Traffic Bots Against the TOS of LL?

Hi,

I know about 3 or 4 accounts a day are being banned for "bot farms" were someone will have hundereds of bots that camp all day.
These add a huge amount of lag and take up a lot of resources from the servers and I am assuming they are against LL TOS if LL are banning the main account holders.

I was at a store the other day and one minute there was 2 people inc myself then from no where 10 green dots appearedo on the mini map all at once. They didnt move at all for 5 minutes.

Then all 10 dots disapeared for another 5 minutes only to reappear in the exact same spot again all at once and again not moving.

It doesnt take a geniuse to see the land owner was using software to run multiple bots to boost a false traffic.

Apart from the moral dilema of faking a "popular location" with flase traffic do LL act on these reports?

I once filed an abuse report some time ago on a similar situation and the land owner still have 30,000 traffic but there only ever 1 or 2 people there every time I visit.
This person is very clever, as some-how they manage to hide the green dots too.

I dont have a clue about how these things work. I have seen programs on SLX that help you set up your own traffic with multiple bots and these same people get a lot of crap from others in the comments box for selling such software.

Is it just a moral issue or actually a TOS issue? There is nothing in the TOS that mentions traffic bots.

Curious.

Thank you .

2.1 You must establish an account to use Second Life, using true and accurate registration information.

2.4 Account registrations are limited per unique person. Transfers of accounts are generally not permitted.

Technically, anyone using an alt is in breach of 2.4, and depending on how they created that alt, they may be in breach of 2.1 as well. *BUT* LL seem to explicitly recognise the legitimate use of alts in the CS...

Alternate Accounts
While Residents may choose to play Second Life with more than one account, specifically or consistently using an alternate account to harass other Residents or violate the Community Standards is not acceptable. Alternate accounts are generally treated as separate from a Resident's principal account, but misuse of alternate accounts can and will result in disciplinary action on the principal account.

... but retain those parts of the ToS that give them a means to deal with alt-abuse and bot-farming when it's seen to be a problem.

Whether you consider that practical wisdom, or convenient double-think on their part is entirely up to you.

Nobody knows. There was a guy who sells 16M plots and erects banlines who found himself on the end of an abuse report. I'm sure many people have abuse reported such plots with no effect.

We don't know how they will act upon such reports and they have the power to change their view.

I don't like traffic bots, I don't see what they add to the world as a whole.

Only if account registrations are limited to one account per unique person, which they clearly aren't. All 2.4 means is that there is a limit to how many accounts a person may have, it does not say what that limit is and certainly doesn't say "one person, one account".

In the past there was a limit of 5 accounts per person (or it might have been per email address ) but that does not seem to apply anymore.

If the bots are on Mainland and are interfering with other landowners' use of the sim, then the bots will be "controlled" by LL in response to an AR.

If on a private island owned by the botrunner, there's not much to be done--and kind of beside the point, really: if the owner cares more about scoring Traffic points than about user experience, then they lose your business--which is not a big problem for them, usually, since they're probably selling newbie-oriented stuff anyway, because only newbies don't know to ignore traffic-inflated top-ranked Search results.

Properly done, trafficbots actually have very little impact on the servers or the network anyway. If the bots come and go in flocks as described, though, they're whacking the hell out of that sim with each migration.

On the plus side, trafficbots will eventually kill Traffic as a Search-ranking metric altogether. That's good because the way the grid (and any network) scales, focusing load on any single location is sure catastrophe, once there's enough load to make a difference. It totally baffles that anybody who knows a bit of queuing theory ever could have imagined Traffic would be a good idea.

Ahh, very good point. I misread that.

Of course, by phrasing it so vaguely, and being the only final arbiters of the limit, LL give themselves a solid option to ban/suspend bot-farmers. So back to the OP's question, while the ToS doesn't mention bot-farming specifically, there are clauses that cover it.

I think the whole crux of the matter is TRAFFIC figures. Once LL gets rid of the traffic figures as it stands now the BOT farmers will stop as it will become a waste of time for them hopefully. Maybe if we concentrated our efforts on LL in getting the way traffic is counted changed, then that would have a better effect for us all.

BOTs have a place in SL without a doubt to play all sorts of roles, however misuse of them is totally wrong and the sooner it is stopped the better for everyone. But BOTs are here to stay so everyone should get used to them instead of moaning about them unless it directly affects them or the sim they live in and hopefully when LL changes the way traffic is ranked then it would be nice to think people will start using them to do tasks they cant do 24/7

As was said they only become ARable on the mainland when they block a sim for instance, we all know that land bots are here to stay for the forseeable future and those that have been here some time now all know that LL feels there are more important things to do than worry about BOTs

Peace

A thread about traffic bots?

