

No, Luna, technology is good or bad because the engineers *weld in their ideologies*. You are not free to "dislike" on Facebook because of a fatuous widespread Silicon Valley belief that this is "too negative". It also threatens their power. The Lindens got rid of negrates for that reason. Driving people to appear "emotional" if they aren't happy likers -- weepers or angry faces -- is not the same as dislike. Just think about that ONE THING that is a feature of most platforms and if you are sincere, you will be seriously creeped out by it. Because then it spreads to the Fair Vote ideology (run by a former Linden) that has now infected real-life voting in Maine. And you thought Russian hackers were are only problem. They aren't. Sure, there are different ideologies. I've written a blot on this for 18 years? Hello? There are technolibertarians and technocommunists. While I realize that it may be hard for you to believe, as most of your responses to me are hostile despite my frequent purchases of your products I have studied this an enormous amount, written tons, and possibly might know not even just as much as you, but more, and certainly have been more critical than you are prepared to be.

Jared Lanier has nothing to do with Linden Lab. He made an avatar once to come on a talk here -- I've met him in RL and he doesn't bother with SL at all. The Lindens are not AT ALL as critical of virtual worlds and social media as Jared is. We DO know that it is their ideology because THEY PRACTICE IT. You CANNOT distinguish a bot from a human being currently and they have only this very shabby "honours system" in place. That's how you know they have the ideology, Luna, please! PS animats is from another opera, can you grasp that? An unrelated heckler.

Yes, Whirly, this is what Lindens mean by saying it is "under the cover". But try to think more conceptually about this, please I know you're thoughtful and smart. Just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD. For years and years, this didn't happen -- people stuck to the conventions of ORGANIC social life and the permissions system in the viewer that said "calling cards come when a live real human being accepts the gesture of friendship by another live real human being". That social convention from organic real life -- which frankly still many, many orders of magnitude better, more fair, and less oppressive than virtual worlds -- should have held. It's like the way the Lindens savaged group managers' permission granting and made "share" override even a group manager's decision not to give everyone in the group the right to "return group-set prims". Very, very similar ideological extremism privileging code-as-law instead of rule of organic law. Sadly I must now say "organic" law each time I describe that problem -- rule of law used to prevail over code-as-law as a given; now it doesn't. The ability to "make a friend" out of ANYONE through this cut-and-paste is VANDALISM. It's VANDALISM of the sacred concept of real, life human consent. Can you understand that? If 100 people didn't make friends with someone, and now they can get a club spam, that's wrong. They didn't expect or ask for that. This "just because you can" and "but you can do it this way here let me show you" as an EXCUSE for VANDALISM and defiance of the rule of organic law never, ever "flies" with me. It shouldn't with Lindens or you or the toxic forums regs, but then, they're toxic. DO PLEASE NOTE that this "finding" of this "affordance" is something that was known for a long time but SELDOM abused. That is, I find most club spammers use actual friendship cards they picked up from over eager friends of rentals agents like me who couldn't say "no" to their "friending". Now I do. Spam has RUINED the sacred human function of friendship even aside from this exploit. The worst problem people have in SL is finding a friend. Not even a sexual partner -- that's easy to find. But A FRIEND. Most people want FRIENDS in a virtual world as they do in real life. So undermining things about the sacred consent involved in friendship is WRONG. That these griefers can sit and rewrite the paste-up using all the names from chat -- hey, that doesn't sound like a bot. But we're told that a bot can come and slurp up all the names of all the avatars on a sim, and maybe this process of pasting and inserting new names is automated in a script. Whatever. Automation of things in scripts -- just because you can -- doesn't mean its right. For example, this is what Google does because it is automated and stupid. Is that correct? Is it right? Google fixed searches for "antisemitism" by doing some manual curation and fixing of algorithms. They didn't do this for anticommunism. That's wrong. You need to become a highly critical consumer of coded artifacts. The smug superiority that most of the forums regs indulge here on this sort of thing is silly -- they never know when automated scripts might come FOR THEM. The Lindens still remove and ban these "bots" even if they "can" use this "obvious hack" to do the cards -- on speech grounds. They need to look more globally how to fix this because a) dozens of alts harassing first me and my tenants and thousands of other people inworld, so that they turn and harass me along with the griefers (in the mistaken belief it is me) -- this is an epidemic of the sort the Lindens need to stop. Like Philip did when he banned 60 Something Awful/Anonymous griefers in the early days because they kept crashing sims, copybotting, and harassing people. Oh, the crying and moaning that went up about this terrible cramp on "freedom" and "education" and "creativity". No, it was a cramp on *criminality*. Which we need the Lindens to straighten their socks and do more of.

