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Warning Signs

Page history last edited by Joe Essid 14 years, 6 months ago

"Friend" & Teleport Requests 

You may meet friendly seeming avatars at any time.  Be careful, however, when you get friend requests out of the blue, let alone offers to join someone by teleport.  I decline all such offers unless I have spoken to the sender.

 

Remember SL etiquette: talk to someone before you offer to be a friend. Experienced residents have learned, the hard way, to reject random requsts.

 

Muting Someone

Some avatars "don't get the message." It's a violation of Linden Lab's policies to continually bother an avatar when they don't want to be contacted.  When a chatty avatar keeps after me in a public place or by private IM, I tell them that I'm working on a project and move on. If they continue, I mute them. I save abuse reports for the most serious instances of violating the Linden Lab Community Standards.

 

You can mute a nearby avatar by right-clicking him or her and choosing "mute" from the wheel (check the "more" option if you don't see it right away).  You can also mute them from their profile windows. In chat or IM, click the other person's name to pull up their profile. You'll see a "mute" button.

 

Once muted, these folks cannot chat or IM you. They'll look like gray shadows on your screen if they are nearby. You can "unmute" them the same way you muted them.

 

"Free Items"

This, students, is a "griefer," or avatar who inflicts pain or makes SL areas crash for the mere evil fun of it.

 

 The griefer, named "Cracklord," was spewing images (at least they are not obscene ones) over a camping area to make it crash (by overloading the server running it) or perhaps just to ruin the fun of the visitors.  This type of "griefing" is merely annoying, but there are also griefers who, if an area permits it, attack avatars with weapons or put them in virtual cages.

 

Some griefers are more subtle, offering avatars "free items" that contain malicious code. 

 

To my knowledge, no SL program of this sort can "break out" of the client to infect a hard drive, but cases have been documented of freebies that take Lindens out of one's account, that mangle an avatar's appearance temporarily (forcing the user to log off and on again) and so on. 

 

Here's a griefer's item at work, one I picked up early in my Second Life in a public "Sandbox," or area that permits residents to build items using SL's powerful content-creation tools.  Batman is merely annoying; he follows an avatar and forces it to do a bizarre dance...eventually carrying the avatar far up into the sky. It also shouts a madman's rant through the computer speakers.

 

The best policy is do not accept free items unless you know the person giving it to you.  You can simply select "decline" when offered a free item or landmark.  This does not apply to most free items in stores. 

 

Some stores have automatic dispensers for landmarks. My advice is to read the offer carefully before accepting or declining it.  You can always set a landmark in a place you like on your own. Only a very few places I have visited prohibit setting landmarks.

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