Frustrations Lead To Resident Created Petition

I was reading Nalates Urriah’s blog when I noticed a post about the commerce team. Now the commerce team aren’t exactly top of people’s Christmas card lists at the moment, they come in for a lot of stick, rightly or wrongly, and in many cases wrongly. However their communications are abysmal, although my understanding is that they are working on this as well as trying to get the Jira team to allow others to read marketplace related Jira’s. The changes to the Jira with regards to reading other reports are quite frankly, abysmal.

However back to the point, Nalates post linked to a petition that a Second Life resident has created, currently with over three hundred and sixty signatures. The petition is aimed at Linden Lab, rather than the commerce team and is basically a list of frustrations regarding DMCA, Abuse Reports that seem toothless and viewers that connect to the grid with capabilities of circumventing the permissions system to copy content.

At its heart, this petition demonstrates the lack of engagement with Linden Lab on these issues and again I have to say that Linden Lab’s communications are in all too many areas, awful. There are exceptions, the server team do a fine job but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. They should be the example.

However the problem I have with the petition is that it’s short on suggestions on how to fix the problems.

I’m not going to copy the whole petition but at the start we see:

“Due to company detachment from its customer base and a failing abuse reporting system Second Life has become a product where its clients are repeatedly victimized while thieves thrive.”

At the end we see:

“We have clear proof of harassment and extortion done from an individual toward other players and we have reliable information that countless Abuse Reports have been filed against that individual. Why isn’t Linden Lab doing the right thing? That person needs to be perma-banned. Enforce your Terms of Service and make the Abuse Report system work.”

There we can clearly see frustrations with the lack of engagement from Linden Lab and frustrations with what appears to be a toothless Abuse Report system. The lack of communication leads to people believing that thieves can thrive and that the Abuse Report system is toothless, I don’t actually buy this view. Second Life is not a product that allows thieves to thrive, thieves can take advantage, but some of these issues are to do with technology and are unavoidable.

As for the Abuse Report system, decisions are reached on evidence, the team look at the evidence and then make a judgement. They don’t need to explain their decision and we have seen complaints from people who complain they’ve been banned for no good reason. On the other hand, people are perma-banned or suspended, this does happen. However maybe it would be useful if we saw a return of the old Police Blotter. Tyche Shepherd still has a list of the old Incident Reports, which you can view here. The blotter is evidence of action being taken.

The people behind the petition should be looking to come up with constructive proposals on how to address issues. Linden Lab should be opening a dialogue with concerned residents. I can fully understand why Linden Lab won’t want to get into gory details on why some things can’t be done as they don’t want to publicise some issues, but they should be talking to concerned residents about issues. The lack of communication, really doesn’t help anyone.

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