Is it so difficult? (goofsquid spam)

[Qie Niangao]

The Lab is making extra work for the people who have to clean up after griefers. Either that, or those people (subcontractors?) are creating extra work for themselves. Witness this fine (NSFW) pile of prims, already AR'd several times:

 

 

 

Yes, of course it's obscene. As anyone knows who's encountered this particular wave of griefer spam, it's also a viewer-crasher if you don't either block (text from) the owner (to prevent unbounded accumulation of llLoadURL dialogs).

The content isn't the point; it's nothing special, just the usual juvenile junk, seen all over Mainland these days -- and that is the point: it seems to have gotten far beyond the ability of the Lab and its contractors to actually do anything about it.

And yet there are straightforward technical measures that would address this problem.

 

• Process under-tiered group-owned land. (Notice the group's Land/Assets tab in the image.) This might follow a few steps:

1. Automatically scan landholding groups to identify deficient contributed tier
2. Notify group Owners and Officers that the group is under-tiered and the clock is ticking.
3. After, say, 30 days, automatically enable Auto-Return on all parcels owned by the delinquent group. Yeah, some content will poof, but the owners had time to prevent that. Maybe leaving some content on the parcel is currently viewed as better than further denuding the Mainland, and I get that, but that's no reason this effectively abandoned land has to be a plague to any neighbors who remain.

 

• Enable and practice Estate-wide return of a griefing owner's content. Yeah, that means the sims have to be able to accept and respond to commands to remove all such content. And yeah, there need to be safeguards. But  this has to be faster than visiting each griefed sim separately.

 

• Provide incentive for landowners to enable Auto-Return. Help us help you. Give us a substantial (50%?) tier bonus for land that has Auto-Return enabled. I mean, why not? It's not as if there's prospect of Mainland being scarce any time soon.

[EDIT: Changed the thread title to more accurately reflect the nature of the spam perpetrators, their self-selected name notwithstanding. Also, I confirmed at the March 26th Server user group meeting that there is indeed an ability to return content by owner, grid-wide. Understandably, this is used very carefully because the effect is very widespread and practically irreversible. One might even suspect that the objective of the Goofies isn't just to gain attention by playing with their poo, but to eventually succeed in prompting a human error that wipes some valued content from the grid. ... Okay, not really. They're just playing with their poo. Never mind.]

[jwenting]

you assume these griefers own land, they don't. They rez on public land and push their prims onto other parcels. Only way to stop that is to make the entire grid no-rez zones, close every parcel except to the owners and invited friends, and turn off object entry on every parcel.

This would instantly mean the end to vehicles, travel, socialising, and everything else the inhabitants of the grid like to do.

Far better to just block the griefers in your viewer, turn on spam protection in your viewer, and AR them whenever you find anything they left behind, plus notify the parcel owners.

YOU are trying to apeace the griefers by giving in to them, by shutting down the grid. YOU are part of the problem because of that because you encourage them!

[Dann Byron]

Forced non-zero auto-return at all used/unused parcels on Mainland will solve the problem ! Greiefers may push and rezz any object they want - in a few minutes the parcel will be clean again  :-)   And no problems for travelers with their planes - few minutes will be enough for them to reach the opposite side of the SIM.

 

[Qie Niangao]

---

jwenting wrote:

you assume these griefers own land, they don't. They rez on public land and push their prims onto other parcels. Only way to stop that is to make the entire grid no-rez zones, close every parcel except to the owners and invited friends, and turn off object entry on every parcel.

This would instantly mean the end to vehicles, travel, socialising, and everything else the inhabitants of the grid like to do.

Far better to just block the griefers in your viewer, turn on spam protection in your viewer, and AR them whenever you find anything they left behind, plus notify the parcel owners.

YOU are trying to apeace the griefers by giving in to them, by shutting down the grid. YOU are part of the problem because of that because you encourage them!

---

Ummm... What?

I'm most certainly not assuming that the griefers own land. (How stupid do you think I am?)

 

What I'm saying is that land that is owned, if set with auto-return, will make such attacks much harder to perpetrate.

Setting land to no-object-entry or no-rez would not have the same effect on such attacks, and I suggested nothing of the sort. (No, I'm not going to explain why these settings are so ineffective against griefer attacks. Let the griefers learn that on the street, not from me.)

And I certainly said nothing about restricting parcel access. (Why did you even raise that, when it's so obviously irrelevant?)

The problem is that there is a very large amount of "owned" land that is effectively abandoned, where the "owner" is either a group with chronically insufficient contributed tier, or a defunct account. I understand why the Lab is reluctant to actually reclaim that land now, given that there's nobody paying tier on all the already officially abandoned land, but all that derelict, delinquent land is making life miserable for neighbors because it gets griefed, over and over and over again, with AR response, overwhelmed by these attacks, is now so slow that the land spends more time griefed than not.

Get more of Mainland set with Auto-Return enabled. It helped some when the process changed to enable that setting for freshly abandoned land. We need more of that help, by also imposing the setting on land that has been effectively abandoned (not covered by tier contributions, or owned by defunct accounts), and by giving real landowners more incentive to enable it on their active parcels.

