Laying Down The Rules

I utterly detest spam, both in my e-mail and in SecondLife group chats. More than once I have left groups which I thought were just too disturbing due to the occurrence of spamming.

About two years ago I and three others were made moderators in the "Swedish People in SL" group by PetGirl Bergman, who once created that group.

With the title comes the responsibility to enforce the three simple rules in that group.
1. No questions about anyone's first life in the group chat.
2. No advertising of products in the group chat without prior consent from the owner or one of the moderators.
3. No spamming with notices of ongoing events. Anyone in the group is welcome to announce an event, but it is not allowed to announce the same event more than once every 30 minutes.

Not that difficult to understand for any grown up person of normal intelligence one would think, huh? Well yesterday evening three avatars were taking turns announcing the same event every 10-20 minutes to the point were it go extremely tedious and disrupting to the rest of the group.

To make matters worse one of those involved had been warned by me personally for spamming the group just a few evenings ago. On that occasion she blamed chat lag in the group. to which I answered that she had been in SecondLife for more than four and a half years and should be well aware of that chat lag sometimes occurs and how that should be handled. The natural thing to do in that situation is of course to wait until it eventually pops up in the group chat or til you get the message from the system that the message will not go through. What you should never do is to re-post the same message repeatedly if it does not turn up at once.

With the responsibility of being a group moderator come certain privileges. I can hand out warnings for breeches of the group rules and - if the the conditions of warnings are not adhered to - I can also disallow text chat from the culprit for a specified period of time or eject them from the group.

So I reminded the three avatars taking turns about the consequences of not abiding by the rules. I took special care to spell it out to the female avatar I had talked to a few evenings earlier. When the next announcement came about only 20 minutes later I shut her off from the group.

I then got an IM from her asking me questions like "Who made you God?", "Why did I shut her off because her message came 20 minutes after the previous message from one of the other two and 20 minutes was almost 30 minutes?" and "A few nights earlier there had been a lot of spamming in another group and no one had done anything about it so why was I being so strict?"


The questions were easily answered and she soon settled down and asked me for how long she would be shut off. I told her I was considering having her shut off until Sunday but that I would let her back in if she talked with the other two and gave me a promise that they would follow the rules. After discussing the matter with the other two she came back to me and told me they were all sorry and would follow the rules in future. I then allowed her back into the group chat and the altercation was finished with the sharing of Easter greetings and mutual hugs.

Otherwise yesterday was a slow and sad day.

During the semi-drama I was told that one of my best friends sister had passed away at an early age. Afterwards I also had a short conversation with a close friend who confessed to me from out of the blue that she was now in a hospice and was certain of her fast approaching death, she was however in no pain and was well taken care of. After we had hugged and I had told her repeatedly that I would always love her and remember her she logged off. Finally I was informed that a very sweet and gentle male avatar, with whom I had a good and friendly relationship without being friends, had just passed away after being seriously ill for a short time.

These proofs of the frailty of our human lives and our sometimes strange priorities about what is important made me so sad and tired that I had to log off. For the longest while I could not fall asleep.