Anyone else experience the griefer attack in sandboxes yesterday?

I tried to get to the LL public sandboxes yesterday to work on a build that had too many prims to do on my own platform.

Anyway, all the sandboxes were filled with moving pale blue megaprim sheets that made it impossible to do anything. What's more, these megaprims appeared to be followers. When I TP'd home, the megaprims appeared in my home sim too. If I relogged, they were gone.

I AR'd the owner of the megaprims, who was in people search at first but had gone the next time I clicked to make the AR. But I found them via the click button on the AR window. In fact I AR'd twice because I had additional info. The culprit was not a newbie but had been a resident for some months.

Did anyone else experience this? It seems there's a potential, if these megaprims are followers, for an innocent person to get AR'd because it looks at first like they might have rezzed them.

You use the word 'followers' very casually... like other peoples prims following you (or someone else) around is common practice. Is this the case as I have never heard of this before?

Yeah, this is news to me, too: followers that can span TPs to distant sims; short of a pretty dramatic exploit, I don't know how such a thing could be done. (Followers within a sim are very simple to make, as long as the sim allows build and scripts--which a sandbox does, of course.)

Perhaps the offending objects were located in more than one sim rather than following an avatar teleporting to a different sim. There's certainly been instances of griefer objects in more than one sim at a time.

Seems like there was a bug that allowed tracking avatars that teleported but it was fixed, but maybe my memory is playing tricks.

Fixed a long time ago, or at least that particular bug was.

I'm sure these huge blue moving megaprim sheets did follow me sim to sim. The first couple of times, I TP'd to sandboxes that were already full of these things. At first I thought it was the sky graphics gone mad but I clicked on the blue and it was a prim, with an owner and creator.

Next I tried TPing to a non-sandbox sim next to a public sandboxe. I looked in the direction of the sandbox and could see the huge blue things and they actually came over to me and surrounded me after a few seconds. I teleported home and they appeared around me there after a few seconds too. After relogging, the megaprims were gone. But I tried going to a sandbox and TPing home again, and the megaprims followed me again. So I am certain these things were capable of following me, even through teleports. Presumably this must have happened to anyone else who got near them too.

I can understand following a TP one sim away without invoking too much magic, but hopping across sims and/or void space to follow a TP: I find *that* part really surprising and worrisome. The only mechanisms I can dream up that would make that possible would be really disastrous exploits. I sure hope there's a more innocent explanation.

They don't seem to work by making themselves into attachments as they take a few seconds to appear after a TP.

Wait, they survived a teleport to a non-connected sim? That is going to tick people off royally.

As for the follower attacks? They are the main reason I stopped using Linden owned sandboxes.

Follower prims, be it blocks, noise-makers, etc are common place in the Linden sandboxes and as was said, is the main reason I avoid them. They are nothing more then havens for greifers and you hardly ever seen any useful building happening there. (I did see a replica of the War Of The Worlds tripod once, that was neat)

If you are looking for a decent place to actually build, then send me a PM on here and I will drop you some names. (Wont say them openly for fear of ruining a good sandbox lol)

Here is what I'd suggest to do if you're being followed by something even after teleporting:

- by using Minimap, teleport in the same region to a distance > 96 meters (let's say, teleport from a region corner to the opposite one)

- immediately after that, teleport in a different region (if you're not already there, Home is the quickest way because you can use the CTRL SHIFT H shortcut)

I'm not sure this actually works! I never directly met this kind of followers.
So - please confirm/deny if you try it in a real situation.

Best part of the story.

(Surely if the LL staff were on top of this enough to ban the perp, then they can find an answer to the technical issue, which I agree is worrrisome.)

Simple answer: Don't use public sandboxes that LL have provided. They are full of noobs who want L$ to be free so they can use SL as a playground, underage kiddies playing with their freebie police cars, and griefers.

Use sims which are protected by their own sim security

the mega prim results in a client overload, crashes me hard rightaway if i dont scoot fast.
I to noticed the following or so it seemed, I now think it was just the prim ghosted in my client or GFX card. After tping home I still saw the prim on my viewer, but after a few moments and home fully rezzing it was gone and no ill effects.

I didn't see anything like the OP describes, but somehow autoreturn got turned off on all the Help Islands. At first, there was random litter...mostly simple plywood prims, then some aircraft. Toward the end of the day, we were seeing adboards/landmark givers for in world establishments.