Hello, delicious friends; we’d like to share with you a few updates about our automation policy, Social Acts, and browser extensions.

Social Act email verification

Starting today, we’re updating the game to require a verified email to participate in Social Acts. We generally don’t want to impose restrictions on players being able to play the game, but in this case, automated sending of social acts was causing the game technical issues.

If you log in through Google or Meta, your email is already verified and you won’t need to take any additional steps. If you log in via email, you can check whether your email is verified in the Account tab.

On automation and the Terms of Service

We also wanted to clarify how we view and enforce the Terms of Service in connection to community-made browser extensions and other tools people use to interact with the game.

Our policy on this is basically:

What happens on your device is your business: using an extension that only affects the game locally is not something we’d sanction an account for.
What happens on our servers is our business: if you use a tool that sends requests to the Fallen London servers that isn’t the game’s own front-end, you’re breaching the ToS, and if we detect it, we reserve the right to ban your account.

This includes scripts, some browser extensions, and all kinds of automation tools.

There’s lots of reasons for this, but they all boil down to this: Fallen London isn’t designed to be touched by third-party tools, and their use has historically caused problems for us that take away from our capacity to address other issues or add to the game. This is especially true with browser extensions, where users might not even realise they are using an automation tool.

In short: We’d rather spend our time making and improving the game, not addressing problems created by bugs in third-party code or malicious user activity.

On browser extensions

This leads us to my last topic today, which are browser extensions. These are community-made additions to Fallen London which aim to add flourishes and time-savers for the most dedicated players.

The browser extension whitelist has existed for a long time as a way for us to give an OK to proposed extensions for community use, essentially confirming that the extensions have no game-breaking inclusions. Decisions on it have been made infrequently and by different people, which has led to some inconsistencies.

I want to clarify what the whitelist policy is currently; this is an evolving issue and our thinking may change down the line.

The extension whitelist is a list of browser extensions we are comfortable with players using. It’s not an exhaustive list of extensions that don’t directly violate the ToS, nor is it a complete seal of approval that implies we guarantee a given extension can’t cause issues.

To be whitelisted, an extension needs to be:

Atomic: The extension does one thing, or a well-defined set of closely-related things.
Functional: It does the one thing well.
Well-documented: It’s clear about what exactly it does.
Feature-complete. The extension is basically done, and future releases will be bug fixes or updates to track changes to the game.

These requirements make it reasonable for us to maintain the whitelist itself, evaluate new extensions, and make it less likely that players will contact us regarding bugs which are caused by a feature of an extension (this does happen, and can cause quite a bit of lost time). Again, we’re a small team, and we want to focus our time on making the actual game.

We’ll also reject extensions for various reasons:

Technical issues, bugs, or poor interactions with game features – including upcoming game features that you might not know about
Inserting content into the game, or altering existing content (including game text, metatext, ads, sidebars, and so on)
Displaying messages or text to the user that aren’t clearly marked as coming from the extension
Behaviour that we think is likely to create support requests for us; for example, changing the UI in a potentially confusing way

In truth, this is determined on a case-by-case basis. The whitelist answers the question of whether we’re comfortable with players using something and are willing to give it explicit approval.

If you want to use a non-whitelisted extension, go ahead at your own risk. I’d only ask that you:

Check and do your own due diligence to make sure the extension doesn’t break the automation rules.
If you encounter a bug when playing, try to reproduce the bug with the extension disabled before emailing us.