The SL Abuse Reporting System

With regards to multiple people reporting something:

RL police departments act in a similar manner. If one person reports suspicious/disruptive behavior, they may or may not investigate immediately. If 5 people call in to report it, they're definitely sending a squad car over right away, and if 10 people call in to report it, they know that something's up.

More people reporting something will mean that there's a greater chance that LL will notice one of those reports, and also means that when they notice it, they'll see the others and realize that the behavior being reported is disruptive enough for several individuals to have reported it.



With regards to the "report anything" mentality:

LL specifically instructs residents to report something if they think that it is abusive behavior. They would prefer that you report it and let them sort it out than try to take matters into your own hands via vigilante justice. Despite what some people may try to tell you, attacking a griefer is an act of griefing as well, and subjects you to a potential AR and potentially severe consequences. Now, if you own the land on which the griefing incident takes place, you can eject/ban the griefer yourself, and even teleport them home (although this can only be done via script). You can also IM the owner of the land (or a member of the land-owning group who has ban/eject priveledges) to come over and ban/eject as well. Otherwise, the correct action is to report it and let LL handle it.


In my experience, the far greater problem is that LL in many cases is unwilling to impose penalties on paying accounts, even in egregious situations (I have personally witnessed abuse that went up to the level of violating Federal Telecommunications laws that was reported and went unpunished). A corrolary to this is that bans are fairly ineffective against "throwaway" accounts with no payment info on file.

Course if everyone called 911 every time they saw a jaywalking, then only the major group reports would even get noticed.

And actual serious problems reported by individuals would be missed.

Which is one of the potential (and suspected) flaws in the current system.

That could turn into a griefers charter.
Landowners can't be on their land 24/7.
Third parties have to be able to AR.

The danger in refining down the ARable activities is that
1) It would open a Pandora's Box of nit-picking
2) It could discourage people from ARing grief if the activity does not fit the AR template. That would be a clear message from SL - "You're being griefed? Tough! We don't care."

ARs filed from private sims should just go to the sim owner and estate managers and they can deal with the problems that arise on their own sims, especially residental private sims where the sim owner is getting paid to provide support to his/her tenants.

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As an aside, from yesterday's office hour it seems that ARs about spam currently rank at the top which would largely be LL's own fault (no option to restrict chat in groups, no penalties for stores that spam notecards and landmarks, etc).

That's very interesting and surprising.

This is drifting a bit off-topic, but were there any details on the kind of spam involved? Specifically, is it strictly in-world spam that's getting AR'd?

The question is motivated by the malware site to which gullible ad-clickers are directed when they touch a certain set of networked ads in-world. Although the threat from this particular site is rather worse than just getting spammed, there could in theory be other external sites accessed through SL that would just spam the browser or (god forbid) any visitor-supplied email address.

There is a danger that Governance staff with power but without clue would dismiss ARs concerning links to malware sites as "We can't control the content of non-SL sites".
It's not inconceivable that a broken cook-book approach would result in such a decision.
Clearly, any report of an inworld link to an infected site should be a high-priority for SL.
However, the matter would have to be handled by a specialist within SL to verify that the site linked to could compromise the computer used to access it. (OK, OK, Quiet at the back. I don't actually mean microsoft.com)
Without that specialist insight, ARing of an object linking to a website could become as much a griefer game as is reporting an account for being underage.



As for spam being ARable:

1) Inworld spam (Unsolicited Bulk Electronic Messaging) should be stamped on hard. If unchecked, it will become a major plague. SL will follow RL in this.

2) Outworld spam is not so clearcut
I have seen people alleging that their registration email has fallen into the hands of spammers.
My RL organisation is at the receiving end of many 1000's of spams per day. The spam comes to every public address and to huge numbers of usernames that are random/auto-generated. After over 1.5 years since we started creating SL accounts we have never detected spam being directed at the tagged alias email addresses used for signup. I would say that any outworld spam received by SL users is almost certainly nothing to do with failures of SL.
Even if someone receives outworld spam promoting a SL merchant, there is no guarantee that the spam is not a joe-job ( i.e. spam sent by a competitor in order to damage the spamvertised vendor). This matter is too specialised for Governance staff to adjudicate on.
In short, outworld spam is not an appropriate subject for an AR. Such spam should be treated/reported as would any other general spam.

Reference the 'right' person - Daniel - the bug..
Reverence the 'wrong' person - Dan - the bug fixer

I'm sure a few people remember my old AR thread that really taught me a lesson. (>_<
/327/8f/243836/1.html

So, I've been putting effort into learning the system. I frequent the Saturday noon G-Team office hours almost every week... But missed this week. (T_T)

The tips and advice I got so far for ARs goes like this:

* Report anything that you see is a violation of the TOS. Not something someone else has told you to AR or something that merely offends you. You have to be witness/victim. And it has to be a true TOS violation. "AR Parties" are greatly discouraged and have resulted in additional suspensions.

