Linden Lab Official:Scripted Agent Policy

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Overview

This document summarizes Linden Lab's policy on bots. The goals of this policy are to provide an informative and delightful search experience for all Residents and increase fairness and reliability of the search service.

Traffic and bots

Traffic is a numerical metric calculated for every parcel of land inworld. This score can be summarized as the cumulative minutes spent on the parcel by all visitors to the parcel within the previous day (PT). For details, see Guidelines for creating search listings in the Knowledge Base.

Bots, or scripted agents, are avatars controlled by computer programs rather than people. For more information, see What is a bot?.

In calculating traffic scores, the number of visitors include bots, which has led to their use to increase traffic scores and boost search rankings.

Policy

Bots per se, are allowed and have legitimate uses, but inappropriate uses are violations of this policy.

Therefore:

• Using bots to "game" traffic is not allowed. You may not attempt to gain an unfair advantage in search results through the use of bots to inflate the traffic for a parcel. This policy applies to both mainland and private estates since both are represented in search.

For example, the following activities are violations of this policy:

• Bots causing unreasonable load on search or the regions in which they operate.
• Bots causing a nuisance by regularly getting stuck at welcome areas or infohubs. This includes the use of large numbers of land bots to get around the throttling of search requests.

Set scripted agent status

If you own a Second Life account that is primarily operated by a Scripted Agent (a "bot"), please identify it as a bot on the Scripted Agent Status page. By identifying bots, you can help us give you more accurate account statistics and inworld search results.

Enforcement

Linden Lab routinely looks at search results, and will treat use of bots to gain an unfair search advantage as an abuse issue. You do not need to file an abuse report for violations; Linden Lab monitors the search results.

To begin, Linden Lab sends a warning message to the land owner. If the issue persists, then account suspension or removal from search may result. If you feel there has been an unfair decision in this regard, use the abuse appeals process.