Malicious Office-Recall in Ravenglass

This evening [NAME REMOVED] of Nexcom, after threatening to "fix me," maliciously joined the group Ravenglass Rentals for the only purpose of triggering an "officer recall" a second later, confusing the group and paralyzing all business for 7 days. During an officer recall, nobody can join the group.

When an officer recall is triggered, for 7 days during the griefer's "vote," no new members can join, which means tenants cannot rent and have a group to use to put down their prims.

We will work around this griefing by just allowing any tenant who pays to reside without joing the group for now and set the land to 0 autoreturn, working with them to remove any stray prims.

Of course, the whole point of a malicious and mass griefer attack of this kind if to paralyze and harm another, and of course business will be loss and tenants confused or driven away during those 7 days, sometimes unable to get an explanation.

If you are already in Ravenglass Rentals, just vote "no" or "abstain" (if you feel indifferent to the matter of malicious mass grief attacks, which I hope you won't).

It's interesting to give a little backstory to this griefer. This is the Nexom bunch of thugs who have been engaging in various attempts to blackmail me for weeks. I've AR'd them, but you know, when an individual attempts to destroy your business reputation by spreading malicious slander, this can be construed as "freedom of opinion". To be sure, verbal harassment can and should be AR'd but it often has to be repeated for the Lindens to see a pattern.

Blue Linden didn't seem to really grasp the enormity of paralyzing a rentals grroup for numerous tenants for 7 days suggested helpfully that I should "campaign" for my continued position as officer. I explained that this was a grief attack, not an election. I immediately announced it on the group IM and everyone had already understood that they had to vote "no" or "abstain" to thwart this griefer, who was not a legitimate, paying tenant.

Frankly, even paying tenants should not have the right to officer-recall their landlord and remove him from the group where he is paying tier and where his investment lies. This is bollocks. The Lindens don't hear enough about this in part because when this happens to large mall owners, etc. they prefer to be quiet about it and just re-form their groups. Malls with separate land and merchant groups can work around it. For me, it doesn't make sense to be moving around numerous pieces of land between groups to avoid the vulnerability of an officer-recall attack.

I'm going to refuse to bow to terrorism and I'm going to keep my group and its name and keep it open once the 7-day period elapses.

It's interesting to give a little backstory to this griefer. This is the Nexom bunch of thugs who have been engaging in various attempts to blackmail me for weeks. I've AR'd them, but you know, when an individual attempts to destroy your business reputation by spreading malicious slander, this can be construed as "freedom of opinion". To be sure, verbal harassment can and should be AR'd but it often has to be repeated for the Lindens to see a pattern.

Nexcom has taken exception to my expose of their exmployee's malicious slander and harassment, and the appalling incident of their CEO's forgery of signature and an agreement reached in which all parties agreed to refrain from unfriendly forums posts. I banned these people from my land, which is my right. If they claim I "follow them around the grid" to "harass," then they have to explain why only they get to be near telehub or high-traffic areas, and I'm supposed to sit in Cecropia LOL.

I'm going to keep fighting this. I think that while the Lindens have bent over backwards to accommodate programmers, scripters, and content-creators in their copyright issues, they have refused to take a serious look at landowners' rights. They often seem to disagree among themselves or be of two minds about basic issues of ownershp of property and its significance to a free society.

On the one hand, various Lindens have acknowledged the need for reform of the group tools. On the other hand, some of them show a strange lack of concern about the notion of an officer being recalled away from the land he paid for.

In the meeting at Pathfinder's last Saturday, I spoke out forcefully against the officer-recall function urging that it simply be removed since it is never used to remove tyrants from a group, but always used for malicious attacks on landowners by rogue griefers, or people with axes to grind. Blue Linden objected that "just the other day" some group "used officer-recall effectively," i.e. to express the group's sentiment that an officer had to go for legitimate reasons. But it was Blue, when I belaboured to explain to him tonight that it was a griefer attack, who sugsted that I "campaign among my members to keep my position." I'm sure the beneficial use of officer-rcall in Blue's example couldn't have been related to a land-tier group. It is a very grave matter to have a system where any idiot can strip an officer away from land he payed for.

