Good or bad idea - voluntary bot identification?

Well, if you lost your job to a green amorphous cloud, you'd turn to a life of crime too.

Mandatory Bot registration should have been in the Plan from the beinging.



And for those who don't comply? Enforcement wouldn't be so bad as people seem to think.

Nothing stoping a Linden from poping around to high traffic areas and logging off the sky boxes of non-registered Trafficbots.

It wouldn't take too many "purges" to get people to register on their own.

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Or having a system to keep track of land bots.

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Spam is not allowed already .. so that wouldn't matter.

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There should have even been the last name "BOT" used for this.

I think all ethical bot users should identify their bots by name and profile, and possibly a tattoo on the skin that says "BOT".

I like the idea of silver bot-dots on the Map and mini-map.

And I am highly in favor of MANDATORY bot registration. The above features should be required of everybotty, not just options that an ethical user may choose to include.

Never gonna happen.

true

But that doesn't mean it is a bad idea either

Agreed.

As long as the client is open sourced there will be no possible way to enforce it except by a whole lot of manual policing by LL. Yeah, like that's gonna happen.

"everybotty" ... hehheh

How do you enforce that, though? It's a wonderful sentiment, but how would LL automatically identify a bot? And, it would have to be automatic for the system to be efficient in any way.

Also, what's the point? Don't get me wrong, I use a lot of bots and I don't care one way or the other if they're visibly tagged or not. Most of my customer facing bots respond to IMs with details on how to contact me and that they are bots. So I'm not against the idea, it makes no difference to me personally. But who cares if they're tagged or not? How does it make the grid more pleasant or more profitable or LL's job easier? Just seems like a bunch of wasted work to me.

There should be a Bot Flag on your land much like the google search flag.

And if it exists the Bot has no access.

For an information/chat bot, I use Pandorabot:

http://www.pandorabots.com/botmaster/en/home

There is no green dot to deal with on the map because the link to a Pandorabot can be scripted into a prim. The bot can listen to and respond on an open or private chat channel. The bot programming can be done through a web link.

It's more under the category of 'a cool thing' than anything else really, and clarify I've got a bot.

Waste of time maybe, but compared to what might be the question. For instance we have four ground textures, it could have been two. Four is just nicer but not a big deal really.

As features go, a bot indicator might not be the most incredible one. Perhaps somewhere below 'ability to walk around' but perhaps somewhere above 'give yourself a neanderthal forehead.'

This sort of bot I dont have problems with - it adds nothign to the 'population' of a sim, and doesnt make it look like there's more residents there than there are. I have no issue with this sort of thing.

Though, I'd rather see some resident who needs a job doing this, personally.

If they made it mandatory to id a bot as such, then open source or not they now have a stick with the rules to enforce it.

Even slapping a hardware block on repeat offenders, much like they do with certain other clients designed to get around certain system restrictions

Unless reasons existed for people to actually register their bots.


Such as if you owned Bots they could all use your Payment/Verification Information and Email Address.

Why not simply do what the Linden's do with their bots?An obvious name with explanation in the profile would seem to be the standard way of going about it.. Any other bot I've seen has declared it in it's chat...

How would they slap a hardware block on something that relies on the client to send hardware info?

While I agree with many of the sentiments above, the cold reality is that as long as the SL Client is open source, there is no 100% verifyable way of determining whether a particular avatar is a bot or not.

I've never yet had a need to use a bot myself, but I think they've received an unfair stigma due to the abuse by landbots & spambots. The resulting environment is one where those who wish to use bots for creative, helpful purposes tend not to talk about them for fear of negative public perception.

A client checkbox is a great idea in spirit, but probably not all that realistic. Those who wish to identify their bots as such can easily do so today. Those who wish to remain hidden can't be expected to tick a voluntary checkbox - nor can we expect Linden to devote man hours to researching & investigating each report of a 'suspected' bot.

After much review and consideration, I think the court of public opinion has ruled that my marked bot idea sucks

Which is quite okay, and why I was asking what people thought.

Time to file it in the 'cool maybe but just won't ever work' category.


Next up: can I get my green dot to turn different shades with my mood? Okay, okay, never mind...

It just got a bit off track by people suggesting ideas that you could make work today and by people talking about bots in general.

Don't think I saw much objection to it being an (optional) feature suggestion. I like it the idea of being able to look at the map and identify designated helpers or mentors or whatever.

Well you could start with anyone logged in for over 160 hours per week, they ain't a human behind the keyboard.
Then anyone not moving or chatting or moving inventory over a time period, maybe not spending would be good for the economy
I guess the problem is massbotters would then just script their bots to do these functions making SL laggier.
We just need to remove things like traffic and ability to pounce on land in seconds that cause them to exist.
Make people search for stores on a 3rd party website or just ad pricing, then at least those ranking high will have to have products that ar egood enough to give them the sales to be at the top, rather than currently many good creators can't beat a person selling average content who is running 50 bots.

Feeling botty today?

Hmm ... could we use captcha for items like buying land? That would prevent a bot from doing it.

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