trawler bot?

My resort manager told me some weeks ago that shed seen this avatar that looked like a small robot..darting about one of our resorts. It was really fast moving, so fast she couldnt catch up with it and it seemed to evade my own private homes security orb-entering my home quite a few times and jumping out again (its set for 15 seconds) Today we were both at this resort and it paid us another visit...as it went over the threshold in my office, the welcome mat recorded its name...so i looked it up...it said something like "Iam a trawler bot for slbrowser.com...and im programmed not to take information about residential land that is NOT for sale..i visit popular places and advertise them free onwww.slbrowser.com...etc etc...

It darted about the whole area...same places again and again...I dont have land for sale...i dont have camping chairs....i just rent homes....

Anyone know anything about these things?

Fai x

Like ESC's Grid Shepherd, these bots gather information about parcels depending on how they are programmed. It is apparently scanning the popular places lists but is not supposed to grab info from residential land that is not for sale.

yes I opened a small store recently on the mainland..well started to open it but didn't..and I kept on getting this "visitor' on my visitor tracker list..like..every couple of days.

I checked the profile of the "person" and their profile said they weren't a person ,they were a bot for that exact company.
So i looked up the company info and messaged the guy who founded it.
He explained to me that he employs bots to gather info that goes into a data bank for his customers to access to find stores and things sold.

I've also heard that these bots are what buys up and rents land and totally fubarred the whole free first land thing back in the day.

~Lana Tomba

hmmm it was very odd how it darted about..there is NO land for sale on that sim at all (well two bits supposedly are but they arent set for sale for anyone to buy) I didnt like how it entered my home at all...or hung around my residents homes, flitting...and darting tsk...i banned it anyway

This one is not looking for land for sale. Bots are just programs, and not all programs do the same thing.

In its profile it said it was programmed to find land for sale...and places of interest...honestly though i find the whole programmed bot thing a bit...disturbing whatever they may be looking for...but then im paranoid lol

A crawler bot
Indexing data for a search engine usually
Like GoogleBot

darn double negatives.

slbrowser.com lists items for sale, not land for sale. If you go to their website, they list the names of all the bots, feel free to ban them if you don't want the items you have for sale listed on that site. Or if you don't like nosy bots.

I welcome the little bots. I leave dishes of coolant and silicon wavers for them outside my door. Plus that SLBrowser.com thinger is kinda neat.

I've also seen Linden bots show up in my sims. PerformanceTester Linden, I think is the name.

Ooooooooo! What a *good* idea! I might put a plate n' can in one of my cells and see if I can trap one... I'd hafta set 'em for sale tho...

Can you orbit a bot?

Actually it's Performance Tester. And he has 3 brothers, Performance2 Tester, Performance3 Tester, and Performance4 Tester. They are known to be litterbots, one left a domino on my sim one day. I think they rez and take back objects to test grid performance, I guess that bot on that particular day wasn't able to take his domino back hehe.

On an aside, the last name Tester is reserved by LL for, let me think, Testing stuff. There are some amusing names and profiles to find if you are really bored one day.

What the...?? It takes pictures of some of my stuff and puts it on the website! The fact that it appears to be grabbing images off merchandise is a bit disturbing.

Yep, any texture, including No Trans textures not in the bot's inventory. Bots are all-powerful!

Oh, the texture store people are going to be having fits about this one. It lifted textures that are only in my inventory and on my merchandise - textures that I don't sell!! I'm puzzled as to why it picks up the textures for some of my stuff, but not the rest of it. Not that I want it to - just wondering. A bot that's allowed to roam SL and pick up all the textures it wants to freely is gonna cause an uproar.

But they use their powers for good (shopping), not evil (selling)!

There's even Torley Tester....

Except that they display these textures openly on their website for anyone to steal. Sure, they have a tiny little "Second Life Search" watermark in the corner - that can be easily photoshopped out.

And technically, they could do evil things with these mass quantities of textures they're accumulating if they wanted to.

OOH WAIT - it gets even better! They are posting the scripts that they use for the bots on their website, and giving everyone permission to use it! Texture thieves, here's the opportunity you've all been waiting for! Jump on it!

edit to edit: My knowledge of scripting is rather simple. Can someone who knows more about scripting check these out and see if what's posted could actually work?

The scripts posted tell how to tell the bots to go away, not actually make your own bots. If you use these scripts, you get to tell the bots what they can look at, or to go away and not look at anything.

Those scripts don't have anything to do with how their bots work or grab textures. The ControlGiver one is something you can drop in a prim on your land and (with some setup) tell the browser bots not to scan your land. The other two are things you can use if you want to actively upload information to their site rather than wait for a bot to find you.

Their bots snag textures using either LibSL or a modified client. All textures are sup-r-easy to grab if you're familiar with those options.

Peep EnusBot1 LLQABot through EnusBot500 LLQABot xD

So in order to not have your textures grabbed and uploaded to this website for anyone to take, you have to:

1. Know that this site exists, which I didn't until just now.
2. Either a) go through the bother of manually banning all of their bots from each parcel, OR
b)configure this script that they put on the site, which most people won't have a clue how to do.

I really didn't think people were going to be fine with this. The uproar over the SheepBot was deafening - but this thing seems to have existed for a couple months now, and people are just rolling over and taking it? Even though it's WORSE than the SheepBot, because it grabs your textures and posts them?

Okay, maybe anyone can grab textures using LibSL or a modded browser with some effort - but with this site, it's even easier!

Linden Lab,

As well as the bot makers,

Seem to have no interest in showing residents any consideration over what they will scan.

They don't even feel compelled to make an effort to inform Residents that such a thing is being done.

The debate over Sheepbot basically proved this. Anything you do or own in Second Life can be scanned and there is nothing anyone's going to do to stop them.

If we don't like it were supposed to buy or move to a private island and restrict its access to group only.


As a reminder - Torley Linden's response to the Sheepbot was:

"Cool"

Also be on the lookout for

SlutRatings Bot - reports back to Trout of any tramps in the immediate area

WangMatch Bot - reports back to Carli of boys who need help matching

MFSL Bot - reports back to Jumpy about what's going on in his world

Naughty Bot - reports back to Wildefire about who needs a spanking

EastSide Bot - reports back to Wheezy on the whereabouts of short, obnoxious men whom she's not going to take any crap from