The REAL New Search

I think the plan Jeska outlined is somewhat workable.... with one huge caveat....

There needs to be a clear & automatic sanction against people that abuse the "Flag" feature for griefing. For example, if you flag something as "Prohibited", and it ends up being blatantly inaccurate - that should go thru the whole Warning/1-day Ban/ 3-day Ban/ 2-Week Ban/Suspension chain.

Assuming anonymous basic accounts can't flag - this should have enough teeth to hinder most abuse.

Without some sort of significant disincentive to abuse the tool - agreed, it *will* be abused.


Edited to Add:

Just thought I'd point out: This is a feature that was promised 2 1/2 years ago. I guess its been in the dev pipeline all this time



From Thread: /110/55/78436/1.html

The problem with the "abuse disincentive" angle is that there's all kinds of little issues and escapes that will result in it becoming nearly impossible to judge.

For example, and thinking about the OP's case: a user with an ax to grind sets up an alt with payment info on file, and flags lots of BDSM equipment stores as "prohibited". If they are challenged regarding this, they can claim that they had no idea that kind of behaviour was sanctioned in Second Life. In fact, they could potentially create a nightmare situation by confronting a Linden directly with a question along the lines of "are you saying that LL sanction the use of SL for simulating rape, torture and sexual violence?". If they say No, the flags must stand, but if they say Yes, the chatlogs can be in the newspapers tomorrow.

A similar one could occur for child RPers. Somebody teleports to an event, innocently advertised as being for child avs, and discovers sexual activity is taking place there - possibly without the sanction of the original event organiser. Do they now have the grounds to report any child-av based event as Prohibited based on that? Or, could they argue that they do?

Worse than that, Because of Robin's major mistake of using the term "ageplay" to refer to "sexual ageplay" the general opinion of people in SL is that EVERY child avatar is against the rules.

So you can see religious vigilante groups getting thousands and thousands of flags against every store that sells kids stuff. thousands and thousands of flags against every store that sells "diaper fetish" or other things.. Heck, I'm sure there's people who will delight in "voting down" any shop that sells genitalia. (including OTHER people who sell genitalia, who want to get a "leg up" on their competition.)

This proposal is just so fundamentally flawed.

Please.. Lindens, do NOT do this. If I wanted "Disney Life" I'd play The Sims.

I completely agree these are valid concerns (Winter's too).

However, I think it depends on how this is implemented, and understood that Linden has a 50/50 track record at best in implementing things the 'right' way. If just a few complaints from payment-on-file folks can generate an automated removal.... there *will* be anarchy, no doubt.

But what if the threshold was high. like 100 complaints... or 500 complaints? Under that sort of situation - we probably wont get as much relief on search abuse as many would like, because there'd need to be a lot of pissed-off people complaining to make for an automated removal. But by the same token - setting a high threshold might protect against the very kind of bad scenerio you're describing.

Sometimes it really seems like some Lindens don't play SL at all. Didn't they learn their lesson from the malicious neg-rating dramas of years ago?

Well, "it's a platform, not a game", so presumably they don't play it, they... um... stand on it?

That's the best quote ever.