what is a bot?

Given the new approach by LL, I'm curious as to what a bot is ... is it an alt or is it an avi inworld without a SL viewer?

Well it's sort of an alt, in the sense that a bot has an account with a name and *someone* had to sign it up... at the same time it's an avatar in-world not without a viewer at all but with a viewer unlike one you're used to thinking of, probably with a text-only interface and coded to perform certain functions automatically.

For the purposes of LL's latest policy changes, I think a fair definition would be something along the lines of "an avatar running a custom client that allows it to operate without a person behind the keyboard".

This is the opinion of someone with very little experience with SL bots, so wait around and you'll probably get better definitions.

I'm not real clear on the whole bot thing, either. If love it if someone would explain more about landbots and how they work. I'm real confused on that one.

As far as I understand it, landbots search (Faster than any human could, of course) for land priced lower than a specific amount per meter, let's just say 10L$/meter. When they find a listed parcel that low, they teleport to it, and buy it.

They're generally run through a custom viewer or application, and are programmed to have the abilities needed to do their job, but not much else, to reduce the amount of resources they need to pull to do their job.

A bot is simply an avatar with no human at the helm. Most bots are scripted to perform certain actions, and that can be done with the regular viewer or a text-only viewer. Other bots do almost nothing at all, such as the oft-cited "traffic bot". Any bot can be logged on to by a human, as they are avatars like any other; whether they are a bot or not depends on how the avatar is being used while inworld.

Quite a few clubs have resident dancebots that are there all the time. In fact these can become minor celebrities.

A bot is the 'guts' of an SL client, namely 'testclient.exe' written by libSecondLife with some additional code. First off, testclient.exe is the core necessities to log an avatar on to Second Life. Over time, various features have been added to it to allow you to do many of the things you do from within a client. Attach an object, rez an object, seat an avatar, teleport, etc. What a bot is is that core 'testclient.exe' program with some additional code to make the overall program have some form of automated functionality. For example land bots. Land bots are coded to continually search the land sales for 'good deals'. I've never used or seen a land bot, but I imagine that you can adjust an L$/sq meter threshold at which time the bot will then purchase the property. That way, once a land bot is setup and running, it will continually search land sales scanning for a property that meets the purchase criteria, and when found, execute the purchase. The account that is used for the bot is loaded with L$ so it can make purchases, and once a purchase is made, it can even be coded to notify the operator via email or IM or whatever. Camping bots are coded to read locations from a list, and teleport there (the exact spot where a camping chair is), and attempt to sit it and camp. If unable to sit, or booted, it teleports to the next location and attempts to sit there, repeating the process until it's gone though the entire list, and then start over again. These are examples of the 'bad' bots LL is talking about, and wants to essentially ban them by considering their usage a violation. They want to leave the door open for 'useful' bots, maybe greeters and such, that are not overly burdening the resources (like a land bot does searching continuously), and perform a useful function. Bots are exactly why you cannot search land too fast or you are stopped, because before the limitation, land bots could scan land sales as quickly as the program could execute, whereas now, land bots are intentially 'slowed down' to stay under the search speed limit. Even with the limit, they are tireless, work 24/7, and can still purchase land faster than manual searching. Linden Lab wants to allow useful bots while eliminating the ones that are essentially unfair or overly hard on resources. Traffic bots are just logged on avatars, something you can do with just the core testclient program, and it's heavy on the system to have them logged on, usually 24/7, tying up system resources and, at times, preventing avatars from logging into that particular sim.

Let us say I downloaded the source code for the viewer and added a new menu option, which allowed you to pick any avatar on the same sim as you, and then some clever code would walk or fly you to the same position as that avatar cleverly avoiding and walking/flying around any obstacles in the way, and automatically apologising in chat or im for any other avatars who bumped into.

If you were to ever use that menu option then you would briefly be a bot, in that your actions, movements and chat would all be being controlled by software, and not by you.

In principle whilst you could add bot controll software into the full LL viewer, in practice (as others have mentioned), bots tend to be controlled by simplified text based viewers so that a single PC can run a number of bots simultaneously without running out of RAM or burning out the graphics card.

Matthew

The only date Phil can get?