Abuse Report Email Confirmations Now Utterly Useless

I know that this is where we're supposed to test out our ideas in the court of public opinion before posting them to JIRA as change requests. However, this issue has such broad-reaching ramifications that I decided to cut to the chase:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-2585

Please visit this entry, and vote. We need to have this fixed right away.

Automatic emails generated in response to abuse reports once contained the following critical information in the subject line of the message:

* the name of the sim
* the SLURL for the exact location within that sim
* the category of AR it was
* the name of the person being reported
* the subject line from the AR as originally created by the user recipient of the email
* the number of the return ticket (the AR number).

All of this information except the very last item has now been removed, rendering these return receipt emails completely useless from the user standpoint. All the user now has is an AR number, and the date on which he or she received it.

The removal of this information affects more than just the individual user, who now has no way at all of correlating the receipt of an abuse report with an in-world event, or even verifying that they have received the correct AR number in the email subject. The much vaunted Linden Lab goal of citizen self-governance is ill served by removing this small bit of information that used to be given out with the abuse report return emails. The information is vital for groups and organizations to keep track of trouble makers, and is one of the critical ways estate managers keep track of them.

I propose that this this information not only be restored to the email headers on the response to abuse reports, but that the body of the abuse report be included. Ironically, when you file a JIRA item, it sends you the entire posting as a confirmation, so it's obviously not a technical problem to do this.

Including a verbatim copy of the body of the original author's abuse report would be a nice and welcome improvement to the abuse report system, greatly enhancing the usefulness of the AR emails, and would go a long way toward improving the impression of transparency of the abuse reporting process without compromising account privacy in the least.

I propose that in addition to fixing what is apparently (and hopefully) a simple oversight, that the body of the abuse report be quoted in the body of the return email received by citizens when abuse reports are filed.

- Kalel Venkman

It turned out that the abuse report number itself was the part that Fritz Linden wanted to remove, as it is no longer used internally by Linden Lab, so it was not a policy change but a software glitch as I had originally surmised. The rest of it was removed by accident.

Very VERY fast response. I am SO impressed.

Thank you, Fritz Linden - I imagine there will be a lot of very happy estate managers from this point.

I wish Fritz had gone the extra mile and included the AR body as well, but if this is the fix, I think I can live with it.

A mod merging this thread with /327/61/268069/1.html would not be unwelcome.

I agree..

As a footnote to this, it looks as though AR email message subject lines have been completely and fully restored, despite some quixotic and inexplicable opposition to having this bug fixed.

I never objected to having it fixed, I just don't see the need for it, and the huge deal being made about it. There are much more important bugs to be dealt with in SL. But glad you got your wish.

Darien, it's not a high priority bug to the individual user. After all, you probably know all about the AR that YOU submitted.

It's a bigger concern for estate owners, who get copies of ARs submitted by their tenants. This information is very important to them.

At least, that's how I read the situation. Good job on the fix, LL.

Well, thats not quite what this was about, those emails to Estate owners were not affected by this. But dead horse is dead.

It depends on how you're configured, Darien. If you had your AR's sent to your estate instead of the Lindens, then I don't think it affected you. However, most estate owners don't do this, because estate owners do not have the power to delete the accounts of egregious offenders. It also affected every resident who was NOT an estate owner, which is a very large number of citizens.

Watching dead horse though, and dead horse is still dead.

/me pokes the horse. Are we sure it's not sleeping?


I thought all AR's _always_ went to the Lindens but estate owners could also get copies of ones filed while on their islands. No?