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
• Increase fairness and reliability of the search service for people who place listings.

Setting 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.

Camping or traffic bots

Attempting to gain an unfair search advantage through the use of bots to inflate the traffic for a parcel is a violation of this policy. This policy applies to both mainland and private estates since both are represented in search.

Enforcement

• We routinely look at search results, and where we find clear use of bots to gain an unfair search advantage, we handle it as an abuse issue.
  • We do not need you to abuse report this; we monitor the search results.
• To begin with, we message the land owner to issue a warning, but this will escalate to an account suspension or removal from search if it persists.
  • The usual abuse-appeals process will be available for anyone that feels that the decision is unfair.
• We will not be banning or removing bots from Second Life.

The future of land bots

We expect that as we develop the web tools further, land bots will cease to work as far as their parcel purchase activity is concerned. In the meantime, the following types of cases involving land bots will be dealt with as a violation:

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

Summary

To summarize:

• Use of bots to game traffic will be considered a violation.
• Bots are fine and we totally support their good use inworld, but we will deal with inappropriate use of them.
• Traffic has value as a land metric, and will remain.
• Responsible use of land bots is acceptable for now, but overuse will result in further action.