Written 2 March, 2007
Abuse
Yesterday morning I got an IM from my friend Melissa Yeuxdoux. She had just seen something in Second Life that upset her and wanted to know if she could come to talk.
Of course I teleported her to Pele so we could talk.
M. told me she that while shopping, she had looked at a weapons booth and seen for sale a canister of Zyklon B.
That’s the nerve gas the Nazis used in the showers at Auschwitz.
No wonder Melissa was upset!
I gave her a big hug and we chatted until it was time for me to go to work (RL).
This morning something happened that baffled and unsettled me. My brother Mordecai was online and I would have liked to have IMed him, but it was time to go out the door to work.
It didn’t help that I’ve known for a week that today would be the one of the worst days of my life.
I was so distracted that I almost rear-ended a car that stopped abruptly in front of me.
And so, after walking furiously for 30 minutes around the production floor, I find myself blogging.
I was working on Pele, installing an aubreTec teleportation system (which I will not probably uninstall) which would help visitors make their way around my quarter of a sim in Forsaken. And then an avatar walked up.
Here’s the way it played out.
Oh, shit!
I was going to run the chat logs. I captured them and put them into Notepad so I would have them at work. I cut them from the notepad and opened Word.
And of course, when I opened Word, Bill fucking Gates wiped out the contents of the Clipboard!
Goddammit.
Goddammit.
Goddammit.
I say it three times.
Goddammit.
Four.
It’s no longer in Notepad, either.
Thank goodness, I wrote down the names of the abusers on paper, as well.
Their names were—maybe—Ripp0r Hammerer and Freez0r Hammerer.
They came within seconds of each other. And I believe they materialized near me rather than at the entry spot at the Temple to Pele.
I said hi in chat when the first one arrived. The second was soon walking about, inspecting things, saying nothing, so I sent a command to MystiTool to ban him.
It didn’t find him.
But there he was.
The other one then made a crude sexual proposition and called me a bitch.
I couldn’t ban him either.
I was able to push one of them into the air, but he came right back.
Their names showed on my Mysti and I could see their avatar’s tags, and I could read their profiles, but I could not ban them, even when I used the About Land tools.
What will SL come to if someone invents a gadget that lets avs disguise their names?
I called the Linden Lab help line, since an abuse report requires the name of the offending avatar, which wouldn’t come up. They wouldn’t be opening for fifteen minutes, and in fifteen minutes I had to be at work.
Silly me.
Blogging helps sometimes.
I just now realized how they did it.
I think.
I just scrolled back up in Word and changed the O in the names of the offenders to 0 (zero). Dollars to donuts, the reason I couldn’t tag them was because they used a zero in their names.
Alas, I’m on my laptop and there’s no wireless network handy, so I can’t go on the grid and check.
I think I’ll hold off reporting them until I can get back home.
And I think I’m going to put the nOObie blocker I bought from NTE at Pele’s entrance point, set to 15 days so new avs will be sent on their way with a note that tells them they’re welcome to come back when they’ve matured.
That’s because while I was dealing with the zero griefers, another newbie flew in and tried to open the doors of my house without saying a word. I banned her and sent him an IM saying she was being rude. She didn’t reply.
Yes, I’m definitely going to put out the noobie blocker.
4 comments:
What Melissa found is definitely disturbing. SL, being full of human beings, has ugliness and hate as well as beauty and love. Sigh.
Your griefer incident is disturbing as well. Glad you found a way to deal with it. It's funny, though, how you cuss out Bill Gates. I just don't have problems with Windows, especially not since XP. One thing you might have done is to copy from Notepad, rather than cut, so the text would have existed outside the Clipboard until you were sure it was safely pasted in Word. And for the banning, maybe a copy-and-paste would have worked there as well. Even without name disguises, people come up with some pretty goofy stuff, easily misspelled. I'd rather let the computer do the work for me rather than trust my own typing, especially if under stress.
It just occurred to me that there might be a way to create a scripted tool to ban based on a touch or collision. Hmmm, have to think about that.
I hope you have some more peaceful days ahead!
I usually do copy, Veronique, but for some reason this time I cut.
As for Bill Gates, it just seems to me that once something is in Notepad, it should stay in notepad, barring a system crash.
XP is way better than previous Win versions, but having had a Mac, I feel as if I'm driving a Ford after owning a Maserati. And a Model T at that.
And yes, cutting and pasting absolutely would have dealt with the griefers. I was just so frustrated I couldn't bother to take the time to cut and paste. My bad.
It's been quiet on Pele since I changed the land options. I miss the nicer visitors, though.
The n00bie blocker at NDE (interesting, the name has zeros in it, maybe because of the vary problem I had) works great. You set the minimum number of days, and when someone who is newer than that touches it, they are bounced. I'm sure it would work for No Payment on File as well.
Thanks so much for commenting on the blog!
Hmmm. Someone should suggest to LL that, as long as they are the ones selecting the font for display of text, they should pick one that makes "l337-speak" obvious and distinguishes "1" from "l".
There are avatars using the 000 to hide their mischief. I was at a dance place the other day and 3 showed up and just started assaulting people.
This time I had on something that registers the name of people who attack me, so I forwarded their names to lindens. But I don't think they care because they change handles, but this time, I got the name of their group also.
Such childish behavior.
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