Police Blotter – v1.1!

You may have noticed, if you pass this spot in the forums regularly, that the Blotter hasn’t been around much lately. Truth be told, things were a little slow --abuse-wise-- and it can be very difficult to fill an entire Blotter when the well of woeful misdeeds has all but run dry. If the Blotter had the gift of foresight, that time off might have been spent preparing for the onslaught that is Second Life Abuse, v1.1.

The Blotter is speaking, of course, about the new abuse reporter tool in version 1.1 and the flood of abuse reports that it has generated. It seems, at times, as if everyone in Second Life is pushing, bouncing, or bumping another user, with or without a scripted object – simultaneously! While it’s an intriguing proposition to attempt to work out a scenario by which every Resident manages to abuse every other Resident at the same time in some sort of orgy of miscreant malfeasance…but instead we'll have to admit that some of these new reports are probably bogus. No worries, though. The Blotter is remarkably adept at separating the wheat from the chaff, and the mountain of new information has already helped to track down a few chronic offenders who had previously managed to evade detection.

The upgrade to version 1.1 has yet to spawn any completely new or novel forms of abuse, only minor subspecies of the known abuse kingdom. The most popular, so far, involves land-banning. Regular readers of the Police Blotter will remember that this issue has come up before, but the advanced land tools of version 1.1 have made this type of abuse easier, faster, and more efficient than ever before!

The Blotter could use this space to engage in a long-winded polemic on the subject –addressing each point and arguing, persuasively, about the logical underpinning of each step in the decision tree leading to a properly or improperly deployed set of land permissions – but let’s save everyone a bit of time and boil it down to a simple, didactic directive: If you undertake to do something with a specific intent to harass a person, you may in fact be harassing that person.

Yes, the good people at Linden Lab provided these new banning and pass- selling tools to you to use on your land as you see fit. No, this does not mean that you’re free to disconnect your moral compasses. The key phrase is “on your land.” If you buy a thin strip of land next to your enemy and charge an admission fee to visitors despite the fact that there is nothing there to visit, the Blotter might become a bit curious about your intentions. Good neighbors bake each other apple pies and lend cups of sugar and whatnot – bad neighbors erect 40 meter-high fences and toll-plazas. It’s just that simple.