Why have AR email confirmations been rendered useless?

Does anyone have a good handle on why users have now been denied access to corroborative information on abuse reports that they themselves have supplied?

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.

I strongly feel that the Lindens went in the wrong direction on this one - denying users corroborative access to information they themselves generated and sent to the Lindens seems arbitrarily anti-user to me.

I'm really REALLY hoping this was just a simple coding mistake, as it could very VERY easily have been, and not a policy decision.

- Kalel Venkman

I don't see this being a problem, I mean, you should be able to remember what happened in your own AR, right?

I could only see it being a problem if you made a SL career out of ARing people. Maybe 20 or more a day and you would start forgetting who you ARed for what, assuming you were keeping score...

You're saying we should all remember the details of every AR we've ever done?

LL®™ recently hired a communications Linden. Since that time communications have been going downhill. I guess our interpetation of what a communications Linden would do and what LL®™ hired them for are different.

Well how many do you do? I think i've done all of maybe 4 in two years. But I don't see the point of keeping a record.

Do you plan to go back and 'mess them up real good' if LL doesn't handle it to your satisfaction? LL has never revealed the results of an AR to anyone anyway, so why is it important to remember that someone rezzed a megaprim on Sim "blah" on July 12 2007?
If I see a problem, I AR it, and i get on with my life. Emails go to the trash. If it's something important and personal, I handle it myself.

If I have to AR someone, I let the ban list and "My Notes" on their profile keep the record for me.

There are three good reasons to have confirmation information:

1. When keeping one's own records, one might not think of some information that might be relevant to records. The AR confirmation can prompt one to record someone one might not have otherwise though to record.

2. The confirmation creates a backup, in case something happens to one's own records.

3. Confirmation assures the reporter that LL has the relevant information. It helps give a reporter confidence that LL has taken the report seriously.

The big problem with LL's AR system is that no one has confidence that it actually helps. Residents are discouraged from making legitimate reports because they do not believe the time that they waste on an AR actually helps anything. Griefers can grief with more confidence not only based on the fact that they don't think an AR will result in any sanction against them, but also because they know they can game the AR system better than legitimate reporters. People making illegitimate reports not discouraged, willing to take a chance on winning the AR lottery.

Linden Lab could take time to make a more transparent AR system that still protects privacy. The problem is that Linden Lab's policy is designed not so much to protect residents' privacy, but to protect itself and its staff from scrutiny. In shielding itself from scrunity, LL shields itself from trust as well.

Well, I guess I'm glad then that some people never have to deal with alts of griefers/stalkers..

I don't get why sending the person who typed the AR an email copy of what they typed is suddenly something that needed to be removed.

.. or owners of high traffic sites within the grid?

It's not uncommon for an estate management or parcel management team to write a dozen AR's every day. You can only have 300 avatars on your ban list, and that ban list doesn't keep track of WHY you banned them, only THAT you banned them.

Got that picture in your head?

Okay - now multiply that problem by 30 sims. Or 50.

And now take away the only automatic record-keeping you have to keep track of all that. Now how happy are you as an estate owner?

I manage rentals, a sim's worth on the mainland, in six months, I have banned one person. If you are ARing dozens of people a day there is a problem somewhere. If you pull up their profile, you can add notes about the person. But really why would you need to, if they are banned, they are banned. I don't need to know anything else about them.

Maybe this is the Labs way of saying "The users do not need to keep track of trouble makers in this manner." Perhaps they are also saying something along the lines of "The Lab can deal with keeping track of customer service records." But those are just my thoughts, perhaps.

Not really relevant. Some places are griefed daily by groups of folks. FurNation, as an example, is constantly being hit by griefer attacks.



Well, I don't keep track of ARs myself, though I have filed quite a few at times. Filing ARs helps the Lindens get rid of the griefer accounts a lot faster, since they use the number of ARs filed within a short period of time as well as the type of incident to ban folks who are just here to grief.

I suppose if I were to have a system to keep track of AR info, and I had a need to add some information (or correct some information) for a particular case, it would be handy to be able to reference the correct issue/ticket number when submitting said information. With getting back just a number, you have no idea what incident it is related to, so that kind of bookkeeping has now been rendered impossible.

*shrug* I don't see what is such a big deal about echoing back the incident data supplied by the filer back to the filer with the proper issue/ticket number. It's not like there is anything else attached to that number anywhere else that is being disclosed (like on the blotter or something).

Probably because seeing the lengthy email confirmations only validate the professional whiners and crybabies and makes them feel so powerful and important that they become serial reporters just for lack of anything better to do and to get the rush of causing behind the scene kind of "damage".

Are you suffering from withdrawals?.

While there probably are people who abuse the abuse report system, the issue raised here is a valid one, I think.

For example, let's say that I ARed you for griefing someone, but later, I realized that there was a mistake in the report; you weren't the one griefing, but someone with a similar name. How would I go about getting that info back to the Lindens to correct the report so that it was expunged before they proceeded to apply a warning/punishment on you? Now, if your Ar was the only one that day, I could *probably* figure it out, but in a busy "griefer" place, like FurNation, the EMs go through enough as it is that they could have a problem figuring out which AR number went with which incident and which person.

Plus, I have also had the viewer crash and/or lost connection before (usually when some asshat griefer crashed the sim) whilst filing the report. Would be nice to have some verification that the report actually got through, esp in the case where I had to file multiple ARs for a roving griefer group (think PNs).

i suggest ban-link.

In other words....It doesn't scale (tm)

well your points only make me ask again, why do you keep records? I just don't get that part.

And going back to correct an AR? i seriously don't think that's even possible.

I ran an estate, and still have 9 sims. I've never come close to the limit. (which by the way was recently raised to 500). I do appreciate some places have more griefing than others. But if it's that important, just keep an Excel file.

Funny you should mention that - I used to use the headers returned from the automated responses to generate my Excel file... of course, that's broken, as of today. See my entry on the JIRA for more info (appended here for convenience):


So, I used to use the return email (AR response) headers as a nice input to tracking things (yes, via some scriptglue and Excel) - none of that works any longer, of course. The old method would scale nicely, as the header was captured automatically as part of the AR-submission process.

The current alternative (manual entry whilst trying to juggle a half-dozen other issues during griefer raids) just doesn't 'scale' (to borrow some LL parlance) for us. Your mileage may vary, of course... not everyone's situation is the same .

Are you saying just that you don't understand why others want a copy of what they said in the AR or that you don't think they should be able to get a copy? If you're against people getting a copy, why??? I can't see any possible reason why anybody would argue FOR them not including at least the name and subject in the RT email.

Though I don't do too many ARs, I do like getting the info - I just stuff it into it's own email folder and usually forget about it. And yes, I've sometimes gone back and looked through them in cases where the person being AR'ed turns out to be the alt of somebody else who had been AR'ed..

I've sent email to abuse manager several times in the past, if I thought I had some more info that applied to the AR.