Unleash the BanHammer!

I've been checking the Police Blotter quite often these days, and I've come to notice that bugger all is done othe rthan issue endless amounts of 3-day suspensions. I even saw a couple of 1-day suspensions. What the hell is that going to accomplish?

"Sorry, asshole. No Second Life 4 j00 for ONE DAY!!!"

The Lindens need to start flexing their ban powers. If you get repeated cases of someone greifing up a sim, ban the crap out of them. Nothing teaches a lesson like a good banning. Simply suspending people only gives them the satisfaction of knowing that they got aay with it and can do so again.

On a minor related point, hasn't Linden Labs noticed yet that out of nearly 8 million accounts only about 2 million are acctually active? Think about all that load on the asset server resulting from the inventories of long-abandoned accounts. Start removing some. Really, isn't your job to make things better for Residents rather than pander to rapidly increasing statistics?

"lol 5 million new Residents in 8 months. What do we do, Phillip?"
"Uh... tell them it's all good!"
"But what about the datab..."
"Shut up."

You only have to scroll through these forums to find people suspended due to mistaken identity. From a few examples, it looks like LL act on incomplete pictures based on chat logs rather than a complete activity log. So for instance saying something like "I have this great new weapon", just before a griefer teleports into the same location and silently launches a griefing attack may get you suspended (there's a similar case in the forums somewhere).

Also the imbalance in terms of your inability to appeal against an outright ban (and possible real financial losses which can result), is being surveyed by the courts at the moment.

So it isn't surprising that LL are erring on the side of caution here.

Moreover whilst an outright ban can have a heavy impact on a resident trying to build a business or life within SL since they will have a heavy financial and/or emotional investment in that avatar. However such residents are unlikely to be engaging in real griefing attacks, as opposed to occasional frayed tempers, misjudged high jinx, misunderstandings etc. i.e. usual human nature!

Real griefers however are unlikely to have such an attachment to an avatar and rather than being detered by a ban would just create a new basic avatar (and probably not even pay the $9 second avatar fee, especially if the sign up pages still don't actually allow you to pay that fee!).

Matthew