Well, it's been a long time in coming, but it is finally just around the corner. Back in October, Linden Lab added a facility where Second Life users could flag the accounts of their scripted agents (commonly called 'bots'). That was in October and the flag itself has had no effect so far.
However, along with the search update on Wednesday, 20 January, user accounts (whether they are actually scripted agents or not) who have chosen to turn the flag on for their account will no longer count towards the per-parcel traffic data generated by the system.
Of course, not everyone running scripted agents will choose to flag accounts – especially not those who are actually using them to inflate traffic figures – and some ordinary users have chosen to flag their own accounts for reasons of their own. As a voluntary process it is interesting to watch, even though there's no actual telling who has and who has not flagged their user-accounts.
All this comes into effect one day after the announcement of the Q4/2009 world metrics, and would be an ideal time for a major action against unflagged traffic bots, seeing as Linden Lab has apparently spent much of 2009 searching out making lists of them.
From Thursday, 21 January, parcel traffic will not include user-accounts that have voluntarily exempted themselves from the system.
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