Automated Mainland Vehicle Guidelines

-- Under construction! --

About

Along mainland protected routes there are two types of automated vehicles regularly seen, self-navigating "roaming" vehicles and pre-programmed "tour" vehicles. These have been a topic of heated and polarised discussion for some time [1][2] with little official line on the subject in public from Linden Labs. This page aims to dispel myths and clarify the boundaries for their use as indicated by Linden Labs employees, Terms Of Service and Community Guidelines.

TOS and Community Guidelines relevant to this subject

Quotes from Linden Labs employees

Michael Linden at Rail Community meeting 2011-06-03 regarding vehicle appearance

Michael Linden: Mild note #3: one area the Lab won't act on is the "appropriateness of appearance".[3]

Michael Linden: If a train looks like a potato with twelve noses and "eat at joes" written on it, that's fine with us (TOS-ly speaking).[4]

Known issues which cause confusion

Self Cloning objects reproducing: 31/July/2010

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-6059

This bug causes exact replicas of automated vehicles to be created upon entry into a new sim. This issue is aknowledged and under investigation by Linden Labs and responsible for "swarms" of vehicles sometimes seen on the mainlands. This issue often leads to residents mistakenly accusing owners of excessive rezzing of vehicles and sending abuse reports for "unfair use of region resources".

Sitted (sic) Avatars 'ghosted' by losing contact with a vehicle are not removed from the prim settings: 29/November/2008

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-4454

This bug causes a vehicle to retain its status regarding an avatar being sat on it. This means that sometimes when an avatar crashes on sim entry, the vehicle is unaware that it has lost the avatar, and the upshot of this bug is that sometimes residents are unable to sit on an automated vehicle, leading them to believe it serves no purpose other than to advertise the scripting abilities of the maker.