My short lived ban from Second Life.

1 user agreed. As dumb as it seems, it's not surprising.

Well, maybe I just WANT to be surprised. I'll reference you back to my original post across the street on the subject...

Definitely!

Re: Sarah's right to post this: a lot of people are venting in the forums about the OSR issue. I don't know why Sarah would be any LESS welcome to do so than anyone else, just because she is a well-known personality. Even though the incident she's upset about is relatively minor in the scheme of things, different people get irritated by different things.

It probably doesn't help your feelings, Sarah, but you are not alone. In the OpenSpace subforum, LL is tolerating negative and bitter commentary, blatant advertising for other grids, and harsh criticism. However, they HAVE been moderating the threads, and are removing uncivil posts.

Lindens demonstrate themselves daily to be human, and so I'm not surprised if customer service representatives occasionally shoot from the hip. When this sort of thing happens in RL (as it does, frequently), I call back to get another person and proceed, as Sarah did here. At least LL fixed it rapidly.
.

To paraphrase one of my favorite movie lines; you don't have the authority to direct my 8 year-old nephew to the bathroom.

So back.
Off.

I agree whole-heartedly Brenda.

We've already seen that SL is the poorer, with the proliferation of clubs, strip malls and 'business' builds, SL is already a far colder, more sterile place than it was when I joined two years ago.

The entire culture has altered, both by the enormous influx of wannabe profiteers, *and* by the vanishing of the old guard. When I started people still said hello to each other when tp'ing into a public space. Now it's like rl, where you pretend you don't see each other. And even worse, there are places which actually discourage open chat. Sooo bizarre.

When I was an editor for SLNN we did a story about the disappearance of SL's 'tip culture', detailing the on effects venue owners and hosts now that fewer people are tipping at SL events, even though there's more money than ever flying around the game.

There are fewer builds which exist simply for the joy of the thing itself, and most of those are created by older residents.

Wait, so I'm wrong. SL may not be poorer because of the disappearance of key contributing older residents. It's just colder, meaner and a little more ugly.

How about: No.

Again: Go and read the ToS. That one document states that LL needs NO reason at ALL to suspend or ban a user ... And guess what? You agreed to it when you logged into SL for the first time.

You're all wrong about that, and I figure you know it.

We do business here as our names, and make our friendships with our names, and we keep our names throughout, and back up all our thoughts and posts with our names. We build up our reliability and our reputation and our trustworthness with the names we choose, not unlike the name of any real-life business run by trustworthy people whose real names you probably don't know either.

People get to know who we are by the names we choose for SL. Which is to say: They GET TO KNOW US. As businesspeople, or as just friends. You know who coco is. (If you know me.) You know me; I'm a known quantity. (A few even know what my real-life name is.)

Anyone who hides behind a convenient alt knows that people he knows would disapprove of him if they knew who he was, and the person is too cowardly to stand up for his beliefs. Or too anxious to be nasty. Or incapable of stating his beliefs in any sort of tactful way. Or not WANTING to be tactful in the first place, but wanting to hurt.

And yet not wanting to suffer the consequences of it. Wanting to maintain a "reputation" which is, in fact, false.

Therefore, it doesn't matter a great deal what they say, because you know it is a weasel saying it; not someone with good intentions.

coco

Sadly Coco, you're delusional: and YOU know it.

I really don't care WHO the Avatar is: If I know the person behind it, I know who I am dealing with. Many of my friends have alts that very few know about: even me. I stumble upon them when they let slip who they are ... or talk on voice.

See: Your Avatar is NOT you, no matter how much you, or anyone else, dresses it up to look like the real person behind the screen. This fixation some have concerning Alts and the opinion of an Alt being worthless just goes to show how very far into the fiction of Second Life some people are. I could probably switch to my ONE Alt ... and no one here would be the wiser.

There is NOTHING cowardly about using an alt to post remarks that may very well cause a FLOOD of IMs in protest: That is avoiding harassment, plain and simple.

did no one ever teach you that it is the MESSAGE, NOT the MESSENGER that matters?

Apparently not.

The REAL 'cowards' are the ones that 'hide' behind the FICTION of their Avatar somehow being more real than they are: That is a cold, hard fact. If you are deluded enough to believe your Avatar and AV name matters one whit: What you need is help.

hopefully next time its a permaban

Does anybody know...has there been improvement of customer service under new regime?

The better job they do at handling cusomers in general, the less angry and invested people will be when reactionary things like Sarah's suspension occur.

I object to this characterization of honest and playful mustelids.

I think you are misunderstanding something really fundamental here, but I really don't want to get into it because it's one of those things that's so fraught with such misunderstandings that it's almost inevitable we'd end up with no better understanding and a lot of bad feelings. Just think about the possibility that you might be mistaken. Please.

Argent, you're talking to someone that used to Role Play and has formed, over the years, a disconnect between the Real world and the realm of Fantasy.

Yes, there are real people behind the keyboard who can be hurt and have a reputation.

To me, it's the Real People that matter, not the pixels on the screen.

Then again this could also stem from the fact that my eyesight often makes a bat look like it has perfect vision.

either way, to me there is no such thing as a 'real' Avatar. The notion just drives me up the wall and quite frankly the number of people that buy into this notion alarm me.

