I'm an 11-year-old griefer and I don't see what Cristiano's big problem is. Excuse me while I go engage in pedophilia in the welcome area....

I find this to be so much posturing. Cristiano should boycott the Harvard event and boycott log-ons, or stage protests inworld, shutting down a third-party site for a day is a cost-free boycott. His stores and vendors still get traffic and payments and he still gets the publicity offered by this high-profile Berkman Center event.

These new "unaccountable accounts" as I call them has sparked a lot of protest because griefing has increased many times especially for hot-spots like clubs and rentals, we're bearing the brunt of this new policy to up LL's subscription rates.

The tools they are putting into place are like a "cure is worse than the disease" sort of problem.

Mark Wallace shares some worthy opinions about this at 3pointD.com today -- I'm a bit ambivalent about Cristiano's move, as it's a strong statement, but only seems to hurt residents. Cristiano incorporated a protest statement into his opening remarks during the marketing panel today. He related it to the panel topic, but it seemed unecessary.

Tony,

Just a couple of comments I wanted to make. Snapzilla is used by Linden Lab frequently as a marketing tool to show off SL. I definitely think that shutting down the site on the day of the anniversary celebration, when many eyes would be on SL, certainly did send a message. I tried to minimize the incovenience to the users of the site by maintaining image processing. The site will not be closed for the weekend - an extended outage would in fact only hurt the users of the site. I feel that the message has been delivered, though based upon Philip's response and others, it does seem to fall upon deaf ears. As far as my participation in the panel today, and my comments (as well as the separate reference Hamlet made in his comments), the event was not Linden Lab sponsored, so I felt no need to back out of it. On the contrary, I thought it was a good opportunity to raise visibility about the issues facing those wanting to market to SL. My comments about the registration changes addressed specifically the accountability issue, which is an important part of business. I am sorry you didn't feel it necessary - I did at least want to address it, given the tone of all that was happening today.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, Cristiano. Upon reflection, it's not so much that I thought the protest mention in your opening remarks wasn't necessary (even though I did say that earlier in this discussion thread), it's that I don't think the audience would have appreciated it. It's that whole "nobody likes a squeaky wheel" thing, and the same reason I didn't say much during the panel yesterday. It just seemed like controversy wasn't on the table.