It was *my* phone, yes it was a pain, but thems the breaks.

I’d rather the cops go after murderers than come racing to a car which had been robbed, with those who broke in long gone. I was sad about that, but there were three SLX cameras in the boot which they *didn’t* get, so we did ok.

I think that the Island going down may have been a server error, however curious it was that the entire sandbox was delivered to me… for safe keeping? I’ll never know, because when the requestor appeared, I declined.

A bad move, as I’ve been curious ever since.

Kath met a few bad eggs when she was here with Ryu and she’s been on the warpath ever since.

Wolfie!

The walls in your fair citys are covered with gang tagging. No one was out after 5, and the people on your trains would rather lie to you then let you know you were on the correct train for your destination. When a shop keeper mentions, “we take any ones money we arn’t prejudice” and you wonder what they mean by that and it’s explained they don’t want to deal with people from other countrys, they just want to be aussy.

When police were called for a robbery they said, we don’t have time to come to you, if you want to file a report, come to the station. (mind you, if your from out of the country, you have no idea where the police station is, and that it would take some one dieing on the streets before they would come)

Better tell your ad people who have been promoting “where the bloody hell are you?” that they could do far more for tourism by paying attention to the problems at home. Polite behavior seems to have been missing from early childhood lessons.

Relating this to time spent on ABC island… people who reported griefers to Abby (with details) were informed “thank you for bringing it to (her) attention.” Nothing else happened.

The griefers were allowed to remain to bother others. Those who are banned are given a reprieve. People are allowed to shoot at, shove, harrass, and break the lindens TOS with out action against them. ((x) “stalk”, abuse or attempt to abuse, or otherwise harass another user.)

(Note, yes, even ABC *paid* staff & Abby has shown rude and snobbish behavior.)

Not too long ago, the majority of the buildings were returned on ABC and the blame was placed on equipment failure.
Na. Don’t buy that. Now, someone having a bad day and pushing the button to return everything out of spite? sure. more plausable, Gary came to mind (as Abby was away at the time) and the person who did it knows who they are.

Clearly ABC, and Aus have problems they need
to address. If you can’t be nice to your guests you need to re think why you are even there and why you invited people there to begin with.)

Being furry isn’t one of them. Wearing a wolf, or a horse or an elephant avitar does not make you by nature “one of those” (what ever “one of those” is) Not every one who wears rainbows or purple are gay.(Google “when I am old I shall wear purple”) Not everyone who wears black are Goth. It doesn’t change the talent, or the passion in that persons heart to be involved in something they believe in.

ABC is not just about a sandbox. Yes, in the past there have been classes held there teaching people how to do things upon the island. While building is a large part of what to do while in SL, socializing is also important, (and like a kitchen where things are made- sandboxes are often a place where people gather to show off what they have made or to gather ideas to fix a problem.)

I won’t lump all aussys as rude snobs who need a weggie to bring them back to reality. Some of them are actually nice.

Some of ya all take things way too seriously, and some things are not taken seriously enough. Bowing to the griefers to keep them happy isn’t one of the ways to keep order.
Like the gang taggers in your city, they need to be cleaned up and told a firm NO. (As well as your RL police to take the first step by acting on crime rather than taking the we don’t have time thought.)

The person who pays the bills for ABC island is the one responsible for things to happen/ get out of control etc on ABC, not the people who volunteer.

Nuff said

Most building occurs on land where the AV has building rights. It’s one of the great motivations for buying or renting land. I would doubt that even 5% of the active population uses sandboxes regularly and I would guess that number drops significantly for AVs that are 6 months or older.

The ABC’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t know why it is in Second Life. It knows it needs to be there, but not why. This lack of vision has meant that they have stagnated - especially with all the ridiculous legal bindings that have been placed upon them.

The community backlash that is emerging is a direct result of that stagnation. After a year of nothing happening people have just lost patience. And while Wolfie’s Posse is copping much of the flack I know from the many private conversations I’ve had before I wrote this article, and a few since, that the community disenchantment is very widely spread. It even includes some of the current ‘loyal’ supporter group.

Hopefully the ABC staff will see that they have a problem and remedy it quickly. Implementing key components of Gary’s Brand Owner’s Guide would be a useful start.

Gary, Dwell is an ineffective metric tool. That is why LL are removing it. And seriously, if you’re going to use a sandbox to generate your traffic you might as well set up camping chairs. It cuts down on the griefer problem.