I'm pretty sure they aren't bots. For the reason you say and other reasons. Obviously even if they are bots, a human had to program their spam using various lies, memes, and idiocies -- as well as racist and antisemitic talk. So on speech grounds alone the Lindens can ban them. Facebook recognizes as an abuse category "this person is fake or this person pretends to be me". Sadly, LL doesn't recognize those categories, but then they heavily reduced all their categories in general and you're left now really only with "spamming" and "targeted behavior to disrupt". If Linden Lab cannot see its way clear to requiring that all scripted agents be marked as such so that the customer base can tell them from humans, they have a very severe ideological problem that again, will prevent their platform from ultimately being used by more businesses, non-profits and educational institutions -- oh, and even ordinary people who don't like being kept in the dark about AI status. There's absolutely no good reason not to mark bots and require they be licensed with more than an "honour" system. From what I gather from talking to Lindens over the years, although of course they differ on differing subjects, they basically subscribe to Turing's idea that artificially intelligence creations -- bots -- if they can "pass" as humans -- i.e. pass the famous Turing Test -- they should be *declared as humans*. Lindens *like* bots generically. It's like they "never met a script they didn't like". Any coded artifact to them should be uber alles because, well, that puts THEM uber alles, you know? That's why I oppose it. I'm for the rule of organic law. Over Big IT, over bots, over coders. So no, I'm not for ever, ever doing that, granting "human" status to bot "personas" or leaving the distinction unmarked. Even when they become More Than Human. They aren't humans, and never will be. And civil rights and liberties of the sort Turing himself should have been granted in his lifetime (he was a persecuted gay man) absolutely depend on the rule of ORGANIC law and the preservation of THIS distinction, that bots are not human. Otherwise, we live under the rule of coders, and code-as-law that serves them, and that is oppressive and the abolition of rights. Yes, the Lindens don't police this because of their extremist ideological views on this matter. Notice that social media companies, who have a foot more in the real world than the Lindens, who may share their extremist views and in their case, even benefit from them financially, have had to curb their enthusiasm for bots with the Mueller indictment. Funny that the Mueller indictment, which indicts actual Russian operatives of an actual Kremlin front group which operates bots, the Internet Research Agency, and is limited in scope (13 persons and companies) would have this BENEFICIAL EFFECT of making Twitter start to get rid of its worst Russian bots. BTW the IRA is not the only Russian state bot-wrangler. Facebook deleted the accounts of the IRA -- and there were numerous such accounts. Some Trumpkins are finding their follower list an awful lot lighter since Twitter felt it had to start getting rid of malevolent bots. So the Lindens will never be motivated to stop anything harassing *me* -- indeed their indulgence of these "bots" is in part related to me, and my publicity of this matter. But they can see their way clearer eventually to the larger picture of why they should not allow bots to be undistinguished and unregistered. And I do have confidence that they will find ways to make "conference call spam" less feral, not because of me or the griefing of me, but because massive numbers of customers hate this, and they know that.

@Theresa Tennyson Do you ever log on? You might try driving a vehicle over this area to see the actualities of it. PS Again, the OP contacted me in world and informed me as if he were a Linden or the police what I must do with my prims. He blamed me wrongfully for his problems. He then went on the forums and went further with this, merely cleverly not naming me as this is the forums "law". Others told him that there might be other reasons for his problems -- while this is a guy who claims he can script self-driving cars, he couldn't turn on "highlight transparency" OR look at the prims *actually in the road*. Then, he claimed that his own vehicle problems were caused by a) my ramp and then conceded b) maybe it was the old Lindens' invisible prims. Neither of these claims are established as fact, because it's only his vehicle that had this problem, on a road where zillions of vehicles including gadjillion driverless cars which are a TOTAL nuisance have traversed freely. Let me think: if I were the one claiming some travel problems across this patch, you know EXACTLY what you'd do, Theresa, you'd say there were gadzillion billion cars that went over this road without a problem as they have in the 10 years that Ben Lindens placed this prims and the more than 3 years I've been forced to put a ramp to get over the Lindens' insanely broken landscaping and road here. Then he threatened to me to create a police car that would drive around finding road faults that he would log -- as if we needed one more driverless vehicle. Why haven't the Lindens just fixed their road? Well, perhaps they will, but the problem is they always have half-formed aborted other plans here and can't justify fixing it when they may replace the entire thing with a witless railroad no one needs. I've summarized the problems here accurately; you haven't.

