What's so annoying and frustrating about this thread about griefing is that the Sluniverse Sharia Court, which has convened on the matter of mainland griefing, just doesn't get it: the normal rules of Second Life are not applying, because griefers have been able to override them with rogue viewers and exploits! Derr!
There is a recurring "knowier-than-thou" strain through this whole thread as each Sharia judge unfairly judges the victim and refuses to find facts and engage in discovery.
Instead, over and over, the victims are told that they must have put their prims on share, or they must be victims of a social hack and somehow griefers have logged on their account, etc.
But that's not what is happening now, as I have been reporting for weeks on end.
The latest round of Woodbury/The Wrong Hand/w-hoods/4chan/whatever griefers are able to do the following because of exploits and rogue viewers:
o return prims from the sim by forcing off owner's prims out of order. Yes, return prims from the sim. Despite long-standing rules that the griefer's own prims should return first if they are over the limit, what's happening is the freshest griefer prims are remaining, and older prims that are group-set or owner are returning to inventory. This is an ancient bug, one fixed repeatedly, and one Andrew Linden knows about and has checked repeatedly. And it's back, or was never fixed. Repeat: PRIMS ARE RETURNING IN THE WRONG ORDER, YES THEY ARE
o What that means is that yes, entire builds can get returned. This isn't consistent behaviour. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. The precise factors aren't clear. But THAT self-replicating objects injected on to a sim rapidly rezzing CAN AND DO return prims is a known issue and documented amply in many places, not just Ravenglass Rentals, but music venues, various other malls, communities, etc.
o Griefers are able to attack your owned objects and change them. Yes, repeat, GRIEFERS CAN NOW CHANGE YOUR OBJECTS NOT ON SHARE. Why is this so hard to grasp? Because it violates the fundamental law of Second Life of ownership -- that only the creator can change the object if the perms are not on "share". But there it is, it is indeed happening. I've seen it on several objects of mine that are not on share, not on copy, not deeded, and are being changed. Again, why certain objects and not others isn't clear, but THAT objects are being changed in defiance of the usual SL "laws of nature" is indeed an unfortunate fact.
o Griefers are able to override land settings. This really, really has to be believed, noted, heeded because the know--it-alls just aren't hearing it. It does absolutely no good to turn off "everyone" and "group" build and "object entry" and even scripts. Griefers override all that. They can rez cubes on land that has "no build" on it, with or without group membership. They can push objects into land without the "object entry" on. Hell, they can even put objects on land from which they are banned (which is another "law of nature" violated, and can push it even through all entry turned off -- in other words, public entry turned off, and even group entry turned off! It's as if the griefers are in a parallel universe where none of the regular laws of SL "nature" apply. They just do it. Nothing works. The settings we have all relied on for the mainland to protect us from idiots and griefers are now all null and void.
o Griefers are now able to inject owners of land into their own ban lists and create annoyance for them as they try to clean up. Now, sure, you can delete yourself out of your own ban list if you have ban powers, and your tenants with that power can do the same. But not all of them realize that. And it's a huge nuisance to bang through 30 parcels on your way to getting to grief objects, jerking back each time as you hit the ban wall, and trying to unban yourself, as the griefer stands nearby laughing and injecting you back again.
o Another curious feature of this griefing override, which has been around at least a year or more, is that the griefers can inject non-existing names into the ban list that aren't in the People List, or just random names that are based on keyword searches to leave you "messages" -- and thus fill up your 50 slots so that you can't put their name in without deleting the names -- which they can inject back in again.
So these five problems again:
o griefers are able to force back prims from sims by overloading sims, whether in group or not
o griefers are able to override normal land settings for "no build" or "no object entry" or even completely closed to "no public access" and even "no group access"
o griefers are able to invade owned prims and change them, i.e. shape them and possibly drop scripts into them?
These all mean serious havoc for the Mainland and group rentals and venues in particular. The Lindens may or may not be working on this, but they aren't talking. They aren't talking in the hope that people will not panic or give up or realize the futility of remaining on the Mainland. They aren't talking in the hope that they might simply ban enough griefers or they will get tired of griefing and it will go away, as griefing waves have in the past.
The Lindens are busy making creative new features of their software like the teleport portal which seems ridiculous to me. We already have the portal script, which Lindens who revised the map functions years ago distributed inworld and which great to put into prims, and then it pulls up the map, and enables a second party to teleport from your prim to your location. I understand the new portal script only works like the "wormholes" -- you can teleport yourself quickly at one click as the owner of the object. So what? What's needed is to have other people use your prim to teleport. The portal script works good enough for that. To be sure, it intercedes with the step of the map pulling up, but that's helpful for people to start understanding the map and where they are going before they click.