When I tried to explain that I was first threatened with harm, then officer-recalled, and that this was a very good example of the problem I'd been trying to explain with group tools, Blue told me to write up my suggestions for FEATURES.

I wonder if Lindens who fail to understand the need to protect landowners' rights and group founders' investment rights from malicious griefers will soon be campaigning for a good deal of high-paying customers, if not for their jobs, and writing FEATURES blurbs for another game.

Restate more concisely to be worthy of attention.

If you have a specific complaint about a person, it should be done in abuse report.

If you have a suggestion about a feature change or whatnot, then you should not name names.

You should know this by now.

Just read the first line, that says it all.

I just can't stop laughing!!! **wipes away the tears**

I sure do. And I'm going to the mat on this one.

I abuse-reported the person, as I have been AR-ing the bunch for weeks.

And I suggest "feature changes" with all the others.

And I will name names because there are times when you have to name names to stop terrorizing, you have to show that the existing response mechanisms are inadequate to address a fundamental flaw: the failure to respect and protect the rights of landowners, even pixel landowners.

No resident should be able to bring harm to another in this fashion by first taking away then customers by making false claims about them, then blackmailing then and harassing them, then triggering a malicious officer recall paralyzing their rentals for 7 days, making it impossible to join the group.

You apparently don't have land groups and you don't see how harmful this is to business in general, simply because your business isn't arranged this way quite possibly.

You need to understand that when there is a flaw in the system this huge, the Lindens have to enable resident-based solutions like a Better Business Bureau to function, and they need to understand that misuse of these tools, especially on concert with a pattern of harassment and a direct threat, requires their immediate and serious response.

The Lindens have been talking about revamping the group tools and they are aware of this problem but they really have a problem understanding its consequences.

I'm here to make them very, very aware of the consequences of this malicious use of the tools.

Ummm... *yawn*... ya... pretty bad. seriously... i mean.. ya... thats um... ya. whoa... like... uh... so who when does nip/tuck start up again? Mistress is all hot for christian but dude, I think he is SO skuzzy.

YAGDD.

(Yet Another God Damned Drama)



You 'go to the mat' more than an anemic narcoleptic with tourettes. Pity you've blown your credibility and influence so badly that all that happens when you smack it is the laugh track.

You were a bad forum joke when I got here, and the joke gets worse the more I see from you.

I used to think you were just overly emotional. Now I understand you're disturbed.

Get help. You need it.

Did I hear correctly that you have a basic account, not a premium account, or don't own land or participate in land groups? Im' not sure how you work the land thing for your stores and vendors and home, but you might want to speak to those landowners about how they view this issue.

It sucks that group recalls are able to be used in this way - and I doubt the original intention of 'start recall' was meant for this purpose. I hope updating the groups to a tiered (or better) system without recall will make it on the feature request vote.

As a side note, this is the reason why I don't deed my land to group. In Prok's situation, I'm sure he has no choice - but given the option myself - I avoid it. Of course, the price I pay is I don't get a land-tier bonus, and attempting to delegate land permissions to others is nearly impossible without some sort of script.

Hope that changes in the future!

\

*triple negrate*

Date: Sat, 23 Apr 2005 00:07:43 -0700 (PDT)


Prokofy Neva rated you negatively: Could the reason be that your
boyfriends dump you have to do with your lack of humanity and even common
sense?


***still can't stop laughing!!***

This does really suck.

Hopefully this is grounds for banning.

Clearly the tools are not ready for renting.

ya. totally. i will do that. like. in the morning. yes.

