Linden Lab's new traffic bot policy, one week on

Actually, to be fair, it's actually been nearly two weeks (12 days) since the recently-announced policy went into force in Second Life . We took a bit of a tour of all the old, familiar traffic bot installations to see what impact the new policy had on the crowded camps of faux-popularity bots.

As near as we can tell from on the ground (or, more commonly in the sky, or under the ground), the answer seemed to be none at all. All the bots are still at their stations.

The gambling den whose bot-box is pictured above still has its quota of 40 or so of bots, and the nearby Seoul Korea sim remains undiminished. We bounced through our usual 23 suspect locations, and found the use of traffic bots to be no less prevalent at those locations.

Concurrency numbers seem to tell a slightly different story, and judging by your emails, a lot of you are curious as to how those numbers panned out. There are a lot of factors involved, but we estimate that about 2,500 traffic bots have been eliminated from the grid by examining the numbers over time. We just can't figure out where on the grid those bots might have been to begin with.

Traffic-bot installations certainly aren't hard to locate. It takes only minutes to spot one, though some of them use an interesting Second Life quirk that prevents the bots from being actually seen at all (by forcing them tens of metres below the terrain mesh, which triggers a quirk that renders them invisible, except on the map and minimap). Even so, though, when you encounter a group like that, you know for sure that they're traffic bots.

It is possible that the governance team is simply swamped with the number of such installations -- we're not sure, because we don't have a reasonable estimate on the quantity. It's also possible that warnings have been issued and followup action will be taken -- because clearly, if any of the sites we visited have received warnings, then warnings haven't made any difference.

It will be interesting to see if additional progress is made over the next week. We'll be revisiting our candidate locations to check up.

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.