Sadly there was a round of adding “admins” who are now doing the most of the whining and wanting to leave their personal impressions on the ABC. I think the ABC threw the baby out with the bathwater and kept the ring around the tub. And that’s just a personal opinion, mind.

But it’s the kind of opinion that may see ABC lose what little status it had inworld. See - I haven’t been back to ABC since then, will only come back once the ABC gets some of the old admins back - and gives them some kind of official standing - so I can be sure my experience won’t be the kind of suboptimal experience that my last few contacts with ABC admin had become.

Like many others in SL I explore regularly, and if I find a sim as lag-ridden as the ABC became, I don’t bother to landmark it. If I find it full of pretentious prats prancing (and yes there are a lot of those unfortuantely) it doesn’t get LM’ed. If it has useful material in it, I’ll add it to my picks.

I disagree that sandboxes are just for noobs and griefers, sorry. They are where at least HALF of SL was built and continues to be built. I also find that the first two sandboxes I discovered, I still go to visit regularly, and refer new people to them.

They may not seem as important if your focus is on using SL as a tool and a set for machinima. Fact of the matter is that unless you have *someone* build it, you can’t film it. And unless you have (or someone has) money (and thus a place to build) you can’t just build it. Ergo, tangentially, sandboxes are important to EVERY aspect of SL.

Another few quibbles. Gary - I agree with your overall view of what you call metaverses, but you need to look at the psychology of online life. May I quote from your “psychopaths or friends” article?

“Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships” - need I remind you that the average “marriage” in SL is something like two months long?

“Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit” - someone once quoted to me “Female, (n): What 53% of female avatars in Second Life are in real life” - several of the more successful businesses in SL are owned and operated by RL men using female SL avatars and personae.

“Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior” - I work on a sandbox as an admin myself and I think I know maybe four or five among the several hundred users that have arrived there that took off weapons, wore clothes, didn’t try using megaprims, and didn’t test griefing tools.

Come to think of it, griefers… Have you noticed that most forms of online interaction have a name for sociopaths? Griefers is just the SL name for trolls, spammers, hackers, skriptkiddies, and the range of other antisocial behaviours?

The whole of SL has to be approached from the point of view that the people who are using immersive 3D online environments are already predisposed towards certain personality traits.

I somehow find the whole situation to be one of ABC looking like one of the oldest noobs inworld, sorry. It reminds me of the old IRC dinosaurs trying to figure out mIRC, and “whattya mean there’s a thing called, what didja call it, ‘Sky-pie?’”

As it currently stands even though this thread is about the undermining of brand the statistics show that ABC Island has been in the top ten for dwell for over a year the latest here. With the Pond still sitting at number one Australians should be proud as two Oz companies are leading the world and showing how they can lead the R&D in this medium.

As for being a poor representative, that was said in private conversation following you wielding expletives at me. This followed an open discussion about ABC island having art on it in the friends forum when it was agreed to include that and other enhancements. BTW it is actually an infringement of IM and Linden etiquette as well EULA rules to repeat as if quoted a private conversation without permission.

As I keep saying any corporation has to be careful about how their brand is being represented and those who represent it. I think Second Life is like many communities in that it is the most vocal regulars whose persistence give rise to a perception they are leading. This is often not the case.

If you don’t have admin there who will deal with those who wear penises, call *your clients* faggots or tell them they’ll be raped, or cause *your clients* to feel upset in any way, you’re stuffed.

But I don’t know anything Gary, because three times in IM *YOU* told Me that:

“You’re a poor representitive for ABC”

Pot calling the kettle black, I’d say.

Wolfie!

A real disparity and cause for many of the issues (community feeling disconnected from the brand staffers) is that media corporations have to naturally think about reach. Sadly a potential few hundred immersed in their ‘experiment’ is dwarfed by their commitment to the millions on TV/Radio and Web 1.0. From the other perspective the divide is caused between an audience who have 10-15 hours a day to spend in SL and a corporation who may have 10-15 minutes a week (in terms of production or human resources) - they feel unloved and forgotten. In terms of the so-called tax dollar, remember an experimental Island in SL can cost half as much as a simple web flash game (which doesn’t require hours and hours of community management) - I can’t recall avatars complaining that their local public service broadcaster spent too much on one of its hundreds of web games?.

