PrimPerfect magazine and Treet.tv Designing Worlds have produced many public service programs over the years. This past Saturday, Saffia Widdershins and Elrik Merlin brought together an outstanding panel of leaders from Second Life’s business and legal community.
The panel addressed the subject of “Griefing”, a topic I presented in my post “Relentless Griefing Attacks” a couple of weeks ago. This video is a comprehensive overview of what griefing is and how it is undermining Second Life.
Please take the time to watch this important interview video.
Being Yordie Sands 
thanks Ms. Y! Really a “nice” conversation about a crappy topic. As you previously documented, the Junkyard Blues situation is really sad. I also am aware of their other topic, griefing noobs. That’s so sad. Both of these things are so unfortunate.
Probably TPTB (LL) could do something to help. Beyond that though, I think it’s one of those systemic things. Of course griefers suck.. haha… mean people suck… but that “friction” or grit in the wheels… it’s not something that really goes away… and it isn’t solved by banning them…
Out on the internet there are zillions of infected windows machines that comprise unwitting malicious botnets. These botnets are used to launch DDOS attacks on, for example Human Rights and Activist Blogger sites. Ironically these attacks don’t usually last that long… why? Because these botnets are really expensive because when they aren’t busy obliterating speech, they could be making more money spamming porn! (seriously)
IDK if there is a way to design a platform like SL to be more grief-resistant – nobody’s less of an expert than me, but I’d think some of the sim-crashing tools could be prevented. As they say in the video, it’s disappointing to discover how easy it is to do some real mayhem. SL is a fairly specific platform and it seems (to this ignorant) that you could be tighter on that without messing up the freedom / flexibility of the rest of the user experience. We’ve discussed many times how much creative spaces suffer under the high LL server charges, and then to have a place like Junkyard Blues have to turn peeps away, obviously cutting revenues, it’s just a giant recipe for more struggling.
I do think the best solution is the one we’re least able to control: infrastructure. It’s hard to address these things 1 griefer at a time, better if you can adjust the way the platform itself runs.
As one of the panelists describes, I too was griefed at Help Island (or one of those) as a noob. It’s a sad state of affairs that a place specifically designed to help noobs turns into a high school parking lot with bullies beating them up. Again though, much as we want to rage against these assholes, being pissed at one griefer doesn’t do much, changing the nature of getting started can change everything.
Another faculty member told me that he had his students do a small SL project, and that right as they were “born” one of them was propositioned (not technically “griefing” I suppose) and that as a result he will never send students to SL again.
On the other hand, I’ve also seen moderators at Wikipedia, WordPress, and other wonderful places be, IMHO, way too controlling and create IMHO, an unfriendly, discussion crushing, environment. So who knows… a difficult topic.
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