I thought gambling was banned.... ???

Club Fairplay is still going strong. Taking $ in, paying out. ???

Gambling is banned but...

As the ban was implemented wihout notice, it isn't surprising that not everyone affected knows or has acted upon it - some people may be on holiday or only log on over the weekend.

Not everyoone in SL knows about the blog or even the forums, let alone checks them on a daily basis. A blog isn't a very good method to rely on for notifying everyone of policy changes (and probably wouldn't hold up in court if challenged).

The top four items from the blog are displayed when you start up SL (if you wait long enough before logging in). However the gambling ban is currently down to number 3 and may vanish off soon. In any case "Wagering in Second Life: New Policy" isn't a very descriptive title, so I suspect many have read that heading without realising it means that gambling is now banned.

LL stated means of enforcing the policy is "Our staff will review, investigate and respond to appropriate notices... When we discover objects or games within Second Life that meet the policy’s definition, we will remove them from Second Life. Any user who consistently violates the policy or our Terms of Service will be suspended" i.e. on a first offence, the gambling devices will be deleted, only on consistent offenses will an account be suspended, so I suspect many will continue to run gambling devices until LL gets around to deleting them (and if an account is suspended for a first offense, the supension can be contested on the grounds that the offender wasn't aware of the ban due to the lack of notice and the inadequate mechanism used to notify people).

Matthew

Edit: The rolling restart has just pushed the "Wagering in Second Life" down to fourth place. There's now a good chance that it will get pushed off the New and announcements before those who only log on at weekends get a chance to see it. Anyone want to make a wager on that

They need to make "GAMBLING IS HEREBY BANNED IN SECOND LIFE" their Message Of The Day when logging in.

If they're serious about it, LL will send out an email attached to each and every avatar stating the new rules, to give people a chance to clear out on their own.

I may be wrong... but given that the new policies are directly related to the TOS, would it not be prudent for LL to cover their bases by sending out a revised TOS agreement for all users to peruse, accept or decline via the client?

Isn't that "new gambling policy" entry on the login screen kinda already telling them what's up? How much hand holding does LL need to do??

Everyone that's paying attention already knows what's up.

Looking for clubs I ran into a few casinos, although they were deserted. I never cared much about them. One dance club in SL I visited nuked their casino portion and expanded the dance floor and added a automated trivia question thingy. They still have an sploder although it looks like the script was modified to enter it for free instead of $L10 or whatever.

Yeah, pretty much every time a significant change is made on WoW, you have to accept the agreement again. I'm not saying people actually READ it - I generally don't - but it gives Blizzard a better standing if someone breaks the rules. Not, "Oh, you once agreed to our rules many moons ago," but "You recently agreed to our updated rules, so you should have known."

Not necessarily. Not everyone pays attention to the blog entries, not everyone is an English speaker/reader, not everyone even uses the official client to run SL anymore (so in some cases, the blog entries don't even show up).

This a pretty major change to the TOS. Considering it was a move made in relation to laws that govern the running of SL, one would hope LL would take all reasonable precautions to make every active user aware of this change.

LOL..one more post and the blog about the ban is off the log-in page anyway. Typical LL BS.

Yup agreed about the WoW client and it probably should be implemented here, especially when it's such a major change of ToS.

That's not LL's fault. They can't be expected to support non-LL viewers. They also DO have non-english viewers out there.

If you're doing business with another country you damn well better know the language!



Yeah, I stand by my statement that everyone paying attention already knows what's up. If you're not looking at the login screen even for a second then it's your problem.

I'm sure that although the changes have been implemented effective imediately, LL is going to float a week or two before responding to AR's, or actively seeking out violations because I'm sure that they know not everyone involved in SL is on every day. Smarter casino owners are probably intentionally dragging their feet, and/or waiting on a warning before shutting down. Imagine the boost in traffic when 95 percent of the competition has already closed down.

I don't disagree that the smart ones look at their login screens, but from a legal perspective, a ban on gambling isn't really enforcable if it comes to the point where you can *prove* you never agreed a TOS with such a ban. If LL does not take the effort to do this one time mass inform (and really, that's all it is - the need for all users to agree *once* to this revised TOS), they could be held liable should an angry casino owner suddenly decide to take LL to court for some legitimate or illegitimate reason.

