follow up message or information on the outcome of abuse reports.
closed
DevinKnights84 Resident
user submits abuse report, LL investigate, LL take action or reject, then LL notify the reporting user with the results. This could reduce the amount of reports coming in & residents could see there is action being taken. Maybe abuse reports could have its own menu slot in the viewer or on profiles, where you see your past/current abuse reports listed & which have been closed or rejected etc.
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SL Feedback
Merged in a post from jackiewallace Resident:
Title: Follow-up Transparency and Feedback on Abuse Reports
Details: I would like to respectfully reopen the topic of transparency regarding Abuse Reports and the communication of their outcomes.
A previous feature request suggested that users be notified when their reports are investigated, acted upon, or closed - possibly with a simple status display within the viewer or on their profiles. The request was closed with a generic response, but the issue itself remains unresolved and highly relevant.
Currently, residents have no visibility into what happens after submitting an abuse report. This lack of feedback not only discourages responsible reporting but also undermines trust in the governance process. Without transparency, it is difficult for residents to feel that their reports are being taken seriously or handled effectively.
We fully understand that certain details must remain confidential, but even a minimal notification system (for example: Received → Under Review → Action Taken / Rejected) would greatly improve accountability and confidence in Linden Lab’s enforcement system.
Second Life thrives on community participation, but participation depends on trust. If users repeatedly experience silence after submitting reports, the inevitable result is apathy or migration to external, independent systems of reporting and protection — which would fragment the community further.
We therefore urge Linden Lab to reconsider this feature not as a convenience, but as an essential part of user trust and community integrity.
jackiewallace Resident
SL Feedback I believe that standing up for good ideas is always worth it - even when a feedback thread is closed by Maestro Linden, or when Linden Lab chooses not to acknowledge it.
Silence does not make a valuable thought less true.
If something has the potential to make the community fairer, safer, or more transparent, then it deserves to be voiced - again and again if necessary.
Progress rarely starts with approval; it starts with persistence.
Maestro Linden
marked this post as
closed
Hello, and thank you for your feature request.
While we really like this suggestion and we do plan to do something like it, we are not going to do it in the proposed fashion. Please keep an eye out for future releases and maybe you’ll see an approach we’ve taken that addresses your concerns.
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](
Feature Requests )
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.
Wicked Nightfall
Maestro Linden Thank you for confirming what we all already knew - Linden Labs does not care about our safety or the safety of children.
jackiewallace Resident
Maestro Linden Thank you for the "copy-paste" response, but if necessary, we do have the means to create a reporting and protection system completely independent from Linden Lab.
diamond Marchant
LOL no way would Linden Lab do this as it would likely be gamed by people... also LL has very few resources to address abuse reports so to give them more work would be counter productive
BIG NO
AlettaMondragon Resident
diamond Marchant Thousands of reports every day, morals going down the drain more and more every day (just like in real life), more and more people only caring about their own needs and the rules and other people are just in their way, yet only a handful of people handling abuse cases. There's the problem. Indeed first they need to hire more Governance Lindens and this time they should keep them, and changing their approach, attitude and the way they handle reports can only come after that.
Wolphin Fluffball
I think they could even just be replied into a private message window.
Even if it says "your report was investigated, found to have broken x rule, and action was taken" would be fine. I think the reporter should have the right to know what happened to their report. BUT also, the one reported.
I think it should keep a log tied to the use of the reports for a period (i.e. 2 years), and if there is reverse reporting... it also is investigated for if it's retribution, and if so, much harsher on the reporter.
Having it tied at both ends, would also allow for knowing if one often reports, and how often their outcome is true... and how often people report about a person.
AlettaMondragon Resident
Wolphin Fluffball To be honest some people are good enough at finding out who reported them even if they should have no idea. I usually don't report anything without contacting the person first and trying to resolve the issue in some civilized way, this is sometimes just extra stress and risk though, for example I was banned from more than 1000 regions recently, thanks to Rich Grainger, who along with his managers chose to harbor a person that kept a sex store in a General rated region, Green Tech. Hundreds of sexually explicit products, functional demos of sex furniture, all out there for 17 years old users potentially just walking in and exploring. Whether it is likely enough that any actual 17-year-old would end up there or not is irrelevant. It must not be allowed. Yet this region was General rated for who knows how long until I noticed it on July 3, contacted RGF management, the first manager told me they would change the region rating to Adult. They didn't do it before July 4 however, so once it was already July 5 after midnight Eastern Time I looked for another manager and he was more helpful, changed the region to Adult (as well as two Moderate regions of theirs having the same issue) and told me they would address this at their next staff meeting the next Monday. I didn't receive any message from any of them after that Monday, I just got banned from all of their regions. That is what you get for contacting people politely to try and resolve issues without filing abuse reports.
If you must still file abuse reports on them because they refused to resolve the problem on their own, and LL takes actions eventually, these people will call you a snitch, a Karen, fascist, communist, etc (this has happened to me very often), and they will never admit their fault or take responsibility. The person at fault according to them was the one that had the audacity to report them.
(Need to continue below due to unnecessary character limit.)
AlettaMondragon Resident
If you don't talk to them at all in order to avoid all of the above stress factors, and skip to the abuse report phase, it is still not granted you will just walk away and "live". If it is a private standalone region (no adjacent regions), you can hardly avoid being in range of their visitor trackers, and they will check who was there and make guesses, especially if you had to go back several times to report again and again, they will see the pattern clearly.