No, Qie. Milk. You had to buy milk, not eggs. MILK. You haven't supplied the actual use case that is valid for this use of calling cards. BTW there are no calling cards outside of friendship. You can't get a calling card in your inventory without a friendship action. That you can then add deeper perms for SOME friends doesn't mean that there are "non-friend calling cards". Don't confuse the ability of bots or actual people with avatars to scoop up NAMES on a sim as distinct from using calling cards in inventory with thinking there are "calling cards outside friendship". There aren't. That is, I totally understand why you want to do this because you think the code is the same and the bots can see through it like they see through money trees. The Lindens should contemplate how they have eroded the concept of friendship which was really a good thing. I'm not at all persuaded that these griefers are actual bots and that's because I remain more curious and demand more facts than many of the scientists here. I don't know where you get this idea that this is "only about me" as I'm merely publicizing it as a generic issue and seeking remedies to griefing from it. Many people hate this and complain about it to those who do it. I get it done to me often WITHOUT griefers involved just by clueless heedless idiots with clubs or whatever. It's like the idiots who conference you on FB, same genre. The ANNOYANCE of being in conferences that is not griefing is a big issue, you just don't see it because you are preoccupied with other things. If you polled most people in world they'd tell you they hate it and want to stop it, even if they get some use out of it. The Lindens finally fixed groups to make it possible to keep them open but ban beggers, spammers, and griefers. And they need to look at this, too, and not "for my sake" because it's an obvious nuisance. It's hard for the regs on the forums to understand this as they don't log in, don't have activities or friends inworld, and don't experience it. Lindens don't either. If you want I'll include you in the next stupid one that comes along and you can see what it's like.

lucagrabacr truly, the Lindens should require one -- and in fact they should STOP ALLOWING THIS MENACE. There's always a tiny claque on the forums that claim these are wonderful for "touring" and "exploring" but of course you can get your own even free vehicle and explore without this spam. Spam is what it is. Ugly, stupid spam, often out of theme -- buses in the air, boats, stupidity -- I see this all day by the roads where I have properties. The Yava ones are ugly and stupid as pods are not anything that fits in with the theme of most sims, it's a science fiction theme and therefore stupid elsewhere. It doesn't matter if they are phantom -- they are are often not on the road, above it, and just spamming as there are way too many of them. NO one is ever in them. The tiny number of users doesn't justify their SPAMMING the mainland.

I appreciate you trying to at least have a better take on this trolling here but honestly. When people not only make false accusations against you in world AND put up a specious post like this to agitate and incite the whole community against you, you set the record straight, Chin. You don't have a situation like this on your land so it isn't your issue. I actually don't buy your analysis of the "misplacement" as literally A JILLION BILLION CARS HAVE GONE OVER THIS ROAD WITH NO PROBLEM with those prims as they are. It just happened that the OP's motorcycle spit up here, maybe he slowed down to try to agitate and harass me for whatever reason and look the place over -- obviously he has 5000 sims he could go on with his motorcycle but has *chosen this one for a reason*. I invite you to be a tad more curious about this. It doesn't look bad even from the aerial pictures, Chin. Do you see a road there? A road that is free of obstruction. The ramp goes on those crazy clumps of rock on the *shoulder* of the road, can you see that? Sure you can, as I don't think you are as blinkered as some of the people of bad will here. I know you generally have good will. So put it to practice and realize that this road is not encroached, that this tsumani was artificially created for who-knows-what-reason, and that the OP's motorcycle issues *may* be caused by the invisiprim or may merely be caused by the curve in the road but they are NOT cause by my ramps. And in any event *he need not drive here* with these problems when he literally has 5000 other sims to choose from.

