In addition, it would be worthwhile to track the number of unverified accounts. An indvidual griefer attack (a malicious user, using an unverified account for the purposes of anonymity) can create a handful of unverified accounts in a single attack.

An example for the uninformed: A griefer logs on to an unverified account and launches a malicious, self-replicating object at an event. SL residents advise Linden Labs staff, who banish the account. Griefer, having been banned, reenters SL with unverfied account #2. SL residents again advise Linden Labs, who in turn bans the griefer’s new account. And so on. A given griefer attack – like one I personally witnessed this week – can create 5 new unverified accounts before the griefer apparently gets bored and leaves.

Now, unverified accounts also are used for more productive aims. But I would hazard to guess that many of the accounts where users are NOT logging back in are griefers.

As a side note on griefers, their attacks are increasing in Second Life. I suspect that control of these attacks will be a major focus of future software upgrades – especially as more and more corporate (read: big dollar spending) customers are coming on line and Linden Labs cannot afford any egg on its face just as it appears to have hit the tipping point.

Apparently LL doesn’t allow it because they did delete over 100 bots with greek first names in December. Now the bots have profiles and group names and are hard to distinguish from other residents.

I would rather see on Linden Labs front page the actual number of paying residents or residents with payment info on file. All this hype over their growing numbers is hilarious…but then Linden Lab is laughing all the way to the bank…