Do the Lindens just hope that with enough disincentives -- swathes of abandoned land for sale everywhere by Governor Linden for $1, griefers everywhere, ugly builds everywhere -- that they can eventually get people off the Mainland and into private islands and then dismantle much of the Mainland? Well, that seems cruel. They could just announce to people that they are deprecating the Mainland and move them in orderly fashion to an island continent with more controls just as they did with Zindra (which didn't have controls but is a separate continent).
Mainland griefers could be dealt with far more efficiently if the people who have sims there, including entire sims, could be "estate managers" for Governor Linden and make bans of people across sims at the top level, check colliders and scripted items, send messages to everyone at once on the sim, etc.
Governor Linden could gives these powers to major Mainland land owners to give them more leverage in dealing with griefers, but they are never likely to do that -- it would mean ceding some of their own authoritarian powers but also involve trust and performance issues and also open up avenues for score-settlings and griefing as well. Even so, it's a solution that needs discussion.
The group tools are buggy because powers that you give people in groups -- to use the ban list or not use the ban list, to rez objects or not rez objects -- these are all being overriden by exploits and/or viewers coded to replicate god-mode or override these "laws of nature".
Finally, what has to be understood here is that I'm not the only victim of griefing on the Second Life Mainland. I'm just the most vocal in documenting it. Many other people are victims, including victims of the same Woodbury and w-hat b-tard spinoffs, but they don't talk. They think if they observe omerta, like with the mafia, maybe it will go better for them.
It won't.
The first step to getting this situation improved is documenting and reporting. Everywhere. On the Linden forums, by naming names -- although mods will remove it. But if enough people keep reporting, they will have to respond. The Lindens keep effective action and awareness of griefing out of view by having this silly ban on naming names -- it's what killed The Sims Online in its day. People who face reprimands then have to go to third-party forums and blogs and report there. If you are griefed, rather than suffering in silence, you have to report it and put pressure on the Lindens to develop a response plan for all this.
The chief policy change that MUST happen is an end to this ASSANINE refusal to roll back mainland sims. There is no technical reason why a mainland sim can't be rolled back. I've had them rolled back on very rare occasions. They are just stubborn on this issue because of a hippie technocommunist open source cultism hobble: they believe in the sacredness of all builds, and believe little builds that might have had a minor change to them are more sacred than an entire build just returned or dismantled on a sim.
This is one of the most outrageous examples of their cult beliefs going, and has to be tackled head on. Der, we get it that when you roll back sims, somebody else's build or little prim table might get changed or disappear.
But in many cases, people own the entire sim. I've even had cases where I've gotten signed petitions from everyone else on the sim that they want the rollback, regardless of whether their lawn chair might disappear -- they can put it back out again, you know?
The idiocy of edge-casing and sacrosanct sandbox beliefs have to go here. In the overwhelming majority of cases, other people's builds are not changed. Most people do not change builds in SL. It is not a sandbox, but is mostly populated by settlers who keep their builds unchanged for years on end sometimes. The focus has to be moved to the victim of a massive griefing, where the build is returned or dismantled.
When Notre Dame was destroyed and chopped up into bits through exploitation of the fact that the prims were group owned when the build was bought through the "buy for group" function on the land menu, the Lindens wouldn't roll back the sim despite statements from some of the other major build owners on that sim, such as they were, that they didn't mind the rollback. What they did do, because better Lindens were on staff than are now, was somehow create a Champlain2, a copy of the parcel on another separate sim of theirs, and then a builder could copy that build chunk by chunk back into its original location on the Mainland sim. Not a great solution, but at least the build was saved that way.
Again, the first thing is admitting and publicizing the problem and showing solidarity, not criticism, and not nit-picking with stupid blame-the-victim shit. The griefing problem is serious; it cuts to the heart of the laws of nature of Second Life and destroys them, deliberately. The Lindens shouldn't stand idly by and they need to make a statement and plan of action.
I think that these most egregrious forms of griefing can be stopped by improving (or implementing, maybe there is none) the protocol which recognizes the viewer used to log on to SL. No 'regular' viewer (this includes the benevolent alternative viewers out there), no dice.