It needs to be fixed or even we remaining die-hard Mainlanders will simply have no choice but to abandon, too. There's no fun in owning land when one has to spend most of the time in-world tracking down and ARing griefer spam. And there's no pleasure in knowing that so much of our tier has to be spent on much-too-little, much-too-late response to those ARs--especially when straightforward technical countermeasures are possible.

 

[Qie Niangao]

---

Dann Byron wrote:

Forced non-zero auto-return at all used/unused parcels on Mainland will solve the problem ! Greiefers may push and rezz any object they want - in a few minutes the parcel will be clean again  :-)   And no problems for travelers with their planes - few minutes will be enough for them to reach the opposite side of the SIM.

 

---

A few minor points. First, there's actually no problem for vehicles to travel through no-object-entry land as long as the rider stays seated on the vehicle. (It does stop automated riderless vehicles, for better or worse, but again, I'm not promoting the no-object-entry setting.) Similarly, auto-return doesn't affect sat-upon objects such as manned vehicles, so it can be as aggressive as the landowner wants and it won't disrupt travel.

Second, I do not want to force auto-return on all land. There are legitimate reasons for a landowner to need to disable auto-return--but that setting adds tremendously to the cost of maintaining Mainland (or would, if Mainland were conscientiously maintained), so those who can enable auto-return should benefit from the savings.

Third, auto-return does not completely prevent the problem of griefer spam objects. This is another thing I don't want to discuss in public, and anyway it doesn't matter: the more land that has auto-return enabled, the smaller this problem will become.

[Dann Byron]

OK, but Lindens could at least make Auto-Return option set to some non-zero value automatically on all abandoned land ! I hope nobody will argue about it  :-)   It won't solve the problem with other parcels that are not officially abandoned, but will be "at least something" – the situation can't be left "as is" any longer !  GoonSquad attack is all over the Mainland and its terrible !

[filthy Adored]

Secondlife is a game.

On main land I own I should have the permissions required not to be griefed. I dont role play, i dont want to role play and yet im subjected to this **bleep**.My choices are abandon my land, rant here

oh if some can correct my spelling and grammer that woudl be lovely.

Its complete and utter bull**bleep** that i have to beg the lindens for help.All i want is to not be spammed and griefed on the land Im paying for. This is a game its not about  the required force to fight griefers. All i want is the check boxes to controll what enters the land im paying for.

Think how much less work that would be for the lindens

and how many paying customers woudl continue to pay

[Qie Niangao]

---

OK, but Lindens could at least make Auto-Return option set to some non-zero value automatically on all abandoned land ! 

---

I believe that all newly abandoned land does get Auto-Return enabled automatically now; if I recall correctly, that started back when they instituted the automatic setting for sale of abandoned land, which practice was more recently stopped. But yeah, apparently it's not as easy as one would expect for them to do that with all the really ancient abandoned land, which is unfortunate.

(There are undoubtedly exceptions, too; I've even found stretches of Linden roads where the Auto-Return got disabled somewhere along the way. But such rare exceptions can be managed with the occasional support case.)

FWIW, reports suggest that a few hours ago this particular griefer's stuff did disappear from many Mainland sims more or less simultaneously. So there may indeed exist an Estate-wide (or grid-wide?) return-by-owner. 

[Dann Byron]

Yes, it disappeared here too !  At last !  But what is strange it happened not in all SIMs around, some SIMs still have that spamm (hope not for long).

[BlackMagi Darkwatch]

Just thinking our loud here and have no idea if even implentable... 

We all connect to inventory server(s).  If the inventory server "noticed" an account or object owner was rezzing a single prim on multiple parcels / multiple sims in a fairly short space of time then the watching process could flag that agent.  I say multiple parcels/sims as I use holovendors on a single parcel.  If that agent was also getting a number of AR's then someone could go and investigate or simply remove the objects (which I believe happened in this case).  Of course, the flagged agent could be legitimately placing new vendors down (moving  from one location to another) but it might make the whole process a little smoother and easier to track? 

 

As I said at the outset, just thinking our loud.
Black

[Monti Messmer]

There might be technical methods to work against griefers but as long bigger companies than LL cannot stop spam emails nothing will happen to SL.

 

Lindens don't have a history in excellent user support anyway ;-)

 

Monti

[NikiF1488315698]

Well as someone who cant go home right now because griefers have set up 5 of these things on a parcel whose owner has set allow object entry with no auto return, that happens to be next door to my home parcel, I wish I knew the answer. AR filed, not that it will do any good the object owner was created today and is obviously a disposable account. Sent an IM to the parcel owner but they are offline and its too late to contact the Lindens through live chat.

Didn't realise that this is widespread till finding this thread. Its not a problem you see too much on Island sims, so yes there has to be an answer to mainlands problems.

Edited to add: If you get too close to these boxes they change their object name to your username so that the spam will read for example:

NikiF Resident shouts: GOONSQUAD..... then the rest of the rubbish these things shout..

