Patriotic Nigras

The Patriotic Nigras (AKA the PN) are a highly prominent griefing group in Second Life's main grid. Despite waning membership (estimates put their current active members at around 20, from approximately 50 in 2008), the group continues to maintain a public wiki that lesser-organized griefers can utilise to cause damage. The PN are responsible for a wide range of attacks, ranging from simple trolling to broad-scale denial of service attacks on the simulators and grid infrastructure.

Origins

4chan.net, one of the most popular anonymous image boards on the Internet, is notorious for having a huge population of trolls. The video games board (known as /v/ or "the vidya") and the random board (known as /b/) both regularly attacked online MMORPGs, including Habbo Hotel, World of Warcraft, and Furcadia. A member of /b/ who visited Second Life and found a thriving furry population reported back to /b/ to gather users for a "raid" on a gay furry club.

The raid commenced by the members of the raid donning black avatars, afros, and suits (in an homage to similarly-themed accounts used to anger administrators of Habbo Hotel), teleporting to the club, and blocking off the entries with American Flag-textured boxes. After the group was banned from the parcel, they built the first Fort Longcat outside of the club using similarly-textured boxes, therefore creating their group's name: Patriotic, referring to the flag texture, and Nigras, a purposefully misspelled racially derogative term for a person of African descent.

Demographic

PN members are relatively young, ranging from ages 13 to 30. Most members are within the United States, Canada, or the United Kingdom, though there are a few members from the Netherlands and Asia. Few PN have permanent avatars, as few are interested in actually participating in the virtual world. Long-term avatars may be used for collecting intelligence or to bypass age-based parcel restrictions. Members of the PN were recruited from varying forums, and SL itself, but the main body of the PN comes from 4chan, 7chan, and other English-language imageboards.

Chain of Command

The PN leadership structure is relatively simple. Highly trusted members of the group form the Ghost Shirt Society (GSS), one of whom is elected to be the leader of the group by the other members of the PN whenever a leader steps down or is thrown out. The Ghost Shirt Society is comprised of well-trusted individuals who collect intelligence on potential targets, propose operation ideas to the leader, and squirrel away the most powerful "weapons" for use later. Final decisions are generally left up to the leader.

When operations are in progress, sometimes the importance of operational success is so high that PN are split up into compartmentalised "cells" in order to complete certain specific duties (Cell A, for example, might attack FurNation vista, while Cell B would attack the Sandboxes).

Pecking Order

Martyrs

This class of griefer is apparently no longer in use, but it is listed here for reference and historical significance.

Martyrs were once the cannon-fodder of the PN. New members were automatically assigned to this class. In order to become a full member of the PN and gain access to the scripts and operations forums, members had to conduct a solitary raid on their own and post pictures of the results. The entire process was intended to keep Justice League Unlimited and Linden spies out of the organization, as it was assumed they would not risk being banned. However, after the first Justice League wiki dump in April of '06, it was found that the Justice League had a spy that was, by prior arrangement with Linden Lab, immune from being hardware banned, which would render their main account inactive. After this discovery, the Martyr program was mostly scrapped.

Pubbies

Members of the public that make use of some of the PN's weapons and knowledge that is posted on their wiki are essentially treated like the aforementioned "Martyrs", or like new recruits yet to be broken in. Pubbies are never really trusted.

Allies

Users of SL who provide under-the-table assistance or knowledge to PN leadership were occasionally given a better treatment (such as Woodbury staff in the early days of the sim, or Intlibber prior to his removal of a Fort Longcat from his simulator). However, after multiple betrayals, allies are usually taken with a grain of salt. ANy information provided is verified through another source, usually GSS operatives.

Full Members

Martyrs who passed inspection were given full access to the forums, excluding the GSS forums (secret to all but the GSS) and the GSS wiki.

Founders

Founding members of the Patriotic Nigras were given special social privileges, usually moderator privileges in the forums and SysOp accounts on the public wiki. These members are seen as the elders of the PN.

Ghost Shirt Society

Highly trusted, highly knowledgeable, and formed of some of the longest-standing PN members. At last glance, the Ghost Shirt Society contained only five active members (including the leader). The GSS forums had only one rule: They didn't exist, and they weren't to be spoken of. Some of the GSS's activities were:

• Profiling targets (such as mapping out furry sex club security vulnerabilities)
• Performing intelligence gathering (gathering real life information on enemies, for example)
• Counter-intelligence
• Designing grid-crashing weapons
• Long-term goal planning
• Advisement of the leader

Leader

The leader of the PN is essentially the dictator, each with their own ways of governing. Most choose a slightly more democratic way of rule by considering the input of subordinates, while others were more iron-fisted. Nonetheless, leaders were elected by the PN membership (full members and above), which brought about some embarassing situations where furry spies were elected and subsequently thrown out once they were outed by untimely GSS operatives.

See Also

• Woodbury University
• W-Hat
• Digital Worlds
• Griefing

References

(NOTE: Some material is first-hand knowledge from User:N3X15.)