There are several sets of rules for users of Second Life. The Terms of Service (TOS) and Community Standards (CS) which combined form your explicit service-contract with Linden Lab, and assorted implicit ones, like following any additional conditions the owner of whatever land-parcel that you are currently on may have chosen to impose.
Well, the Linden Lab have updated the Community Standards for the first time in, well, perhaps forever. While the Lab has said that it has updated them in the past, the document has remained unaltered since at least 2005. What's new, however, isn't necessarily as interesting as what's missing.
What's new:
Explicit reference to the Adult content rating, Adult continent (Zindra), and PG and Mature ratings relegated to a minor mention.
What's missing:
Missing from both the Terms of Service and the Community Standards are:
- Any mention of the banking restrictions.
- The ban on gambling.
- Any mention of sexual ageplay restrictions.
- Any mention of restrictions on methods of gaming traffic (eg: Camping/traffic bots).
- Heck, maybe some additional restrictions that fail to come immediately to mind. How, exactly, would you know?
If you're a new user, none of these things are made known to you, they've never appeared in either of these documents, and you'd have to dig pretty deep into other sources to find them. None of them are a part of your explicit service-contract with Linden Lab, but you will be cautioned or banned for violating them.
While Lab staff have publicly and repeatedly stated that some of the above have previously been incorporated into the Community Standards, the fact is that if they ever were, those versions were never published to the users by the Lab.
Is Linden Lab doing the users a disservice by this? It seems hard to see how the failure to make this information readily available to all users benefits either the Lab or the users.
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