No, it's not "stealing" land from the Lindens. It's putting a ramp over their mangled mess there so that I and my tenants can drive out of the Lindens land I paid for and pay tier on but can't use because of their mangle there. What's really stolen here is the value of my land, which they've harassed and harried for years by not fixing their road and letting their crazy factions harass us with the railroad issue. That's what is REALLY going on. I own land on 7 sims in that area, and pay tier for it. The Lindens in the three years since I bought that parcel and put a ramp in have never said a thing to me. It doesn't bother THEM. I've only taken their abandoned land in this area and put it under tier and given them money for abandoned land that they'd be happy to leave for YEARS AND YEARS and DO leave for YEARS AND YEARS so sorry, no sale, no success in your troll. Do you own any land and do you do any development or anything creative at all in world or do you just think up harassment posts on the forums?

You're a good example of the toxicity and insanity of the forums, Callum. Any normal person can see that the road is not obstructed. It isn't. The tiny squares where there might be a ramp TO GO ON TO THE LINDEN'S MESS OF A ROAD OFF PROPERTY WHICH YOU CAN'T OTHERWISE DRIVE OUT OF is not hampering traffic. It is not the problem with the OP's motorcycle. How do I know? Because not only do I drive up and down on the road in cars, on motorcycles, on Megapuss cat but I see jillions of other people do this. You know, all those damn driverless cards. I also occasionally see normal people who sometimes stop and chat. Sometimes they might pick up one of my flamingos or milkshakes there -- every day I see activity here that shows people drive on this road fine, they enjoy the area here that I and others have built, and they get around the Linden mess here, you know? It really is a metaphor for all of Second Life. Truly it is. People finding ways to make do, building nice things, making it work despite the Lindens' rampant neglect, indifference and incompetence -- and harassment by their little friends in extremist grouplets -- and then people on the forums totally misrepresenting reality and taking the side of extremists. Totally all of SL in a nutshell right there. And entire road is open for anyone to drive through, and the ramp is only on the lumpy mess of rock/ground put there. But I've found that people like you literally cannot see reality, so hidebound are you with ideology. This is a VERY good example of it. So what is the result of your shenanigans here, along with the OP's? Only harassment, and harassment driven by ideological concerns and who-knows-what agenda. It's a marvel to behold. A dozen or more people live here and drive out of this area in vehicles, or on bikes or horses or on cats on to this hideously messed up Linden road with some ramps. That have been there for years. So through ideological fanboyz clamoring and agitation, you or other that bother to log into the world (most of you regs who heckle others on the forums don't even log in) my get feckless Lindens to remove these ramps, even as they don't fix their roads. The OP will still not get through here because his problem is invisiprims set by Lindens as Chin Rey pointed out, something you've failed to grasp yet. My job is to document these idiocies as they happen.

