I can't believe they moderated THIS post from the blog

So Robin Linden makes his Sept 9 post about the Update: Resetting Passwords on the official linden blog yesterday. I add the following comment, which they initially let stay as of late last night, but I just checked now (Sunday early evening) and I see that my comment (along with many others) have been moderated off of that blog entry.

Why was my comment moderated? Because it was openly critical of LL, in a way that was as neutral and as objective as possible without watering down the essential point of the critical comment. In other words, LL is *deathly* afraid of any seriously critical entries that make them look bad, even if they deserve it. It's not just a matter of censorship; it's about sticking their heads in the sand and pretending that legitimate complaints just don't exist. Here's the unedited text of my critical comment on that blog entry. The fact that they saw fit to moderate it off without addressing it is yet further reason that I will *never* own land or a premium account in SL again. When they learn how to act professional and actually provide some degree of support, maybe I'll entertain the notion of actually paying them to host my build. In the meantime, I think it's laughable that they're trying to attract commercial enterprises and pose SL as a legitimate business platform.

---- Unedited content of my deleted blog entry -----

Not secure. So very NOT secure. What are you people thinking? These questions can so easily be guessed at or deduced. Please disable this mechanism; I just went through literally 4 hours’ effort cancelling and replacing my RL credit cards tied to my SL accounts, and then chasing down other finanical sites that could be found through my compromised email, name, and password info and changing passwords, changing credit card numbers etc.

That’s 4 freaking hours of my time gone to clean up after your security screwup. Gas spent driving around town to my credit union. The inconvenience of not being able to use my debit card for at least 3 days. The inconvenience of probably missing some place that has my old credit card info on file that I haven’t remembered to change, etc. etc.

I’ll point out that at various times I’ve considered buying an island sim for my small group of friends. Every time I come back to the same conundrum: “Why on earth would I *buy* a processor for LL at $1200 up front and then pay $195 per month on top of that for a company that has a reputation for TERRIBLE support, TERRIBLE availability, NO published SLAs, etc.?”

I find it ironic that LL is trying to attract bonafide real world businesses to SL and promote SL as a viable platform for real world commerce and business, when LL won’t spend the money and hire the resources necessary to staff up a *real* support center and publish real, binding SLAs, and generally show a degree of profesionalism required to entice commercial enterprises to trust you to provide a reasonable level of service and reliability.

Too many instances of caps lock usage. Does not compute.

Hi cuz, how's Aunt Sophie?

I can believe it, unfortunately. Yours is not the first case of a post being removed. A post can be removed from any blog by any linden; I believe the criteria was for the good of the community.

Are you picking on my family?

Isn't Robin a she?

And yes, this censoring of critical SL resident voices is only going to generate more ill will among LL's customer base. IMO, the only reason any comment should be moderated out of existence is when it's clearly spam or full of unbridled profanity.

If there is going to be any faith and respect in the ability of the company blogs to communicate to and with SL residents, LL needs to ditch this very "personal blog" way of moderating comments and instead implement a fair, professional and consistent approach ASAP.

Especially when the fuck up on LL's end is as monumental as this one is.

Now see, this post would not survive there.

no ofcourse not.

::changes his last name and hides.::

It's pathetic. They should turn all the comments off, rather than do this.

coco

Give it some time and see if that isnt exactly what happens. At least on stuff that is worthy of conversation like oh, security issues.

How Funny. We wouldnt even know the difference if the forums were not here.

Time will tell.

Xplorer

I don't get it. I just looked at the blog again, and there are plenty of "negative" comments still there.

I think someone is going through and just erasing whatever strikes him as more negative than others, or something like that. Or maybe in some cases, just erasing them because he doesn't like that person.

Because otherwise, I can't really see any rhyme or reason to it, or any difference between the post above and those still there.

It's also criminal, in my view, that the Linden whose blog it is may never even read the comments that were submitted to it, since any Linden can remove anything he feels like removing from any blog.

It's EXACTLY like writing a letter to someone and having someone else intercept it so that they won't ever see it.

coco

I am pretty sure they are magicing away things out of the answers forum as well. Im sure I read a question there a while ago that is now gone. No indication it was moved or anything ... just gone.

Surely they dont really believe that they can make all this go away if they remove commentary they dont like.

It's not criminal, but in poor taste yea. Beyond moderation of excessive cursing or whatever they shouldn't be TOUCHING the comments.

My job is tech manager at a internet company. We were using a blog to convey our main site for a while and they just opened it up to comments. One of the issues was "what do we moderate" and I used LL as a specific example of how it's going to backfire if we're not careful.

too bad LL can't learn from anything until it's well past the pissing-off point.

Oh they're definitely doing that. I've had two posts deleted, one of which got me a warning.

And neither of them were anything remotely bad compared to other viewpoints I've expressed this week.

it stands to reason it will only get worse, its my guess, and only a guess that they are looking for financial backers or even to sell LL, and we cant have these negative comments laying around for all those eyes to see now can we?? Oh we can post on outside resources and they will tell the investor/buyer, "oh those dont count, they are not sanctioned by LL"

The blogs are just a way to monitor everything that goes into print about LL, its not too hard to figure that one out. I think the thing that really pisses me off the most, is that LL sees us as a bunch of idiots, not worthy of free thought or dialog. We are not a benefit to their company, just the money that trickles in to provide salaries, rent, computers, and everything they use or do. Never anywhere have i seen a company have such low regard for its paying customers, this last incident goes even further to show, we werent even important enough to keep our personal and financial information safe.

