A question about resolving harassment...

Ok. Clear and brief as possible. Can LL or can they not trace back harassing avatars' accounts to the originating machine, and then identify and block the real-world creator of those avatars? Does doing this involve finding the IP address of the machine? Can't those be changed, somehow? I've heard of people "releasing" their IP address... I'm angry. I want to know if this can be done, or not.

Well I to have had my share of rather unlogical people on secondlife I even went so far to avoid them by creating a new account .. after trying many many repots to LL about the rl threats i recieved.. now a normal logical person would think why continue to play a game where people act this way well the answer is I wont allow the jerks to ruin something i enjoy.
MUTE. REPORT copy and paste the chat logs take pictures.. mute the voice as well and if all else fails and they keep creating new alts or having others send you things I would do what i did . Good luck.

What Vika said.

File Abuse Reports with as much information as possible about the incident. Then mute the avatar in question and go about your business.

DO NOT take it upon yourself to retaliate in even the smallest way. The very last thing you want to do is give them an excuse to report you.

IP addresses can easily be spoofed, so unfortunately, banning someone by IP address really doesn't help that much. If you have cable internet, your provider will likely assign you a new address if you reset your modem. They aren't a terribly accurate way to ban someone. Also, they don't resolve to the individual machine, just to the general location and ISP. Even that isn't necessarily accurate, though.

There are MAC addresses, but I don't know enough about them to comment. I think they can be changed as well, though. If someone wants to get into SL to harass you, they probably are going to find a way to do it.

If you are getting RL threats that worry you, contact the Police. It's one thing to be harassed by a dick in a video game, but if it has gone RL, don't take chances.

True, dat.

Online harassement, in the USA, is a felony. If they live elsewhere, then who knows. As for the various IP spoof abilities, whether or not their data is subpeonable would depend on which country they are based in. Assuming for a moment that it is all happening within the US, then via LL and probably the ISP combined, the final originating computer location can be determined. LL can definitely trace the IP back to the ISP, and sometimes further. The ISP can trace the IP to a specific location. The exception to this are the IP spoof services that are not located in the US or in any other country that has laws concerning the legality of such.

If someone is truly harassing you, the absolute safest and best bet is to go ahead and file a police report in the area that you live in. This gives you the initial legal complaint that you would need to go forward with any sort of action of trying to trace something back to its origins.

And I'm sure LL will be much more helpful in resolving the matter when the police get involved.

File a Harrasment report and within minutes to a half hour or so you will be contacted live in chat and email by a GM who deals with it immediately, investigates the chats and takes action-------oh wait.--------------WRONG VIRTUAL WORLD.

LL will go to the server logs if they want to see what was said.. Including a little text is fine but filling the AR with it won't help - better to BRIEFLY describe the issue and maybe include a line or 2 of chat log.

Thanks everyone. My AR's are getting their own notecard template now... sigh.

If they are threats of RL harm, contact authorities. Don't wait for them to become RL threats, for goodness sake.