The new Linden Lab Bot Policy has been published on Dec 11th. If you did not see the new policy yet, you can view it here (or view the changes by comparing policy revisions).
Free-to-spam group IMs and notices
The changes make bots which use free-to-spam groups prohibited. Although they are able to send messages to smaller groups, bots will only be able to send a few messages to groups with a few thousand members and completely unable to message groups with 5,000+ members.
Please note that it is not allowed to own multiple bots to bypass this limit. Even if your bots are operating under SmartBots control, this restriction remains in effect, even if you try creating multiple SmartBots accounts. Linden Lab takes this very seriously, and so do we.
Other services
Group inviters, greeters and support bots are not affected (unless they send more than 5,000 invitations per day). We will continue developing SmartBots Support Bot and alive bots to enhance your environment. SmartBots group chat monitoring and group moderators are also not affected.
As you may see the new policy mostly restricts the functionality of spam bots. Bots which enhances the Second Life experience, NPCs, support bots and other helpful tools are not affected. We will try to get permission from Linden Lab to allow sending individual messages even to large groups (for example, moderator warnings to group chat, automatic chat translator messages etc).
I agree that it causes a lot of traffic to servers, but really which group has over a 1000 ACTIVE members. And I didn’t even mention alts, people belonging multiple times to the same group this way. Can’t LL come up with something to easily clear out groups ? Delete inactive members in an easy way ? That would reduce traffic far more effective. I could honestly reduce my own group from over 300 to maybe 20 this way. That would save their server already 280 messages each time. And this is only a fairly small group.
Comment by Yves Welles — December 20, 2013 @ 4:10 pm
Unfortunately LL seems to be very proud of their solution of the traffic problem. They reject to discuss any question related to a group messaging and step back from the new policy.
Comment by Glaznah Gassner — December 21, 2013 @ 10:56 am
The next step is to decrease no doubt people sending out spam. My bot is paid for till January 7th I will use it for internal group messages other than that it will vanish
Comment by Ezziedq — December 22, 2013 @ 9:38 am
I know at least 10 people on my friendslist with 10,000 – 25,000 members including my own. There is a very very easy way to delete inactive members when you sort them by “last login date” which was pretty much designed for the action of deleting members. The craziest thing about this change is that about 8% of my group 11k members group would receive the message. Not a single offline person gets the message and only a few of the online people receive it. However LL would count that as 11,000 recipients.
LL could have reduced a huge amount of traffic by simply stopping this group live chat for groups over 300 members. Nobody has 300 people staff in order to lose important staff related messages.
It is 2013 almost 2014, all sorts of companies are finding ways to connect, LL disconnects us from a useful service in the middle of busiest month of the year.
My complaint is not that they did it, it is the way how they did it. There was no notification, blog post or dashboard info whatsoever and since this is all about profit they should offer approved customers a premium service.
Of course LL is proud of their repeated disrespect and their ongoing communication problem, they simply don’t know their platform and what is going on in SL.
Comment by Steph Catseye — December 23, 2013 @ 5:49 am
How are LL planning to enforce this?
The policy revision seems to suggest that warnings and bans will be used to keep bots within the 5000 message target, but a few bot owners have mentioned that LL is muting the bots once the cap is reached.
Capping messages is discouraging, but far less discouraging than how the official revisions are worded.
Comment by Eppy — December 28, 2013 @ 10:37 am
I realy do no understand this whole thing ….
this new rule is stupid …
and I do not understand why you guys do not offer a soloution for the people which paid for your service and cant use it anymore .. not even my group joiner is working … thats just sad
sad is that linden lab is destroying buisseness without thinking about it … :(
Comment by Benny Spingflower — December 31, 2013 @ 8:15 am
Benny, Lindens are fighting group spam in a first place. You are using your bot to send a lot of information, thus it prevents invitations from being sent.
We would be glad to satisfy our customers’ demands (for example, provide a flexible way to send invitations separate from notices), but Lindens insist to count ALL messages together, killing all kinds of SL business together with spam tools. I hope they will understand that this is a very destructive approach.
Comment by Glaznah Gassner — December 31, 2013 @ 8:42 am
I am very sorry for you guys that linden labs people do not think about what they are doing … and you guys maybe will loose your buissness which was great .. I am a smartbot user for a long time now
Comment by Benny Spingflower — January 2, 2014 @ 10:03 am
and I really dont understand the newest tos changes at all … because .. I mean imagin a bot would do 5 dots in a group with more than 1000 members – it would violate the tos already. something like this here for example :
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thats crazy sorry
Comment by Benny Spingflower — January 2, 2014 @ 10:07 am