Bye bye traffic bots

Ah, alright, I must have read it wrong.

There are many places with traffic counts so high that it'd be impossible to achieve without 10 or 15 avs there 24/7. This makes it rather obvious that they're probably using bots, and if you click 'Show on Map' you'd see a huge stack of avatars in one spot, basically proving it. A quick look at the avatars in the parcel/sim (As I'm sure Lindens can do), or an actual visit would be all you'd need to be 99% sure it's a bunch of bots.

Actually I do really love some things about this.

First, I've personally wanted to label a bot or two just for estate management or terrain mapping purposes; stuff like that. They are handy and rarely ever on.

Second, those monstrous pointless piles of green dot zombies... yeah it's time they go. Campers, we'll always have some form of that maybe but this is a huge step in the right direction.

Performance. I'd love to see how much peak time load goes away now that we won't have to uphold the bot search traffic.

Data scrapes... I sure hope those bots go away too. Well, sort of... anyone remember my whining about customer knowledge and insight being worth serious money? Imagine if LL was the *only* source for search... hm.

I was never against traffic bots since everyone had equal access to them. I didn't see their use as unfair competition. But with them gone, it continues to be fair competition, so I'm pretty *meh* on the whole thing.

As for land bots, I can see why LL decided to try to obsolete them as opposed to banning them. I guess I'm also pretty *meh* on that as well. I'm sure a new way to automate their function will appear soon after implementation of the new web functionality.

Isn't this part of the dumbing down, err I mean the "improving" of the inworld experience for noobs?

In the old days, land scanners could find "public land", not cheap land. There is no way for LSL to return land prices. Linden Lab co-opted this practice by changing the codebase to have abandoned land revert to Governor Linden.

LL would do well to impliment new ways for residents to keep an eye on their respective regions, for the possibility of land coming up for sale, at any price. In the past, even if residents wanted to monitor parcels within their regions, there is no practical or technical solution to it, other than to bot.

In the past, our group has examined the possibility of posting bots on our parcels, but the sheer volume of CPU's, processes and resource usage would be phenominal. Our network has survived based on minimizing resource usage and a long standing record of community co-operation.

I am wary of some web based solutions, because they can be gamed by bots. It's very easy to write a bot which refreshes page data and gleans cheap land prices. That data can be passed to a "buy" bot. If this is the case, then nothing has changed except the method used.

Owners/barons in new sims are reluctant to cut smaller parcels, even though there are legitimate uses and we are willing to pay a premium price. The new rules of microparcel cutting make creating new networks prohibitive, so even if they reimplimented public land, the proliferation of massive microparcel networks are unlikely.

Get the slogan right. It's "To provide a more oredictabke experience".

Could someone please post the text of the origional linden blog post here I cant seem to get to that page without a bunch of errors.

hehe. I read the blog as I was virtually on the way out of the door to go bowling - just got back. First let me say that I've been against traffic bots for a very long time, as most people here know, so I'm not exactly tearing my hair out. Back in the Future of Traffic meetings I was calling for traffic bots to be banned. I changed my mind about simply banning them since then, as I'm sure it will make things worse (see #2 below), but I still wanted rid of the need to compete with them or with camping.

I am disappointed about 2 things:-

1. It's not a big announcement. It's below the fold on the blog and in small print, so it may not get rid of traffic bots and most camping overnight. Also, they don't want ARs - they are going to police the search results themselves, although I can't imagine people are not going to AR traffic bots and traffic camping. Maybe they'll ignore ARs and maybe they won't.

2a. My predication, if traffic bots were banned, was that many of them will come down from the sky, where they are responsible for very little resource useage, and roles will be invented for them down where people are, where they will be responsible for much more resource useage and add to the things that cause noticeable lag for people. In that way, I predicted that user experience will become worse. Now we'll see if my prediction comes true.

