Monday, April 16, 2007

Myst's Soapbox: Your battle is not my battle

Myst's Soapboxes are my personal rantings. You may find them interesting, or not. They are my personal thoughts, so they are highly opinionated. You've been warned.

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Today's subject is personal vendettas and involving people who really have nothing to do with them.

I have several groups I run. Some are for Rping, some are for sales notices. One of the largest is a joint group which encompases several things and is a primary vessel for sales and product notices. It is an open group, most people who join it are customers who want to know whats new and hot. Its not a very active group, and I'm sure people come and go all the time.

So I get this message today in my inbox because I'm offline, at a place where I cannot get on SL, but the handy dandy offline messaging lets me deal with most stuff offline if I have to. It reads:

" There is a Griefer in your Group by the name of *nameremoved*. He just griefed me and my 2 sisters. I am reporting him to the Lindens"

I blink. First off, I run many groups. So this tells me nothing. If you are going to report someone to a group owner, have the decency to include the name of the group you want them to look at.

I ask him which group, he replies with:

"Yours. He is in your group."

Once again TOTALLY UNHELPFUL. That wasn't what I asked. I had to explain to him I have many groups and finally I got the name of the group. It happens to be one of the largest groups I'm a part of as an admin, its also primarily used for product notices.

So just so everyone is clear, this guy wants to get this fellow who's wronged him kicked out of a group that's sole purpose is product notices. Most people want to sign people up for for this sort of stuff when they are mad, not get them kicked off.

....

Okay, so moving along, I ask him where the attacks happened. Obviously if they happened in somewhere that realmscapes controls such as our stores, mall, etc, we would definately take a serious look at action to stop whatever griefing is going on on our lands, but no, it appears that the action, which has passed now happened in Limbo. A region that has NOTHING to do with us.
Once again, I pause, and then I reply as follows:

Ah. Well unless it happens on land that is controlled by the
Realmscapes group there isn't much we can do. Your best course of
action is to report him to the lindens, which you've done.They will
take appropriate action.

So I told him where to go and what to do. In these instances, it is a Linden matter, it doesn't have anything to do with the group owners that a user might be a part of if it does not happen on that groups lands or have anything to do with the group in question. We didn't see what happened. All we are getting is one side of the story. Its his word against the other guy. There is no proof we can get that gives us any definative evidence to look at to determine what action is appropriate. Obviously if the dude gets banned from the Lindens, your problem is solved! Why must you drag in other people? So I get this lovely gem back:

Well, it should be discouraged everywhere. Sorry to hear that you advocate this kind of behavior by letting him slide.

Excuse me? where does "Report him to the lindens" translate into "I advocate griefing!"? I have no evidence that THIS GUY didn't do something to start this in the first place. They could be equally at fault. This is NOT my battle, and yet this dude is trying to draw me into something I am trying very hard not to get involved with. Its pretty clear in the general community standards that unless you are directly involved, third party vigilante-ism is rather frowned upon. As fair group owners, we are going to have to look at things before we do something drastic. I can't even log on, we haven't even talked to the guy. Besides, really, because it didn't happen on my land or really involve my group, it kneejerk to just kick the guy out without some investigation time. Now if the guy said, "Hey, just so you know, there is a guy in your group who was griefing in Limbo, you might want to keep an eye on him." Thats fair. But requiring us to take action on your behalf when we have no way to verify you are even telling the truth? Uh no.

The conversation went on for a bit, but its not worth posting here. Suffice to say, I was very polite, but I refused to be a part of his little crusade. I'll look into this on my own time, but I'm not going to be pressured into a kneejerk reaction.

I know people get frusterated with griefers. It sucks, I've delt with them before. But you have to realize that going on little vendettas trying to get them banned and kicked out of all their groups is just as asshole-ish as the griefer's behavior in the first place. Not only that, its really annoying to us who never had anything to do with anything because suddenly we are being dragged into people's personal squabbles, forced into a lot more workand trouble than is probably nessessary for a situation which was never really any of our business.

Please, if you run into trouble with a griefer, do what is right and report him to the people who can actually DO something about it. If it was on my land I would have been more than happy to deal with it, but it wasn't. Report them to the people who own the land and the lindens. Remember, if you harrass other people, they can report you too.

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