People think that you make a land group merely for the 10 percent discount or bonus, but 10 percent isn't very much when you think about it. That is, it might seem like a lot at first, but Let's say you get 10,000 bonus for having 100,000 donated to your group -- that's $75 of tier, but it never compensates something like the 7 days of paralyzed activity you face for being open to this malice, nor does it compensate for the fact that once you and the others in your group deed land or "buy for group," it cannot be taken back, unless it is sold for $0. So the $40 or $75 or whatever in tier you might save off your group is often by other things that do cost you.

You need to have a group for rentals. People need to have a way to easily pull up the group's land menu and see all your listings -- given the lack of listings in the game to advertise rentals, given the limited nature of the classifieds on this forum and in the game, the group's own menu listings of land parcels, their sizes, their names, their locations, etc. is a big help. Any prospective or existing tenant can pull up that list and see where they could move or what sizes of lots are available. I find it a great convenience to instantly keep track of where the land is.

If they were just a non-landed group, they'd not be able to do that.

Furthermore, in a rentals group, you get the dwell for the entire group, on all sims, redistributed to everyone in the group. That's a nice little bonus to give to tenants. Whereas if you make all of the rented land just under your own ownership, you do keep the dwell but then they don't share in it, even thought they themselves have generated the traffic in part.

A rentals group also enables you to set down the prims and have group announcements, etc.

They are when I run them, blaze

I don't know if you have other officers you trust in your group (a good reason to have at least one alt as an officer), but Anshe has had this happen to her numerous times. Her solution was for the person who is the subject of the recall to immediately quit the group (thus cancelling the recall), then rejoin it. The alt officer then promotes the subject right back up to officer, and business goes back to normal in short order. Having no direct experience with this situation, though, I can't guarantee that it still works this way with 1.6.3... but it might be worth looking into, as it would get your group back to normal without any more fuss.

Interesting solution - I'd never thought of that. Once a recall is going - could another recall be started on the alt-officer? Or only 1 recall at a time?

If its only 1 recall at a time - that could work - and I'll have to take another look at using groups

Well, I want to thank Mash Mandala for alerting me to a workaround to this griefer recall problem.

He tried it first on an old group of his own to see if it works with the new patch. It did for him.

Then I tried and it worked for me.

First, if I am the subject of the griefer officer recall, I leave the group. My leaving the group ends the "officer recall" vote in progress.

Then another officer must invite me back. He sends me the invitation and I log on, get it, and re-join the group.

The drawback is that when I leave the group, I take my tier donation with me. And that offseats my group's tier donation coverage.

So I'd have to make very sure that either an alt or an officer who is online takes care of the invitation quickly so that I can return to the group on his invitation, and put the tier back in place quickly. If anything goes wrong on these steps, the under-tiered group is going to have that much land seized.

I've now walked through it and it seemed to work fine. I hope others can benefit from this workaround and be freed from the harassment of griefers.

IT still happens anyone new logging on will find a vote to take part in,

Since everyone hates you, you should set your groups to invite only. When you are a hated assclown, this is what happens to you. Enjoy your fucked up Karma!

I am sure some will question why I would help Prokofy. But regardless of differences and unbecoming attitudes (and believe me I have taken my share of hits from Prokofy), I don't believe that anyone deserves to be grieved. I don't believe that anyone should lose their land or their group. Sometimes its difficult to do what’s right when you feel someone has attacked you, but some things never change. Right is right regardless.

Yes - I've only ever seen the group tools used for mischief. Anshe gets this regularly.

You're absolutely right. No person deserves to be harassed in this way.









However, as certain foods may impede the bowels, certain behaviors often constipate one's empathy for the misfortunes of others.

/me groans, trying to force out a loaf of sympathy far too large for the narrow opening through which it must pass.

WHAT??? You mean, you could have posted your problem without naming names, and gotten a solution while not violating forum policy? No! Impossible!

Mmmm. More abuse of the neg-rate system. More personal attacks. Fun.

Even in cases where I would normally agree there is a problem I find myself stirred to utter apathy.

Fascinating. This is worthy of a research paper, I tell ya what...