Don't be ridiculous, of course it's not. A prim that isn't even in the road, but only slightly over the Lindens' ridiculous messed-up rocks there really can't be said to be encroaching. Anyone with normal common sense and good will -- actually Lindens themselves would likely "get it" here -- would see that. Only on the toxic forums could this wild distortion of reality occur. Any and all trolls, like the OP, of course will feel free to AR this OMGODZORS ENCROACHMENT but I honestly don't care. The Lindens have never removed it. They tend not to remove things like this when they see they themselves have "issues" or when it really doesn't matter, like a bridge over Linden water as long as it doesn't interfere with boats. I will simply keep putting it back and filing ticket after ticket with them as will many others who live around this area to get them to fix their road. Of course one really big challenge they have is their selection of this type of road in the first place. Cobblestone roads are quaint and even over on the neighboring sims they look much better. Here they selected this god-awful lumpy mixture of rock/earth which is hobbling them and the road and traffic. Of course, they could always drop it just for this odd curve which is kind of a hairpin almost in places -- which they are stuck I suppose although one could consider a completely different layout. There's the issue of the slanted lots that are at odd angles to the road, as well. One OBVIOUS thing the Lindens could do is simply drop this whole scheme with this curved road in that location, and their prims that don't curve, and their lumpy rocks and go another route that is in fact a straightaway -- and old railroad bed titled now "Linden Right of Way" which they seized as their own out of a resident's abandoned parcels years and years ago -- or at least what they "envision" along with their fanboyz as a railroad. For that they'd have to give up their aborted "dream" of a railroad that no one asks for, no one needs, and which the Lindens themselves did not build, because they sold the land here, hello (I bought it from the person who got it off the auction; other neighbors of mind bought other parcels). The old land of the *resident's railroad* (it was never Linden land* was *sold by the Lindens on the auction*. People who endlessly mispresent this might want to come in world and pick up the fake history of this area from the flamingo over by Sikkima, and my actual history from the blue flamingo there by my property : ) We who actually live on those sims and actually own the property have asked for a pet walk or any other thing -- yeah, shocking, imagine, but more people have pets and want to socialize with them than there are hobos who want to ride rail cars -- which of course exist in ABUNDANCE already on the Mainland without having to ruin more sims with them. A pet walk with water fountains for pets, areas where you could play with them, rezzing areas not for cars (which Lindens are always happy to provide as they love the load-testing spammers) but for pet toys or pet food. Shocking, shocking concept I imagine, going with the culture of MOST OF THE PEOPLE ON THE PLATFORM instead of the tiny minorities in the cultures they feel more affinity with like hobos. Or, if they hate pets, and I imagine they do, whatever cash it puts in their own coffers -- Gasp -- if they went on that 45 degree angle across that Linden "path" through Grote and then at right angles down to Electra, none of these problems would exist. Cars have had to turn 45% angles before, it won't kill them. That's how I'd do it. Put this mess on the Robin Loop there out of its misery, put the road in the right-angled area leading up to another crossroads, take out all the mangled prims and leave a field with picnic tables or whatever Moles feel they can do -- naturally the pet walk could go THERE too! Once you have good will instead of catering to tiny clamoring minorities. BTW, if they need to achieve any widening or smoothing there, the Lindens could GASP AGAIN offer compensation to existing landlowners for their "takings". This would be like "eminent domain" in real life. Usually the government compensates you at least something when it has to take your land for a road easement, for example. I've never gotten the Lindens to even discuss this as it is completely outside their ideological scope. And finally -- I know this is an UTTERLY WILD CONCEPT they could use not prims, but sculpties (I hate them, they look terrible) or even mesh. Lindens do have these newer things in road materials elsewhere. So they could create a new sculpty/mesh thing there that would curve better and maybe work better for vehicles to cross. Certainly absolutely no vehicle in any way in any fashion is hampered by MY little ramp there -- how do I know that? Because all the live-long day, the driverless cars come through, spamming up our neighbourhood completely. There are buses in the air; boats in the air; those stupid little pods -- no one needs this. All day long those things drive through, annoying all of us who live there, sometimes crashing or getting stuck on lawns and needing removal. But we've already long since learned that the Lindens will never stop these nuisances as they love them for load tests and their own experiments with sim crossings. Finally, let me note what is really happening with the OP's motorcycle -- he is tripping up on Ben Linden's and Eric Linden's invisible prims. Not anything from me anywhere. That's the exact story and we all get that if we know how roads and travel of vehicles work. Ben and Eric had to put that junk there because of their curves and mess-ups there. Whatever. They're long gone now, and newer Lindens could try to clean this up, but for that they need to a) drop their stalled "railroad dream" of more than a year ago that literally ended in mid-prim when Michael Linden left -- and he himself had ended it when he built it out in the bed there, put up a train engine and then suddenly realized that he would have to *cross Prokofy's land with it* to make it go along the road and b) put the road in the Linden Right of Way where it will not have to curve OR use other materials to make a curved road and get rid of all the mangled junk there. It would literally be less than an hour's work for a Mole. And once again, despite all the bullying and harassment I've experienced from the hobos and their griefer pals, I will not be selling my land there so that these silly rail plans can go through. Oh, no, not when I and my neighbors who own land there had to endure YEARS of misery with this ugly high-rise rail bridge blotting the view of this lovely pond here and the sky around it. Hell, no. We got that ugly high rise despite my working with that resident RR dude, both giving him right-of-way and selling him land to run his RR through Slosser and such -- and for my troubles I got that ugly thing ruining the value of my land. I had to abandon two pieces of land there finally, they wouldn't sell. Fortunately when this resident RR failed and was abandoned, I got to buy back my land again and get some use of it. Normal, peaceful, ordinary communities of people who want normal things like ponds and fishing and nice views really, really matter in SL and I will fight like hell for them because it is right and decent, not because I get any cash out of it, I don't. I refuse to allow tiny extremist communities of griefers, sandboxers, hobos etc. encroach on that when they already have entire sims of their own OR have no land or worst of all, have even abandoned their land and want to freeload on others. The Lindens could never see their way clear to zoning, something that could have been easily done simply by labelling sims and setting an example. They didn't wish to get in the governance business but they also created many many conflict drivers with their poor planning, i.e. having water in a land-locked pond go for sale to anyone, instead of making it Linden protected water and increasing the land's value and securing it against blight.

