Prims being able to receive IMs

In developing a long-distance relay over the past two days, I came across the documentation that outlines how prims can send IMs, but can't receive them.

I think LL should change that and allow IM's to be sent to and from prims. Why?

IMs are instataneous... data can be sent from one prim to another without much hassle (like this freakin' relay net I'm having to build just to call an elevator), and several prims can share data.

IMs sent to a prim cannot reach the outside world, so there is no fear of spam getting out, like the case with prims being able to email.

Another advantage is that IMs can be send great distances... in fact, any where in the game. Prims that can send and receive IMs could update prices on a network of vendors, change the picture on dozens of billboards, and a whole other host of wonderfully cool things.

We need an instant, secure method of communication that can go beyond the limits of the chat system. Relays suck and add to sim's losing fps.

Make IMs with prims two-way!

I still think LL isn't concerned so much about any specific security or stability risks with this, so much as LL distrusts the users with this kind of power. It's very powerful, what you're asking for. Think about this... An object creates a thousand copies of an attachment, and commands each copy to relocate to another sim... so each sim has one or more of these objects. Then the "mothership" object, ... well, ... did you ever see the movie Independence Day?

It's not so much about power or security, it's about inter-sim communication which defeats the distributed design SL uses.

Right now, each sim only talks to the 4 sims around it. Connectivity between them is low. Adding more sims doesn't have much effect on the LAN traffic between the SL servers. Players can send and receive IMs, but that's limited by how fast they can type. Objects can send IMs to players, but not many players will want a constant stream of messages hitting them all the time. So as it stands right now, IMs don't have much of an effect on the sim-to-sim cross-talk.

Now if scripts could receive IMs, plenty of people would be creating scripts that IM each other at high rates of speed. There can be as many of these as you want, so there's no upper limit to the extent of the cross-talk bandwidth they would consume.

The email method works. It's a little slower, and a little more roundabout to use, but it does what you need. Since the mail is an external system and it's speed is governed by how heavy it's being used, it's self-regulating. If used too much, it will become very slow. It's a good solution to the problem.