IM harassment!

Hiya all
I have a query

I have a friend inworld who is getting hassling IMs from a particular person. Someone who she used to know but went all weird and posessive.
Now if she mutes him then that is all well and good.
But he keeps making new alts (alt after alt etc) and IM-ing her.
My experience with the 'muting feature is that if you reply to a 'muted' person they then become unmuted automatically!
Obviously the idea is to not talk, respond or answer them once muted but just seems to be no way of permanently muting them if you accidently answer.

If they create another alt and IM her and keep repeating the process, what can she do?

Will 'harassment' be sufficient enough for a ban?
She's asking me for help and I dont know how I can help her! or give her appropiate advice that will sort out this abuse

Any 'positive' and constructive ideas would be appreciated

Thanks

Taz

There's something in your settings that allows only your friends to see when you're online. I assume these new alts aren't on her friends list and the first one isn't as well. This doesn't stop them from IMing when she's off line, but it might help a little.

Ignore the person when they IM. They might get bored.
DO NOT REPLY but keep the IM window open. (I think you can even separate it and drag it to a corner of the screen so that you don't "accidentally" reply.)
It will record the person's name and the time that they sent each message. Once your friend has a long log of this nonsense, send it along with the AR.

What Brann said, plus set the chat and IMs to be logged on the computer. That way, your friend will have actual logs, and can compile them into a text file - notecard - for the AR.

A worse possibility is if the person's new alt doesn't IM your friend, but engineers meeting him/her. I've known it happen where a person has got into the relationship again by using an alt.

Each time you AR somebody, you should get an email with an RT number on the subject line.

You friend should _politely and clearly_ tell this person that they're not interested in keeping in touch and ask that the person stop contacting them.

Every time this person creates an alt, your friend should do another AR and include the RT number of the previous AR in the text. If it's from a new alt account, include "alt account abuse" on the subject line.

The Linden governance team can see the logs on the server. It's important not to embellish or take things out of context - if an AR contains a chat log, the gteam is likely to ignore that and look at the server logs instead to see what was actually said.

edit: also, your friend should not respond. Stalkers will usually get bored and move their drama elsewhere if they can't get a response. That sometimes takes a while so the ARs are important.