What would you do?

aka Shifte Benedek Born on: 2006-10-25 (account deleted) owner of Impact Weapons.
My account was banned for 14 days for an alleged assault and disturbing of the peace within being logged on for about 15 minutes sitting on a prim afk for about 12 of those minutes. I returned to my pc and started to greet some friends which were around at the time, in the process of greeting them i was logged out by an admin. I promptly responded to this with a support ticket asking for an explanation and i all i got for a solution to the ticket was a quote of the TOS i had supposedly breached and saying it was correctly applied. I gave up because this was not a solution to my problem and just a band aided excuse for an incorrectly applied ban just and accepted it as 14 days is no big deal. After the 14days were up I was excited to be getting access back to my account and being able to deal with my daily Customer Service, etc. except i was still unable to login, the messaged changed from "you cannot access secondlife until (date time)" to we cannot process your request at this time. I sent another ticket reguarding not being able to login after the ban was over and get a reply saying my account has been made permanently inaccessible and i will not be refunded any amount of Linden dollar balance (in excess of L$100,000), inventory (over 1 year and half research, scripts building) etc etc. Of course I appealed this and go figure, my appeal was handled by the same person who applied the 14 day ban, then answered my request to have it removed, and also answered my ticket in relation to not being able to login after the 14 days. My appeal was also written off so to speak which did not surprise me as it can hardly be fairly considered if the same person who applied it and reviews it.
Today i log in to find all my groups which are co owned by other persons land has been taken by Linden Labs. ( in excess of 25,000 sqm prime mainland)
In all, an account, a successful and popular business, Groups land, IP property and any record of it, and money "fictional currency" which is exchangeable for real money "which has no real value" (not really an issue as i have told linden lab they can have it all in exchange for access to my account) have been blatantly "deleted" of the face of the virtual world.

Myself and a few others conducted a test on the abuse report system at a later date to find that it fails us all and its served purpose.
I was logged in and logged in another alternate account to the same location, at this time i had not rezzed any prims nor used any scripted items on either account. I told the friends around at the time to Abuse Report the alternate account for assault (although it had not assaulted anyone), within 3 minutes both accounts were logged off and inaccessible with not even an email explaining why, what , when or how. I also submitted a ticket about this using my main account which to this day still remains unanswered.

Fail

It's because parts of LL are operated by stupid people, and the whole of LL doesn't give a damn.

In answer to your question, I would simply turn away from SL, but I would be sorely tempted towards publicity. I wonder if the domain name "secondlifesucks.com" is taken.

What would you do? Comments and Opinions Welcomed


Send a formal snail mail letter threatening court action.

Yeah formal letter, followed by small claims court. If your case is legit the details will come out there.

I would just keep going trying all avenues, use an alt, whatever, to try and plead my case. It seems so easy for a malicious resident to falsely AR someone. That is not really LL's fault, it's the fault of the bad resident. But LL must be aware of a possiblity of malicious ARs (I've seen a griefer being extremely offensive and abusive at a busy infohub and they threatened to AR anyone who argued with them)...it does happen. In that case the griefer themself got banned, and swiftly.

I know I'm only suggesting doing things the OP has already done, but that's almost the only way. However, possibly writing a letter to LL, as in pen, paper, envelope, stamp, postman might be useful as a last resort. Best not to get angry, but show you're genuinely upset, all you wanted was a happy time in SL.

Is there a pressure group, either in-world or out-world, that supports SL residents who feel they have been genuinely wrongly banned? It would be good if such a group exisisted that was on good terms with LL - it would be able to heal a lot of wounds.
OK, there will be some real baddies trying to get unbanned, but people like that would probably just come back as an alt, that's so much easier!

I think LL does care about us on the whole but there are gaps in the caring that are down to mistakes or individuals having off days, like in any job.

Given that we are usually only hearing one side of these events, it still seems that the AR system is very flawed and seriously in need of total overhaul.

If LL are going to ban and delete accounts along with assets that may be worth hundreds of thousands of L$, land holdings included, then they should be duty bound to look into each case carefully and the process be made transparent to the account holder concerned, which means informing them first with notification of actual reasons/evidence.

Also it -cannot- be right that the same Linden who applies a ban is the same person who deals with any subsequent reassessment and appeal: too much room for cover ups of negligence/error and abuse from within.

--
Aes

Like you said, we are only hearing one side of the story. These stories are just like the ones you hear in prison, everyone is always innocent.

I honestly don't think they do. There are some good people amongst them but, on the whole, I don't think that LL gives a damn - unless it's to their benefit.

I don't know of any overall thing that LL has done that is/was for the benefit of the residents. Individual Lindens do things sometimes, but not the company as a whole - imo. It's my belief that LL isn't concerned about the current population, and that we are just necessary guinea pigs for them as they develope the system. They tell us precious little about things we really want to know. They make pretences of consulting us in various ways, presumbaly in case there are any good ideas that they haven't thought of, but they don't do anything that residents want. Look how long it took to get any action on adfarms, but why are they taking action. I don't believe for a second that it's because people want it. Imo, it is *solely* because it suits LL at this time.



The result of the OP's experiment may not be what it appears to be. When the ARs went in, someone at LL could have connected the new avs with banned ones. Or the sheer number of ARs that were sent in at the same time would have certainly persuaded me if I were dealing with it. Such an experiment needs just one AR to go in, so I think that the experiment was no good.

I notice the account is associated with something called "Impact Weapons." One wonders if there may have been anything like an H4-capable orbital weapon somewhere in the backstory. (I don't think one can be banned for stumbling upon such a thing, but if there were repeated sim crashes in the process, or if a warning to cease and desist had been issued, it might be a different story.)

Gave up after one canned response from the help desk? A business owner with that many assets takes a 14-day suspension without further investigation?
Weapons business, hmm? How come hosiery business owners don't get suspended?
Bribing LL by telling them they can keep the confiscated assets in return for grid access?
AR'ing alts like LL has nothing better to do? (and don't they end up suspending entire IP addresses?)
There are few pieces missing from this story.

They do... on elastic.


This is a serious issue we hear of more and more ... Something needs to be done.

imogen

Huh... ever since coming to Second Life I always heard you needed extensive documentation to accompany any kind of Abuse Report. Maybe not...

That's what I'm thinking. If all it takes is crying "Waaaaah, he pushed me!" then there is a serious problem in the system. Finding that hard to believe. (Or, rather, I prefer not to believe that )

Evidently at the very Least Linden Labs needs better form letters

They should explain

Reason of Ban (some canned category)

Date and time the infraction incurred.

Length of ban.

Who to contact to try and get the situation reconsidered.

And for perma-bans ----

Who to contact to provide documentation that you are not at fault for whatever it was you supposedly did.

I have to agree on this specificly, the one who delt out the ban should NOT be the one who reviews it.

This is scary in fact to know all you hold on SL, and we KNOW we have RL money, lots of it for most of us, involved and to lose that and the work we've done ..

I would stop using impact weapons whatever they are.

Color me skeptical, I am not a bad person but there have definitely been moments in SL when I was NOT an angel. Seem to recall clearing a few sandboxes of griefers and anyone else around that happened to be using Nvidia cards with an illegal texture a time or two. I've most probably been ARed at one point or another and yet neither I nor anyone I know has ever been banned for any amount of time, none the less, perma-banned. If anything, I've seen that LL is too lax and hasn't dealt strongly enough with some people.