Stopping notecard spam

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See the official Second Life Knowledge Base for the most current information.

Although infrequent, it's really annoying to get spammed with notecards. When this happens, notecard after notecard (or in some cases, other items like textures or landmarks) pops up on your screen -- a deluge of clutter you want to get rid of! Often, notecard spam is unintentional, for reasons that'll be explained shortly. Intentional notecard spam constitutes abuse, and spam certainly isn't allowed in Second Life; it's considered "Disturbing the Peace" in the Community Standards.

What can I do if I'm being spammed?

When you receive a notecard, texture, or landmark, a blue dialog popup appears asking what you'd like to do with it:

• Keep
• Decline
• Mute

Click Mute to stop receiving items from that source.

There are checkboxes in the Popups tab of the Preferences window that give you further control over offers of notecards, textures, or landmarks (open the Preferences window by selecting Edit > Preferences from the menus at the top of the Second Life window, or by pressing Ctrl+P on your keyboard):

• Automatically accept
  • Checking this checkbox means that notecards, textures, and landmarks are automatically accepted into your inventory without asking you.
  • Unchecking this checkbox means that are asked whether you want to keep, decline, or mute these items every time they're offered.
• Automatically view after accepting
  • Checking this checkbox means that notecards, textures, and landmarks are opened automatically after you accept them.
  • Unchecking this checkbox means the items go into your inventory without review.

Why might this spam be unintentional?

It could be a problem with the script. If you're familiar with LSL (Linden Scripting Language), "touch_start" should be used instead of "touch". The reason is because the former should be used for things that require holding down the mouse button (like dragging checkers on a board), while the latter triggers only once per click, as opposed to repeatedly while the mouse button is held. Since getting a single notecard is enough, it makes sense that "touch_start" is the right choice.

A rare-but-aggravating problem occurs sometimes when a Resident clicks on a notecard giver using "touch", and then teleports away quickly. As a result, the giver object doesn't detect the end of the touch, and goes into an infinite loop, sending notecard after notecard. Again, the source object has to be disabled to break the loop. This can be done by its owner by right-clicking on the object, selecting Open from the pie menu, double-clicking the script to examine it, and clicking the Reset button. If that doesn't fix the problem, uncheck the Running checkbox and click Reset again.

In the event the notecard spam you're getting is deliberate, and you can sometimes tell by the content it contains (i.e. vulgar and rude threats), please use Help > Report Abuse to send an abuse report. Be sure to include specific details.