Bots hammering our TP system at 23 sims per minute

It's the weekend as usual over 50k of residents and bots online and SL is failing.

Can't login or TP or buy land, thousands of bots still can
Search, Events, Education is down, so you can't find any classes to attend.
Transactions are failing so those 50 traffic bots in a box above your store are USELESS.

We didn't get any grid destroying upgrades this week to whine about and surprise surprise, SL still seems to bjorked, maybe it's not the fixes and upgrades causing this at all.
When is LL going to do something to limit the number of accounts a person can run, we need to draw a line because there's only room for 50k of us in the grid.
For a start if you don't own a premium account I don't see why you should be able to run more than one account at all. And if you do they should all be linked to the premium and limited to 5, that should allow people to still run bots but severly limit them. This isn't about banning bots, just limiting the current infinite limit on numbers you can run.
And seeing the age verification "supposedly" IDENTIFIES accounts to a RL person, it should be pretty easy to avoid someone running 100 accounts. So only count avatars in traffic that are both age and payment verified, because counting annomyous and non spending residents is too open to gaming, no not gaming it's a pussyfoot term, I mean CHEATING.

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-2289

i was exactly thinking of those boxes to be marked to control traffic on another posts written before, i can see you think similar to me to avoid so many people CHEATING as u say in SL
in my land only that kind of avatrs can enter to it (aged verified and given payment info), so i hope LL will think more about this control access boxes and used to keep BOTS out the hell of SL

Before I arrived when they stopped requiring credit card verification?



Shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, they're not going to do it. We should have WoW type accounts whereby one login, multiple avatars.



Balderdash, age verification is easily gamed, it has been reported, the system is rubbish. Secondly 80% of the grid is estate land, estate tenants do not need to be premium and they obviously spend money or they wouldn't be tenants at all. Plenty of anonymous accounts spend a fair bit of money.

Well the concept of still leaving the stable door open and keep watching the horses running out doesn't seem to be working.
And if the age verfication system is rubbish then it needs to be fixed after all is this the teen grid, adult grid or just "free for all"grid?

Voted! I'm with you Tegg. I'm not premium cause I see not much of a point in going premium due to the fact that I'm a happy renter...however I hate the hell out of bot runners!

Just me and my one alt who are very, very rarely logged on at the same time cause it's just too much of a strain on my pc.

If you come up with a an age verification system that works then you'll be a very rich man. The system in place would be increased no end if there was a credit card transaction applied to it, it's really not rocket science.

Still anything is better than nothing, a cheap padlock on the door is better than an open door we currently have.

You would think LL's system is able to detect how often certain avatars teleport.

What if they had some sort of speed bump built in that would automatically slow down people who started making excessive TPs

Problem is they would do what bot owners always do, just run MORE bots.

well as long as they refuse to make a bot account a different kind of account ... there will be no true solutions.


The only way to guarantee freedom for actual residents, but manage the resource usage or negative focuses of Bots is to make Bots a different type of account.


They could investigate the serious violators using the wrong type of account for bots- by measuring the account usage.

Basic credit card transaction system is a million times better than the Integrity system. Integrity want details that they cannot legally verify, personally I think they're a bunch of charlatans. However if you mix what they can legally verify, which is name, address and date of birth, and then add a credit card transaction, which gives the person verifying an audit trail and completely gets around the issue with minors holding cards and you have a much better system.

However there's a lack of will for such a system, Integrity want people to volunteer information for their own ends and Linden Lab are complicit in this charade, it's morally repugnant.

*cries*

I can't TP or buy anything and i'm supposed too be at a party in 5 mins. I'ts not fair i hate SL

Damn you Lindens WORK WORK WORK NOW!!!!

I don't think there is a way to make a normal account unbotable or a reason to seperate accounts as poilicing the seperation would be too resource intensive. LL need to do whatever they can do to verify all residents somehow and then restrict the number of accounts.

How feasible are these steps now (since it would need to be done after the fact, now):

Have accounts create an umbrella username that all associated accounts are under
Limit log-ins from one username to, say, 5 at a time
Limit log-ins from one computer to, say, 5 at a time.

I'd be more than happy with such a system.

Where is that 23 sims per minute number coming from? A bot and a real avatar account are exactly the same, how can anyone come up with a number? Especially someone on the outside looking in. I'm sure there are a lot of bots running at any given instant in SL but LL can't even come up with an accurate estimate...........so I appears the number has been pulled out of somewhere besides statistics.

The basic argument of the thread is very much in question.........so any discussion about it is rather silly.

Any control system that depends on the honesty of the subjects will
1) Punish the honest
2) All the dishonest to run riot

Dishonest people can produce any amount of names and unique email addresses.
Dishonest people can produce any amount of details that pass the IDV process.
Dishonest people can make their client software spoof the signature of a standard SL viewer.
Dishonest people can make their client software spoof a variety of hardware footprints.

The only thing that dishonest people can not easily supply online in high volume is a unique credit reference.