 

Kinda spooky

[Rex Midal]

They got me tonight.  The goonsquad crap.  I was surprised.  They're getting better

[Jadeclaw Denfu]

Qie Niangao wrote: "Second, I do not want to force auto-return on all land."
But exactly that needs to happen. If someone sets Autoreturn to 0, it is not switched off, but instead set to 15 seconds.
If someone really needs Autoreturn to be switched off, then that should only be possible through a support ticket.
And the maximum time should be limited to a few hours, not 999999 minutes, close to two years.

Qie Niangao wrote: "Third, auto-return does not completely prevent the problem of griefer spam objects."
That is true, but it would take care of atleast 90% of the unwanted junk, leaving the AR-team with more time
to aggressively pursue the real hardcore griefers like these Goonsquad-terrorists.

 

[Qie Niangao]

---

Qie Niangao wrote: "Second, I do

not

want to

force

auto-return on all land."

But exactly that needs to happen. If someone sets Autoreturn to 0, it is not switched off, but instead set to 15 seconds.

If someone really needs Autoreturn to be switched off, then that should only be possible through a support ticket.

And the maximum time should be limited to a few hours, not 999999 minutes, close to two years.

---

The need for 0 auto-return is indeed pretty specialized, but it happens. A medium-term case, where a few weeks of no-auto-return might suffice, is the migration of a parcel from individual to group ownership. There may be hundreds or thousands of objects rezzed on the parcel that aren't set to the landowning group, which may have never even existed when the objects were rezzed. It seems reasonable to me that landowners may want to start enjoying the many advantages of group land ownership without having to wait to first fix all the objects on the parcel.

A harder case is legacy content, including stuff of historical significance, where the object owner is dead or no longer in SL. Those items are never going to be safe from auto-return, and Mainland has quite a few of those historical items and builds. I guess they *could* be preserved with one-off support tickets, but that would seem a tremendous lot of work.

---

Qie Niangao wrote: "Third, auto-return does not 

completely

prevent the problem of griefer spam objects."

That is true, but it would take care of atleast 90% of the unwanted junk, leaving the AR-team with more time

to aggressively pursue the real hardcore griefers like these Goonsquad-terrorists.

---

Off and on since the Goofy alts went on this little tantrum, I've been thinking about it, and I'm no longer so sure that auto-return would reduce griefing, long term.

The current Goofy poo-fest  would be completely stopped by universal auto-return, but we both (and many others) know how to defeat auto-return... and indeed, no combination of settings can completely protect a Mainland parcel from griefer prims. Auto-return is merely (by far) the best individual option.

If the griefers couldn't get their poopy-fun with objects vulnerable to auto-return, would they give up? Or would they just find a slightly more sophisticated griefing script to copy? I'm kinda on the fence about this now.

[Qie Niangao]

I thought yet more on this subject, and I'm now even more strongly of the opinion that a tier bonus for land with Auto-Return enabled would be a major win-win for both the Lab and Mainland owners. Even if there's eventually some griefing with objects immune to Auto-Return, there are big benefits to the appeal of Mainland, the more of it that enables Auto-Return. A casual look at the Mainland reveals many stranded vehicles and unintentional debris--stuff that's escaped somebody while building, for example--all of which would be cleaned up by Auto Return.

It's time for this change.

[Perrie Juran]

---

Qie Niangao wrote:

---

A harder case is legacy content, including stuff of historical significance, where the object owner is dead or no longer in SL. Those items are never going to be safe from auto-return, and Mainland has quite a few of those historical items and builds. I guess they *could* be preserved with one-off support tickets, but that would seem a tremendous lot of work.

---

---

The loss of Legacy Content is a real issue.  Parts of Governor Linden's Mansion were lost when there were changes made to prim allotments:

 

"Thankfully, land was purchased before all of the mansion was auto-deleted by the server -- the main loss being the basement which is accessible through a hole in the pool and a door with a drop down inside the house."

The Governor's Mansion

[Melita Magic]

Hope someone listens to you on this Qie.

 

[Angus Mesmer]

I am quite familiar with the subject on prim spam on the mainland, as I am the caretaker for two parcels in Darkwood, one of the oldest themed sims in SL, and one sim away from a telehub. 

One of the big problems is that it is so old that many of the original owners had Lifetime accounts. 

Some of those people have not been online in months, others possibly in years. And yet, the parcel settings remain rather open, with no autoreturn, and object entry. There is also, annoyingly, a lack of response to the ARs sent about the litter, even when the reason why the parcel owner can't do it is explained in the AR. (It did work, once, when I managed to corner a nice Linden, but only partially as they only set one of the two parcels.)

At the moment, one of the parcels with ugly litter is set to a group that is not the group to which the main item on it is set.

Autoreturn would certainly be a problem, the owner would need to set the item properly first, or builds older than most AVs around these days would be lost. But if this cannot be done, at the very least No Entry and No Rez could be set, and the obvious litter removed.