"Black Marks"

This is just a thought on the removal of negative ratings, the abuse system, and the idea is actually fairly simple, and designed to combat more minor griefers and generally abusive/unpleasant people!

Basically, when you abuse report someone for anything (griefing, being racist/abusive/mean/a complete doit) you give them a single black mark against them. This stat would probably be invisible, I'm not 100% sure of displaying it, though people would be aware of their own black-marks.

Anyway, this black-mark lasts until the abuse report is viewed by a Linden, at which point they can either remove it, or increase it (or just ban you, depending what you did ). If a black mark is confirmed or increased, it would be noted. When the report is originally filed, the person will receive a note saying they were reported and which category they were reported in (not who by, though they may know anyway since it'll likely be obvious). e.g "You have been black-marked for intolerance and will be reviewed by a Linden official shortly".

The idea here is that each avatar has a kind of rating of how many abuse reports they've caused, and land-owners could use this filter them out, same idea as the filtering by payment info, except better in some ways as it encourages (hopefully) good behaviour rather than just people having payment info
Land owners would choose how many black-marks a person is allowed up to, a rough value of 5-10 seems reasonable to avoid people getting black-marked too much from random people. Additionally, you can only receive one black mark per-person, per-machine (to try and discourage alt abuse), until all abuse reports from that person/machine have been dealt with by a Linden. This way you could receive reports for five different offences from the same person, but would only receive one black mark (except perhaps if you are on land owned by that person or their group? Getting complex though heh), however if all five are found to be valid, you'll receive the points for all of them.

The thinking of adding a single mark right-away is that it can take a while for the reports to be looked at, a higher recommended threshhold could of course be added if we do something more like:
Abuse report filed against you +1 black mark
Abuse report confirmed by Linden +4 black marks (total +5)
Abuse report found to be more than a minor offence +X points (as chosen by the Linden)
Abuse report for a 'crime' +1 bazillion black marks = BANNED

This system would likely require that open registration be closed (as would ANY system that encourages good behaviour to be perfectly frank, since open registration kicks them all in the crotch). But I think that it encourages the use of abuse reports more to report abuse, which is what it's for, and allow people to have some idea of the bad-eggs to keep places fun and friendly.

Good idea in principle, but far too open to abuse.

Say I'm a griefer, and decide I don't like someone. I file an abuse report, get all my other griefer buddies to file a report...and then for several weeks, before LL reviews the reports, my poor victim finds himself unable to get into a lot of sims.

While I understand that it's a possibility, I'm not sure how likely it is to happen? I mean, you'd need multiple griefer accounts or several griefer friends (though whether any of them actual have friends is debatable), each of which has to file an abuse report on the same person. Seems like an awful lot of effort just to annoy someone.

An alternative would be to only give an instant black mark if the person is in your bumps, hits and pushes list, or if they are there in person. ie an abuse report filed directly by clicking on the person, or by filing it from bumps, hits and pushes (which IMO should have an option to directly file a report) would give an instant black mark. While filing reports with the person's name will not (unless it is reviewed as valid). This way all the griefers would have to either have a genuine reason to file the report, or be there in person, but you can easily just leave or whatever.

Yarrr, shiver my timber ye got the black mark!

sorry its just what it makes me think about

Very, very, very likely indeed. I think you underestimate the effort that people are prepared to go to. ARing people before they AR you, to make it look like it's just some disagreement and both parties are to blame, is a standard griefing tactic; I, innocent flower that I am, would have a huge negative rating by now.

Besides, this will never happen because it would require a great increase in Linden time to monitor black marks, and they're hardly overflowing with Linden-hours at the moment.

Doesn't require Lindens at all except in the more extreme cases, they could assign community helpers to deal with cases, have a minimum of two of them review each case (to be sure the judgements are kept fairly impartial) and only pass them up to Lindens if it's something more major.
And you didn't comment on the alternative I provided to avoid the 'exploit'.

Really, really not a good way. Any method to cripple or mar someone's account will be abused by griefers, there will always be workarounds. We had something SIMILAR to this, namely negative ratings, and although nobody could be filtered out by them, they were still an annoyance. People started acting obnoxious to get as many negatives as they could and others would get their friends to gang up on those they didn't like and give them negatives. This was a downer as, if I recall correctly, negative ratings impacted your weekly stipend in some way (as did positives.)