Communications in Second Life have long been problematic, this is largely because there’s so much communication going on, this is a good thing by the way. Some people consider Second Life group chat to be broken, indeed there’s a webpage that asks Is Second Life Group Chat Still Broken? Other people login to a load of group messages and basically ignore them because they can be annoying.
In a thread over at SLUniverse, Darien Caldwell has brought to people’s attention the fact that Linden Lab have changed the bot policy, largely in terms of communications via bots. There is a temptation to raise the issue that there has been a lack of communication regarding a communication policy but I won’t go there!
The policy appears to have changed on December 11th and the new policy can be read here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Bot_policy . The page states that bots can add to the Second Life experience but that as each IM, chat message, inventory offer and group invitation creates load on the servers there comes a point where excessive use can cause problems for other users.
This all sounds quite reasonable, that is until you see that the limit where a bot’s communication is excessive appears to be at a much lower limit than would be applied to an object or regular avatar.
Bots are now supposed to send below 5,000 messages a day. Now at first glance that may sound like a lot, that is until you see that Linden Lab consider a message sent to a group as one message per recipient. This suggests that if a group has say 10,000 members then a bot could potentially be considered to be abusing resources if it sends one message to that group as that could potentially be 10,000 individual messages sent, which would be double the policy limit.
Now this is where things don’t quite add up. If it’s considered bad for a bot to be sending 5,000 messages a day then really it should be bad for anything to be sending 5,000 messages a day. I suspect that bots are being used to abuse the messaging system and Linden Lab are trying to discourage their use in communications. This policy certainly does that.
There probably aren’t that many people who really need bots to perform group communications, although it’s useful, if people genuinely have notices to send, especially to large groups, there are ways of doing that which are not that troublesome. Larger ventures will find bots more useful. I can certainly see group inviter bots being a more common use case as this is a feature that is very important to the smooth running of so many experiences in Second Life. I suppose that in theory a very busy sim where a bot automatically sends invites could send more than 5,000 a day, but automatically sent group invites aren’t really something I think are needed for people who merely land at an entrance of a location. They are useful if people rent a plot and need to be in a group to use the plot.
Personally I have long felt that Linden Lab should look to utilise web pages for groups, so instead of sending a message to many people, you give people the opportunity to go to the message. When you login there’s an indicator that there has been new activity on the group feed, something along those lines. A Web page style for a group could also deliver far more richness to group notices and be far more dynamic than the current system.
This isn’t something that could be achieved overnight but really, as communications are an issue in Second Life, LL should be taking steps to restrict the need for so many messages, notecards, IM’s and Textures to be sent to individuals. A web based notice could contain an image, a SLURL and information all in one location instead of sending that information to the inventories of many people.
Of course when people send group messages they want people to see that information, but a lot of notices are simply closed without being read and then end up cluttering inventories. Many of these messages are also quickly out of date and of course, as we can see from the bot policy, even if you’re not using a bot to send messages they create strain on the system. There must be a better solution to all this than the current one.
Web based groups might not be the way to go, they may be difficult to intergrate into the inworld experience but I certainly feel that encouraging people to go to the message, rather than the message going to people whether they want it or not, is the right starting point for an improved communication system.