Allow Harassment Reports to be submitted via Support Tickets
closed
Kiptin Resident
Currently, Abuse Reports for harassment in Second Life can only be submitted inworld, where the interface allows little more than a short paragraph and offers no practical way to attach supporting evidence. Reports can also be initiated through the Boxy chatbot, but that method is similarly limited and does not allow residents to fully document coordinated harassment. This makes it difficult to report situations that might also originate off-platform but result in a great degree of inworld disruption. Additionally, Linden Lab’s Support Ticket system only allows Abuse Appeal submissions, which occur after enforcement actions may already have been taken, leaving residents with no prior way to submit detailed context or evidence explaining the initial abuse.
Allowing harassment reports to be submitted via Support Tickets with adequate space and evidence attachments would benefit residents by enabling clearer, better-documented reports, while also supporting Linden Lab’s ability to review reports submitted by residents concerning harassment directed at Linden Lab staff. This would help Governance more efficiently investigate coordinated or bad-faith harassment campaigns affecting residents, staff, and the broader Second Life community, improving accuracy, fairness, and community safety.
If there are other methods to submit a detailed harassment report to Linden Lab with supporting evidence that will be investigated, then please include those methods in a reply or comments. Thank you for considering an improved reporting process that enables more thorough review of harassment.
Log In
Spidey Linden
marked this post as
closed
Hello, and thank you for your feature request.
Incoming suggestions are reviewed in the order they are received by a team of Lindens with diverse areas of expertise. We consider a number of factors: Is this change possible? Will it increase lag? Will it break existing content? Is it likely that the number of residents using this feature will justify the time to develop it? This wiki page further describes the reasoning we use: Feature Requests
This particular suggestion, unfortunately, cannot be tackled at this time. However, we regularly review previously deferred suggestions when circumstances change or resources become available.
We are grateful for the time you took to submit this feature request. We hope that you are not discouraged from submitting others in the future. Many excellent ideas to improve Second Life come from you, our residents. We can’t do it alone.
Thank you for your continued commitment to Second Life.
GreenLantern Excelsior
The Linden Lab Community Standards, which include the category of Harassment, apply to "all products, services, and environments offered or hosted by Linden Lab, including but not limited to, its websites, servers, software, forums, and blogs." So Governance is not going to take action if someone posts harassing content in a place that LL does not control, like social media websites or in someone's personal blog. Those places are outside of LL's "jurisdiction," so they can't control what happens there and they can't confirm who said what. Inside Second Life, Governance can look at recent chat logs and verify that an Abuse Report documents what actually happened, then take action from there. So if you're filing an Abuse Report about someone's post about you on Facebook, just be aware that nothing will happen as a result.
Kiptin Resident
Hey, Hal -- I'd argue that the results of off-platform harassment (e.g. facebook posts and online blogs or articles) that manifest as disruptive behavior
inworld
on the Second Life platform clearly falls within Governance's jurisdiction. This includes targeting residents, staff, merchants, or perceived competition; intimidating their customers and visitors; disrupting their events and communities; and filing false abuse reports against them.As others here have mentioned, coordinated harassment (against both residents and staff) often involves repeated behavior by the same individual(s), yet there's currently no way to submit historical evidence or supporting context. How else is Governance able to more easily recognize patterns to even prioritize deeper investigation like reviewing chat logs (as you mentioned) or looking at the history of other inworld abuses, targeted harassment, and similar complaints involving the same individual(s).
This is why we're asking that support tickets be allowed as an additional option for submitting harassment reports.
SL Feedback
Merged in a post from Satyrn Resident:
Title: Ability to expand upon Report Abuse reports
Details: Not sure if it's a thing already and I'm unaware of it, but it would be really nice to be able to further elaborate over the situation as well as attach multiple photos/videos of the matter you are reporting. While I rarely find myself needing to report someone, the single IW screenshot and limited text box don't feel like enough. The single photo doesn't allow demonstration of a situations progression, which is usually always escalating (at least when it comes to land affairs lol)
It would be nice to be able to add to reports the same way we can add additional context to support tickets.
Playing Possum
SL Feedback I strongly agree with this request. The current Abuse Report tools are inadequate for documenting complex or coordinated harassment, especially when behavior spans multiple platforms or escalates over time. The inability to attach evidence such as screenshots, chat logs, off-platform messages, or timelines makes it extremely difficult for residents to clearly demonstrate patterns of abuse or bad-faith reporting.
This is not a theoretical issue. I have friends who are being harassed to the point that even after blocking the individuals involved, the harasser continues to post screenshots of their new comments on various posts—content that could only be accessed by using alternate accounts to deliberately circumvent blocks. There is currently no practical way to document or clearly explain this kind of block evasion and coordinated behavior using the in-world Abuse Report system.