As it stands, no one user has acknowledged, agreed or declined any change to the TOS.

I guess you're the legal expert!

I'd at least do random "Check the bloody d*mn blog for news, you morons!" announcemensts from time to time.

I find it funny that people expect to have their hand held when IRL the law doesn't really work that way. You can't get out of something because you didn't read the latest revisions to the law. Ignorance is no excuse.

Also, it's been confirmed that they are going to be working on this using the "broadly offensive" tactics of relying on snitches' ARs for the most part. Either way I don't think they're going to hand out bans and take money in the first week of this new policy. Probably just a warning and a deadline to get rid of their stuff or next time the penalty will be worse.

A lot of people forget that LL is incredibly under-staffed and spread thin. Why do you think SL has as many technical issues as it does??

Everytime my banking terms and conditions change I get sent a letter. If the banks didn't do that they'd be in a whole lot of trouble.

Actually, this may be a great time to start a casino and tell everyone about it... just for the reason that the big ones are all closing down already. Keep going until LL deletes your machines and hope that they don't ban you as well.

BTW- I am ARing every casino I am still finding. being a snitch is fun.

Come to Colette's Cacino

While everyone else is being shut down - we aren't!

Why? Becuase we dont have any gambling, Thats Why!!

Just Elvis and Wayne Newton Impersonators.

1.) The "speak english or die" mentality is quite racist.

2.) No one does business with another country. SL customers do business with Linden Lab, who, as you said, support foreign customers by offering the software in multiple languages.

3.) If now completely LL fails to announce important TOS changes to their customers (the blog is read by 34 techies only), not to speak of announcing policy changes in all languages supported by their software, it's hardly the customer's fault.



4.) The prohibition came and went in the USA. I bet people who denunciated underground bars and their neighbours were really popular afterwards.

The TOS isn't a law - it's an agreement between a company and the end user. By agreeing to it, you agree to user their software and services based on that agreement. As users of computer programs, you and I come up against this every time we install a program.

Whether the upholding of that agreement in the case of LL actually happens from their end is up to them, certainly.

I don't want to be arguing *for* casino owners here, and for sure, there was fair warning from LL as far as the fate of casinos months ago. THat's not what i'm debating here.

The fact remains that major changes to administrative policy have taken place - and given that no users have actually been presented with the opportunity to accept or decline them, this presents a big liability, especially since end users are effectively putting in an investment here (whether there is return or not).

Let's put it this way... if LL suddenly decided let's say.... to make a major change to the way they dealt with your private information... and didn't bother to make it known to its users in the form of an official notice of change in the TOS... would you be upset?

LOLOLOL that's a funny definition of racism. inaccurate, but funny.

You're joking, right? Good one. hehe.

I do think a notification of a change in the TOS is needed...I also think it's coming. This isn't the first policy change they've done. I'm sure there's a reason why we haven't seen it yet.

Maybe this is the grace period that the gamblers are getting?

Either way, if I was playing a Japanese online game I'd make sure to know Japanese before I started putting real $$ into it.

Same with SL...if I was counting on RL$$ being involved, be it income or expenses, I would sure as hell pay attention to that front page!

Many were unaware of the advertising ban - why? because it is not mentioned in the TOS or Community Standards. Also the TOS and Community Standards do not mention either the blog nor the support portal as having additional policies or rules. As such, it is totally unreasonable to expect a new signup to be aware that they need to look through blog archives or search the support portal to find additional rules and regulations. However with a few days, that is exactly what LL is expecting people to do in order to know that gamlbing is prohibited in SL even though it may be perfectly legal in their jurisdiction (and again expecting them to know what is or isn't illegal in California is unreasonable).

I'm not talking about the casino barons who run major gambling sims here, I'm talking about the little person here. I suspect we will see a number of situations where a new sign up, buys a 512sqm piece of land, pays a few 1000L$ on a slot machine (there'll probably be a few for sale) to help cover their tier/premium membership and when it gets deleted come on the forums to complain saying that there was nothing in the community standards warning them. Telling them that they could have found out by going through 5 pages of blog, or going to a page in the support portal you can't give a link to, isn't going to appease them.

Matthew