1. Yes, we've established this about the "calling cards". Oh, silly me for living in the past when only calling cards were used, the latest griefers who can "see the script under the cover" now do this. But...say...can you tell me again the GOOD USE CASE for having this ability to spam everyone on a sim without a calling card. I'll wait! 2. If you study all the chat and activities of this bot (on my blog or I will send you) you'll quickly see they really aren't a bot -- or at least they are a bot/human combo. Example: how would you program a bot to "only once" send a teleport invitation, "Join me in...." If you were a good user of bots and you needed to do that, let's say on an RP sim or something, your bot would *keep doing that*. It wouldn't do it once. Pro-tip. It wouldn't do it only to known griefer sims and sandboxes LOL. Sure, maybe you can set a bot to do that once, set it inworld to do that. But then...why?

What is a "dual conference call"? And thanks for ARing *the bot* instead of harassing me. One thing that numerous people harassing me as bot-victims do is spam me as if they think I need to "see how it feels". So they send me 100s of landmarks to creepy sex sims. Or they send me bunches of notecards. Or they send me bunches of spam messages.

I don't think it's bots, because I don't think the Lindens casually let day-old accounts have scripted agent status. They've deleted every single one of these "bots" that appeared in recent months, there are dozens of them. It's useful to read the Linden policy on bots, which is a bar on your account page -- you are asked to voluntarily supply this information but I don't know if there is a consequence if you don't. But do note that "there are a few ways" that bots are used that might lead to disciplinary action: 'Scripted Agent' is our term to describe a Second Life account that is operated by a program rather than by a real person. These are often called 'Bots' by residents and are automated avatars that perform specific tasks inworld, generally without any human intervention. There are Bots that manage Land tasks and Bots that model clothing in stores. If you know that a Second Life account is to be used in this way, as a 'Scripted Agent' or Bot, then we ask that you identify it as such here. There are a few ways that Bots can be used that are considered a violation of Second Life's Terms of Service (see this article for more details). Identifying this account as a bot allows us to improve the Second Life experience for all Residents (for example, by improving Search results). Failure to identify an account as a Bot could result in disciplinary action if the Bot is then found to be negatively impacting our service or otherwise causing problems. Scripted Agent Status Change Current Status: The avatar associated with this account is identified as being controlled by a human. Please select "change" to self-identify your avatar as a scripted agent (sometimes referred to as a "bot").