The fact that news sources, governments and the like also buy into this notion also alarms me to no end.

Something you should know by the by Argent: when I use my alt, my entire typing style undergoes a change. This is one of the ways to make it so that a person cannot easily guess who I am. I do have plenty of people that harass me as is ... I don't need any more of them.

Or perhaps he knows that some people would choose to drop his business simply because he happens to support one particular side of this issue. Or that some people would interpret that support, unfairly, as a reason to badmouth him, discourage customers, or whatever.

You're speculating on another person's motives. Whether the speculation is correct or well-founded isn't relevant. By labeling him as "cowardly", you're making an ad hominem attack. Neither of these is a legitimate argument.

I understand. People matter. Avatars are just a part of the mechanism by which you communicate with real people. The thing is, you're still communicating with real people.
See, that's the misunderstanding. When someone says the reputation of "Joe Avatar" matters, that doesn't mean they're saying "Joe Avatar" is real.

Let's move away from the realm of roleplay and into business. Let's say you own a company called "Widgets Incorporated". Widgets isn't a "real person", but the reputation of Widgets matters to you. And if you post an article praising Widgets as "Joe Anonymous", people would see that as being unethical... even if they never had any idea who the owner of Widgets was.

Now I'm not saying that an Avatar is the same as a corporation, either, I'm simply suggesting that you're reading something into this whole situation that isn't what other people are putting there.

That's why there's certain companies I will not discuss in this or any other forum, without disclosing the fact that I work for them, or that I have a working relationship with them. If I don't want to disclose that, I don't comment. More, I *can't* comment. Not ethically. And that's got nothing to do with whether 'Argent Stonecutter' is the name that company knows me by.

Anything else would be unprofessional.

Hi Sarah,

I lost my friends through Linden misuse of power, I had a friend that i played with the last 2 years. He changed his Title to "BUSY EDITING APPEARANCE)" because he didnt want to be disturbed whilst making stuff. Someone at Big Pond hated his guts and got Linden to ban him for hacking.

He spent over $3500 US on his account buying stuff all over Linden. They banned him for nothing and deleted his account. Linden refused to answer his call and ignored him.

Don't you just love Linden? This is why i never will buy anything in this GAME.

well let me think about it. do you have any hot dogs in there?

Well, of course if your friend tells you he is on an alt, you treat the alt the same way you would if he were on his usual avatar. It's knowing who the person is that is the key element. Your friend isn't hiding from you who they are.

If you don't think my avatar name matters, then you are living in some kind of lala land.

Of course avatars are not more real than we are. But they are run by real humans. That's the fact you don't seem to want to acknowledge. And some of those real humans want to talk nasty behind a fake name. They want to hide and talk nasty.

Flood of IM's my foot. I've written some of the most controversial posts imaginable in my years on the SL forums, with scads of people (back in the day) taking great issue with me, and not necessarily nicely. But I never, ever got any flurry of IM's. NEVER. Or even one. Not once.

There is no "fixation" concerning alts. There's the recognition that people who use them to snipe from cover, who use them to hurt people - as opposed to using them for some fun purpose - are cowards who are pretending not to be themselves.

It isn't the opinion itself of the alt that is worthless - for one thing, it's never anything new. It's never something someone else hasn't already addressed, respectfully. It's never anything brilliant or earth-shattering.

It's the person who is the alt who has so little self-worth he dare not speak his name. It is the person himself - what that person has to say - that becomes worthless, as few respect the opinions of a worthless, throw-away alt.

And you know the worst kind? It's the kind who says, "You know me, but I won't tell you who I am," or, "I know someone you know but I won't say who," or "I'm someone in your inner circle," and so forth. Just for the extra devilment of it.

What. A. Cretin.

coco

For the love of god, is it time for


(TM)

Yet? * sorry I couldn't resist*

lol! You've made my day.

coco

/me fanatically opens van door...

/me creates sticky key for this thread with the words: What Coco Said.

Absolutely on the nose, on alting frenemies and LL overreaction/CS issues.

Yay for you that no one responds to something you've wrote in a negative fashion in world. Yippe, hooray!

Yes, that was sarcasm.

Your mileage may vary, but it does not make such a reason invalid.

Guess what?

I have NOT said that Avatars are not run by real people. read the post again Coco, you missed it or skipped that part on purpose.

Let me put this in caps so that you can see it (yes, I'm in a foul mood as is, deal with it - I have no patience left): YOUR. AVATAR. IS. NOT. YOU. IT. IS. NOT. AN. EXTENSION. OF. YOURSELF. IT. IS. NOT. REAL.

and another one for you, since you seem to cling to this mistaken belief of yours: IT DOES NOT MATTER WHO HAS WRITTEN THE MESSAGE, IF THEY HAVE A REASON FOR USING AN ALT - LEAVE IT THE HELL ALONE AND FOCUS ON THE MESSAGE, NOT THE MESSENGER.

It is the person who places a value on the name of a mass of PIXELS and COMPUTER DATA who has no self worth.

As I said, go back and reread the post: Do so until you cease seeing what is not there and can actually respond with something other than utter BS.