Good or bad idea - voluntary bot identification?

I was just thinking about this, as I'm considering a bot or two for Caledon to help residents out.

One might perform basic land functions for authorised people while I am offline (estate management slots are full and don't cover everything); another might assist new residents.

A couple of bots won't exactly make a 43 region area look deceptively full.

But still, the green dot of a bot I don't like a lot.



How about a purely voluntary profile checky that made a bot's dot silver-metallic?

Or maybe a last name such as "Bot" or "Bitwise" or "3PO" or "Nexus6"?



Should there be any particular thing about an intentional bot that might clearly and distinctly make it different?

Perhaps when logins are tough for human players, the bots all get a forced logout?

I like that notion.

There will be those who loathe the idea, however. Making bots readily identifiable is far too transparent for anyone who uses them to inflate traffic to gain Search ranking.

For identifying bots to LL, it's already there - http://www.libsecondlife.org/wiki/Login , if the bot writers want to use it. I assume things like restrained life and onrez viewers also put their special tags in, too..

I wasn't too worried if the Company knows about bots... I thought it might be good if *we* could know.



How to explain this. Say someday we might have a Librarian - an avatar that could help with many many things... but clearly a bot inworld.

Might look like a bespectacled Victorian gentleman perhaps, but with a silver dot on the map instead of a green one, and perhaps some aspect that clarified the botness - perhaps silver text? I don't know.

I'm sure some people would 'hide' as bots - perhaps they could perform some function on demand that humans couldn't... digits of PI or something?

...or perhaps to stray a bit topicwise, 'humans' could be occasionally asked a question on login to verify their humanity... "you see a turtle, it is turned over in The hot sun - what do you do?" kind of thing...

Indeed. Just speculation and all that - but I do wonder how many people, who normally insist there's nothing shameful about using bots, would object to such identification for ironic reasons like "it's nobody's business" and etc.

I have a friend with a conversation bot. He gave it the first name "Bot".
So far it's the only bot I like.

You could have your bot chat on a hidden channel wearing an item that relayed it into open chat (owner chat only of course). Name the item the same as the bot, and it'll all come up with green object text. You could also start a group member type "bot" (or Automaton in keeping with the sim) and have the bot wear the title.

I don't hate all bots - just the uses most have them for.

Make turtle soup, of course!

I have no problem with bots that are used for models in shape stores or clothing stores. I'd thought about using one for my shop to exhibit the latest release, but I've enough accounts at the moment to deal with.

I think many shop owners would welcome the ability to register bots as such, especially if their sim becomes overloaded for some reason, the bots could be booted to allow user driven avatars to enter.

Great topic, Des.

Yes, I think giving folks an optional, but standard visual indication that this av is a bot would be useful. Bots are cropping up in all sorts of legitimate retail uses, and retail bot owners would probably welcome a distinctive skin or name that uniquely identifies their clothing model (or librarian!) as a bot. It would also be nice if there were a standard way to interact with the bot -- e.g. on touch -- such that they give you a notecard, so owners can explain the bot's purpose and steer people to email or something for more interactive retail help.
.

oooo look! a shooting star! oh wait...it's a box o bots!

Oh.. Ok..

I kinda like the idea. Especially the bit about having a different colored dot on the minimap. Having more use cases will make it easier to sell to LL - maybe you could also have a color for estate managers and maybe even something for people on the mainland that have owner privs on the land they're over. This would enable people who are looking for help to find it a bit more easily. There'd need some way for people to turn it off, though - everybody doesn't want to be working all the time.. Oh - people with mentor tags, too.

If you say 'forced' then anybody making borderline bots will avoid it.. Maybe rephrase that to say that people logged in with the bot flag can get a message when the grid is hurting which they can use as a signal that they might want to log out.

While I appreciate the sentiment behind the idea, why can't I just check the box, walk about as normal, and be counted as a bot? Or roleplay a bot? Or run a bot and just not check the box?

Personally, I don't want to see a bot doing anything a human could do. We keep talking about immersion and the grid economy and inflated traffic ratings, about the loads on servers and resources, and on and on ... but one of the biggest things that could happen to make the grid better is the elimiation of all the stupid bots.

We have bots pretending to make clubs look lively, bots to camp and influence search rankings, bots to earn lindens and bots to take lindens away. We have bots performing useful services, and bots to copy and steal textures and property from other residents.

If there were a way to regulate and control the numbers of bots a person could run, or the number of bots on a parcel or a sim, it might not be so bad. There isn't, though, and the potential for abuse shows itself far more frequently than the potential for usefulness.

No bots.

It's already possible, for someone who wishes an avatar to be recognized as a bot, to do so. Add "Bot" to the end of the first name. Use floating text. Write in the profile, "I am a Bot."

Those things are already possible now, and I see no reason for Linden Labs to add additional means.

The only thing not possible now is distinguishing, via the mini-map, what avatars are bots and what avatars are not.