2b. The other prediction I made is that, in many cases, the search results will be worse because many clubs with tiny, unfrequented shops attached in the parcel will tend to dominate the results due to their events traffic. They will rank highly because of something that has nothing to do with what they are ranking highly for, and many specialist shops will give way to them. It was a major reason why I got into bots in the first place - not the only reason, but a major one. We'll see if that happens now.

On the whole, I'm not too disappointed. Most of the time I've been using traffic bots I prefered not to have to use them, but my preference to compete as a business was greater. I don't see them disappearing overnight due to the 'hidden' nature of the blog, but we'll see.

Ironically, just today I completed my new traffic bots system that guarantees that the sim would always have plenty of free slots for avs to arrive in it. Oh well

Phil, no matter what else, you have gained friends here in the forum because of the bots. We don't all agree with every view held but you have never been afraid of speaking your mind. We will just have to find some other something to argue about now

Appreciate the efforts very much....a start.....but won't the ones using bots just plug in several dozen camping chairs and have their alts sit in the chairs?

And if they're "embarrassed" to do this in their store for public view....(obviously they were embarrassed by their bots, so placed them out of sight)....won't they just put the camping chairs on a platform somewhere out of sight?

And then tell the LL bot police that they are "contributing to the SL economy"......even though those campers are their own alts.

I remember way back one day....when a store owner told me those green dots were campers....went to check it out.....couldn't get to the camping spot without a huge amount of effort....told by store owner that "campers" can find it just fine....(but someone who has been navigating SL for a year can't)....and that the 3L per hour was contributing to the SL economy.....

lol. I'm open to suggestions

And thank you for that kind word. It's very much appreciated.

It's interesting that Jack Linden says:
"Almost everyone agrees that using Bots to manipulate traffic (and therefore Search rankings) is unfair".

"Almost everyone! ????? "unfair" ????
Tsk! He must have been listening only to the tiny minority who banged on about it in places like the forums.
What about the vast majority that were said by some gaming apologists to not care at all?
What about all those people who said it wasn't dishonest/unfair as it wasn't against the TOS??

Here you go:

(Jack Linden)
First of all, wow! What a great discussion thread, thank you all for the feedback you provided! I know the new Discussions page takes a bit of getting used to and we've learnt some good lessons by having such a long thread on there. We'll be working to improve the layout and style over time to make it more usable.

Having read all of the comments, and the many notecards and IMs I have received inworld, the direction we need to go in is fairly clear. So I'd like to start with..

Camping or Traffic Bots

Almost everyone agrees that using Bots to manipulate traffic (and therefore Search rankings) is unfair. Not only with respect to Search itself but also due to the load on Mainland Region resources and how that can impact other Residents in the area.

Therefore we are setting policy that attempting to gain an unfair Search advantage, by the use of Bots to inflate the Traffic for a parcel, will be considered a violation. This policy applies to both Mainland and Private Estates as both are represented in Search.

How will this be enforced?

This time next week we will begin to routinely look at the Search results and where we find clear use of Bots to gain an unfair Search advantage we will be handling it as an abuse issue. We will not need you to abuse report this, instead we will monitor the Search results. To begin with we will message the land owner to issue a warning, but this will escalate to an account suspension or removal from Search if it persists. The usual Abuse-appeals process will be available for anyone that feels that the decision is unfair.

We will not be banning or removing Bots from Second Life. There are many amazing and useful ways to use Bots and the fact that in some circumstances they can be misused should not impact the more constructive users of Bots. We wouldn't remove Scripting because it can sometimes be used in bad ways, and Bots are no different in that respect. 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.

We will continue to strive toward providing more statistical data to land owners, including the number of visitors they receive. However, the way these statistics relate to Search ranking will be changing. In the next few months, we will be making both technical and policy changes to the way relevance and ranking works in Search. The "traffic" score will be only one aspect of the ranking logic, and it will be scrubbed and weighted to account for gaming vectors. Our goals will be to (1) provide an informative and delightful search experience for all residents, and (2) increase fairness and reliability of the Search service for people who place listings. So Traffic will remain as part of Search ranking. Stay tuned to the blog to learn more about Search improvements and to join the discussion.

