Meeting Purpose
- The Trust and Safety User Group is to provide a forum to discuss topics relating to safety and security in Second Life. However, please note that for matters of privacy and personal safety, the following will not be openly discussed by members of the team:
- Reports of abuse, together with the outcome of investigations or actions taken in response; specific account information (including terminations, suspensions, warnings, etc.); DCMA or copyright issues; internal processes; ToS interpretations.
- The meetings:
- Are held on the 3rd Tuesday of the month, at 11:00 SLT.
- Take place at the Linden Estate Services meeting place.
- Are a mix of Voice and text chat.
- Dates and times of meetings are recorded in the SL Public Calendar.
- For descriptions on all SL user groups and their purpose please refer to SL Official User Groups.
Trust and Safety Blog Posts
- The Second Life Trust and Safety team shares regular community blog posts to help keep the community informed and educated on various topics. These blogs cover topics such as maintaining strong account security practices, tips and tricks, and helpful how-to guides.
- All posts can be found within the Trust and Safety Tuesdays section of the Community blogs and are now tagged as such.
- Those who wish to receive the updates via e-mail can hit the Follow button on the page.
Most Recent Blog Posts
- Marketplace Tips and Tricks for Sellers – Tuesday, October 13, 2026.
- Marketplace Tips and Tricks for Buyers – Tuesday, October 20, 2026.
Updates from the Team
- [Video: 1:19-2:24] Work is still continuing with the in-world Trust and Safety Team offices; this has been somewhat delayed due to other priorities. Currently, the hope is to have the work finished by December 2026.
- The current plan is to have a holiday themed meeting/tour at the new office space in December.
Marketplace Blog Posts Discussion
- [Video: 9:55-20:00] General notes on the Marketplace blog post noted above, including:
- Reviewing aim and purposes of the two posts.
- Reminder that MP product reviews are for reviewing products, not for airing personal grievances.
- A request was made for a similar blog post for buyer to be made on in-world shopping – seen as a good idea for a future T&S blog post.
- Questions related to listing management removal of mass listing of of poor-quality AI generated (AIG) content, etc., use of AI generated images for products, etc., were asked but were more questions for the Marketplace team / Web User Group (although there have been internal discussion on the matter of AIG content and use of AI images).
- Other Web Group specific questions and requests were made and referred more to the Web Group.
- Melody Linden noted that she (or a member of T&S) will be attending a future Web User Group meeting to discuss overlapping matters.
Scripted Agent/Bot Usage and Policy
- There has been a range of concerns about scripted agent / bot activity within Second Life, which Alabaster Linden attempted to address (in a somewhat circumspect manner).
- The Lab is looking at matter of policy with regards to the use and operation of bots, including potentially updating the policy, bringing bot usage more into line with policy requirement, identifying scripted agents, etc.
- These discussions are described as “on-going” and “collaborative” (presumably with bot / bot service creators, etc.), and are aimed at trying to strike a balance to allow bots (and associated services) to be used usefully and preventing the use of bots being abused (e.g. to inflate traffic numbers, to harass, etc.).
- The hope is that people will start to see “some progress and changes in this area”.
- There was further general discussion on bots during the open discussion part of the meeting (see below).
- A blog post is in development on the use and registering of scripted agent (or “registered bot” if you prefer) accounts.
- It is not clear as to whether this work will involve defining the use of bots for “legitimate” data gathering (e.g. gathering data on grid use, for the production of 3D maps of regions, etc.).
Alt Account Creation / Abuse
- In the first two T&S meetings questions were asked about preventing people creating multiple accounts specifically for the intention to harass (some are known to make multiple accounts per week or even per day).
- At the times of those meetings it was indicated that the Lab was aware of the issue – and of some of those involved – and steps would be taken to try to address the problem.
- Alabaster Linden confirmed at this meeting that two new measures – system and monitoring – have been put in place to try to cut down these incidences and make it easier for LL to spot when it is happening. Details as to what they are were not discussed (to prevent people trying to circumvent them).
- This does not entirely prevent such situations occurring, but it is hoped the changes have diminished the ability of those concerned from being able to mass-create accounts.
General Discussion
- The new Group Role ability to moderate who can post links to Group chats came up – please see my Leviathan Officer Hour notes from the session immediately after this T&S meeting for the latest on this.
- Requests on managing Tiny Empire bots crowding-out OpenSpace (open water) regions and thus blocking them from being accessed by those sailing or flying was again raised alongside the general discussions on bot (see above). No definitive answer, other than LL continue to work towards removing unregistered bot accounts.
- Bot identification: there have been requests to make Scripted Agent accounts (that is, properly registered bot accounts) identifiable in-world (e.g. via a Profile symbol or a colour surround on the Profile + giving them a default dot colour on the viewer maps). Whilst a good idea which should be implemented:
- It would not make the identification of “bad actor” bots any easier, as these would most likely not be registered as scripted agents.
- It runs the risk of people determining that “all dots of X colour are bots – and all bots are BAD!” – leading to the potential of stores, etc., being avoided, etc., on account of, “they use a bot, and bots are BAD!” As such, care on implementation and communication needs to be addressed.
- It was suggested that bots could only be allowed to access Groups if invited by an Owner / Operator – the problem here being – if the bot is not registered as a Scripted Agent, how does the system tell it is a bot simply because it responds to a Group Join request just like any other “normal” account?
- With regards to Groups and phishing scams:
- The suggestion was made for a T&S blog post on Group management tips and tricks – this was taken on-board.
- It was requested that the message people receive when ejected from a Group for causing trouble (such as spamming) should be updated to not include the name of the person doing the banning (e.g. just leave it as “You have been ejected from [Group name]”), so as to prevent instances where the officer / owner doing the ejecting comes under personal attack. This request is being taken back to the Lab for discussion
- Please refer to the last 15 minute of the video for more general discussions (e.g. OSGrid shutdown, SL Discord server moderation, etc.).
Next Meeting
- 13:00 SLT, Tuesday, November 17, 2026, at the Linden Estate Services.
