Community Participation Guidelines

[Dakota Linden]

Introduction

These guidelines cover Resident participation on our Second Life community pages, which include the Second Life Blogs, Forums, Answers, Bug Tracker, User Groups, and the Knowledge Base. They are intended to help all Residents have a constructive and enjoyable conversation.

The Second Life Blogs, Forums, Bug Tracker, User Groups, Answers, and the Knowledge Base are places for you, the Residents of Second Life, to discuss ideas, experiences, and questions, and to share what you’ve learned about Second Life with each other and with us. We want to foster an honest and open exchange of ideas on our community pages; to do that, we want to encourage all participants to maintain an atmosphere of courtesy and respect for others at all times. Creating a constructive place for conversation will help us build a strong, better informed community in Second Life, and make both our communication channels and our world a more supportive and engaging place for all.

In addition to adhering to the Second Life Terms of Service, Residents must also refrain from the activities listed below. These Activities are Not Permitted on the Second Life Community Sites:

• Vulgarity, Profanity, and Sexually Explicit Content: No name calling, expletives, or any language that is offensive, pornographic, or sexually explicit. Profanity, hate speech, or threats of violence are not permissible.

• Harassment: Harassment of any kind will not be tolerated. Harassment can include text or images that contain racist, threatening, abusive or hateful material.

• Personal Information: Sharing someone else’s personal information—of any kind—is not allowed. Disclosing another Resident’s real-world identity, contact information, or the text of interpersonal communications (chat, email, IM) is not allowed.

• Nudity or Adult Content: Keep the content of your postings “General” as provided in the Maturity Guidelines. Postings that do not comply with the “General” rating may be removed.

• Spamming, Solicitation and Advertising: Spamming is not allowed. This includes aggressive self-promotion. No advertising or promotion of specific Second Life merchants, Marketplace listings, products, or services, unless the forum area is specifically for the buying or selling of Second Life products or services, for example, a “for sale” or “wanted” forum. Do not reference other websites offering any product or service.

Note: It is OK to have a signature line with a link to your Second Life profile or information about your Second Life business.

• Interpersonal Disputes or Personal Negative Commentary: If you have a personal disagreement, do not post about it on the Second Life community pages. Residents who have personal differences have other channels of communication available to them — private messaging in the forums, IM within Second Life, or chatting within Second Life.

• No Flaming: "Flames" are hostile or disruptive posts, or messages intended to incite an angry response. Spirited discussion and constructive disagreement are welcome, but name-calling and airing of grievances are not appropriate in our discussion areas. We will also not tolerate any post that encourages others to violate any policy of Linden Lab

• Off Topic Content: Please keep your commentary relevant to the discussion and within the format that the forum, board or question and answer area require. (For example, in the Answers section, please follow the Q&A format of the discussion.) Content that is blatantly off topic is not permitted. You may also not post regarding subjects that do not relate to Second Life except in the General forum discussion board.

• Abuse of Moderation or Moderators: Please honor our moderation process and the decisions that come out of it; they are being made in order to provide you with a productive environment for conversations about Second Life. We prohibit abuse of our moderation process, including the following:
  • Posts that discuss or re-post material that has been removed or locked by a moderator
  • Posts questioning a moderator’s decision
  • Posts that discuss the status of any Resident account (e.g., on hold, suspended, etc.)
  • Frivolous or malicious use of the abuse report feature

Report inappropriate content for moderator review

Moderating a discussion site is a daunting task; our forums alone see in excess of 10,000 posts per week. You can help by reporting abuse when you spot it. If you see a post you feel violates the Community Participation Guidelines, or our Terms of Service, then please click the Report Inappropriate Content link that appears in each post, and let us know why you feel the post is inappropriate.

We moderate at our discretion

We evaluate posts on a case-by-case basis and take into account the severity of the conduct and any history of past violations. Although we will make reasonable efforts to take into consideration the context and general sentiment of the blog or forum discussions, the actions taken (or not taken) by Linden Lab and our moderators are at our sole discretion, and we may act without warning or explanation. We provide the discussion areas of our sites as a service to Residents, and we will take the actions we deem appropriate to keep our sites a productive and enjoyable environment for all Residents.

 

*Please Note - these participation guidelines can be located here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Community_Participation_Guidelines