Yet Another Bot Thread (with a Twist)

I was on a mainland parcel of land that I own a few nights ago and a bot appeared only it did not fully rez, it just stayed as a cloud.

I attempted to right click and get the options that appear for an avatar (which was in itself quite difficult). Once I managed to find just the right spot to access the right menu I find that the profile and eject, freeze, eject & ban options were greyed out as if unavailable (using v1.21 released viewer).

In effect I could not eject the bot from my land, and after a few minutes whilst I puzzled on this the bot disappeared anyway.

It occurred to me that the bot client might be deliberately stopping it's profile from being loaded completely in the same way they deliberately do not rez properly and that led me to thinking that they may be able to make SL think that they were in such an minimally loaded state that the parcel powers are not yet available (and never in fact appear).

My question is this:

Is it possible for a bot client to make those parcel powers unavailable due to communicating SL in a most minimal fashion and fooling SL into thinking they have not logged on sufficiently to present those options?

If so then this presents a big problem for those people who do not want bots on their land in my opinion and the potential for grieving becomes significantly higher.

Unless you tweak libsl or clone your master for instance, you appear as the mist cloud when using TestClient from libsl. Profile and everything is still there, nothing being hidden, just nothing much to right click on to show profile.

EDIT: It has been a while since I used it but it is highly possible you also show as a cloud when logged on with SLeek which is just basically an IM client.

Don't know if this is the case here, but Lindens run a lot of test bots. (They're messy, too, if a parcel they visit is set to allow build with no auto-return.)

I think Day Oh said their IM client was extremely minimal - never sent some of the messages that cause other similar programs to get sent info they don't need for their purposes. Perhaps it's that client, or perhaps Day Oh might know something about this issue.

Thanks for the replies so far, Jesse I am not some much concerned with LibSL's ability as it comes by default so much as whether it is possible to change it (or any client to be written) that uses so little of the protocols that it could stop someone using parcel powers.

If so then I would consider that an exploit as SL ideally should refuse to keep a client like that logged in.

I hope someone with some of the protocol knowledge is able to comment here.

There is also one other possibility. For some reason (which I have been too lazy to debug and trace down) it frequently takes me up to 2-3 minutes from the time I logout until my "cloud av" actually poofs from the simulator. I'll have to play with it sometime and see just what kind of presence I actually have in world until I do disappear.

Jesse has a point about the avatar ghosting; if the client quits without doing a normal logout procedure (for example, if it crashes), it can take several minutes for the avatar to vanish from the sim. The avatar is visible, but not functional during this time, so that could have been what you saw.

Otherwise it was just some other temporary SL glitchiness. Did you happen to check whether you could add the avatar to your parcel's ban list? Doing so will kick the avatar off the parcel.

I don't know the answer to the question, but there's no difficulty in right clicking a cloud av. Just right click the name tag and proceed as normal.

It is true that the client could have crashed but I considered this unlikely as I was there as it rezzed in. It would have had to have crashed almost immediately.

Unfortunately I did not have the presence of mind to try the ban list at that time but I am going to watch out for it again, see if I can repeat it. I did consider it just might be a glitch as there have been so many recently. However I then started to wonder about if this might be a deliberate thing designed to stop bots from being ejected.

To Phil: For some reason on my viewer right clicking the name tag and most parts of the cloud seem to select the terrain behind it. Not so with a fully rezzed av though. YMMV.

Heck I never tried aiming that high.

I never have any problems using the name tag with cloud avs.

Good for you - *points to YMMV*

???

YMMV = Your Mileage May Vary.

Incidentally, this isn't a bot thread. It's a cloud av thread. From the post, I see no reason to assume that the av was a bot. It sounds like it was an av logging in but got stuck part way in, and then the user either cancelled or closed the application, or even got all the way in and TPed off somewhere. It's not uncommon for avs to remain as clouds to other people even though they see themselves as normal - just like we used to see ourselves as normal when others saw us Ruthed - and female, regardless of our gender.

Oh.

This is actually very funny but I knew you were going to say this eventually. Sorry I hope you don't take this as rude but I just knew it.

I 100% knew it was a bot, the reason is it belongs to a well known land-botter and had their characteristic name and group tag. Also I have observed this bot before on my land as it seems to return periodically for some reason.
I just didn't really want to go into that too much as it is not entirely relevant to my question.

Plus I did say it was with a twist.

Besides even without that my question was about a bot client and whether it could achieve what I asked at least conceptually, so on all counts it qualifies as a bot thread.

I would still like someone with some protocol knowledge to give us a nod and tell us whether what I theorised could in fact happen even if in this situation it was not necessarily as it seemed but had some other cause.

Fair enough. I won;t start the thread, "When is a bot not a bot?"

ROFL, oh Phil you are priceless at times.

I'm never priceless. I can always be bought

Depends on the viewer version, I think. I had this problem for a while (not just with cloud AVs), but haven't seen it with the new RC--which is odd because they've changed the whole "pick" method in a way that they warn will lead to imprecision at first. (I also haven't seen the weird problem that made the right-click pie-menu selections just do nothing, although I'm not sure that was client-side anyway.)

I always use the current standard viewer (when a new one comes out I always get it straight away).

With the options being inactive, it could be that the av didn't make it all the way in - either into SL or into the sim server - at least for a while. It could have crashed in the process. It does take a little while for SL to pick up a crash and make the av disappear.