Even in mainland regions, it happened to me that I was reporting multiple adult items outdoors in clear view in General regions, and some of the owners added me to their parcel ban lists eventually, even though I had never talked to them and never entered their land. Were they using visitor trackers or security devices that were scanning the entire region? Quite likely. At least more likely than a Linden leaking the abuse reporter's name to these people, isn't it? Who knows.
In any case, when you need to report some abuse, the least you need is the abusive person retaliate and make your life even more difficult because you dared interfere with their God-given right to ignore clearly written rules and act like they are above said rules, real life law and other people. It is LL's job to deal with them, not ours, if we must report them, it shall be 100% safe and anonymous, and it must be only our own choice if we first contact these people and try to look for a peaceful resolution instead of involving LL.
Sorry, I didn't want to make this reply this long, it's a bit of a rant but all of it seemed very relevant.
MatthewRiver Resident
They don't care about abuse. I've reported so many ageplayers and they still roam freely and happily.
ValerieShepherd Resident
MatthewRiver Resident Yep! I've submitted so many abuse reports it's not even funny! Comes with owning a G rated region, sadly! Something desperately needs to be done!
AlettaMondragon Resident
Even if not the outcome due to "privacy reasons" (it's lovely when abusive people's right to their privacy is more important than their victims' rights but that's a different topic), at least a personal notification that the report has been reviewed would be useful.
Especially the way they handle abuse reports, "one report is no report" in most cases because they can't prove if it was deliberate, continuous abuse, and in many cases multiple reports over time by one person will grant no result either. Interestingly if several people happen to report the same thing independently, they act on it. In that case somehow, magically, the abusive behavior really proves abusive.
Nonsense, if something breaks the rules and affects people negatively, the fact that it has been reported shall be enough, the number of people reporting it might be a factor but the case must not depend on it. (For example a sex club or a dating agency in a General rated region - yes, those are still in Chopsaw and Romantic Reef - is clearly a violation of the rules, in fact these things should be monitored and sorted out without ARs proactively as well.)
So with a personal notification that the report was reviewed, even if not disclosing any details, filing the same reports again before the previous ones were reviewed could be avoided.
On the other hand, this "not disclosing details" approach doesn't matter much, it's relatively easy to tell if they acted upon certain cases or not. People who kept up their abusive behavior consistently and on purpose over some time and suddenly stopped, didn't just stop because they changed their mind or got bored. Sometimes even the severity of the actions can be seen very clearly. And sometimes these people disclose the results themselves because they feel like the Lab's actions weren't justified.
I think the way abuse cases are handled should be changed completely but it would be a good first step if the people who review reports would send some sort of notification to the reporter. Of course it's important to keep in mind there are thousands of new ARs being filed before they get to review some.
GreenLantern Excelsior
AlettaMondragon Resident Back in the days of extensive organized griefing, my group used to try to send in five Abuse Reports from five different people on every large attack, to get Linden Lab's attention. That's because the guidelines for sending Abuse Reports have not changed for many years:
"Whenever you see one of these rules being broken and you believe it to be intentional or malicious, everyone present at the scene should file an abuse report. If there are multiple incidents, file multiple reports.
File reports on any abuse you witness in addition to abuse that targets you personally. Not every Resident is aware of the abuse-reporting system or remembers to use it, so please help out your fellow Residents! Reports from multiple people underscore the seriousness of an incident."
When you think about it, this makes sense. One naked guy in an empty sandbox is not a high response priority. But if the Governance Team starts getting five or six reports about the same kind of problem in the same area, they will investigate. If you don't have a group where you can send a notice to get help writing reports, you can always grab some local residents who are being affected and ask them to send in ARs. If they don't know how to do it, you can send them the link above and they will learn a new skill.
Linden Lab used to have a web page called the Police Blotter, where they would document some of the more serious Abuse Reports they received recently and record the results. They didn't name names, but they did show the dates and the affected regions. If someone said "They don't care about abuse," you could simply supply the link to the Police Blotter page to demonstrate that they did care. But that's gone now too, along with other good things from the past.
I can understand how you wouldn't want to invite liability by publicizing someone's disciplinary action, but it seems to me that it would be courteous for Linden Lab to send a response, saying "Thank you for writing an Abuse Report. Your report was found to be valid, and the Governance Team has taken action." Or the opposite, if the report was invalid and they took no action. That would be valuable feedback, and it would (probably) improve the quality of subsequent ARs that they receive while not revealing anyone's private information.
Wicked Nightfall
There is no abuse department as why nothing ever gets done.
Aser Corvinus
Wicked Nightfall Right I had one threaten to come to my city, by name find out where I work and live and kill me all gyazo's reported then and there and logged in everyday thereafter. Not a single thing was ever done.
Monroe Ghost
Wicked Nightfall Someone looks into them . I reported 2 profiles for racist comments and LL deleted the offending flags and words. I know LL did it because the user was furious that LL had accessed his account. Also if you have seen the dozens of 1 day accounts with the user name Timberwood included you will see they do only last one day. Unfortunately banning his 1 day account is pointless because he just keeps coming back.
Wicked Nightfall
Monroe Ghost Good point - I also reported a neighbor on the mainland for racist flags. I reported each one and within a week they were gone. True they are there for some issues but there needs to be a better system in place as a lot does get ignored by them.