Should LL Participate in Resident Abuse?

Linden Lab employees regularly frequent the EFnet #secondlife chat room which is run by several SL residents. This room is used by LL to provide a communications link between residents about various technical topics and to provide a comm link to residents during downtimes, especially grid attacks or during updates. LL employees such as the following visit there on a regular basis...

Philip Linden (rarely)
Robin Linden (rarely)
Vektor Linden
Ben Linden
Phoenix Linden
Kelly Linden
{And various other Lindens at various times that I can't remember off the top of my head}

Lindens will come there to inform people when it's okay to log back in, heads up on various things like new previews just being posted, new ideas being floated around SL, etc.

However, several of the ops in this channel have decided that I am no longer welcome, due to certain disputes we have had over the past concerning the the {group name removed to be within LL TOS} group. So they took it upon themselves to ban me from the channel and to silence me. One major reason given was that I would stick up for {famous anti-FIC figure removed to be within LL TOS} and {famous land baron name removed to be within LL TOS} when they decided to rail upon them, as well as the aforementioned {group name removed to be within LL TOS}dispute.

So, my question to you all is, should Linden Lab use an abusive IRC chat room as their official chat link to residents outside of SL? When Lindens are present in the IRC chat room they do so with "ll" appended to their name, such as "llBen, llPhoenix, llKelly, etc.). They connect to the #secondlife irc room from janus.lindenlab.com and are recognized as officials from Linden Lab. The ops even enforces rules that people cannot impersonate a linden by placing "ll" in front of their names so that official news from Linden Lab isn't confused with a regular residents chat.

Here is a listing of other residents that condone or participate in such actions...

The Ops of the Room:
{4 names removed to be within LL TOS}
MRY-H96 (A Bot run by the ops and some room residents)

People fervently wanting my ban because they don't agree with me:
{4 names removed to be within LL TOS}

Other people in the room:
{21 names removed to be within LL TOS}
...and many more that don't have descriptive names in the room.
Impressive list of residents, no?

Messages I get when I login...
*** HankRamos was kicked from #secondlife by MRY-H96 [Banned: Hank: Adam says Hi]
*** HankRamos was kicked from #secondlife by MRY-H96 [Banned: Hank, Adam says Hi -- Part 2: The Revenge]
(Note, MRY-H96 is their bot they use to remove people they want to silence.)

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This is the group know as FIC, with special access to Linden Lab employees. Yeah, yeah, FIC is the big joke. But people in this room wield a lot of power over at Linden Lab, get to speak with Linden Lab employees on a daily basis about scripting, new technologies, what's up and coming in SL, toss around ideas, etc. Yet, this room is run by a group that knows how to silence people when they don't agree with them. Interesting, no?
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Note: I'm posting here in the official SL forums because hardly anyone reads other forums where you can speak freely. It's important to expose what is going on regarding the actions of Linden Labs. You can view the entire, original thread at SL Universe...

http://www.sluniverse.com/forums

Linden Lab does as they please; it has never been any different. I'm only still around as I haven't pissed anyone off severely enough.

Yeah, I think the Lindens need to start up their own IRC channel.

Who says they haven't?

Hank, its an unofficial, recreational channel that you were glad to be a part of and proud to be a part of for a very long time; however, Cienna was the founder and may do as she pleases with her channel, as far as I'm concerned. She could boot me tomorrow permanently and I'd move on.

Please don't let your personal feud with AZ and NN come into this; its time for everyone involved in this feud to move on and stop and move on. I've been saying this for months now.

Regards,

-Flip

Well, there ya go.

Flipper, don't derail this into a personal issue between Hank and Cienna.

You know it's not. It's basically the Lindens promoting by association the banning of a player by another player.

It could be Cienna and Blaze Spinnaker. Or C and B.

The names aren't the issue, the clear informal / non transparent relationships are.

i think the linden dont need you or me to tell em what to do.

Riiiight.

So they should fly blind with no user feedback?

So what is with all those proposals and tens of thousands people voting and telling LL what they'd like to see done?

Hank has a very good point here.

IRC and Lindens are OK as far as I am concerned, but when they start banning people - that basically means that Cienna gets to decide who can hold court with the Lindens.

The ops in the channel have crafted #secondlife to be a sort of neutral ground for players and Lindens. Kind of like the DMZ between north and south korea. Anything goes, and nothing is kept as official record.

The Lindens are actually as much of threat of being permanently banned from the channel as anyone else, perhaps more so; if they start basing disciplinary decisions or other factors based on what's said in #secondlife, the ops have stated that'd be the end of Linden involvement. this almost happened after the pathfinder debacle.

Hank, you got banned because you've been a one-track record for the past 3 months, taking pains to lay it on thick against Adam and Nexus almost every time you've been active in the channel. The other ops (belaya and cienna) have told you to give it a rest multiple times over many months. You didn't. You're the one that keeps bringing it up. You're the one that won't let it go.