* When sending the report, describe the situation as clearly as possible and don't include copy-pasted chat. The cat logs will be read when necessary. And, yes, chat and IM gets logged. It has to get through the servers in the first place.

* Be sure to directly identify the offending object or avatar. Include a screenshot if the abuse is visual in nature or if multiple avatars or objects are involved.

* If you can't identify an avatar or object directly as the source of the abuse; make sure your avatar is in the location of the abuse being reported and AR a Linden avatar name. (I use Socrates Linden.... for personal reasons. (^_^)y)

* Don't expect to be notified of any part of the investigation and/or solution to the abuse in question. But, also, don't be surprised if you wind up being immediately contacted in IMs.

Using these tips above, I can say that I've had and arguably great level of success in getting my ARs addressed. And have had some good opportunities to add to my Linden bear collection. (^_^)

Not only that... To date... Reglardless of what anyone thinks I'm up to inworld... I have been 100% AR free for over half a year. \(^_^)/

Well, there is no reason to store all this centrally. This could be stored on the sim, since each AR will include the location the alledged offence took place.

The fastest recorded sustained typing speed was 150wpm sustained over 50 minutes. As a word in this context if 5 characters, a word would take 12 bytes of storage (5 characters plus space stored in UTF-16). So 150 wpm is about 1.75Kb per minute.

The maximum number of avatars on a sim is 100 (on a private estate with the owner setting the allowed avatars to the max). So if you did have all 100 avatars typing at record speed, you'll generated at most an hourly log of 10.5Mb. Now if the logs are stored on an hourly basis, grepping 10Mb is not too difficult, and you should have enought detail in the AR to track it down to one or at most two such log files.

If you delete logs after a month, you'll only need 7.5Gb of storage space for the sim full of world class typists, which isn't a great deal of storage these days.

These are extreme cases to get the absolute maximum log sizes - even so the sizes are small compared to what the asset servers have to cope with!. However, in practice a typical sim will have a limit of 40 avatars, and even the busiest sims are only going to have about 1/4 to 1/2 of these typing at any one time, and normal typing speeds are probably around 50-70wpm. So a more realistic figure for a more typical but still pretty busy sim would be about 1Mb per hour of log file, and 750Mb log files storage per month.

The real problem however, is voice chat - as this goes through vivox servers rather than LL, LL probably can't log it. Even if it did, then we are talking 8Mb per hour per person at the poorest quality codec and much of that could be just white noise!. Assuming that LL does have the ability to record it, and the storage space to keep it, then there is the probably of finding stuff in it, as you can't simply grep it.

Matthew

I've been bringing that up with the G-Team. As I've mentioned before... I frequently discover children on the grid and because of my avatar they seem to be more than willing to open up to me about their age. Sadly... When I got a kid saying "I am fourteen" in voice chat, it's difficult to get that across in the AR tool. (>_<

So far, the difficulty I see is that there is no native recording tool on the client or the server side. Where it's easy to click "Include Screen Shot"... There is no "Include last 60 seconds of voice chat". So I'm left with waiting for a Linden to arrive with only hope that (s)he shows up with a dot on. So far... I'm 1 for 3. And this is not about RP confusion... I'm smarter than that. (>_<

Socrates wasn't that specific about it so you'll have to go and ask .

(They're abandoning the Wednesday office hour soon btw and only the Saturday one will remain)

The majority of grief in SL is user solvable/ignorable.

I do not need to Lindens to come and handle things I can take care of myself.

The advantage to making banning rare is that very few people comparatively will get banned unjustly.

I think that the protection of the innocents account status is more valuable than punishment of sophomoric pranks with the ban-stick.

There was a really good reason that open court was invented: it gave people confidence that justice was being justly carried out. Hiding behind the asinine "confidentiality" gives no one any confidence that AR responses are just. This lack of confidence gives rise to the genuine concerns mentioned in this thread.

As I am of the opinion that enforcement by LL is generally capricious and arbitrary, it is in their best interests to keep it as closed as possible. That way customers can't assert that it is either just nor unjust.

To amplify a point made above, if you make the games mechanics such that that which can be done is allowed, there is no need for ARs. Except LL wants to be able to - for example - prize free expression excluding expression they abhor. You then get bad rules impossible to consistently enforce and are thus tempted to keep it all closed and mysterious.

LL too often wants to have their cake and eat it too; these are some of the results.

They are not abandoning anything, merely are moving one of the Office Hours to the Teen Grid and which day was not specified.