Posted by: Laetizia Coronet | August 02, 2012 at 08:15 AM
You really want to know the truth Prok? You're close to it, LL are the "griefers" and the greifers are the lab, the lab is the griefers. They really are tasked with devaluing the mainland. Eventually the lab will shut the mainland down entirely and will use the above as just one more excuse to do so. Its all going to plan.
You have a great day now, y'hear?
Posted by: insider | August 02, 2012 at 10:15 AM
Prokofy, I hate to tell you this, but the ONLY griefers who would be able to do the things you describe (building on your land without permission, banning you from your land and so forth) would be Linden lab employees (remember Rodney?)
Posted by: Eric Metropolitan | August 02, 2012 at 10:42 AM
Laetizia, that can't work. It's way trivial to pretend to be another viewer.
I know what you're thinking, many Windows games use a service which authenticates the executable and scans the memory of the machine for cheating software. Well guess what, the signalling of the service to the server can be spoofed too. And besides, SL Viewer isn't just available for Windows. A malicious client can simply pretend to connect from a Mac.
And i don't even think that's the issue. I think there's a lot by which LL can detect that someone is up to no good with reasonably high probability, yet no absolute certainty, but chances are, there isn't personnel to take care of those red flag signals coming in. You'd just be adding an extra red flag to be ignored.
Posted by: Siana Gearz | August 02, 2012 at 12:12 PM
You are likely just going paranoid and imagining things. If someone are really changing your objects, building on your land and banning you from your land, it can ONLY be either because you have left your objects on share, are allowing it to happen in the settings etc, or it must be a Linden employee, maybe a new (or old for that sake) hire in the coding department or something.
Posted by: Qopi Pink | August 02, 2012 at 02:20 PM
Thank you for this post.
Posted by: Ahab Qvetcher | August 02, 2012 at 11:43 PM
Besides Eve Online, Second Life is the only other game that allows griefers to "play".
Their game is causing anger and frustration to other players. EO coddles them. SL coddles them. Either company only relents when things go so far off the scale it could cause them to lose money.
Why do they allow it? It can only be because some of their employees (CCP and LL) were once of the griefer class. They think it's funny and let the games play on as a kind of twist psych experiment.
It is even more fun to know that we are paying for this abuse (CCP charges a sub and Tier fees might as well be counted as sub fees too).
Posted by: melponeme_k | August 03, 2012 at 08:45 AM
Ever wonder what happens when the simulator tries to return objects for accounts that no longer exist?
Posted by: Anon | August 03, 2012 at 12:03 PM
Qopi, google "Shooped Life". Anything is possible when you're using a custom-made viewer with God powers. Not so long ago, Lindens found themselves teleported off to random places.
Or just stick your head in the sand and sing LALALALA. Your call.
Posted by: Laetizia Coronet | August 03, 2012 at 01:14 PM
Laetizia, Laetizia. Middle aged women should not have strong opinions on things they know little about. Shooped Life is years old, hacked viewers these days have different names. I'm very familiar with what these viewers can do. The things Prokofy mentions, including building on her land without permission, banning her from her land, or changing her objects, are impossible even on a hacked client, unless you are a Linden or have Linden powers that you can not get merely by using a hacked viewer. So for the knowledgeable, only two possibilities remain: Prokofy is imagining or making this stuff up, or she is griefed by a Linden employee or someone who is a lot closer to Linden Lab than a random griefer on a hacked viewer would be.
Posted by: Qopi Pink | August 03, 2012 at 08:20 PM
Q Pink:
One of the singers I work with in SL has had three different episodes in the last week, involving three different sims and venues. They cannot all be operator error, and they do involve the exploits that Prok is talking about, and others. I do not speculate about the cause, but SOMETHING is going on. It is comparatively few episodes now, but if it spreads/gets worse/ increased, it is a serious concern.
Posted by: Ahab Qvetcher | August 03, 2012 at 11:33 PM
Qopi, your name is not an SL username, so I don't see why anyone should take you for an expert on anything SL related.
Something is going on and if you insist on denying that, than maybe you're part of the problem.
Posted by: Laetizia Coronet | August 04, 2012 at 04:16 AM
I had long standing prims forced off my region by a replicating object about 4 to 6 months ago. It's not happened again and I was on their when it happened so managed to contain and delete the objects but about 1/4 of the buildings were returned to the inventories of the two of us who built the place. I noticed it because they started by placing several large invisible prim over the region. I had trouble clicking on anything until at first but realized what they'd done. Since it was a private island I sent a ticket to LL and they rolled it back.
They were able to force the return of objects just as Prok says. I have no reason to doubt the rest of his claims.
