What is LL's policy on alts?

[Faith Keneinan]

I heard that if you have too many alts, LL will ban ALL of your accounts. Is this true? Also, how does LL know which accounts are yours? If they use IPs, I don't understand how that works since so many use IP vanishers. 

[Rolig Loon]

Technically, that's true.  Linden Lab defines "too many" as "more than 5 from the same IP address".  This limitation can make it difficult for some educators, who are trying to set up accounts for a whole class of students, but isn't much of a limitation for most of us. 

Again, theoretically, Linden Lab reserves the right to start charging you a fee ($9.95) for each alt you create beyond the limit, and they always reserve the right to ban anyone from SL if they seem to be abusing the service. For example, if you create an army of alts to try and overload a region and force it to crash -- a "denial of service" attack -- or to try and "game" one of the Lab's venues like Linden Realms or PaleoQuest, they will ban your acciounts fasterthan you can say "Boo!".  In general, however, people can have many more alts than the theoretical limit as long as they don't draw attention to themselves.  Linden Lab can't spare employees to check up on every single new account to see whether it's owned by someone who owns ten others. 

Read more at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alt_Account_FAQ