Many Second Life residents are coming up with innovative building ideas that bypass the limits of the Second Life engine, such as the (now obsolete) god made hack, outsize prims, zero or negative mass prims, and similar.
However, it seems that the line between exploits and innovation is becoming blurred. Although it might seem that developments such as these have a positive effect this is not always so; for example, zero mass prims are used to make undetectable spying devices.
The key difficulty is that when a limitation of Second Life becomes apparant, it is not clear why the limitation is in place. For example, after sending an e-mail a script is forced to sleep for 20 seconds. This is not a natural consequence of sending an e-mail but the result of a piece of code delibarately added to the Second Life server. From a previous question asked here, I have learned that this was intended as a "speed bump", to increase the effort involved in writing a "spamming" script and also minimise the chance of one being written by mistake. But I had to explicitly ask on this forum to find this out, and it would be entirely reasonable for someone to assume that because LL had taken deliberete action to prevent e-mails being sent more frequently than every 20 seconds, they intended that to be a rule of the world and anything bypassing it would be an abusive exploit.
The exploit category on the AR window is described as "doing something that you should not be able to do", but often this is not clear. If I open the Object window for a prim, and type 100 into the Transparency field, it pops back to 95 - but that's well known as another deliberate speed bump. If I try to make a prim larger than 10x10x10, then the prim is snapped back to that maximum size. Again this is a "deliberate" limitation, since there is an IF test in the Second Life code which performs the reset. But I have no way of knowing if this is a genuine technical limitation (which I could try to bypass), or a speed bump (which it's deliberately intended I should try to bypass), or a rule, that LL have specificed that they do not want any prim to cover a greater area than 10x10x10, and therefore bypassing it would be an exploit.
I would therefore like to know if it would be possible for LL to release a list of all such delibarate limitations in the system (delibarate meaning that they are created by program code that's present in the system, rather than by the absence of program code) with an indication as to if they are the consequences of a technical limit, a deliberate speed bump, or a rule. Alternatively this could be added to the user interface; for example, trying to raise transparency beyond 95 would result in a ? appearing on the mouse pointer (indicating a "secret" or speed bump), but trying to move or alter an item owned by another user would add an icon of a judge's gavel (indicating a rule/law) and moving a setting beyond current technical limits would add a picture of a conical flask (ie, "experiment around this"
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