Now we come to Land Bots

We know that being able to safely transfer Land between accounts is very important and so we have decided to provide a safe way to do this on the website, later in 2009 . In addition we also intend to move other forms of Land sale to the website, including allowing auctions between residents for the first time which we're really excited about. We'll be talking more about this soon. So for now we are not going to remove Land Bots; we expect that as we develop the web tools further, by the end of 2009 Land Bots will cease to work as far as buying up parcels is concerned.

In the meantime, where we see Land Bots causing unreasonable load on Search or the regions they operate in, or where they cause nuisance by regularly getting stuck at welcome areas or infohubs, that will be dealt with as a violation. That also includes the use of large numbers of Land Bots to get around the throttling of Search requests.

So to summarize..

Use of Bots to game Traffic will be considered a violation.

Bots are fine and we totally support their good use inworld, but we will deal with inappropriate use of them.

Traffic has value as a land metric, and will remain.

Responsible use of Land Bots is acceptable for now, but overuse will result in further action.

This policy will shortly be in the Knowledgebase. I will leave Comments open below this post so feel free to discuss it further, I'll be reading them all as usual and will reply where I can.
Thanks again for your support as we continue to drive for a better inworld experience for all of our residents.

That's one way that I expect my prediction to come true, Mickey. But, unless I'm mistaken, the ban is on both bots and camping for the purpose of improving traffic numbers. However, I'm sure that LL will allow some camping to continue, in spite of the traffic increases, if it's claimed that it's there to help people financially. I think we can expect an upsurge in the use of store models too - among other things - all of which will be where people are, making their lag experiences worse.

ETA:
I've just seen that it's only bots camping that is banned. Not camping to improve traffic numbers. So real people camping is fine, in spite of the fact that the land owners only do it for the traffic/search. We'll have to wait and see how that pans out.

Well, we'll have all the other methods of search-gaming that are not (yet) against the TOS.

As in the past, people like me will call such methods dishonest, and people like Phil will get uppity defending the techniques. Same old, same old.

Different points that's why. The vast majority don't care how they came to find an item but if you asked everyone a yes or no regarding falsely inflating traffic then yes, most people would almost certainly agree that they weren't "fair". That still doesn't mean they care about the issue.



Didn't they also say that if LL made an announcement like the one made today then their point about it not being against the TOS would be null and void?

Wonderful.

Now that we've spent two years discussing "real traffic"......let's spend the next few years discussing "real people"......have a hunch that discussion/debate is going to take a tad longer.

Traffic bots and camping bots are the issue Jack's talking about, not camping itself.

I saw that after I posted, and I added an ETA about it

Thanks muchly for the post of the linden text. Interesting stuff. Not sure how much good it is going to do but it is indeed interesting. I will be watching how things play out in practice closely. If its like other Linden Policing of things not much is going to come of it.

Would really like clarification on if using 1 or 2 alts to model shop clothes at ground level and in full view is considered a bot. And getting a model/friend to do the same...? (My sim has a few stores that use ground-based models so reaaallly would help if they clarified it a little )

Camping chairs+my own bots+paying myself L$3/hour=traffic!

It couldn't get more "clarified" than this: "Bots are fine and we totally support their good use inworld, but we will deal with inappropriate use of them."

I have three store bots that model my clothes and customers implants. They are clearly labeled as such.
Theres no mistake what they are. bdbot5000cc for Implant nations boobs, bdbot7500cc for ECORP and bdbot9000cc who represents FoxBean Labratories (the 5/7/9000 cc refers to implant sizes that the breast enhancement community uses and knows.)

There are times I log in to just pose too. Its rather fun. And I have actually scared people I think by jumping off and going boo when they least expect it. So they are entertaining to me as well as a sales tool.

Huge bot lots in boxes though is just stupid.