Another chirpy addition to our new Knowledge Base—which, BTW, has recently been themed by Cornelius Linden to match the look of our website! (I know some of you were asking about that.)

Although infrequent, it's really annoying to get spammed with notecards. What this means is that notecard after notecard (or in some cases, other types of items like landmarks) will start popping up on your screen–a torrential deluge of clutter you just want to clear away! Often, this is unintentional, for reasons that'll be explained shortly. But when it is intentional, that's abuse, and spam certainly isn't allowed in Second Life; it's considered "Disturbing the Peace" in the Community Standards.

Here's what to do if you ever find yourself in such a situation:

1. First, go to World menu > Set Busy. This will decline all incoming inventory offers, so the notecards will be blocked.
2. Next, you'll want to click the History button on the left of your chat bar. (You can also use View menu > Chat History.)
3. There may be a mess of text in there–you're looking for something which looks like this: "An object named [so-and-so] owned by [so-and-so] gave you [so-and-so]." (By default, it'll be in light blue color, indicating system text.)
4. After that, go to View menu > Muted Residents. Despite the name, this can mute objects too! At the bottom of the window, you'll see a box where you can type in the exact name of the object as you saw earlier, and click the Mute button to silence it. So if it said "An object named Notecard Giver"…, then type "Notecard Giver"–exactly like that, without the quotes–into the box and mute it. You'll see it appear in the list.
5. Then, you can go back to World menu > Set Not Busy and you shouldn't get any more notecards.

Now what?

You may notice that your Chat History still shows messages saying "You decline" the notecards that are being sent to you.

If this continues to bother you, the surest way to stop the source of the problem is to find out where the giver object is. This way, either the owner of the object, or if really needed, a Linden can shut it down. If you don't know where it is, it may be considerably trickier, but remember, the earlier system messages told you who owns it! Try sending them an IM and let them know. Again, remember, this may be unintentional, so it's best to be friendly.

Why might this 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, as opposed to repeatedly, per click. Since getting a single notecard is enough, it makes sense why "touch_start" is the right choice.

A rare-but-aggravating problem happens sometimes when a Resident clicks on a notecard giver using "touch", and teleports away quickly. As a result, the giver object doesn't detect the end of the touch, and goes into a terrible 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 pressing the Reset button. If that doesn't do the trick, untick the Running checkbox and press Reset again.

In the event the notecard spam you're getting is deliberate, and you can usually tell by the content it contains (e.g., vulgar and rude threats), please use Help menu > Report Abuse to send an abuse report. Be sure to include specific details–pasting in the entire line of "An object named…" will be helpful, as well as what time the trouble first started.

Thanx to Mick and Aura Linden for their assistance on this how-to!