Could a viewer be spoofed to make the server think it is a Linden's viewer?
Posted by: Amanda Dallin | August 04, 2012 at 03:37 PM
Prok I notice you always plug sluniverse even though you made so many claims about them harassing you and you hate the site so much.
Why do you keep plugging them on your blog if you don't want anything to do with them? It seems like you are just inviting them to harass you.
This isn't the first time I asked this on your blog seems like you hide any comments asking you about why you keep communicating with people who are supposedly harassing you.
Posted by: Joshiano Yip | August 05, 2012 at 01:48 PM
Amanda, yes, the viewer built from LL's public source is probably already almost indistinguishable from LL viewer. At least initially - once you start doing shady things, red flags do go up!
Laetizia: "Anything is possible when you're using a custom-made viewer with God powers." This is not generally the case! As per SL architecture, the viewer has no authority, the complete authority is at the simulator side. If you try to modify the viewer to request actions you're not allowed to, generally, nothing happens, and a person at LL gets sent a notice of this. So not only will you have accomplished nothing, somebody at LL will eventually start watching you very closely.
The original god-mode hack was really elaborate, as far as i heard, involving multiple simulator servers and another entity. So removal of limitations and checks in the viewer was only an small part of the hack. The way it was done, it's possible to close that category of exploit once and forever by using verification of all authoritative connection partners, a viewer should never be able to become one. If i have left something unclear, i can elaborate this privately. Of course i'm not entitled to very specific information, but everything i heard tells me that this exploit was closed forever.
Now, there can still be single bugs, exploits, new, yet to be discovered and patched up, which would allow the client either to perform an action not within his frame of privileges, or escalate his privileges generally. All information regarding these MUST be directed at LL - knowledge about possibly still existing exploits must not be circulated openly.
Posted by: Siana Gearz | August 06, 2012 at 12:00 PM
@Joshiano: No People List, no posting.
And this is just the usual trolling. I don't "plug" Sluniverse.com merely because I link to an article to show what they are doing in order to criticize it; that's called "polemics," but I guess it goes over your little head.
No comments are "hidden" or banned unless you don't have a first and last SL name that is legitimate or RL or bloggers name that isn't fake, either. You get one shot and then you have to give your actual main account and take responsibility for your hatred. That's all.
Er, "communicating" with people means talking to them. Linking to a blog to comment on it isn't "communicating". What an ass.
As for the Herald, I make a policy of not linking to them unless it's some really super important story of national security or something. But generally I find them so reprehensible I won't even link to them.
Sluniverse is made up of a bunch of whiner oldbies who don't even log into SL any more. Why Rod Linden goes there and comments and graces it with his presence is beyond me! I'd like to get him to comment on the sort of griefing I've described here!
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | August 06, 2012 at 09:02 PM
Prokofy please, please listen to what you are told?
You should be taking 2 of the blue pills in the morning, one of green pills at midday and 3 of the white pills before bed.
If you take the pills as prescribed they will help control the griefer hallucinations.
I am sorry but I must go now as I wish to purchasing Maryport Island and Coast for the very cheap price of only L$2/m, thank you for posting this information on your blog, it is a lovely spot.
I am looking forward to living on the this beautiful island in my most lovely Siggy Romulus Beach House I have been lucky to obtain.
I wish you and your readers well and recommend to you all to take medications as prescribed and should the symptoms persist please contact your local health professional as soon as possible.
Posted by: Dr Langway | August 15, 2012 at 12:42 PM
@ Dr Langway: There is absolutely no need to be insulting about this; it typifies the reaction one finds, however, when one challenges the dominant SL narrative, I find.
Prok is merely reporting what has been observed by many others--a new form of griefing in a number of places which seems to override controls in a way that should not be possible. But though it should not be possible it is--see Amanda's comment above.
One can stand for the implementation of order, or one can stand with the griefers. If one continues to find a mentality of standing with the griefers among both fashion setters in SL, such as are found in SLUniverse, and among some at LL, one can expect that people will find other ways to spend their finite life spans; if SL continues to favor griefers, and other such, there is no need for decent folk to waste time on it.
Witness Melpomene's comment and Amanda's. Taken together they ought to be a wake up call if you don't wish to enjoy your fancy house on your island all by yourself.
Posted by: Ahab Qvetcher | August 17, 2012 at 04:20 AM
Dr. Langway, you aren't in the people list so provide a valid first and last SL name or you can't post here.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | August 17, 2012 at 01:07 PM