The chat history in abuse reports

When you check the "include chat history" box in the inworld abuse report dialog, does that include all the IMs, including group chats?

How long does it include? The entire session?

I always thoght the IMs were afforded some degree of privacy.

Does it actually include text in the report or just links to a point in a recorded chat log?

So if someone files an abuse report while they are having private, unrelated IM sessions, the private, unrelated IM sessions are sent to the abuse staff along with the chat stream being included as evidence to support the abuse report? And without the knowledge of the participants in the unrelated IM sessions. Hmmm.

"Include chat history" does not include IMs.

I will clarify the Lindens dealing with abuse only look up the logs when necessary, and that they are temporal and not stored forever. As have a strict privacy policy, chat irrelevant to the investigation isn't looked up.

For this reason, it's a very good idea to: 1) send an abuse report in a timely manner and not hold off too long while the details are still fresh in your mind, and 2) specify those details in the body of the abuse report of what happened, e.g. "Yesterday at 4:30 PM SLT, so-and-so hurled racial slurs at me".

Here's a related post by Robin from last year.

Thanks for the question.

The "Include Chat History" feature in the SL viewer is currently under review, and at this time it is turned off. This feature only captured Chat. IM is considered private, and IM logs are not automatically generated and posted in an abuse report.

We strongly recommend that you do manually include chat and/or IM in your abuse report when it's relevant to the incident. You can do this in two ways:

1. Copy and paste chat/IM from your Chat History window into the abuse report Details field.

2. Type a description of the offending chat/IM in the Details field and be sure to include the date and time the conversation occurred and the name/s of the speakers you are reporting.