any news on the "broadly offensive" scandle?

anyone news or anything more comments about the banning from the lindons or know if they commented any more since it looked like it all went quite?

Just seams like they've gone quite about it or ignoring the comments completely.

They always make these announcements on weekends so they can run away for a few days to figure out what they mean. This time they threw us a curve. They announced on Thursday, then made more announcements on some other topics to throw us off, then ran away for the weekend.

I'm guessing you haven't seen this yet:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2007/06/broadly_ambival.html#more

That doesn't help.

You see the 2nd paragraph of the original blog suggests business as usual: "continuing to notify Linden Lab about locations in-world that are violating our Community Standards regarding broadly offensive and potentially illegal content." could means report stuff which violates the CS that broadly offensive material must only be in mature areas and not PG ones.

However, the first paragraph suggests that broadly offensive material isn't allowed anywhere.

The interview initially suggests that it is all business as usual, nothing has changed - i.e. no adult stuff in PG areas, be considerate of others in public areas, a few extreme things (e.g. illegally copied material, paedophilic material etc.) aren't allowed, but then he says "our Community Standards have always prohibited broadly offensive behavior" which actually contradicts the wording in the CS ("anything else broadly offensive must be contained within private land in areas rated Mature (M)." causing the confusion to set in once more.

So is broadly offensive prohibited as per Daniel's current statements, or allowed in mature areas as per the CS? Does "broadly offensive" in Daniel's statements actually mean something much stronger than "broadly offensive" in the CS, in which case why use the same wording which would cause confusion. I gather Daniel wrote/helped write the CS, so should have been the last person to have inititated and then prolonged this confusion.

It's not a scandal. It's just a poorly thought-out and ambiguously worded blog entry asking residents to turn themselves into the SL police.

Maybe Dan took Friday off this week?

Thanks for the link Daniel Linden says in this interview:



I find that quite outrageous. In his blog post, he threatens land owners and content creators with immediate account ban and loss of all their property. And then he says that it would be foolish to catalog everything we can get banned, disowned and financially ruined for? Imagine RL laws would work on this basis, we'd all live in fear the whole time. Fear that someday the government may arbitrarily deem our own behaviour offensive and punishable.

Laws always need to be clearly defined. And yes, everything not defined as illegal by the law automatically becomes legal and has to be tolerated. A community, any community, can't possibly work on the basis of "Just behave and use common sense to figure out what might offend your neighbours". Because everything could possibly be offensive to them.

Daniel also contradicts himself. First he says:



According to this statement, it's the community feedback what dictates the rules. 120 people report a certain behaviour as offensive, and millions of people need to bow to their judgement; not exactly democratic. It means that everything will be illegal sooner or later, since everyone has something which they are strongly against (religion, bling particle effects and pink hair in my case). But then he says:



This means that the resident's opinion decides jack squat. It's LL who makes the rules and decides what is appropriate, based on the Community Standards which only say that offensive content belongs in mature areas.

So, what is it? Judgement "according to the expressed wishes of the residents", or according to what "is appropriate to our stated Community Standards"? That's a big difference for me. According to the CS, all of my content is fine on mature land. According to the judgement of groups of residents, everything I create, be it a bondage device or a field of tulips, could lead to me losing account, business and land.

This ambiguous new policy and the recent court ruling on the unenforcablity of the SL TOS will open up LL to massive lawsuits from anyone who may be banned or lose business. LL really needs to have all policies reviewed by a GOOD legal team, something, along with anyone who understands business, they seem to be lacking at this time.

And blogs may be nice for informal communication of information and ideas it is a terrible way to present policy to your customers. No formal changes in policy should ever be released without a through review by your legal, marketing and managemnt teams.

I find this thread broadly offensive. AR's sent.

Hey, there's an idea. Let's everybody AR Daniel Linden - for disruptive behavior, harrassment, trolling and abusive posting (on the blog), and especially for being broadly offensive to the SL community - easily demonstrable from this forum alone. Sounds like griefing to me.

I was/am against the Official Linden Blog, because blogs were always meant to be more about personal opinion than corporate professionalism. It was fine when it was used by employees as a means to communicate personal ideas/opinions on the product to the players, because that was just an added dimension to the world and it's designers. But to use it as the only form of 'official communication' to the users? What we get is one person's opinion taken as a 'formal' announcement and because it's a blog, it's not as regulated by management as it should be. After all, what harm can come from a blog? *snort*

Hope you're right, Raudf. If so, then this whole brouhaha exists only because LL is in need of adult supervision. Which we already knew.

"All that is not mandatory is forbidden. All that is not forbidden is mandatory."

There, that wasn't too difficult, was it?

AR sent for naming.

NWN should not be taken seriously for this thing, they're essentially linden backed (they are often heavily linked from even the main page) and they toe the linden line when it comes to their posts.