Linden Lab Announces New Moderation Tools for Sansar Experience Owners

Little did I know, when I was writing my recent blogpost about dealing with trolls in virtual worlds, that Linden Lab was already working on new tools for experience owners to combat trolling, griefing and harassment in their Sansar experiences!

Today Eliot, the Community Manager for Sansar, sent out an announcement to the official Sansar Discord channel that there were two new tools, a kick command and a ban list:

Kicking a user out of an experience

As an experience owner, you have the power to kick users out of your experience if they are causing abuse or griefing. To kick a user out of your experience:

1. While visiting the experience, go to Nearby Chat.
2. In the input field, type the command %%Kick <Avatar ID> , where <Avatar ID> is replaced with the user’s Avatar ID. For example, if a user’s Avatar ID is @carrot, type %%Kick carrot. This kicks the user out of the experience.

…

Banning users from an experience

To ban a user from an experience, you need to add the user’s Avatar ID to the ban list. To add a user to the ban list:

1. Access the publishing options panel from the My Experiences app.
2. Under your chosen experience in the My Experiences panel, click the Publishing options  button.
3. Under Who can visit, click Edit list next to Banned users are never allowed to visit.
4. In the Edit ban list panel, click Add.
5. In the Add Someone panel, type the user’s full Avatar ID and click Search.
6. Select a name from the search results and click Add selected.
7. Repeat as many times as you like until all banned users are added.
8. Click Done to close the Add Someone panel.
9. Click Save to save your list and close the Edit Guest List or Edit ban list panel.

Note that the new kick and ban tools operate independently of each other:

Kicking a user does not automatically ban that user from an experience. Likewise, adding a user to the ban list does not automatically kick them out from the experience either.

Here’s an animated GIF that Eliot shared showing how to add someone to the ban list for an experience:

I’m glad to see Linden Lab developing and releasing these moderation tools, before they are needed, rather than scrambling to catch up after trolling gets out of hand, as it has in VRChat!

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