Unknown 'Frink" message when cleaning

muleheadjoe wrote:

Pezmaniac4 wrote:


1) It is NOT the "Other Springfield".
2) It is NOT a second friend "cleaning" the graffiti of other friends.
3) It is NOT players who are anonymous (how would they be my friend in the first place????)

It happens when people who are my friends graffiti a building. Instead of their user name showing up when I clean it, the name "Frink" appears. It is that simple.

I concur with all 3 points you have there ...

1) "Other Springfield" is not a player, hence does not / cannot / never has performed any actions on the player's SF;
2) When a neighbor cleans up graffiti left by another neighbor, it simply erases the graffitti and the player does not see any graffiti;
3) Anonymous players can't have neighbors other than "Other Springfield", so anonymous players can't graffiti you.

The only suggestion so far that seems feasible to me is that it's a server-side error retrieving the username of the player who graffiti'd you ... it can't find the name fast enough, so it substitutes "Frink" for the player's name.

Still, tho ... has anybody else seen GREEN graffiti, or am I the only one?

I'm thinking this too. Like if the programming has glitch and can't remember the username, "Frink" is the default.

The idea suggested was that the Frink graffiti is FOR anonymous players, not FROM anonymous players. Since they cannot have neighbors they cannot get vandalized and so some sort of auto graffiti action might have been enabled to help them get 5 stars in righteousness. Ostensibly the vandalism would come from the Other Springfield in concept and by default, but it would in fact have been a system action. This sounded like a perfectly reasonable speculation to me.

If, however, it can be verified that Frink graffiti does in fact come from other players, then this theory would be wrong.

Aennilya wrote:
The idea suggested was that the Frink graffiti is FOR anonymous players, not FROM anonymous players.

It's always good to think outside the box, but this theory is disproved by the fact that people on this forum (including myself) are named, registered players reporting the "Frink" on our graffiti'd buildings.

Before the update push last week all my graffiti'd buildings identified the neighbor who graffiti'd me, but after that update is when this Frink jazz started (for me at least).

I too have be Frinked. I had been getting it occasionally since Halloween, but it is almost a daily occurrence now. I am also firmly in the camp that this is a server problem, and is a default name when it loses track of the actual tapper. My reasoning: I have several feeder towns. I also have a daughter. My feeder towns are only friends with myself and my daughter. My daughter is only friends with my feeder towns. It is in the feeder towns where I see Frink the most often. There will only be 3 taps, all from my daughter. (I don't bother to tap my feeder towns from my main.) Two will have her name, and the third will say Frink.

muleheadjoe wrote:

Aennilya wrote:
The idea suggested was that the Frink graffiti is FOR anonymous players, not FROM anonymous players.

It's always good to think outside the box, but this theory is disproved by the fact that people on this forum (including myself) are named, registered players reporting the "Frink" on our graffiti'd buildings.

This theory was already disproved because:

Aennilya wrote:
If, however, it can be verified that Frink graffiti does in fact come from other players, then this theory would be wrong.

The idea was that the auto graffiti system was erring, hence the reason it was showing up in registered neighborhoods. But, again this is moot because people (myself included) have verified that the graffiti comes from other players.

muleheadjoe wrote:
Before the update push last week all my graffiti'd buildings identified the neighbor who graffiti'd me, but after that update is when this Frink jazz started (for me at least).

Frink graffiti began either just at the end of or after the Halloween event. Perhaps it is some leftover from the Halloween "Ghost" message in that when they were testing it they used "Frink." (Hasn't someone else suggested this?)