Those who do wish to use bots to inflate traffic numbers won't use a voluntary system of identifying bots.

Those who might be inclined to use the voluntary identification- trying to balance usefulness vs. traffic inflation when it comes to bots- probably are not going to use bots enough to inflate traffic numbers regardless. The people who would use the voluntary system are the people who might only use one or two bots anyway, rather than ten or twenty.

Looking at 20 dots on a mini-map, and seeing half of them in bot-silver, for example, might be useful information. But the people who use ten bots on a sim probably aren't going to use a voluntary identification system for them.

Looking at 20 dots on a mini-map, and seeing maybe only 2 in silver while the other 18 are green, really isn't significant information.

Honestly, the main thrust of the plan does not seem to be information. It seems to be a plan about avoiding feelings of guilt when using bots.

Honestly, I think the only people who would admit their bots are bots are the ones creating and using bots that are truly harmless - the ones that it wouldn't help a bit if they logged out, because there was only one bot like that, staying put in one sim.

The people using bots to scam traffic, to farm camp chairs, and to buy land faster and cheaper than any Human has a chance to? They will all just laugh at the idea, and ignore it. And it is THOSE bots that we most explicitly need to get rid of when things get tight on resources.

Or, rather more to the point that I think Desmond is going after, the ones using bots that are helpful.

He sometimes mentions, for like a year now, that he'd like some automated in-world way to do conceirge (as a generic term, not as an LL term) type stuff and answer FAQs.. A bot would be a great way to do that.

Not so much about avoiding feelings of guilt, but avoiding deception. I would *like* to have a fairly well recognised bot at, say, the library - and people could see it on the map there, and realise perhaps what it is for, due to its location.

As it is, people see a green dot, discover a bot and are dismayed. I'd like to turn that around for legitimate uses.

Put something above it that reads BOT on the minimap?

Identifying legitimate botes is great, saves confusing them for residents, you could ignore them for traffic counts etc.
BUT it would have to go hand in hand with a LL police making it illegal to run bots otherwise.
The trouble is all the legit bots could be logged out but they would be a minority compared to those used to cheat and exploit systems.
Traffic botters don't care if people can't login as long as their precious traffic figures are high.

Agreeing with Amity, I just don't think you have a problem here, Des. If you give the bot a botty first name and a botty group tag and maybe a botty titler, people who come upon Marianbot* are gonna know she's not trying to deceive anybody. And of course she could be programmed to go on break if the Library ever got overcrowded. As long as, up close, she's obviously not trying to scam anybody, I'm not sure why it's that much of a problem that she's green on the Mini-Map.

_______
* I know: River City was not exactly SteamPunk.

I agree with Qie, Desmond. You can already do what you have in mind, except for the silver colored dot, which really doesn't matter.

The very fact that you posted indicates that you are concerned about what people here might think but, even in this forum, "bots" isn't a dirty word. The use of bots isn't objected to here. It's only some uses of bots that some people *here* object to.

Having said that, perhaps you'd better not do it. If Phil Deakins agrees with it, then it *must* be wrong

I'm more inclined towards mandatory bot identification as a subsection of the ToS

But voluntary would help show which bot users are ethical and honest about it.

Different minimap dots would be a good thing as well

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe."

Meanwhile I don't see any great value in this. Probably your best bet is to just give them a group role tag that says bot or whatever. I suppose it would be cute to have different colours on the minimap but is it really worth any amount of development time to implement?

Maybe you could get enough bots that you can spell B O T on the minimap with them all?

The traffic thing is all but irrelevant now and traffic bots will eventually go the way of the dinosaur. After that it'll no longer be shameful to run a bot and have to worry that people think you are gaming search rankings.

"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
Time to die."

Sometimes you look at an avatar and you just *know* it's a bot.
This is a landbot that beat me to sales of recycled 16m adfarm plots - even when I had the benefit of a countdown to the right moment.
It was hanging at cloud level in the adjacent sim, and obviously it had to be continually hammering the scripted equivalent of About Land to beat me.



That is one very kinky bot!!

Shame on you. You know who you are

I can see the appeal of marking a bot differently on the map if it has an NPC like function, because you *want* people to be able to find it easily. An info bot or one programmed to interact with residents, as mentioned in your library, that funtions as part of an attraction. I actually think that would be kind of cool, and being able to spot them on the minimap and seek them out to find out what they do would be useful.

But, there are so many ways that people use "bots", that if they were all marked this way I think it would defeat that goal. People would see the silver dot, and think...another bot, no need to go there. Then, you'd have the same problem you have now, the silver dot would look "bad" (if one sees bots as a negative thing) and only Caledon residents 'in the know' would know to look it up and interact with it.

In your case, it would be easy enough to build the bots into the Caledon storyline. You could pick a bot-ish last name (Borkotron comes to mind) and put their picture and some relevant backstory info at the landing points that would encourage people to go looking for your seemingly narcoleptic assistant librarian.