Back in the day Second Life used to list the 25 most recent offences in what was known as the Police Blotter. Later on it became the incident report. These reports looked like this:
Date: Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Violation: Community Standards: Indecency, Global Standards
Region: Ahern
Description: Offensive language in IM.
Action taken: Warning issued.
Being as that offence took place in Ahern you can’t help but wonder whether the issue was using offensive language in IM, whereas in Ahern it’s traditional to be abusive in local chat. Some of the offences fall into the bizarre category, such as what appears to have been the St Patrick’s day massacre:
Date: Friday, March 17, 2006
Violation: Community Standards: Violations using Alternate Accounts
Region: —
Description: Use of primary and alternate accounts for mafia “hits” on residents.
Action taken: Suspended 14 days.
We see examples of offences that were serious enough to be listed but had a touch of humour about them:
Date: Friday, June 30, 2006
Violation: Second Life: Respect, Pets
Region: Arabian Nights
Description: Hedgehogs will be respected, dammit!
Action taken: Warning issued.
Date: Saturday, July 8, 2006
Violation: Terms of Service: Adult Allowing Teen Access to MG
Region: Hawaii
Description: “My little brother did it.”
Action taken: Suspended 14 days.
Then we see examples of action being taken because of abusive behaviour in the forums, spamming event listings, nudity in profiles and using real world trademarks to sell goods in Second Life:
Date: Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Violation: Event Listings Abuse: Spam
Region: Dryas
Description: Repeated spamming of the events.
Action taken: Suspended 3 days.
Date: Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Violation: Forum Informal Warning: Spamming, Trolling, Flaming
Region: —
Description: Spamming Lindens to unlock a thread.
Action taken: Warning issued.
Date: Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Violation: Forum Banning – Misuse of Forums
Region: —
Description: Continued egregious flaming and trolling of other Residents, numerous accumulated repeat violations of the forum Guidelines, including personal disputes and attacks.
Action taken: Suspended 14 days.
Date: Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Violation: Terms of Service: Trademark Violation
Region: Extraordinaire
Description: Using real-world trademarks on products sold in SL.
Action taken: Warning issued.
Date: Wednesday, August 2, 2006
Violation: Indecency: Global Standards: Profile
Region: Ahern
Description: Nudity in profile images.
Action taken: Warning issued.
Now whereas some of these reports are humouorous, others show action against offences that people complain about today. The Police blotter was evidence that Linden Lab could point to in order to exemplify that they did take action against people abusing the service.
The weird and the wonderful appeared there but you could also see that some actions weren’t acceptable. People definitely still complain about spamming of events, indeed some claim that the problem is that events are no longer policed and with no Police Blotter to check, it’s hard to argue with that. Events use their usefulness when they are full of spam as people can’t find the good events.
If you want to take a look at the old Police Blotter I suggest going to the wayback machine and starting here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20051223090920/http://secondlife.com/community/blotter.php
Tyche Shepherd has a better way of searching incident reports on Grid Survey. There you can search incidents by region, description or violation. The incidents are between June 2007 and December 2010, so a bit later than the ones I listed from the wayback machine, but it is a much easier way of viewing incidents, you can find them at:
http://www.gridsurvey.com/blotter.php
Grid Survey also has a chart showing how many reports were published per month during this period and there you can see that they certainly reduced over time, but whether that was because less incidents were reported or less incidents were investigated and published isn’t clear.
Interesting stuff…. well it’s interesting to me!
The “police blotter” wasn’t a bad idea at all, if you ask me. InnoGames’ MMO strategy game Ikariam has something like that; it’s called the “pillory” (quite fittingly). The forums and feeds really need a far stricter moderating policy, as there is a pile of vociferous garbage that uses these platforms (as well as armies of alts/sockpuppets) to harass residents.
As for the “profiles must be safe even for Walt Disney’s intended audience” policy, I’m against it. Here, LL should take a few lessons from Flickr and allow residents to determine the intended audience for their profiles and intervene when a resident is too stupid to understand how maturity ratings work.
The Police blotter was a great idea and it’s interesting to see that the forums and events were included rather than just inworld behaviour.
They were at one time flitering out profiles as some people weren’t showing in search if you weren’t searching all ratings, I can recall someone finding they didn’t show in general because they had submissive in their profile.
Profiles should have maturity ratings, it’s silly to have adult land but using a PG profile to mention it, direct conflict there.
Indeed, maturity ratings need to be brought to profiles. Not having them is idiotic. However, Linden Lab needs to classify harassment and cyberbullying as severe griefing and adopt a zero tolerance stance on it.
“Description: Hedgehogs will be respected, dammit!” <— That made me smile.
Since the mysterious governance board in SL never replies to the abuse reports we file, that old blotter was really the only way you discovered if a complaint had been actioned.
Random factoid: In the States, the police blotter is the life's blood for most local newspapers.
Yup, the old blotter was a way of seeing action being taken, even if you didn’t know specifically who was involved in the incident.