While Linden Lab continue to allow accounts without a payment method recorded, there is no way that they can tie accounts or logins to a single entity.
They could group logged in accounts by a profile of activity if they were so inclined.
They very probably won't go down that road because
a) It's too much trouble for them
b) The results would not be welcome news to their marketing people

I can think of some ways to automatically sniff out bots that didn't volunteer to use the right account type.

Trafficbots:

-The account is logged in 24 hours a day and never moves, and shares geographic space with other accounts used the same way.

Landbots:
The account uses the search function constantly and makes land purchase after running a search in a very short period of time.

The account rotates through a lot of land within a month.

Spambots:
The account hops sims rapidly (like your example) and sends messages to other accounts.

Searchbots:
The account performs a circuit covering accessible parts of the grid, periodically.


However in most cases the bot runner would just use the bot account voluntarily - as long as such use was not detrimental.

You speak of not having the resources to do something like this.

Long term it may be that dedicating such resources makes Second Life a more profitable place than NOT doing so.

In a world where the populations of other virtual worlds are measured in millions and LL is pushing to bring in even more new residents, I should think the question would be "Why can the grid handle only 50,000 simultaneous users and remain stable?". Compared to that, the issue of a few thousand bots seems to me a ripple on the pond.

... Yes, I'm new around here. First post!

Easy I have hard evidence of a a bot emailing me from over 23 different sime each minute.
And if a bot can grab your land in under 5 seconds and there are tousands of mainland sims in SL what does that tell you about the number of bots, the off peak nubers online have gone from 1/4 the day peak to 2/3 due to 24/7 bots.
Put a visitor logger out and tell me who are the 2-3 odd visitors a hour you get that don't even rezz.
Landbots, Campbot, UUID harvesting bots, they all bounce sim to sim pretty much invisible to us.
Yes, it's silly to discuss why real residents can't get online, sell, build or buy things or TP while bots are still functioning inworld just fine.

Sounds like a great idea. I can imagine a scenario where more than 5 genuine avatars are logged in from a single IP address..... a house with a single shared internet account.

As for myself i run my main avatar and 2 alts whenever i do a live music show... it looks more like a band performing than the typical afk vatar twitching away with a default guitar strum animation.

The standard answer is because SL is a single world composed almost totally of resident-created stuff.

It's hard to compare SL to something like WoW. In WoW, the entire environment is already on your local hard disk - users don't really get to create stuff so there's nothing to download. Also, WoW servers run multiple copies of a single place to allow lots of people to be there at the same time. A place could have something like 1000 people in it but many of them would not see each other because their servers will move people off to different copies of the place. SL doesn't do this - everybody at a given place is at the _same_ place.

Welcome!

Welcome Aiden!

I think the issue is that it is sooooo simple to add traffic to the grid. It's very easy to make a bot and have it do anything you want, 24/7.

I don't think there will ever be performance gains fast enough to satisfy people who casually make horribly inefficient bots... in fact the more people that are here, the more bots we are likely to get.

There is a valuable place for nonhuman avatar-agents. But when the grid is in trouble, I think two things need to be worked on simultaneously:

a) sorting out whatever grid issue there is, related or unrelated to additional load

b) removing additional strain caused by bots or 24/7 'campers' leaning on the system.


* * * * *

Waaay back in the day, I used to play Lineage 2. Sometimes that world would go down, and then when it came back up it was tricky to log in. Once in, you saw the *incredible* stream of bots logging back in with you, all at the same time - entire towns full.

I'm amazed that the server was able to come back up at all, and I felt lucky to have logged in myself (when I actually could). I pray this grid will never be like that.

I'm still not convinced that number is real or accurate. Besides, I know from over 2 years experience that it takes from 5 to 10 seconds to tp on a good day in SL. A bot's tp will take just as long..........just not enough seconds in a minute to get to 23 tps per minute.

But, if you are talking about several bots tping into your land to come up with your number of 23 I can see that happening. But, I wonder what it is that attracts them to your land? Do you have canping? Are you selling land? What is it that attracts bots to your land? I think maybe you just got hit one time and think it's a problem for the whole grid.............I've never seen a bot on my land that I know of. Can't say for sure that none have though.

I don't think bots account for near the asset server issues you are saying they do. It's just the magic number of 60,000 concurrent log ins. Just like it used be 10,000 when I first became a resident.......it's the total number and LL can't keep up with it. Bots account for a very small percentage...........IMO.

I think LL likes bots, for three reasons:

1. They inflate the numbers. Numbers are the Holy Grail.

2. They are techy and programmed and therefore cool. (And since they are coded, they contain God, according to Philip.)

3. They are much less troublesome than messy, raucous, demanding humans with minds.

As far as LL is concerned. bots have full privileges and rights as much as any actual person. Thou shalt harm no bot.

All in all, an SL full of bots is probably a much improved place over an SL full of actual people, from the LL point of view.

As far as residents who like bots are concerned, "They don't take up THAT much resources, so, see, that is the same as taking up none at all! Leave Bots Alone!"

coco