It's no secret that many parcel owners in Second Life make use of bots in order to boost traffic numbers, and hence gain a higher spot on search results. There are arguments on both sides of this debate, as demonstrated here, but to date bots have been annoying but not devastating (copybot, landbot, and other devious creations notwithstanding). As such, it seemed that the issue was much ado about whether the traffic bots were degrading the quality of the SL experience, which cause places to appear more popular than they really are. Regardless, the issue really didn't seem to affect the performance of SL, so I, like many others, ignored it and went about my business.

But the past two days have been frustrating. Suddenly I'm not able to login, and the error message I get is new:




So there are at least a couple of possibilities for this message. One, this is either a problem with a massive number of concurrent logins hitting the grid, or Linden Lab is testing something new. If it's the former, then it's likely we do have a bot problem. If it's the latter, then the message would seem to indicate that Linden Lab is anticipating a situation where the grid is hit by massive concurrent login attempts.

Either way, although this message is new, this seems like a familiar situation. I remember a a blog post by Linden Lab, quite some time ago, stating that premium members would be given login priority in certain circumstances:

When you open your log-in screen and see in the upper right hand corner Grid Status: Restricted, you’ll know that only those Second Life Residents who have transacted with Linden Lab either by being a premium account holder, owning land, or purchasing currency on the LindeX, will be able to log-in. Residents who are in Second Life when this occurs will only be affected if they log-out and want to return before the grid returns to normal status.

What happened to that? By all means, prevent bots from logging in if it affects grid performance, but please, don't lock out paying members.




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