How do you deal with absentee land owners?

Here's the situation: A few weeks ago, a particularly bad griefer was banned from the club for strafing residents with his minigun and setting off c4 bombs. (He did this right in front of a Linden, but that just added humor to the moment. He also did it while holding a teddy bear, which did not making him any more endearing).

So with autoreturn set to 1 minute on the parcel, and being banned from entering he was helpless to cause further grievance. Right?

Wrong. He dropped huge Linden bonfire particle prims all along the boundaries of the parcel, just outside the line. On three sides, the property owners were contacted easily and they removed the annoyances. On the fourth side however, the landowner's name does not come up in Search. I checked the land and saw that it was set to a particular group, so I looked up the group and contacted one of the officers. Luckily, that officer knew the owner and said she wasn't in SL anymore but he would contact her and try to get something done.

That's been over a week now. The particle fires create some nasty particle lag for our graphics-challenged members. Hoping to exploit occlusion I erected a large wall textured with clouds to try to block out the particles but I'm not sure if it worked or not (I have a 256MB card and particles don't usually bother me).

Meanwhile, the Lindens refuse to touch anything on that parcel because they can't be sure if it's there by that owner's permission (even though the HUGE bonfires are obviously only lining our club property). I understand their reluctance but if they can move trees, I don't know why they can't return fires

I'm looking for suggestions as to the next step. I'm going to try again to contact that group and see if I can jog their memory but it troubles me that there may be land parcels all over the grid that are basically unowned, unattended, and not set up to prevent people from cluttering them with junk prims. If your land ownership is tied to your premium status, wouldn't your land revert to "for sale" if you terminated your account? Why else wouldn't her name show up on the search feature?

Good Question,

I have IM'd the owner of a parcel near one of mine; It is set to allow anyone to build with autoreturn turned off.
In the past week, it has accumulated several fires, 3 ceiling fans, the ubiquitous plywood cube(s) and possibly even a family of squatters in a skybox!!
If the land weren't horribly over priced, I would buy it just for the pleasure of watching everything go POOF!!

I'll watch and wait and see what happens.

Max

We have a number of absentee owners in Federal and I've had a lot of success with getting Lindens in the SL Land Management forum to come by and set all their land to auto return. Unfortunately, it doesn't help with the half finished builds littering the landscape, but at least it keeps the junk from piling up....

Try posting in the Second Life Land Management forum. Here's a case where they removed an annoying particle generator:

/145/9d/124319/1.html

There is a build on the border of Indigo in Magenta that has been there since the Phantasie Isle days. The land owner has since been disappeared and Magenta changed hand numerous times since then and yet this out of place unused build remains. I am thinking of building a giant box around it because everytime I see it I wanna scream.

Thanks, Isablan and Hugsy, great advice. I am off to do just that. I like the possibility that they'd set the land to auto-return. No harm done on those who just forgot to set their objects to group but it would keep idiots from cluttering up the landscape.

LL's in a hard position I think. They don't want to interfere in how individuals use the land we pay for, but the price of that is allowing annoying, unsightly crap builds and prim clutter to pollute the skyline.

I don't think the ultimate answer should be in the Lindens' hands. This only emphasizes the advantages of buying/renting/owning in a private sim where you can write your own zoning rules and enforce them as you wish.

Someday I'll win the lottery, then look out