Another newbie scam?

That's exactly what people are trying to do.....they go to OI to grab the business before anyone else gets to em....or before new people understand fully how to search and explore. As mentors...we are prohibited to solicit our own SL businesses while on OI....for obvious reasons. But a lot of non mentors will go to OI to 'help' newbs.....when all they really want to do is dump notecards and group tags on them.

I would love to see some kind of automatic detection system (and with all scripters out there, I've gotta believe it's possible) that can either track chat....so that say if a line is repeated over and over.....as often is the case with griefers and spammers.... the AV responsible simply gets booted....LOL.... or maybe even tracks profanity. I'm no prude by any means or extremes.....but on OI....if people are talking filth, they aren't newbs, they aren't mentors and they aren't helping anyone. They're just there to mouth off and get attention. If the 'F' word flies out of someones virtual mouth say more than 5 times... they're not there for any legitimate reason, lets face it. LOL

That's just one angle though.... policing wouldn't be a bad idea just for that area... but, since mentors are volunteers......they do NOT tell us what or where to do our mentoring. There's no structure....it's not a job and it doesn't come with any particular power. If a paid SL employee could be posted there at all times.... I'd say that's worth it....I wouldn't sit there on a schduled time doing that, for free LOL No way. Pay me...and I'll happily don a badge and a hat and go kick the wingnuts off OI for a few hours a day. LOL

I was thinking the same thing, disable the ability to recieve items while still on the oi and hi, once hitting the mainland then sure enable it

the sign could issue an slurl one would think, there has to be another way to get out of there

maybe disable resident to resident transfer until they leave the oi, then ppl can not send the lm and such to their alt to hand out. Or have it so only the items on the oi, can hand out an item to the resident on the oi....

*shrug*

makes sense to me

There are many Orientation Islands. There were a hundred or so Orientation Islands at one time, with numbers added to the name Orientation Island.



There's Orientation Island 105.

Those Orientation Islands are new users, Lindens, and Mentors only.

There is a public access Orientation Island, just one at present.

The public access OI is a copy of the old OI, not a copy of the current OI.

Anyone can acess Orientation Island Public.

Thanks for all the supportive stuff people are posting. I'm glad my gut-feel was correct.

For those with questions about what happened - yes, this was one of the non-public OIs. The character passing out the group invites and LMs was a newbie (obviously an alt), so they hadn't found a way to get an established character in on OI.

I TPed to the LM they were passing out, and got ejected from there, not from the OI.

Both group invites and LMs were being passed out to the same avie every few minutes. And, like someone else said, if *I* saw that when I just signed up as a noob, I would log out and not come back.

Trouble is that we can't do anything about it - this flies under the radar because only newbies get to go there and they don't know enough to report them.

And no, I didn't keep any evidence, I'm afraid. Perhaps someone with some time could create an alt or two and find out if they are doing it everywhere, or if we just got unlucky.

Sorry to hijack the thread. A RL friend of my uses Alucard as his handle and I am wondering if you are from Louisiana? I didn't have a way to send you a PM.

"CX"

whats wrong with c&p there name and message ,or note card drop there id in world?

Yes, that would help some - maybe send them to the public OI after a fixed period so if they try their funny tricks, someone can catch them.

Unfortunately, the offenders would probably just keep creating new newbs, one after another, to perpetually haunt the starting OIs. They probably will want to create a ton of accounts anyway to use as traffic bots so it's not much extra trouble for them.

Cause, I am not In World and I am just a jerk like that. "CX"

Partly my fault - I hadn't enabled the PM option in here (first place I have been where it is off by default).... that has now been rectified....

I really don't see any other way of solving the problem without LL's involvement. They have to limit what people can do on the "restricted" OIs. The exercises there are buying something from a vendor, chatting and IMing, moving around, sitting on things, and using the Map and Search feautures.

There's no reason for them to have functionality to give notecards, LMs, or make friends requests - do all that once you have reached Help Island.

As for what they say to each other, you're not going to be able to police that unless you have some sort of permanent RL-human presence there. Very sad.

The practice in question is called "newbie harvesting" and has been going on for some time. It's a very difficult problem to track, because as SueC observed, there are many Orientation Islands (and we're just talking about the LL ones), and you have no way of choosing which one you go to when creating your character- so it's incredibly infeasible for residents to police.

There is an officially-sanctioned form of newbie harvesting, which involves licensing the ability to create your own Second Life signup portal and orientation experience. ACS, Avatar Island, and CSI are examples. Some are better than others, but all have a potentially significant advantage by being a newbie's first contact on the grid.

The bottom-feeders who troll orientation island for newbies lack the funds and wherewithal to set up their own official SL portals, but in spirit what they're doing doesn't differ much from the "official" newbie harvesters. Where they likely differ is in their tactics and lack of honesty. Tricking newbies into wearing embarrassing or misrepresented group tags is despicable and the businesses to do this should be held publicly accountable. I should think LL has an interest in this too, because a newbie who ends up leaving SL embarrassed and humiliated from their experience with these scumbags is a potential customer LL has likely permanently lost because of it.

I think that that's probably the best option if parcel's had an option for blocking inventory transfers TO people in that parcel. Make it an everyone/group/owner option so that inventory transfers from correctly set items can still be allowed.
This way you can design the OIs to provide a sampling of freebie items that mentors can direct newbies to, but others can't spam them.

SLurls in chat are still a potential annoyance, but newbies would hopefully be more inclined to ignore them. Could possibly add an OI-only option to remove URLs from chat, griefers/scammers could still give garbled URLs that make it through, but it would instantly put people on alert as it why someone is giving their links in such a format.

Anyone know if the "block inventory" type feature exists anywhere on the JIRA? I'm sure I read about it before in relation to something else a while ago (scripted objects spamming landmarks to people in stores). If it doesn't then it needs to be created as it would be a useful feature for helping defend against similar attacks/scams.

That's a terrible idea. One of the things mentors do VERY often is hand out free hair, clothes, and information notes to newbies. Crippling the ability of the mentors to help newcomers in order to block a (probably very few) shills is not a good tradeoff.

"another way to get out of there"...there are currently four exits to OI. Help Island, plus a choice of three welcome areas. Do we need more? (Arguably, those welcome areas aren't the best place to throw a newbie. Better destinations, yes. More, no.)

Ah, so likely a bot, so restricting in-world communications wouldn't help much to prevent spamming the newbs as soon as they TP out.

It can't be too widespread. I've only heard of it happening a couple of times. I've only seen a very few newbies on OI with group tags, and most of those were alts.

Still, once is too many. I'll keep an eye open.