Also, trying to avoid the ban and get back into the channel by routing through open proxies in South Africa and Brazil doesnt exactly endear yourself to the channel.

Call me an asshole if you must, but that's the way I see it.

I never once called you an asshole Lordfly!

Again, you guys are making this an issue of C and H.

It isn't.

It has absolutely nothing to do with them... it's the fact that the resident in charge of the channel basically gets to decide who has quick access to Lindens and who doesn't.

The resident is basically telling the lindens who they can talk to on IRC and who they can not.

And the Lindens have set it up in this way.

If the Lindens were to set up their own IRC channel then the resident in charge would not be able to tell the Lindens who they can talk to, the Lindens would be making those choices.

I wasn't present at the time of the ban. But I can definitely assert that this issue has nothing to do with:

"You know it's not. It's basically the Lindens promoting by association the banning of a player by another player."

It has to do with a certain resident being over the top with his personal vendetta/drama/irritation/whining/you-name-it in said channel. Just because several Linden employees frequent said channel does not relate to the fact that disruptive behavior of the one-track kind isn't allowed or warranted there. Let's not pepper the facts just to make it more than it really is.

Lordfly makes a good point. If you can't handle your ban with civility(IE: do your best to circumvent it via prox(ies)), then perhaps you deserved it more than we know.

Are you suggesting that LL employees should be able to use anything that's created by a resident outside of SL? Because that would be a damn shame. I agree its a narrow line to run, but one of the greatest things about SL, in my opinion, is the fact that the Lindens are just "cops" or behind an iron curtain as "the developers". They're community members and friends. Name one other 3-D online environment or game where a company actually "promotes from within" - hiring from their expert user base? You may be opposed to this, in principal, but I think its pretty damn cool.

Does this set up create occasional difficulties? Sure. Do I get to decide who I ban from using SLBoutique? Yes. Since I have that power, does that mean LL shouldn't use anything I create? No, it doesn't. It means I have the responsibility of wedding out the folks acting like jackasses.

Regards,

-Flip

You don't need to be in a channel in order to talk to someone on IRC. You can still talk to someone in a private window.

Do Lindens buy things with their linden account from SLBoutique?

No, I don't think they should. They should use an ALT account, I mean, it takes absolutely no extra time at all to do so.

Do you ban folks from SLBoutique that disagree with your friends in other venues, or ban people that grief the SLBoutique system (i.e. act to subvert the system, post annoying and abusive objects, sell stolen items, etc)?

Knowing you, I wouldn't think you would ban people that you just simply didn't like or disagreed with. You would only ban folks that were active troublemakers on said banned system. No?

I would hope that banning power is not used as a weapon to squelch dissent against powerful figures.

The IRC channel is in no way run by any Lindens. If you have a problem with the reaction to your behavior, please take it up with myself or another op. The SL forums are not the place to bring this up.

Thanks.

They also write things to the channel that you can't read unless you get Cienna's permission.

Sorry, the forums are *exactly* the right place to bring it up.

This has to do with Lindens, being able to read what they say and to get audience with them, and you have positioned yourself as a gatekeeper.

For example, I can't go into the IRC channel and read what they say because I'm afraid if I piss off the ops they'll ban me.

But you continued to bang on the subject after the ops warned you to drop it; not because it was "against powerful figures", but because it was, quite frankly, fucking exhausting. Every day I'd come into the channel and there'd be yet another discussion on how Adam/Nexus screwed you out of king and country. Eventually, the other ops in the channel (not adam, not nexus, they stayed out of decision-making, as they should have) got sick of it.

You got banned. instead of letting it go, you spent at least an hour circumventing the ban by bouncing your stuff around on open proxies. You were abusing the system, and even just for that, should remain banned, regardless of what politics you may or not perceive as being the problem.

But this isn't politics, this is attempting to keep that channel civil. Lord knows there's enough egos in that room (mine included) to cause tectonic plate shifts. There's a pile of drama in that channel every day, normally spilling over from the forums. But it's different drama every day; it changes weekly. Old drama is forgotten, as it should be. You never let it go. This happened, what, half a year ago?

Six months. A lot happens in six months.

What? You too can join #secondlife! you need an IRC program and a connection to Efnet. It's the Black Sun of SL. open access for anyone, as long as you're not being a dick.

Hank's banning isn't the first banning; there have been MANY others (hello, plastic duck, I hope you're enjoying the FBI today) prior to his. Most deserved it, in my opinion.

By that token, you can't read the SLuniverse forums, because you might piss cris off (??)

I don't get it.

Lindens don't visibly participate in the SLUniverse forums.

I've yet to see a Linden post on the SLuniverse, or if it has happened, it's very very rare.

Were that true, we would have banned Prokofy.

But we didn't.

Well, you banned Hank because you didn't what he was saying.

Trust me, you'd ban me to if I wanted to go in there and talk about what was interesting to me.

You've also kicked people simply for talking about Prokofy.

Even though you're like this freaking sewing circle in there and you talk about everyone else you can think of.