Linden Lab Official:Scripted Agent Policy

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Overview

The following is Linden Lab's policy on bots, adapted from the text of a post to the official Second Life Blog about bot policy on April 23, 2009.

Our goals in setting this policy on bots are as follows:

1. To provide an informative and delightful search experience for all Residents
2. To increase fairness and reliability of the Search service for people who place listings.

Camping or traffic bots

Attempting to gain an unfair Search advantage through the use of bots to inflate the Traffic for a parcel is considered a violation. This policy applies to both Mainland and Private Estates as both are represented in Search.

How will this be enforced?

• 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.