So count me in as one that hopes they sell LL and fast, and hope and pray the next owner has some idea of how a professional company is run, and how it should treat its customers.

Okay, I haven't posted in the forums in a while, and I really don't want to be flamed, here. But, okay, it's a serious issue, a really serious one. But why is everyone pointing fingers at LL specifically? I bet if the name of the hacker was somehow released, the finger would still be pointed at LL. Hacking happens. It's shitty but it just does. How many security releases has Microsoft made in the last year? Do you remember when myspace advertisements were installing keyloggers on the computers of anyone who just saw them? Fact of the matter is, hacking is an issue that goes way beyond the walls of LL, and if Microsoft--you know, the people who make the software for that program called Windows--can't keep the hackers out, how are small businesses? Again. It's crappy, it sucks, it blows, it's potentially very dangerous, but if you're really tech savvy, I'm sure Second Life isn't the only online program that has your credit card number stored. Have you ever talked to an Amazon.com employee? Do you think they'd talk about an issue like this if their system was hacked? So many, "-This time- Linden Lab went too far" suggests that there are a lot of grudges being held against the company whose product you may even use daily. I'm not trying to belittle anyone's opinion or anything, I just wanted to throw my couple of cents in. Within a day, the forums will be gone. So, I also want to say bye to anyone who remembers me from the forums. Take care, everyone!

No one plans to fail, but failure to plan is not acceptable.

Better safegards should have been in place, several of the software products they used had posted problems with security, and had patches in place..that should not have been ignored.

What's hard to understand is, if they're getting rid of the forums then why would they even have comments capability on their blog? My guess? They're too lazy to assign a programmer to remove it.

Comments on Linden blog makes as much sense as asking for olives on top of your strayberry ice cream.

Troy

I got a very snotty message from one of the Lindens regarding my posts being deleted, so I AR'd him for it.

You cannot silence dissent from the community by censorship, only by listening to your playerbase and responding appropriately.

When I received a forum warning some months back, and couldn't find what I was supposed to have done despite taking the matter up with several Lindens personally, could still not get any information - it was apparently 'lost' although they had no problem in remembering that the warning was "appropriate".

When asked by Robin how we did things over at Stratics, I stressed the importance of, when removing forum posts, the person responsible took ownership of their actions, and contacted the poster quoting the various bits from the rules that were broken - even if you don't agree, you can at least find out what you broke, and hopefully try and regulate your posting style a little for the future. She agreed that was a helpful thing to do.

Evidently, however, Linden Lab learnt absolutely nothing, and fail to inform blog posters why - and when - their posts are being removed. This essentially destroys all usefulness of the blog, because you can't be honest. Do we know for sure that blog removals do not result in in-world discipline? Will people simply stop posting there out of fear?

Lewis

I really wish the last name beacon was pickable in SL. I would SOOO make a Mavis Beacon and walk around correcting peoples typos.

Mavis Beacon: Keep your fingers on the home row. Lets play the driving game! don't let those bugs hit your windshield. keep typing the words and your car will not wreck!

I just want to address this point, as it concerned me, too. Because of comments like this, I investigated the problem and confirmed it with another account in my household. I was going to check it with someone else's account, too, but did not because I couldn't get their explicit approval to try. (No way I'm going to mess with anything like this without explicit OKs from people.) Sirens went off in my head & I submitted an exploit report, then hopped on SL and started contacting Lindens.

After checking into it, it was confirmed that the questions are *only* offered if you are connecting from an IP address that has been used previously with that account. If not, you just get a page telling you to call LL. Being paranoid about something of this proportion, I did eventually get ahold of a friend and confirmed this. So LL did cover this one -- they just should have made it evident that this wasn't a security hole; I know I panicked.

For those of you who saw this potential exploit, did you submit it? If not, why not? This was a potentially major security risk impacting everyone.

That being said, yes, while your comment was a rant, it had legitimate points and should not have been moderated.

OMG i must be tired when i start thinking like this. I just invisioned Mavis Beacon roaming around SL being some griefer with a rifle, while shouting LAWL ROFFLE OMG!!! o.o

You beat me to it . Just to reiterate.. just because YOU can get to the page to answer specific, possibly easily guessed questions about your avatar does NOT mean everyone else in the world can (yeah, the thought did occur to me, then I came out of shock and started thinking logically again). I mean, they reset *everybodies* password, on the chance that somebody might decrypt MD5 hashed and salted passwords, and people are thinking they are going to turn around and let anybody access anybody elses password reset consisting of answers that could be publicly known? Breathe.. it's so much better when you stop and breathe.

Actually I can see why they might delete a post like that from the blog. It was possible that a post such as that could start another mass panic over a non-issue. If someone has not witnessed how easily this seems to happen around here, you've just simply not been paying attention. LL has enough on their plate right now without having to calm down YET ANOTHER drama.. especially one that has no bearing on reality and that they can simply nip in the bud before it builds... and before somebody says "but.. but.. they could just give an answer to the question instead of deleting it..", well, if some research had been done before the original question was posted it would never have been asked, because I've seen many posts since Saturday referencing the fact that the page is only accessible from the IP adress that you have previously accessed that account from.. so it kinda goes to show that stuff like that snowballs regardless.