Second Life scripted agents to be exempted from traffic this month

by Tateru Nino on Jan 15th 2010 5:00PM

Economy, News items, Second Life, Virtual worlds

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.

Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Source

Tags: bot, economy, linden-lab, scripted-agent, second-life, sl-traffic, virtual-worlds

Reader Comments (2)

the mid boggles on the bot policy. i really don;t understand much about it (out of apathy) i mean i understand bots, for eLearning (like guide bots) and even in stores as virtual agents. i guess i don't ever think of "gaming" the system with traffic inflation sine it is so easy to do

thanks on explaining about the flagging and as you said, anyone trying to scam is not going to self-flag *puts up the white flag* =)

One problem with the flagging of bots is that it turns the concept of bot into a black and white issue, which it clearly isn't I have accounts that are used by two of the musicians in my band "Real Folk" - when we play, one or sometimes two out of the three of us is logged in using a server-side process to avoid using up limited network and computing resources in my studio, so strictly speaking they are bots during that performance. At other times those AVs are logged in via the SL client with a human at the controls.