Bye bye traffic bots

QFC
(Quoted for contradiction)

Anybody that thinks this announcement will have a big affect on botrunners is kidding themselves. Instead of stuffing them in a box where they aren't doing anything and not hitting the sim or asset servers, they will be bouncing around multiple locations on the grid. They will be fully dressed and accessorized to blend in. They will probably even walk around a little and appear to be shopping before zipping off to the next location.

And whenever LL gets around to changing the metric a little, you can bet that it'll be gamed again within a week. Even if people don't know what is really being measured, they can make several guesses about what may be measured, then maximize all of those.

Nothing much changes it just goes back to how it was in 2007. Campers with real avatars which is not being banned. Ok it's more expensive to the shop/land owner....the alternative is what Argos described, bots on the move!

The interesting part of the blog is this part--->

"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"

Only the worst offenders will be targeted. This will have a mixed effect:

1) Relatively few locations have large numbers of bots, so this will change search results little.

2) The few locations that have large numbers of bots *do* affect the concurrency numbers, so if the bots don't just become better disguised (in time they will) the concurrency numbers will fall.

I thought of making a bot survey last week (it's been about 6 months) and I probably should have, to see what the peak bot usage was.

If you want to play some what-if games, try subtracting the largest bot farms from my survey data: http://greendots.typepad.com/

For example, if you take the estates data and subtract out only the largest 4 bot farms, you knock the total number of avatars down by 21%, but affect only 2% of the occupied sims. The percentage of affected search results would be even smaller (a handful of parcels out of perhaps a few thousand--I didn't count parcels, so I'm guessing).

In short, I think this will do nothing to improve search, but will have a measurable affect on concurrency. I don't think that's what LL wants.

If you're hoping for better enforcement than that, let's suppose they catch every bot farm larger than 10. In my data, that'd knock concurrency down by 34% and affect only 6% of occupied sims. Probably a couple dozen parcels out of a few thousand.

A few large bot farms are really screwing up the numbers. If LL kills them, they aren't going to like the results.

Uh sure, but those few are all top of the search result list. So while it may only affect 1 or 2% of sims it will precisely target the 1 or 2% of sims we all care about.

My models are going nowhere, and neither are my castle personel. My pure traffic bots will be sacked though.

This 'what business does' is a tired old nonsense.
*SOME* businesses act unethically. This is no way justifies other businesses acting in the same way.

With your attitude to ethics, I certainly would not trust you in business - or socially. I don't think that any sensible person should. You appear to be saying that you consider it acceptable to do whatever you feel you can get away with.

All-in-all, this new policy seems very wishy-washy to me - no real heart in it from LL's point of view - more like a measure of appeasement to those who have been persistently calling for the end of traffic bots, just to shut them up for a while. LL isn't seriously against traffic bots - the most negative judgements I've seen from them are, selling traffic "is not cool" and gaming the search results with traffic bots "isn't fair". They are hardly strongly felt views. They don't want ARs and they will be taking time to police the new policy by watching the search results instead - hardly a full-frontal attack.

It seems to me that they aren't too bothered about it and would probably rather it went at a slow pace - otherwise their figures would be badly affected, but doing it slowly will mean that the figures can hold out, especially since apparently good bots are going to replace some or many of the pure traffic ones. I told Jack, in a notecard, that that's likely to happen, so it isn't something that didn't occur to them. My guess is that it's probably desirable for LL, so that their figures largely hold up.

The new policy looks like it will turn out to be a shambles. It won't satisfy those who persistnently rail against traffic bots because they'll still be here in large numbers - both those that LL doesn't get round to warning about and those that are converted to "good" uses. Only when they get round to bot owners having to flag their bots, so that they are not included in the traffic figures, will there be an appreciable difference, imo, but how long will it be before that happens? Many months? A year? More?

It all looks very half-hearted to me. And it's all very stupid too - imo. All they had to do is put the All results, filtered by Places, in the Places tab, exactly as they had intended to do from a long time ago - and exactly as they *did* do in one RC viewer. Why won't they do that? The fact that they haven't done it speaks volumes to me. It says that they don't want their figures to be negatively affected to a noticeable degree, and this half-hearted, slow-moving measure will ensure that they aren't.

I'll believe it when i see it in the results..


i wonder how much the witch hunters will factor into all this..
it's just a feeling but i can hear them breathing at the starting gate to the AR machine already hehehehehe..
omg!! BOTSORZ!!!!

Well seeing you are supposed to only have 5 accounts per person, I would have to say past that number is cheating.
People running 5 or 6 bots aren't the major problem it's those running 50 or 60 packed into boxes like meat that have massbotted SL to the point restriction is necessary.
There's nothing wrong with bots untill they are used to cheat, mainly because LL have allowed infinite anoymous free accounts for all.

