Is BOTs traffic gaming SERIOUSLY breaking Second Life search?

[Rolig Loon]

Linden Lab's practice regarding alts is deliberately vague. As people have already pointed out, there are good reasons why a group may need a flock of accounts from the same IP address, and it's certainly in the Lab's own financial interest to let people have several Premium accounts to play the Game of Homes with.  The limits in the policy are useful for keeping griefers and gangs of Paleoquest cheaters from spoiling SL for the rest of us.  Regarding enforcement, the FAQ page regarding the alt policy says

Accounts that have not been paid for and are found to be in violation of our policies, Linden Lab may, at our discretion and in alignment with our Terms of Service, take any or all of the following actions:

• Prevent the user from creating additional accounts
• Close some or all of the user's accounts until payment is made
• Close all of the user's accounts permanently

No system is perfect. If you have legitimate reasons for creating multiple accounts but have been unable to do so:

• If you have a basic account, go to Help Island and talk to someone there.
• If you have a premium account, submit a support ticket.

So, there are some nice weasel words to say that the Lab may enforce the policy if it has to, plus a couple of side doors that we can use if we have a perfectly good reason to need an army of alts. And as for the potential fee for creating lots of alts ...

However, if you create an army of alts, Linden Lab may charge a small fee of US$9.95 for the creation of each additional basic account as a way to recoup some of the cost.

Or maybe they won't.  If you are using your army for evil purposes, though, you have been warned.  😈

[Coffee Pancake]

[RunawayBunny]

This most confusing explanation in LL tos but thanks.

[RunawayBunny]

LL explaining 5 avatar limit on wiki:

[Gabriele Graves]

[Phil Deakins]

17 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

I guess there could be a couple different ways to use animesh for a "bot". It could be that an old-timey bot wears animesh, same as a regular logged-in user account. Usually I think of the other case, where there's no agent (no logged-in account) at all, just a hunk of free-standing animesh, possibly with a webservice-driven chat backend.

For some uses that avatar bots are used for, animesh ones wouldn't need a webserver back end. I'm thinking of greeters and such. Animesh ones would just need the same small LSL script that avatar bots need. They don't need to chat.

Edited March 5, 2021 by Phil Deakins