The new search. My big fear is spam. All the useful information is available to spammers, my name, my avatar key. Free accounts available. I play world of warcraft when I have time. If you post on the forums, you’ll get spammed.
So why isn’t this a problem with SL? Well with SL you need to sign in to the forums to use them, this makes it a pain for those who want to collate names and spam people, until now that is.
The new search provides all the information spammers need. Free accounts mean they can sign up and have no worries and most ridiculous of all, if you opt out of profile search, any information that spammers need is readily available, any information that residents need … well that’s not available.
You can’t even get the IM tab up for an opted out profile, so what on earth is the point of opting out of profile search? It’s useless if you have any business interests, it’s useless to those whom who want to contact you, but it makes no difference to those who want to spam you.
Spam isn’t an issue you can shut the stable door after, anyone who has worked with spam knows this. Yet LL make an opted out profile so utterly useless that it serves no purpose. You’re only hiding your information from those whom you don’t want to hide your information from.
So when our IM’s are capped because of spam, when we’re getting notecards galore from people who want to sell us L$, remember that LL were told about this. Even facebook allows you to opt out of having spiders trawl your profile and yet leaves your profile in a position to be useful to other facebook users. LL? They’ve created a situation whereby opting out of profile search is a lose lose situation.