New harassive SPAM issue: please join me in doing something about this.

Like any tool - be it group notices or IMs, it can be abused. duh.
edit to add: Opting-out or Opting-in is a CHOICE by the owner of the group. For my lounge and my house sales, the group is purely opt-in. I have not bothered to use the hippoGROUPS for my tenants, as I generally feel that the inworld notices suffice. But if we hit another rough patch with communications, it is an option that I will exercise at my leisure.

Because my business model demanded it. I rent mainland. I do maintenance tasks from time to time and I communicate with my group when I am doing them. Signal far outweighs noise, and while communication is not frequent I need it to be reliable. capiche?


This portion pertains to what is LEGALLY spam, which it is not.



Then AR the Lindens because anything can be abused and LL provides it all.

According to the TOS as quoted above, it's a violation, so the group owner should be AR'd.

You should not be entered into a group simply by visiting a place. It's too easy for that to happen completely by accident, not to mention when looking for something and finding the *wrong* place.

IMHO, you shouldn't be entered by buying something either, but that's shakier ground. In any case, I wouldn't be a repeat customer!

Regarding blaming the tool versus blaming the user, this is a lot like the argument about gun ownership. There are good arguments on both sides, and intelligent, well-meaning, thoughtful people can disagree.

Please support this statement.

Legally it is spam; unsolicited commercial messages. Entering an area does not constitute soliciting commercial messages, any more than if I visited some company's website I would be consenting to them then sending me more "information".

I'm cool with ARing the group owner, but not HippoTech. That's ridiculous.

I agree in principle that for casual relationships such as a one-time transaction, one shouldn't be forced to opt out. That is why I don't do it for my own activities. But the tool itself can be useful to me for my primary business, which is a long-term relationship between me and my tenants. When communications are borky and notices are problematic, it is a good backup option and I do not care if they don't want to hear it - on the rare occasion that I bother to send a notice, it is going to be important and they need to know. I don't want to hear squat about opting out.

AR the group owner all you like but ARing HippoTech is stupid.

Well, no, you wouldn't want to AR HippoTech; there are cases where it could well be appropriate to sign someone up for a list if they entered an area. Say, if the area had a big sign over it saying "Enter This Area To Be Signed Up To This List".

I don't think being auto-added to the list is the main problem, I think the spam is. A notice every blue moon from a landlord for a critical issue would be very acceptable to most I would think. Being spammed daily for crap you have no interest in is not acceptable.

Reporting this to LL is certainly a way to go though. Legalities mean nothing in SL as SL is a business and you agree to deal with whatever LL says. All they have to do is add a line in the TOS or the Community standards to make such spamming a violation. Enough community complaints and they will.

As said, it isn't the tool that is the problem it is the people that use it in a problematic way. This is true for about any tool that exists in RL or SL.

People that spam in SL are doomed to fail however. People in SL are normally well educated on how the internet works and deal with spam in a way that isn't positive for the spamers (legal spam or not).

The only reason spam is profitable on the internet is the large amount of people that receive it. They say only about 1% of spam is effective but yet that 1% is so large it is profitable enough to continue doing it. SL is different because not only are the people more educated on ignoring and blocking spam but there simply is not enough people in SL to make enough profit off to justify the action. In SL you would gain a lot more business, especially long term, with quality products and good support.

People simply do not like to be bothered. many people I know leave any group that is constantly having people in the IM's going crazy. I can't stand it and only have a couple groups and they are personal groups.

This also reminds me of thread I saw the other day of someone offering to BUY your group list..... Sighs....

Calling people stupid is stupid.

Some people don't want this kind of capability to exist. Without HippoTech, it would be difficult for spammers to spam their IMs, so HippoTech bears some responsibility. ARing them is not stupid. I disagree with it, personally, but that's another matter.

I am not calling an individual stupid. I think the idea is stupid. Smart people can have stupid ideas. Happens all the time.

This argument reflects the ignorance about the product. It is a tool. It is easier to spam people by joining open groups than it is to use hippoGROUPS because you have to own land to put down the object, and then either have to manually enter people name by name (and have their avatar key if not already in a key database) or have people come to your property to grab their info.


What HippoTech has done is provide a useful tool for communication that, like *any* communication method, is subject to abuse. Using the logic, you would have to sue LL for having open groups to begin with and group IMs. That's going too far and is, I dare say, a stupid idea. When armchair lawyers start talking about legal action here, it gets my dander up. Should we sue Microsoft for making Outlook Express? People use it to send spam.

Put the blame squarely where it belongs - on the individual abusing the communication. The tool does not need "fixing."

hippoGroups is not a tool or a product, it is a service which makes any analogies made so far besides the point. A gun is a one time sale, the store owner can't suddenly make the gun stop working after the sale, but hippotech can just revoke access to their service.

Are they responsible for any spam/abuse their clients unleash? Absolutely not.
Are they responsible for taking action when it's brought to their attention? Absolutely.

They're not a vendor of tools, they're a service provider and just like we expect LL to take action against spammers, so should they.

HippoTech has an agreement with their host that their site not be involved with spam in any way, since the site ties into their in-world group service it's an integral part of it.

Failure to take appropriate action (denying that particular client access to their service, or issuing them a warning) is consequently in violation of their host's acceptable use policy. It doesn't need to be AR'ed in-world but should be directed at their host's (which is One and One if I remember correctly) abuse department.

I stand corrected on that.