particle griefing

I was at the Ivory Tower, sitting and going through all of the tutorials at long last.

When what to my wondering eyes should be appear, but a sleigh-full of *chan spam and numerous racial slurs centred topically around Obama.

Tried to find the source of it all, client locked up.


I was curious -- does anyone have any thoughts on how often griefers hit the main 'help' type locations?

I am inclined to think this is griefing, rather than someone experimenting with particle emitters, due to the racial slurs and inflamatory/trolling type images being spewed forth.

Also, any strategies for trying to find the emitter in order to report it? Do you need to be on the same parcel to use the report function [gotten to through right-clicking an object]?

Turn on Disable Camera Constraints in the Advanced menu. If you don't have an Advanced menu, press ctrl-alt-D.

Pull your camera back so you're looking down on the scene, maybe 50m or so up. Griefer particle clouds will almost always be sphere - all coming from a center point. Try to eyeball about where the center is then enable View -> Highlight Transparent.

Open View -> Particles and put a check next to Particle Sources and disable all the ones _above_ that one. Press ctrl-alt-shift-= to disable particles then zoom straight down and try to spot the beacon that's emitting them.

It might be an attachment on an avatar or it might be a standalone prim. If you can't spot it, pull the camera back a bit again and prses ctrl-alt-shift-= to re-enable particles. Rince & repeat until you find the source.

Hi Sindy,


This was... interesting, to say the least. There were multiple emitters, across at least five regions that I could identify -- there may have been other regions as well, but was incredibly lagged, even with particles off. Was basically minefield strategy of emitters scattered mid-air.

I had not known about the View -> Beacons -> Particle Sources previously, thank you

And the shortcut key for turning off particles is extremely handy.

For now, it seems to have died down. The emitters had all disappeared for about three minutes, and then a bunch more appeared, but it has been quiet for the past ten minutes. [Or, they've moved to other regions well beyond my draw distance / the maximum distance particles from poofers can exist from the source]

With the ones that move around, usually as big physical boxes, the trick is usually to find the thing that's spawning the boxes. It's similar to tracking down the particles - try to spot the center of where they're coming from and zoom in on that location. There will likely be one box that looks like the others but it will just be sitting there.

Most griefers do the same old tricks.. They will have one box that spawns multiple physical/temp boxes and the spawned boxes are the ones that are spamming. LL denies it (or has to me a couple times) but I think that if you Abuse Report a temp object and it poofs before they look at the AR, they will assume it's resolved. If you go to AR an object, right-click and edit then look at the Object tab and see if Temporary is set - if it is, you will get better results by tracking down the rezzer and ARing that instead. Usually, that one won't have poofed by the time LL gets to the AR.

edit: just flew the area and it looks like LL cleaned it up.. don't see any griefer stuff in the neighboring sims.

OK I was looking around the advanced menu and I found if you go to advanced->rendering->info displays->particles. That brings up ten lines of floating text above the prim and it shows the particle properties. Age, angle, burst rate, etc.

Yep - lots of neat toys in there! As a club owner, I find myself in Rending -> Info Displays -> Lights pretty often. Hate face light abuse!!

Help Island Public: Three times a day at weekends, sometimes.

I see those a lot in sandboxes. You just build your thing, and someone places this object next to you, activates it and leaves.

While they probably have enormous orgasms while doing this. Linden Labs allows these kind of objects. They know by the code it's an exploder particle object that sends out waves of annoying pictures, lagging the grid.

But they haven't got anything to stop it. Thse people who make them should be banned.

Actually particles are a prim property, and thus are handled by the client, not the server.

All prims ALWAYS have a particle emitter, it is just that most of them are NULL.

The same amount of information is sent to the client regardless of whether the emitter is null or not. So the only additional lag created by an object with particles is fps lag, on your computer.