So, you're saying that it is not the Second Life Viewer, the official LL viewer, in conjunction with LSL that a) does this joining and entering of groups and b) does this act of spamming people on a sim, but the third-party libsecondlife or its spawns? Or are you saying that Corrade is a third-party program that enables bots to function better in SL that Linden allows? It seems the latter. If that's the case, then the Lindens can review whether the Corrade people's enabling of bots to spam people on a sim by collecting their names and spewing spam to them may be something that should be deprecated/throttled/restricted/whatever. If a third-party griefer viewer, not trivial, because then the Lindens should ban that viewer. And don't get started about how "it is impossible" to ban third-party griefer viewers. Of course it's possible. The Lindens can get even 20% success on this and make a dent. But they'd get more. The point is to have the political will, as they did in facing down Firestorm griefing madness in earlier days, and the rest will follow. As for the howling that goes up when "creative scripters" are ever challenged (because the Lindens love having the rest of us endure the load test for these experiments, like the spam vehicles on all the roads), I shrug. Sooner or later the Lindens have to rein in their children if they want this platform to be used by business and non-profits. As for "how do I know they are not bots" because...bots cannot collect friendship cards and make conference calls out of them. If a bot can go on a sim and join any group that is open and spam in it, you'd still have to explain why it then adjusts its conversation, not as an AI would, but as a human. It would be helpful to have a list of the functions that bots can perform through LSL, and what they can perform through third-party programming like Corrade (if that's how it is done) so we understand what hath God wrought here. God never thinks of what He wrought in Second Life because he's God. But we can question it because we are mortals affected by it. Ask yourself if a bot can paste chat from a real-time conversation in a group to me, then offer me friendship requests, then offer me teleports, all forms of griefing. You might be able to show that a bot can be set to perform these functions. But perform all three, with varied conversation? I don't think so. My guess is that these day-old alts, that don't even wait for the period that LL would have to approve them as scripted agents normally aren't bots, but just call themselves that as a social-engineering that works especially well now due to the Kremlin Trolls issue in RL. A feature of Russian bots is that some days they are bots and just spout scripted lines sometimes in hilariously bad English, but the accounts on Twitter can sometimes then be taken over by real humans who then engage in conversations in non-AI ways -- it's the combination of bot and human that works best (there's even a term for that I'm forgetting now). So again, As for this: There's an LSL function that can get the keys of all avatars in a sim - llGetAgentList - and another LSL function to send an IM to an avatar's key -- given that this form of griefing isn't just common to me, but to many then there may be a way to throttle it, or for the owner of the sim to jam it, either using third-party tools or perhaps even a function the Lindens build into the browser. The point isn't just to say "oh, but bots can do that" -- my quest here is to find out the technical matters of what they can and can't do -- but to say "oh, since they can do this, why are we letting them?" No one needs agents to come in a sim and spout spam, whether racists insanities claiming to be "from me," or just some ordinary rentals or merchant spam. Of course, the problem with all this is the estate bans are broken and griefers keep exploiting this, something no one ever wants to talk about.

@Callum Meriman - that looks like the ability of a bot to issue invitations to others to join the group. If it isn't, it looks like it is restricted to one group that the bot might join. And it seems that there are important restrictions set up on this "Corrade" http://grimore.org/secondlife/scripted_agents/corrade/api/progressive/permissions But if your claim is true, that means every bot that ever enters a sim would have to scan for all available groups to join. It would always be doing that. Filling up its 60 slots, then the owner might delete them (it can't itself choose) then it roams around randomly joining again? I find that hard to believe. If this script added enables a bot to join a group, then what is stopping it from constantly looking for groups to join? I can't believe the Lindens would have calls like that on the server all the time. Also keep in mind that these griefers aren't bots anyway. It's more a question of how either a real avatar or a scripted agent could go around joining so many groups. This griefer selects groups to join where it can get maximum griefing -- large groups, groups of fans at concerts, rental groups, and so on. Obviously the groups have to be open for it to join -- and that's another mystery, as some of these groups seem to require invitations, i.e. rental groups.

@ChinRey but the issue is, despite the physics and rayface and all, some mesh doesn't have this problem and plunks down. That is, if the problem is that one mesh item pollutes the area, or if the problem is just what you're describing, then not even "good" mesh could go down. Yet it does.

So I have these griefer "bots" impersonating me again and people raising a rumpus thinking it's me, etc. -- perfect form of Kremlin Troll style griefing, eh? And you know I found the Russian language on these prims years ago... But to get to the generics here: I note several things about the reports that either the griefer itself makes or people scream at me as they are scolding me for "having a bot" 1. It's not a bot. Bots can't join groups on their own. 2. But how is it able to spam everyone at a concert a message? I realize some third-party illegal viewers and scripts can spoof names, can spam out things, but what sort of function enables one new alt (not a "bot" but just a person pretending to be a bot as a form of social engineering) to spam everyone on a sim a message? Wouldn't the Lindens NOT want to have that? Who would? I can't think when anyone would want it? After all, if you are the sim owner, and you need a global message, you can do that yourself on the island control panel? The "bot" could of course sit and manually IM manually every single person with this nonsense, but that doesn't seem to be what it is doing. It seems to be able to hit quickly and spam everyone. Or is THAT what is happening? Griefers have invaded the island owner's control panel and can do this now, like they can override bans on islands? 3. How is anyone able to gather all the calling cards -- not names, but calling cards -- of someone on a sim, or in a group, or at some location? Because I often get transcripts of calling-card conferences in connection with these fake "bot" attacks -- how are they able to do that? Again, that's not normal. Why would the Lindens allow that? And more to the point, why can't they stop it? One way is to add permissions for nonce group conversations like that using calling cards. But what I really want to know is how you can collect calling cards if no one has actually befriended you? Which a day-old alt wouldn't be able to do in a group. 4. Is there an exploit of groups here? Because it seems to get in groups, get names of people, get calling cards from that group, then create another group-outside-of-a-group when it is ejected and banned and keep bothering people. How? Remember the topic of this discussion: how to stop illegal exploits, griefers who respawn on alts and engage in abuses, etc. The topic is not: a) your hatred of capitalism and your belief that I'm a greedy landlord b) your hatred of me as a non-tech person persisting in trying to right the wrongs of SL by raising technical issues; c) your belief that I "deserve" to be griefed because XYZ belief you have about me, capitalism, or anything.

