Just another unauthorised virtual world fansite
Last Sunday Skate Foss threw a party for the movers and shakers in the world of Twitter and Second Life, she also let those of us in who don’t move or shake that well. However there were signs that this party could be troublesome, when you arrive and find SecondLie there you start to worry:
A content creator whom I’ve know for quite a while inworld contacted me last night to berate me for being anti Redzone, said content creator has suffered badly at the hands of copybot over the years and felt that Redzone was the best solution on the market. This content creator is convinced that the anti Redzone rising has been instigated by copybotters who have been thwarted by Redzone, even when I pointed out Redzone’s own miserable statistics for dealing with copybot, they wouldn’t have it, the propaganda war on both sides has taken hold and for many there is no middle ground here.
Some Redzone supporters refuse to see the alt exposure as a problem and feel it’s silly, Some Redzone opponents refuse to acknowledge that IP bans have worked and that griefers coming back with throwaway alts have been thwarted by Redzone.
This of course was always going to happen, in my view Redzone remains unethical because it does not seek consent and uses an exploit to harvest data. There is no need for Redzone to harvest data on people who have done no wrong, if it’s a security tool, but the lure of the nosey parkers seems to have been too much for ZFire to resist.
Last summer, in an attempt to improve their forums, Blizzard announced people would need to use their real names on the forums, this went down like a lead balloon. Blizzard backed off after many pages of annoyed forum posts.
This week, TechCrunch decided to introduce the new Facebook commenting system, which some believe will help to reduce trolling, unlike Blizzard TechCrunch doesn’t have a link back to an account holder so anonymous trolling there is easier, however like the Blizzard issue, some people will shy away from commenting there because they don’t want their life analysed by some twerp on a forum who will comment on their real life location instead of the issues of the article and anyone who has spent more than ten minutes on Facebook knows that a lot of trolling goes on there, indeed there’s bullying there too, which is why many education organisations have people watching Facebook and other social networks for signs of bullying.
Facebook comments will stifle debate and put people off from commenting, some people aren’t allowed to comment on certain issues due to workplace social networking policies, you can of course still comment on TechCrunch via Yahoo, but this is yet again a sign of Facebook being a lot less of a supplement to a system and more of an egging of people to use Facebook.
This week Linden Lab rolled out their new community platform, one noteable absentee at launch is a General Discussion Forum, some described the old one as a cesspool but the discussions that happened there will find their ways to other areas, to the detriment of the intended purpose of that area, LL really should know this by now and just create a General Discussion area.
Continue reading “Trying to make people play nicely does not work”
On January 6th Lil Linden was informing people of server deploys for the week of January 3rd….Americans write dates funny, anyway whilst talking of Magnum (no not the PI) Lil pointed folk in the direction of Grid Survey to see what release channel their sim was on, be it Magnum, Le Tigre or Blue Steel.
The other day I was at an office hour where a question was asked about RC channels to which a Linden mused there was a website which informed people of what release channel a sim was on, a resident piped up that the website was …..Grid Survey! Yes Tyche Shepherd’s Grid Survey is an unofficial, official source of great data on the grid and the reason that Tyche’s site is considered one of such awesomeness is due to Tyche’s extremely ethical handling of data.
The data Tyche collects is informative, public, wonderfully interesting and presented in a manner that makes it a delight to read, indeed I’d go as far to say that Tyche presents the best public stats on Second Life anywhere!
Continue reading “How To Collect Data, Win Friends And Influence People”
The Redzone kerfuffle is in serious danger of masking other concerns regarding Second Life, griefing being one and I personally find some of the harassment of Redzone users to be particularly unpalatable, whether you agree with Redzone or not, there is nothing to be gained from harassing Redzone users. However one thing Linden Lab should consider is taking a look at Argent Stonecutter’s Jira proposal to give us better security via a master account, as explained on Jira-SVC-6212.
This proposal has quite a few big advantages, for a start it means it’s harder for people to guess your Second Life login name, it could be used to adult verify and give payment status to, all your associated accounts if you choose and it could also be used to ban or allow access to parcels or sims for this avatar only or all avatars associated with this account.
This would of course mean some substantial work for Linden Lab, but in terms of security and greater options it would enhance the Second Life experience.