Linden Lab decide on Traffic Bots
In his current blog post, Jack Linden decides wisely how to cope with bots:
- Use of Bots to game Traffic will be considered a violation.
- Bots are fine and we totally support their good use inworld, but we will deal with inappropriate use of them.
- Traffic has value as a land metric, and will remain.
- Responsible use of Land Bots is acceptable for now, but overuse will result in further action.
Note, that this is not a technical solution, but rather a guideline to the community, just as I proclaimed on JIRA and slinfo.de back in mid-2008.
On the other hand you could say, they just forbid what they can monitor. (Since of course they can monitor unusual Traffic spikes easily, but it would be much harder to data-mine land sales.)
Anyway, I’m happy with it for now, and my chat bot, and the ZKM project are not threatened, phew.
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April 24th, 2009 at 00:08
Ok, they define “use of bots to game traffic is a violation,” but then they don’s say what is not considered a violation because if you use bots, for example, as I once did, to model clothing in my store, my traffic’s gonna increase. My purpose isn’t the traffic, but it’s a nice added bonus. What would he say about that I wonder?
April 25th, 2009 at 01:02
As long as your bots provide useful tasks to da world (like presenting your clothes), there’s nothing wrong with them. They still push your land traffic, but that’s just an side effect, not their main purpose. I’m fine with it, Linden Lab too.
Or am I seeing that too naive?