Bye bye traffic bots

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/land/blog/2009/04/23/conclusion-to-the-blog-post-on-bots

So the question -- how will this affect your Second Life?

Phil will be lonely?

Thanks for the link Mari!

I had a chuckle at Damien's comment. First thing I thought of is "I wonder what Phil will have to say about this?"

I once turned up at a beach club where there was just one person dancing - another woman. Presently a man turned up - a profile check showed that he was a newbie.
Anyway he started asking the other woman for a dance. I happened to know that she's a dancebot who's always there. He asked a dancebot to dance, but he didn't ask me!!!!!

I am personally glad they are trying to crack down on gaming the system, but like most LL policies it ends up to vague. I am sure the enforcement of this will be just as erratic as the enforcement of most.

What exactly is too many bots? What are legitmate uses? Personally a large clothing store (1/2 sim to full sim) having six model bot with different outfits is reasonable, but the same amount for a 512 or 1024 store would not be. Now that is completely based on what I think is reasonable. It is totally subjective. I have no clue what others think reasonable or what LL thinks is reasonable. I have no guidelines to go to and figure out what is reasonable as far as I know. Heck if I am a noob I have no idea there are other rules outside of the T.O.S., but it seems to me that LL is begginging to make a bunch of these hidden rules.

Yes, I think some rules and guidelines are good and neccesary. I just think the way they have been done so far is atrocious.

/me claps!!

Hm. This just makes The Game a bit more difficult and a bit more interesting for bot runners.

I suspect that traffic bots will be easily dealt with, but land bots?

That's going to be interesting. It doesn't take much... games like Lineage2 still suffer from botting and so forth, where bots can earn you a permaban.

It's like unlawful drugs ~ as long as people keep paying for drugs, there will be a drug war. As long as there is profit in bots, either direct or via customers... there will be bots enabling illicit activity.

Watch for the rise of prim landscanners again ~ high speed, high altitude invisible things too fast to even see. Wow, I wish I was Weedy right now with those hundreds of microparcels. I remember the old days where certain oldbies (not Weedy) would launch swarms of those things from microparcels, which could report available parcels quickly and easily.

Voight Kampff tests, anyone?

Well I don't use bots, so the only affect it would have on me would to move me a bit higher in search, I think. Depending of course on the other changes that will affect search. I'm waiting to see what those are!

I had one of those on my doorstep, literally. When things changed and it was put on sale the for sale sign looked like it was MINE. I (over)paid for 16m2 and tiered up to accomodate it.

It is about BLEEPING TIME! OMG!!! I can think of a few places that will finally suffer and come back to earth in respect to search as well as a user heading for a populated area just to find out that.. hey... they are just standing not doing anything!

Sure the ARs are now going to increase... ok I can see how the Lindens are going to be busy for a while.. but I can assure you SL will be a different place real soon when it comes to overall load )

From what I'm reading so far I think it looks good. I was especially happy to see this line:

"Going forward we are going to look at ways to allow you to voluntarily identify to us that an account is a Bot, so that we can remove it from Traffic completely."

That let's people keep things like bot "models" in their stores and can keep them as long as they identify them as bots.

I'll run out of people to throw LOLCubes at until they crash. (>_<

lol this is typical no real answers and after all this time they still dont get it.
bots are ok and traffic is staying so we have no change except now people will be abuse reporting more

I'm actually concerned about this:
This implies that they're eliminating in-world land buying and selling completely. It's going to be pushed to their auction site, and every time you want to transfer land you'll have to go through their eBay site even if you're just trying to swap parcels with a friend.

They're increasingly moving towards having the "2d web" take over from the in-world "3d web" they originally promoted. What's next... eliminating in-world sales in favor of XStreetSL?

It's just a fig-leaf.
LL are just slapping down the most inescapably obvious form of Search-gaming. No more than that.

It's silly.
Moving land sales to a website just changes the buying interface from an in-world bot to a web-based bot/program.

But that doesn't cause annoyances for the people running the simulators, so that's OK.

Do we know how much that sort of change would impact in-world services? Could be zero, could be a lot - I honestly don't know..

Thank god.

The DCWF gets bogged down all the time by people who put "wrestling" in their land info (like mud wrestling, arm wrestling, or whatever else) and then have nothing but bots. We pull 15k on most days with no bots at all, pure legit traffic, and yet we're 5th on the list at times, under 2 clubs with bots, a store with bots, and a wrestling/boxing "club"...with bots.

However, LL stating that people can't report when they notice botting it just ridiculous. Your users are the best way to get this info and handle it. Instead, they're going to monitor traffic numbers? How will they know which is legit and which isn't? If they want to be effective, allowing reporting by others will need to happen. Beyond that, good job...its about 3 years too fucking late...but good job.

Yes I think to most of us on these forums, we consider Phil the expert on this topic

It depends. How will LL manage to F**k up implementing it?

I also like how they will let us tag an account as a bot, so it can be used without affecting the traffic (ie models and such)

I have a feeling if someone is running 6 models or whatnot, they will end up being told to shut them down until they can tag them as a bot, to remove them from search.
Otherwise stores will use "models" to game the traffic, instead of hidden bots, we will see them.

It is nice to know they are thinking ahead on this.

how will it affect my SL, well I think it will make things more interesting to see what happens with search with the bots removed.

I don't want to imply that I speak for Phil, nor attempt to put words in his mouth, but if *I* were a self-proclaimed "bot runner", here is what I would say.

OK, the traffic bots in the sky are gone. So long, farewell, it's been good to know you.

But since traffic is still a metric, and there is still value in having traffic a high number because it drives volume to the business, then other means will be employed to increase traffice. So say hello to camping pads, lucky chairs, paid models, etc., and all their lag-heavy prims, attachments, and scripts.

they did not say we "can't" report it, they said we do not need to

I am sure many many folks will still report it, thinking they are helping LL

You're so damn cynical. They don't screw EVERYTHING up.