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.