Stopping Notecard Spam in Second Life
Second Life resident Torley Linden (formerly Torley Torgeson, until she became an employee of Linden Lab) has a post on her blog yesterday about how to stop notecard spam — i.e., the repeated delivery of notecards to your avatar from an automated object — in Second Life. While Torley notes that the problem is occasionally unintentional, it raises an interesting point. Podcaster extraordinaire John Swords (producer of SecondCast and the Metaverse Sessions) has a theory that no software platform can be called truly successful until people start writing security apps like spamblockers for it. The thing is, though, that SL’s in-world communication tools are fairly crude, so building a spamblocker may not even be possible. And we’ve yet to grapple with the problems and solutions that will arise as more and more SL functionality becomes Web-based. By John’s measure, though, notecard spam may be a good sign. Does Torley’s post mark the beginning of SL’s maturity?
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I fully agree there with the concept that no platform is successful until you have to right security tools for it. Security indicates value. I was suprised as soon as I got into second life that people had built frequency hopping radios across the comms channels, with encryption, to counteract the ease with which snoopers and bugs can be created.
In addition to al that we have both gambling and pornography represented in the space. Cometing with the more friendly uses such as education, creative pursuits and even the odd game.
It all points to the metaverse, and its instantiation in Second Life as being ’succesful’ and ‘mature’
When I wrote that post, I was thinking of really metallic, unemotional, insectoid drum ‘n’ bass music. That’s the background I had, because notecard spam has a certain cold rhythm to it–
I’ll mention a few things to fill in some more context, tho: this problem has been around a long time. I first recall hearing of it a few months after I started Second Life. And while on the job, firsthand, the times I’ve seen this occur–it’s *mostly* been unintentional (the “touch_start” vs. “touch” thing). However, with such a quickly growing grid, it’s also a very time-consuming and frustrating problem, especially for new Resis who explore a few days, then get struck by this. With so many people to help, I noticed a gap in documentation explaining this more cohesively than “one avatar tells ‘the legend of the repeatedly-arriving notecards’ to another inworld”, and lept for it. So several factors dovetailed.
Another bit is, I’ve been called to the scene of notecard-spammings numerous times. I always get the visual image that I’m a dog sent in to diffuse a bomb. (Fascinatingly enough, the other day, I’ve taken on the form of a canine Torley named Tollie, the cat-babysitting collie.)
What I am really and personally hoping for in the future is a 3D equivalent to web adblockers. We can temporarily make objects in SL disappear in a variety of ways: intentionally like Debug menu > Rendering > Hide Selected, and packet loss conditions as well as occlusion culling glitches (some significant ones were already fixed) can make stuff “not appear”. Obviously, it’s not desirable nor practical to jiggle your network connection around if you want to make your neighbor’s ugly house go away.
One of the most significant voting proposals I’ve seen on the Feature Voting Tool is Chris Wilde’s Prop. #905: http://secondlife.com/vote/get_feature.php?get_id=905
Now, in the present, we’re beginning to see clues related to this type of direction: mute features to control your experience have been added, one after another. True audio mute is around the bend, and some were surprised that now, if you ban someone from your parcel, their chat is also muted–so they can’t yell from outside to harass you.
We definitely need better inworld communication tools. I’d like to communicate as much within Second Life as possible. Some use the expression, “Eat their own dogfood”–but I see it more like “A dog eating catfood”. In other words, a loyal-but-bumbling beast becoming more refined through the consumption of a product for finer–or at least more finicky–tastes.
And this comment wouldn’t be complete without: thank you for blogging about this, Mark aka Walker! :)
I’m absolutely amazed that Torley Linden can take on this non-problem, and her Lindens absolutely ignored and were paralyzed by a far, far, FAR worse spam problem inworld causing far, far FAR more destruction to the view, to property values, and causing far worse eyebleeds.
I mean the spam on 16m plots all over SL owned by Lazarus Divine and spammed with IMPEACH BUSH signs which weren’t about impeaching Bush, which might indeed be a laudable goal and one finding support in SL’s demographic, but which was all about extortion of land sales.
I believe the notecard spamming problem to be grossly exaggerated. As someone who flies around to A LOT of sims every day, I can only recall one automatic instance of this from the Pimp ‘N Ho people when they were in Baileya (you flew by and got a face full of notecard against your will) and one caused by a newbie simply manually advertising his ad service, not realizing it was against the TOS. I think there is WAY WAY WAY too much hysteria about this in SL, to the point that people are utterly intimidated, especially when new, from even sending a proposal for business collaboration or a query about interest in rentals. I surely don’t ever sent out blind or cold queries about rentals ever since somebody’s on Anshe’s mall list slammed me as a newbie and blew me into the Lindens — the zeal to police this and the hatred of commerce loaded up behind it is far greater than the actual incidence of this problem in world.
Like unsolicited tps, the notecard-spammer is a function of clubs. And it comes at a time when clubs are more desperate for business since dwellopers’ was taken away from them, and then traffic. So banging on these poor clubs that entertain all the people the Lindens want to keep on their servers once again over this non-issue really seems inappropriate to me.
What we need is better advertising outlets in SL, and a policy that governs ads, signs, notecards. A POLICY. Made by HUMANS. Not a machine or code or function that simply “adblocks”. Because you will never get that to be blanket enough, and you will kill commerce that people in fact want to engage in, if you do that.
A tiny sect of forums royals and inworld botherers hate billboards. The problem is that billboards work. Avatars fly to them, view them, click on them, go to the locations and SALES ARE MADE. This is proven over and over again. Which is why they appear. That means the answer is not to kill them, but regulate them. Have them appear in certain public spaces, have them be buyable at newbie landings or welcome areas (yes, yes, yes, instead of letting only Jeska’s mentors sell to newbies, let the free market get a crack at the newbie stream, too). Everybody who is so fearful and righteously angry to shield the delicate children’s eyes from anything so horrible as an *ad* need to go back to their sandboxes and get out of the way of what most normal people want.
I’m really troubled by the idea of a society where you can blank out, mute, and whitewash from not only history, but the present, anybody you don’t like. That’s like Stalin whitewashing out Bukharin. This isn’t right.
I don’t want to solve the problem of the Bush Guy on the 16m by making him invisible, nor do I want Pimp ‘n Ho’s ability to advertise its wares be muted or hidden. I want human-made and human-agent-run policies, like “All signs have to be roadside, they cannot be planted in water or on mountains” or whatever mixture of rules people want to devise not only on private islands, but mainland sims or blocs of sims. Automatic spamming notecards should be banned; only touch-induced cards should be allowed.
Please don’t tell me this “won’t scale”. Gosh, the entire human race “scaled” by making civilizational policies long before there was Second Life. It can be done again.
[…] Mark reminded me the other day of one of my folksy sayings for gauging the maturity of technology platforms. I believe that platforms are not viable or mature until security tools need to be written to protect its users. His blog post was about notecard spam beginning to happen in the emerging virtual world platform of Second Life. […]