Attn. New Policy regarding Group Bots

[Steph Catseye]

Hi everyone ♥
it was brought to my attention today that Linden Labs has changed and started enforcing a new bot policy regarding group bots... If you are sending scheduled messages in your group with services such as SmartBots or have your own bot you might want to check your group history..

Long story short, each bot is allowed to send 5000 messages per day. Each recipient counts as a message.

I have 11,000 group members and now I am unable to even reach my entire group.

here is the new policy from December 11th, they started enforcing on the 18th

New Bot Policy

Since the information part is over I take the liberty to rant.
Once again ... WEL DONE LINDEN LABS..

Obviously they want to safe some money and server load, I am fine with that
i am getting furious...
....when these changes are made without informing us at all
....not giving us at least a 1 weeks notice
....and when this is being enforced in the busiest month of the year.

I am asking myself who makes decission like that and why they care so little what they do to their customers.

 

[mikka Luik]

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....when these changes are made without informing us at all

....not giving us at least a 1 weeks notice

....and when this is being enforced in the busiest month of the year.

 

 

 

erm they did inform

link you have is from 11th december I think more than a week...

try logging in more often as a sentient and merry (insert holiday) kitten

 

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[Steph Catseye]

a policy change without a notice that a policy has changed is not information unless you read the TOS and ALL policies entirely on a daily basis.

 

[Amethyst Jetaime]

You can avoid the 5000 limit by sending out the group notices yourself or have an employee do it for you, just not a bot.  It doesn't take anymore time to compose a notice and send it yourself than it takes to compose a notice and set it up for a bot to send unless you are sending it out multiple times per day.

 

Personally I am glad of the change.  I get far too much spam from bots. Group notices are usually sent by bots when a merchant is sending them out multiple times per day.  This is not necessary as people get group notices even if they are not logged in at the time they are sent.  You can also combine notices about different things onto one notecard and send them once per day.  If a group spams me more than once a day I leave the group or turn off the notices. 

Its well known that LL's communications with their customers leaves a lot to be desired.   Most policy changes are posted here by regular participants almost as soon as they come out for this very reason.  So you can just check the posts here rather than reading everything every day.  This policy change was discussed here in the forum about a week ago,

[Steph Catseye]

I totally agree Amethyst
I don't mind the change or that it will turn into a premium service you have to pay for, I am mad that it was not communicated in order for people to prepare for it. If you find out because of a traffic and sales drop that is probably not ideal. They should have made a post on the Dashboard a week ahead instead of killing the ability during Christmas sales.

With groups like mine you get about 1000 messages out per notice. If you want to inform 11,000 customers about a new release you will have to send it a few times and still i get complaints that people didn't get the message. A scheduled service was an ideal solution, I will cope now that I know, mainly I was trying to inform because there are thousands using bot services and most of them have no idea that it isn't working anymore.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

My biggest complaint with LL is their lack of communication with their customers and the fact that when they do communicate something, often it is on a third party website that I don't use.

There really is no excuse for it as they have many in house options available.  IMO not only should this change have been blogged so it appeared on the dashboard, but they should have sent an email about it to the owners of every registered scripted agent. 

 

[Steph Catseye]

I couldn't have said it better myself.When policy's change those affected by it should be informed, I can't even believe that it is legal to make ANY kind policy changes without sending a notice. Even if it was legal there is still something called respect and decency where one has the urge to inform their customers so they can adjust and not let them find out by losing money.

Believe it or not the service I am using found out 3 days ago, when I sent in my first ticket to them they were digging and couldn't explain why my bot wasn't sending.

I still believe sometimes that LL has 2 cute capuchian monkey's with a red and pink button and whatever button they hit affects a policy change

[Evie Moriguchi]

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mikka Luik wrote:

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erm they did inform

link you have is from 11th december I think more than a week...

try logging in more often as a sentient and merry (insert holiday) kitten

 

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They were pretty quiet about the whole thing, and for anyone who's had to set up bot scripts for Meta or any of the other bot services out there, it's going to be a nightmare scrambling around for options to keep it within a reasonable number of messages below the limits.

Worse, it's 5000 messages per bot owner.  That means 3 NPC bots are pretty much limited to about saying something once per minute.  Which means I'll have to go back into my scripts, add a few dozen listeners, sensors and collision detectors to make sure the bots aren't accidentally using up their quota in local when no one's around.

 

The other issue is that they just kind of tacked it on to the old "gaming search with bots" policy without specifying how, or even if, they were enforcing it differently.  No indication if they were going to cap messages for going over during a 24 hour period, or start sending out warnings and account suspensions for folks who accidentally went over.  Based on what my bots are used for, If they go mute for a couple of hours without putting their existence in jeopardy, the world won't end and it gives me a leeway in tweaking their scripts until they come under the cap.  If I have to deal with warnings and threats while I'm adjusting their scripts then it's a major issue.  LL needs to clear up the "penalties" for exceeding the limits.