If a corporation faces a backlash from an inworld community because off its inability (through lack of these human resources) to connect regularly then it has two choices - 1 Switch the project off gracefully or 2 Leave it on with a clear message that this is Metaverse 1.0 (a pushed experiment in a virtual world being monitored - CD rom-like, click, walk around, a few events when we get time, create your own stories, play in the sandbox and leave). Now we, the immersed, know that that is not the best use of the medium (the 3rd option being create a wonderful community to self-manage and promote activity on behalf of the brand) but until the medium is more widespread (psychographically and numbers wise), has less ‘ego-centric and activated early adopters’ and more core participatory audience then it will remain at the current phase 1 as a trial.

If you recall, I built over a year ago, what is currently on these islands (ABC 4 days total rush /BigPond 3 weeks) which have had very minor updates since then, so am a little dismayed myself that the community hasn’t been able to bring about a collaborative vision but rather spend their time whinging and then fragment rather than cause transformation. The Pond has had a beach and more living spaces but the main areas are over a year old and like the ABC suffering from a serious refresh - I think the SL community deserve to be listened to and changes implemented, but that has to be carefully structured and I believe the early adopters are too involved with more personal issues to be able to truly collaborate.

I am concerned that rather than helping the cause we have a group of Oz SL users who constantly whine rather than allow a range of community activity, or those that think being admin on an island is driving community, which is completely wrong. It should be about allowing the community to be diverse and take risks. Sadly many corporations like BigPond and ABC were restricted by rather outdated internet copyright issues (no music, tv, film, art etc) which meant the ‘build’ was somehow to blame for why things are not working. An easy target. What is really to blame is R&D being run publically without clear exit strategy and that goes for most of the under resourced corporate sims across the grid. Also corporations can’t be represented by individuals who are often motivated by personal promotion rather than altruism. Wolfie and his group of friends does not represent the ABC but was rather an active voice from within it’s SL presence, much the same as he has now switched his efforts to SBS, more about him than the company. This is a big problem for corporations who have to protect their brand against mis-representation and trust me after many dealings with media brands what is happening in SL across the global board is really turning a few branding police heads.

The situation in Australian SL will get better but only taking into account some of the key points in my article above. What needs to happen now is a sort of closure of phase 1 and evaluation of how things went. Any new company thinking of entering SL now to do more R&D needs a balanced consultation between the hardcore immersed community and mature ‘non-world-copying’ developers - wiith a goal of creating something also attractive to new entrants with definite ROIs and good exit strategies. In all the recent rhetoric and whinging I have heard of no useful constructive comments about what would really work for the ABC for example, and without joined up thinking across a new and old SL contingent about what is required (vs knock it down and build it up again) nothing will change.

The new admins apathy about keeping griefers out is one of the main reasons I left.

If you are a corporate island, with a sandbox, then it needs to be watched over.

Griefing could be anything that might annoy or upset your visitors, not just filling the sim with random stuff, which is annoying for about two minutes… to the really worrying, Racist and Sexist remarks, threats etc.

The new people didn’t seem to care one iota, as long as their art was up for people to gawk at, then the world was all warm and rosey.

As for the branding, many turned up and had no idea what the island was, it often wasn’t till one of us were asked, that we could fill them in… odd that Japanese thought it was their ABC and the Americans thought it was theirs despite the curly Lissajous in plain view.

Skribe, I know you’re open minded about furries
quite a few people are, so I’m not too worried.
I suppose not liking furries is like Racism or Sexism, in the end, being that way does people no favours.

Karma kicks in eventually.

Thanks Mate, I’m grateful for the support I’ve been getting from quite a few people too.

Wolfie!

No, a sandbox is not a great way to build a community. A handful of loyal people is a pittance compared to what the ABC could be pulling if it started delivering real content rather than remaining an attractive haven for griefers. Griefers scare people off. Especially newbies. And a sandbox is only useful to those who don’t already have building rights elsewhere - which is, not surprisingly, the very same people that the griefers are scaring away. So, no - as far as building a community a sandbox is not the way to go. In fact the tiny community has evolved inspite of the sandbox and owes more to the ABC brand name. Very few people would have visited - let alone stayed - had it been XYZ or SFA Island.

Wolfie, the ABC might not have a problem with furries (good thing) but every other corp I’ve dealt with has. We’ve been asked to remove furry footage - including some featuring you - a number of times and on one occasion it was part of the initial proposal - NO FURRIES. Sorry, but apartheid is thriving in sl. That needs to be a factor when choosing one as spokesperson. You’d still be my first choice btw.