But when the 50 and 60 sets are gone, then the 5 or 6 bot sets become the problem. The current arguments against traffic bots will apply to them.

How about "Use of Bots to game Traffic will be considered a violation. " is that strong enough for you?



That's the beauty of traffic gaming, if it doesn't get you top of the search then no-one cares and if it does get you top of the search then you're easy to find.



Then how comes the response from pretty much everyone is overwhelmingly positive? People are satisfied. We're cautious to see how the implementation goes but all we can say right now is it looks to be great.

Jack has had some success with his earlier pronouncements. The ad farming ban was very succesful. The land cutting one has been OK but slow to get fully ramped up. The difference is that ad farming was implemented by massive insitutional business with a lot at stake. Land cutting is done by every two bit newb with who can afford a 512.

Traffic gaming is like the first example. No-one with a serious sized store can afford the risk of being banned for using bots so they will all stop. Are you going to wait it out and see what happens and risk being banned Phil or get rid of your bots before the deadline?

People will have to be very brave to try to skirt the letter of the law and hope to get away with edge casing when it could mean losing their businesses and land they are trying to promote. The kind of people running Box o' Bots are clued in and know what's going on. Most of them will be scared away from bots if there are a few high profile suspensions.

If 5 or 6 bots gets you to the top of the search you'll get detected and beat down, if it doesn't then no-one cares.

Well at least webbased programs don't lag us inworld by hundreds of bots hammering the crap out of the servers teleporting from sim to sim every 30 seconds 24/7.
Most plots set for sale at bot prices are brought within seconds, so that means there has to be nearly as many bots as there are sims for one to be there every few seconds. And they may not even be in the sim long enough to rez.

You are way off base. Landbots search the land sales tab and teleport when they find something. They don't flit around every sim in the grid super fast and hope to find something. There's maybe 20 landbots, or 100 or something. Not thousands.

5 or 6 bots run by every store would not cause the degree of problems 50 or 60 bots would.
It just means that everyone who doesn't devote a couple of spare PC's to masscheating the traffic system will have to actually compete with other retailers who have few or no bots on normal basis of quality, service and price.
Massbotters are like email spammers, they will continue to mail out a 100,000 emails per day to make 1 sale, because it's legal and free to do so, if they had to pay even 1 cent per email, they would need to justify their expediture according to it's returns and narrow their target audience to people actually interested in their product.

No. It's only a measure of appeasement, and doesn't indicate any deply held views. Maybe I'm not making what I mean very clear, so let me try this. If some people hadn't persistently railed against traffic bots, would anyone at LL have felt so deeply against them that this policy would have been made anyway? Does anyone at LL have any such deep feelings about their use? Judging by what Jack has said, and the length of time it's taken to reach this stage, I really don't think that anyone at LL cares much at all about them.

Maybe, but I think it won't work out like that in practise. Initially, this thing will be the latest fad for some of the LL staff, but their enthusiasm will deteriorate before long, just as it has with the advertisement rules.

That's because most people haven't thought it through like we have in the forum in the past. They think it's the end of bots for traffic, but it isn't.

The ad rules are being ignored by LL staff. I know that personally. It was fine at the start but time affects minds.

I've no intention of waiting it out but, if I did, I'd only get a warning, after which I'd remove the traffic bots, so it wouldn't be a risk at all. I imagine that a great many people who use traffic bots will think the same. My bots will disappear later next week - when this thing gets started.

The use of bots for traffic/search purposes won't end because of this new policy. I wish it would, but it won't.

Every store won't run 5 or 6 bots - most stores won't run any. So 5 or 6 will definitely be a problem when it comes to traffic rankings. Five would give a 7200 traffic points start and 6 would give 8640 points start. There would be no difference in the search results - those with the bots would be at the top.

If they don't disable the in-world transactions then how is it supposed to prevent traffic-bots from continuing to operate in-world?
I can't see any other possible interpretation in the context of traffic bots.

Why does it matter?

llTeleportArgent()

Bots tagged as bots shouldn't show up on the world map either.

I agree with Elanthius about this. I once came across one of his bots - just hanging there in the sky - going nowhere. Hammering search is different though. That is hammering system resources but, as far as I know, that particular resource doesn't suffer from overuse. Traffic bots can cause a sim to be full so that people can't get in (my system allbut guarantees that that doesn't happen) and, if used badly, they contribute to people's lag, but I don't think that hammering the search by landbots causes any problems at the present time.

I'm not going to bother to make a spirited defense of landbot resource use but I will point out that search pretty much never fails and is never slow.

I agree. Bot for bot, landbots use far more resources than well-used traffic bots, but far less overall because there are only a tiny number of them by comparison.