The info that Pixeleen and Rickel requested, as well as the stats I asked for should have taken only a few minutes to prep. ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, or a quick query report from a database search would have gone a long way in allaying (or exacerbating – but there, perhaps, is the rub) the concerns of SL residents.

Pix did what she could here. If Linden Lab won’t answer her questions then that becomes the story and it begs for editorializing.

I frankly don’t buy it. It costs them nothing in bytes or work to save chat for more than 24 hours. We’ve heard them say they don’t save the world itself, i.e. you couldn’t dial back and get the 2004 version in a box, I guess, but surely they save chat.

I think their paucity of police blotter incidents has more to do with their notion of wanting to keep for themselves the right simply to delete or “disappear” people without due process. They have such a load of griefers and their alts that they want to do it that way. They talk a good game about treating each alt as if it were a new family member with a clean rap sheet, but in reality they look at the hash marks and IP and whatever they need to look at, and delete without putting really unseemly incidents on the police blotter, which might scare some people if they saw how much crime there is in SL; and saw how vicious and nasty and evil it is – and how rampant, and how much it’s boomed since 6/6/06.

I don’t see how collecting chat or for that matter a record of every single transaction/movement/location/ etc. for every single avatar 24/7 would pose a problem. It’s not like these people don’t know how to run servers. They have loads of servers, and no doubt loads of back-up tapes. It may be hard to get a chat record so they don’t bother for the garden-variety police-blotter type offense, but surely they save chat. Philip probably wouldn’t be able to know something like what he told the Herald about the forum closure, regarding the amount of words and the novels written every day in SL, if he didn’t save and look at chat.