Dealing with abandoned groups and trolls.
Zandrae Nova
An abandoned group is a group where the owner and moderators capable of changing settings in a group have all left Second Life or the group in question.
Problem: Some very old very large groups exist with thousands of users who are unmoderated resulting in constant trolling. Recently one troll who creates a new account every day to bypass blocks was promoting real life violence against minorities. People join these groups trying to find someone to play with because they are large and people want to cast a wide net. Instead they have this super negative experience.
Solution:
When a group no longer has an owner or officers who can manage the group in the group or the owner / officers have not been online in X time, do one or more of these:
- Disable group chat for the everyone role. If there's no one to moderate, it's probably best to not have chat. If an owner returns, they can always change it back. This shuts down trolling and compromised accounts.
- Disable notices in abandoned groups. Same reason as #1. Shuts down trolling and compromised accounts.
- Disable joining these abandoned groups. They're effectively dead, people shouldn't join them as they will have a degraded experience. If an owner comes back, they can enable this again.
- Delist these abandoned groups from search. Again, these groups are unmoderated and probably shouldn't be listed. If an owner comes back they can always list it again.
- After y years of being abandoned, if there are no avatars in owner rank or with access to officer powers, and there is nothing deeded to the group, delete it entirely.
These changes will help users in the following ways:
- Group search will no longer be a graveyard of dead and unmoderated groups.
- People will be able to find groups with players in them that play.
- Players will have an improved quality of life by finding people with less seeing trolls promoting violence against people irl.
Thanks for reading.
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Vanity Byron
Instead of disbanding the group. Linden Labs could pit group up for sale if group creator and group officers are away from Second Life for more than 6 months ,a automated group notice could be sent saying "this group is now for sale" put it for sale 100 lindens ,if no one purchases group in 14 days then close the group ,it is highly doubtful that any of the trolls would bother to buy the group, let alone have 100 lindens .
W
Walt Finesmith
I would agree, although I would add:
If a group owner as well as any moderators, fail to login in for more than 30 days, proceed as above.
If a group remains abandoned, prior to deleting it kick allembers so they don't end up with a group membership they can do nothing about.
If, after x months a group owner has failed to login butoderators still do, offer the moderators a chance to take ownership.
Isabella Cinder
I second that.
Furthermore, the people trying to cast a "wide net" are mislead by dead groups with a lot of offline accounts and zero to no way of knowing average last login date (you could even try checking the 'members and roles tab to infer if the group is active but most people don't even know that and those who do, trust me, it's a hassle scrolling that to infer activity, unreliable at best, and most times the list doesn't even load properly on too large groups).
This is clutter, not community. It doesn't help giving the impression that "SL is big", it does the opposite.
Haridsam Resident
Totally agree. Disable them, and delete after a year at most. There is so much clutter in all search...