Abuse report loophole

A fellow developer made a plea for help on the SLDEV list this morning, because someone has placed a scripted object on land next to his plot which is spewing out particles at a fast rate.

Of course, the right thing to do with a griefing object of this sort is to abuse report it.  The problem with that is that the abuse report form nowadays requires one to name the abuser.  This object shows no creator or owner and therefore doesn’t allow one to do that — and therefore it is impossible to report the abuse, owner or object.  I suggested that he ought to report the person who owns the land next to him, as they are hosting the object even if they did not create it, but their name doesn’t appear on the list for the abuse report form either.  This is a loophole:  if an account has vanished from the list because someone has been banned for griefing, their legacy of griefy particle objects can’t be reported because you can no longer find them in the list.

This puts him in a difficult place, in that he can’t place an abuse report on record … and with live help gone, he can’t get anyone in world, and so has no option but to set up a support ticket for the problem.  It makes it very easy for people with permission to build on plots to randomly grief the people around them, and makes it hard for people to stop it happening.
Fortunately, of course, it is possible to switch off particles in preferences, which solves the problem for anyone bothered by this sort of thing.  Hard luck if you happen to have particle effects on your own plot that you would like to be able to see, however.