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SBSL now with user-defined variables support

SBSL variables added for Second Life bot programming SBSL – the simple programming language to control your Second Life bots – have been extended to support the user-defined variables.

Now it is possible to declare a variable and pass its value across different SBSL events, writing more complicated scripts. See SBSL docs for more info on user variables!

The SBSL documentation itself has been rewritten and extended too. Now each command has its own documentation page with a syntax explanation, comments and examples. Visit SBSL commands list section to see the difference.

SBSL is currently being used by more than 200 bot owners (with several hundreds of scripts running). You may use SBSL to process SL bot’s events in-place, or pass them to your web script (e.g. php) for a complex processing. SmartBots Support Bot uses SBSL to process customers’ inquiries.

Tags: events, sbsl, variables
Posted in For developers,SBSL | No comments

HTTP API commands added and updated

HTTP API updates: control your Second Life bot SmartBots HTTP API functions have been extended by adding the new functionality.

listinventory – retrieve the bot’s inventory contents

listinventory command allows listing the bot’s inventory: items, wearables, folders. Now this command shows the object’s permissions. More information available in docs.

give_inventory command improved

give_inventory command sends inventory items to a specific resident. Now it is possible to send the whole folders (just specify the folder inventory UUID – system determines the inventory item type automatically).

Also, the error handling has been improved: the function now returns an error if object permissions do not contain a ‘Transfer” flag.

These changes are published already, you may use them in your applications or try HTTP API by using SmartBots API Testing Suite.

Tags: delivery, inventory, permissions, second life bot
Posted in For developers,HTTP API | No comments

Linden Lab bot policy changes

SmartBots will be available in Italian, German, Russian and Polish. More languages are coming! 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).

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (9)

3… 2… 1… All systems nominal!

All systems nominal The maintenance issue that happened a few days ago has been successfully resolved yesterday. We were monitoring all systems during the last 12 hours and consider the problem fixed.

What happened? There was an overlap of several factors, both technical and managerial:

10th: We started adding a new server and began migrating some bots from one of our existing ones which was 100% full. The transfer had been completed but the old server did not receive the shutdown command so both servers launched at the same time, logging in bots simultaneously.

This attracted the attention of Linden Lab who quickly blocked the affected servers from accessing Second Life. The bots accounts were not affected, only the servers’ addresses were blocked. We immediately contacted LL and received a list of questions to justify the situation. A reply has been sent to LL.

11th: We got a reply from LL requesting us to implement several adjustments to our system. LL has been immediately notified that we’ve started adjusting our system. These adjustments were done within a few hours.

Since the server block was not lifted yet, we distributed as much bots as possible to our other servers. Unfortunately we were going to install a new server, so there were very few empty bot slots on the other machines.

12th: LL replied and lifted the existing blocks. All servers are up and running now. There are still several adjustments required by LL for a better customer experience, we are working to implement them.

13th: We added a compensation subscription week to all bots that were offline during the outage. Thank you for understanding, we really appreciate your business!

Posted in General | 1 comment

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