Peering Inside: Massively abusive
by Tateru Nino 
Mar 31st 2008 at 10:30AM
Filed under: Culture, Opinion, Second Life, Virtual worlds, Peering Inside
At any time that a Second Life user feels that someone in their vicinity (or objects in their vicinity) violates Linden Lab's Terms of Service, or the Second Life Community Standards, that user can file an abuse report, which is then forwarded to Linden Lab's abuse team for processing via a request tracker.
Each report, we are told, is examined and action taken where appropriate. Every account has a record which is to be assessed to determine ongoing abuse. An established resource and record of actions apparently exists to determine consistency of judgment.
But that can't be the whole story.
We've poked the abuse tracker to figure out approximately how many abuse reports are submitted by users. At peak this seems to be as many as two per minute. That's one every 30 seconds. There seem to be slower periods where it may be as much as a couple of minutes between reports.
Let's just count how many people process those reports. Let's see...
Eight. The whole team is eight people.
Of course those eight are spread out over 24 hours and 7 days. That means as few as one and as many as two or three at once processing.
So, in the event of an abuse report being submitted to Linden Lab, a staff member has between 30 seconds and maybe a minute to look at the abuse report, decide what to do, and take action. Anything more and reports are falling on the floor, unexamined.
As far as care goes, that's got to be about as personal as a thunderstorm.
If abuse reports are anything like requests to the old Live Help system, then the majority of them likely don't contain even enough information to find out who did what to whom. Given the figures and staffing, it is highly unlikely that an abuse team member can spare a moment to verify any fact or detail. There's probably barely time to put a note in the account's record if there is even enough information to do so.
We can only guess at how many abuse reports get thrown away for insufficient data. Most of them, perhaps. Many more because there simply isn't time to check anything. A matter would have to be quite extraordinary to draw as much as a minute's attention within an hour or so of the issue being filed.
It is hard to imagine a worse job at Linden Lab, to be honest (except perhaps CEO). Take action against an account, and there are complaints. Don't take action against an account and there are more complaints. Knowing that there's no way to do an effective job and no way to follow up.
Eight people to handle the abuse-report workload of between 32,000 and 65,000 users, 24 by 7. Abuse reports that are probably largely deficient or unverifiable. Plus, of course, some users feel that they should encourage others to file false abuse reports to draw attention to some particular social agenda.
That's just not a workable system. Just how do you handle more than 2000 abuse items in one day without losing your mind?
Maybe you don't.
Linden Lab has set up an option so that the owner of an estate can receive abuse reports filed within their estate and handle those reports themselves. That's probably good for Linden Lab, but it allows only narrow and local actions to take place.
It also would seem to require the reporting user to pay more attention to where they are on the grid at the moment they submit an abuse report. If they're not within a Linden-owned mainland simulator, there's no guarantee that one of the inadequately provisioned abuse team is going to see the report.
Of course, there's not much chance that it will get more than 30 seconds attention anyway.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Cyn said on 10:54AM 3-31-2008
Interesting. You might want to interview a few large/prominent estate owners to find out what *they* do with abuse reports submitted by avatars on their land.
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Tenebrous Pau said on 11:08AM 3-31-2008
I suspect that the abuse team has a few nice shortcuts to deal with the simple/common reports, like a button next to an AR which says "Ban this person for 1 day for xyz reason", which does the job and automatically adds a note to the account.
I wonder what percentage of the abuse reports are those 'simple' or 'common' things that result in a 1 day ban. If the 8 people in the team deal with 95% of the reports by hitting "Ban this person for 1 day" button, then the other 5% which are complicated probably get the time required to investigate properly.
Presumably, also, those 8 abuse team members can delegate to liasons or other Lindens to do the actual grunt work... perhaps the 8 members literally are like a call center and just resolve quickly with one button-push, or hand to someone further down the line.
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Ari Blackthorne said on 1:42PM 3-31-2008
I'm an estate owner and I have the reports set to come to me. Though, there seems to be a bug in the current RC viewer where adding the email address in there doesn't seem to 'stick' once the preference window is closed.
Either way, I plan to investigate, should anything like this come my way. If it turns out to be a false report ( I hear many are AR-ing child avies as RL underagers to get their accounts frozen) - I'll banned the reporter from my estates. If the one being reported is to be at fault - same thing.
Of course, not everyone will be banned - that's for the heavy-duty offenses - serious griefing, etc. But other than some kind of temporary or permanent ban, what else can I do? Nothing.
And - my actions affect only my estates.
So... I don't know how well this particular method will work.
We'll see, I guess
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Cyn said on 3:12PM 3-31-2008
Thanks for commenting, Ari.
The ARs I've submitted are pan-SL things, like repeated obnoxious spamming via notecard. Just banning them from an estate would do no good whatsoever. An estate owner can't suspend an account for ToS violations, either, right?
Ari Blackthorne said on 4:54PM 3-31-2008
"An estate owner can't suspend an account for ToS violations, either, right?"
Exactly.
As an estate owner, I have no more power than ANY other land-owner. Notecard spamming is notorious - I hate it. Fortunately I don't receive it often enough for it to be that much of a bother.
And that's handled through profiles, so it doesn't matter if they're banned from your parcel or estate or whatever. Supposedly, Linden Lab will get copies of abuse reports that are directed toward estate owners.
As for 'powers' of discipline - I can see where banning would help. For instance - someone comes to the store of one of my tenants and drops landmarks to their competing store on all the people there. I can ban them from the estate and they can't even TP to the island. Of course, they can just go and make another account (But I don't allow anyone younger than 7-days to stay - they automatically are TP's home for this reason.)
Unless, of course, as an estate owner who receives a more serious SR - I (estate owners / concierge customers) carry any more weight - or are taken more seriously if we bring that particulat AR to LL?
I really don't know.
All I was saying is that I would take the report seriously, and actually investigate it. Not swipe the hand of 'discipline' in a wide swath without thinking about it. And I would report in detail my findings to both (or all) parties.
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