Linden Lab Adds Kick & Ban Tools to Sansar in Wake of Harassment Reports

Days after Linden Lab staff reported harassment by their own users in Sansar, Linden Lab has announced tools for banning and kicking designated users. Ryan Schultz with the scoop. Frankly, the tools as described seem a bit taxing for everyday use:

To ban a user from an experience, you need to add the user’s Avatar ID to the ban list. To add a user to the ban list:

1. Access the publishing options panel from the My Experiences app.
2. Under your chosen experience in the My Experiences panel, click the Publishing options  button.
3. Under Who can visit, click Edit list next to Banned users are never allowed to visit.
4. In the Edit ban list panel, click Add.
5. In the Add Someone panel, type the user’s full Avatar ID and click Search.
6. Select a name from the search results and click Add selected.
7. Repeat as many times as you like until all banned users are added.
8. Click Done to close the Add Someone panel.
9. Click Save to save your list and close the Edit Guest List or Edit ban list panel.

Imagine an experience targeted by dozens of harassers at the same time (as if often the case when someone or some platform is targeted by trolls from an online forum), and building a ban list could easily be as stressful as the trolling itself.

Comments

[William Gide]

Do LL employees not use their own products? Or even social media? If I were going to build a VR/Social platform right now one of the core pieces of functionality I'd add from the start is ways to deal with harassment, griefing, and trolling. To not have them available until now strikes me as almost inconceivably naive. It borders on negligence.

[Ai Austin]

It really does seem to be the case that LL is ignoring all the experience of the comprehensive social features in Second Life with its finely tuned accordances, feedback and controls that have been honed via a lot of usage and feedback.

[Ai Austin]

That should be “affordances” !