In my own case, I am being actively targeted through persistent misgendering, hate speech, and harassment, including threats of real-life violence made against me outside of Second Life and carried back into the community. Situations involving threats of physical harm, doxxing, or stalking require detailed context and supporting evidence to be properly evaluated. Limiting reports to a short paragraph with no attachments severely undermines resident safety and Governance’s ability to respond appropriately.
Allowing harassment reports to be submitted via Support Tickets—with adequate space and the ability to attach supporting evidence—would greatly improve accuracy, fairness, and efficiency for both residents and Linden Lab. It would also better enable Governance to identify coordinated or malicious harassment campaigns affecting residents and staff before they escalate further. An improved reporting process would be a meaningful step toward community safety, accountability, and trust in enforcement decisions.
Moon Pudding
I support this! I’ve dealt with so many griefers at locations I’ve built to bring fun, free experiences to other players on both mainland and private. Sometimes banning them from the land does the job but not when it’s a large group of individuals with multiple accounts at their disposal. I also had to deal with another user who wrote multiple racial slurs about myself and others in a pick. They had done the same to another POC who owned a popular hangout. The reports went nowhere and the picks remained despite reports. It’s a bit disheartening to users who invest time and money into this company so yes, it will be great to see changes to the abuse reports as well as follow ups so it doesn’t feel like they are being ignored.
Zippy Banana
Agreed on this.
I think many residents have witnessed how social media has long been used, to create inworld drama and attacks to residents inworld; which eventually go on to actually develop harassment and vindictive campaigns. All of these have been manipulated by sociopathic trolls, the cantankerous and ill-tempered personalities and some very vindictive people, who unfortunately have soured the grid by using social media as another troll technique in the armory.
Unfortunately LL seem to have the head in the sand in this matter for far too long, resident enjoyment and safety is paramount no matter what they choose to be. Frankly many sour minds and trolls have been abusing Facebook, Wordpress (and other easy accessible platforms), to shoehorn in another brand of in-world harassment. Using multiple alts to abuse the report system to get others loss of service etc. Problem is they know they can get off with it too. It's almost like being bullied twice, once by the villain and one by an apathetic system, that's grossly archaic vs the varied psychology of modern online world. The In-world report system does nothing and no transparency to see reports are taken seriously.
This is wholly unacceptable, when such action allows using outside third party forums and websites to cause attention to evoke harm, bullying and wrongful stigmas etc, when such tactics are spread over communication lines. Especially when such harassment can be manipulated, people misdirected and info leaked inworld regarding harassed subjects, which can also cross affect a residents enjoyment.
Such as having access to regions, stores and freedom of the grid taken away by uninformed residents, due to reading and having access to such biased and manipulated content; that is geared from its very inception to manipulate the public ignorance and anger etc... to sedate a personal issue. Second Life needs an anti-bullying charter and expand its harassment reports with better clarity and wider subject matter.
As a forefront thought... It's not as if Linden Labs don't know this goes on, in fact the last time Lab had themselves been harassed and staff doxxed by same tactics. You would have thought they would have learned from the issue, to have these situations rectified for everyone... but that's another story entirely.
It's a disgrace!!
Judy Wunderland
100% agree
Beatrice Voxel
SL at least sends you an acknowledgement that your report was received (altho' for 'reasons' they refuse to update you beyond this point, whether the report resulted in any action being taken, or not). It seems that this would be an excellent vector for followup information, attachments, or even references to prior Abuse Reports.
I know of one "account" (many many many alts, all with the same name included in them) that targets groups with anti-Semitic and racist screeds, accusing group owners and members of illegal age-related behavior, etc. Reporting each new account does not connect any prior history, but some kind of ticketing system that would allow these prior reports to be 'tagged' as a continued harassment campaign would be invaluable, both to Residents that are tired of playing whack-a-moron, and to support staff/AI routines in finding patterns and hopefully locating the actual account/RW person responsible.
Metmes Zerbino
I support anything that really takes the problem of stalkers and harassment seriously. There are really real psychopaths whose purpose in life seems to be harassing, persecuting, tormenting, slandering and insulting other SL residents. Linden Lab would have to do much more about this. The ability to submit a detailed report with enough space for documentation would be a great relief.
And, of course, there should also be serious consequences that really alleviate the problem.
HollyKrampus Resident
Agree. More should be done to uphold the TOS, rules & stalking laws. Otherwise what is the point
Violete Beaumont
I support this enhancement!
Load More
→