Toads and Twinks
For some reason today, my mental eye is aimed at the past. Back in the olden days (when computers were made of wood and ran on corn cobs and grease), I used to hang about on various different MUSHes. In fact, I helped run one for a bit. :) The folk who ran these "games" (and some of them were games in the same way SL is a game... as in not at all) were called Wizards - a terminology left over from the days of yore when all MUDs (from whence MUSH came) were based on RPGs. As a wizard, you had many powers, you could sneak about invisibly, read and change object code on stuff you didn't own, and, like our very own Lindenfolk, you could boot folks offline temporarily or permanently. One of the ways to do the latter was with the terrifying and hilarous @toad command.
When someone was @toaded, the database no longer recognized their db# (like UUID#) as a player, but instead thought it was an object. Obviously, the offender could no longer log in. It also renamed them to something along the lines of 'A slimy toad named X'. Some games (I'm using that because I'm never sure whether there should be a "e" MUSHes , and plus, I don't want to leave out MUCKs and MOOs and all the rest of the MU* spectrum) would have galleries of the greatest toads they'd dealt with. Oldtimers could bring newbies by and point at the inanimate objects and say, "That, my child, was name obscured to protect the guilty, the most obnoxious twink the world ever did see." Or something like that.
It was a giddy and awesome power. Wouldn't it be funny if there was a Linden Lab version of this? We could go and fire watermelon guns and throw virtual rotten apples at that person who brought us the giant physical pushy prim springs... I think the general public would maybe be more reassured if the victims could actually witness that the perpetrators were brought to justice - and nothing says justice like a toad. But then again... people would probably vie for spots in the toad pantheon - for some, negative attention is better than none at all. :(
Back in the olden days (when we made our own routers out of bit of string and used bubblegum, and galdurnit, we liked it that way!), the internet was a smaller place. The wizard could look at the IP the twink was logging in from, figure out which ISP it belonged to, and where it was located, find a telephone book for that city and look up the home number of the user. I am aware of several instances where parents got phone calls telling them that their wonderful son was up to no good on his computer (and it was almost always a preteen/teen boy who was causing problems) - and that would be it. No more attempts to hack the db, because someone was grounded and had his modem taken away. We've come a long way from those days.
Twinks, by the way, were early griefers. I think I prefer that word to griefer for most situations, because of its supercilious tone - it almost sounds like twerp. Like they're not even worth worrying about. It's a word that should be used more, I think. Yes, the guy who shows up randomly on your land, wearing nothing more than a giant flexi penis, is not there to promote testicular cancer awareness... but I don't know if calling him a "griefer" isn't giving him too much credit. Likewise, the girl that stands on the border of your parcel shouting obscenities. Roll your eyes, "what morons! Don't they have anything better to do than to be twinks?" And freeze them, eject them, ban them, mute them. They are not worth any more concern than that.
The real griefers are the toads who make it so everyone and their brother needs to reset their passwords. :P
Comments
Yes, LL needs to give serious thought to the concept of public humiliation as a way to deal with twinks. And I'm going to adopt that term from now on!
Posted by: Akela Talamasca | September 9, 2006 03:43 AM