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.