But on 50 sims, on all different parcels, everywhere, always? No, Qie. This contamination of which you speak is either global everywhere OR doesn't explain this issue. If this only happened on one sim, sure. But it happens everywhere. To be sure, I do find certain mesh-related things that only are on certain sims with certain channels like "LeTigre" or whatever. There's one annoyance where the mesh does rez, but always rezzes under the floor of the skybox, or down under the ground -- it's rezzing not where you put it. So that's related, but different -- at least it rezzes! And that I find literally tracks with some versions of the software on some days on some certain channels (some sims where those channels are) and doesn't happen on some other sim with other channels. Go know...

Well, that's interesting and all but...I'm not buying it. It sounds like what it does is display all the techie underpinnings of mesh which is TMI for most people. It then expects you to fool around with edit and moving things and trying to jigger the panel to make mesh different or place it differently... But that's not what is needed. What's needed is for mesh that is not made in the proper way (if what Chin says is right, and I have no reason to doubt her) SIMPLY CANNOT UPLOAD TO SL. That the 'OWNER OF THE PLATFORM DOES NOT ALLOW IT' becomes the new nag message that those lazy creators deal with, not us. IF that is the issue. You know? AND, if it isn't about them, then the Lindens need to make the WORLD a thing that you can place mesh in, not make people go off on some tech quest to fix it in something like an SL version of the Firestorm version. PS I will never, ever, ever, use Firestorm in my life.

So only in the totally, skewed, fact-free, context-free world of the forums, where no one remembers what they posted even yesterday or its ramifications, can you feel "vindicated" and claim that you "knew all along it was something about the Lindens' software changes." Let me refresh your memory about what you ACTUALLY WROTE as the reasons for my problem with Typepad: Prok, you've been using Typepad since before 2006 and you're still the only person I've ever known to use it. Maybe it's time to update to something more modern? No, I am NOT trying to troll you or anything, I'm serious. I was just reading a thread about how the old HippoVend system stopped working in 2016 - and people are still posting (even as of this morning) about "Wait, what?" So, you aren't clear about your workflow: are you just doing this stuff through email or are you using one of the HUDs that were available way back when to post from in-world to your blog (like the old ones that posted to other blog platforms, or Flickr, etc). I'm just thinking if you're using something like that then chances are there are enough changes in the LL systems that handle these back-end communications that the HUD has become broken - in which case see if there's an update to that gadget. If you're doing straight email then the same thing may apply, though I'm not sure how one would go about troubleshooting or otherwise fixing it. May it be time to search Market Place for a new gadget and change your workflow? OH, and if you're using the LL Viewer and its built-in thing (Postcards? - it's been years since I've even looked at that) - then maybe a ticket is in order? So, you've erroneously complained this is a PICNIC and my use of Typepad. You've erroneously claimed that this is my purported use of an old HUD which of course I don't use, they broke years ago. You've erroneously claimed that a now obsolete vendor is a clue to somehow understanding this problem with Typepad -- it's not obviously. You've erroneously claimed that I "need to find a new product on the Marketplace" -- a HUD to send Postcards? Are you serious? When the VIEWER ITSELF has a function to do this? You've ACTUALLY ADMITTED that YOU YOURSELF don't use postcards and don't really follow its issues -- and then You've erroneously claimed that I should "just put in a ticket" (as if I wouldn't think of it) as this could "only be a problem on my end" and not globally WITH THE LINDENS" SOFTWARE. And you're feeling vindicated? No. You should feel deep, deep shame and apologize for your snarky, nasty, fact-free post, that's what.