Cue Phil in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

I thought that but wasn't gonna encourage him lol

Sorry folks. I was asleep - just got up

Traffic bots are not against the ToS. I have that in writing. LL doesn't do anything about traffic bot ARs unless the bots are interfering with other people; e.g. filling the sim so that other land owners and their guests can't get in, or causing huge lag. Mine have been ARed a number of times to no avail.

The group of avs that the OP saw might not have been traffic bots at all. They may have been real people. Two days ago, it rained avs in one particular spot in my store - the small freebies part. 10 - 12 of them arrived in the space of 10 - 20 seconds. It was the day that Honeybear mentioned it in her freebies blog. The groups could have been something similar.

I've said plenty of times recently that, imo, LL should ban traffic bots and camping, but I've changed my mind. I won't bore you with my reasons unless asked to. What LL should do is do away with traffic rankings.

Good Morning and i totally agree

Good morning your lordship

I won't tell anyone that you agreed with me, or you'll get a bad reputation here. We'll keep it to ourselves

Dam I was hoping my reputation was tarnished already lol

the best thing next to AR still is ignoring shops that use them, if I spot a cluster of bots, signs about getting payed for putting them in your picks, just move on to the next one

Whats wrong with "add us to your picks signs" its just a link exchange system and less resource hogging than some other methods

On our RL websites we use a lot of link exchanges to enable our sites to be found more easily as well as many other things to get extra traffic and including being available for our members to help when needed, bit like here but in 2D instead

What Lord said plus...

A few people do what you suggest, but it has the effect of a tiny drop in a large ocean. Imo, the best thing to do, for those who protest, is to badger LL to do away with traffic rankings altogether, and keep on badgering them. It is (or was) part of their roadmap for search, and they almost did it recently, so they are not against the idea. The place to make your voice count is not in the stores that use traffic bots, because any difference it makes is so tiny that it is unnoticeable. The place to protest is at Linden Lab.

I'm not keen on a traffic type stat being totally eliminated, I find it useful to compare the numbers when i'm making changes. Whether anyone else needs to see those numbers is a different matter.

The post you quoted talked about manipulations of search rankings (be it traffic or picks), not solely about traffic bots.

Getting rid of one broken system to just replace it with something that's equally open to manipulation doesn't accomplish a single thing if someone's objection in both cases is people who selfishly manipulate their and others' ranking.

Picks isn't a better ranking factor than traffic is, they're both easily "gamed" and it's that that needs to be addressed, not getting rid of one of them just because you happen to be better at manipulating the second. As long as LL doesn't step in and starts delisting people from any search because they're gaming the system it doesn't matter what search and what ranking is used, nothing will change for the better.

It still is, but they don't seem to be in a particular hurry to either fix the broken inworld browser (no scrolling, no clicking), nor to revamp the new search results to be more manageable like Search / Places is, or to add features that were removed from search (show on map, etc).

Kitty.

As long as any search system relies on user input for ranking pages, and as long as search rankings matter, the rankings will always be manipulated. LL can't do anything about it, any more than the web search engines can. The web engines accept it, as do most web engine users. It's no different here.

How do you propose they do this? One man's meat is another man's poison and all that. Search requires a ranking and any ranking is going to be manipulated.

From the "future of traffic" meetings, it seems they want to keep the traffic metric for land owner's use, and add more metrics as well.

Safe road travel requires a speed limit, and any speed limit is going to be ignored - unless it's enforced.


If gaming of Search in whatever form were an explicit violation of the TOS, *and* if LL took action to delist any perps ARed, then that would stop a lot of it.
If someone is gaming search, the method used is generally clear once the situation is examined.


On the other hand, if LL are not prepared to put in the resources to make their search ranking credible, then they should drop attempts at ranking altogether.
Perhaps they should rank only on the content of About Land, with automatic measures to zap keyword spamming.

That would of course mean that anyone could 'be influenced by' the text used by someone in the same line with a higher search ranking. That might seem a pity, but that's what happens when low-lifers game search by obvious means and LL do nothing to slap them down.

However you have to define gaming. I've seen people complain about traffic bots but say they're happy with bots that model clothes, however bots that model clothes increase traffic. Shop assistants increase traffic, having your workshop above your store or on the same plot, increases traffic. Some of those are unintentional side effects of the system at play.

The best we can hope for is that they limit the scope for gaming of search and people need to be careful of what they wish for because a simple ranking factor would be to rank by the amount paid for a classified, the more you pay the better exposure you get but I'm sure plenty would cry foul.

But really, isn't it just that the reason LL keeps "traffic" as a metric and allows "trafficbots" to go largely unhindered is because if they actually kill "traffic" as a search metric it will result in their own concurrancy numbers dropping drastically?

I mean, that's the real reason LL doesn't bother to address this issue outright, isn't it? Those 20,000 trafficbots online at any given time aren't only good selling numbers for the people using the bots to maniuplate the search system for their own benefit, they benefit LL as well, by giving LL concurrency numbers that they can sell to investors.

Which is why I don't expect "traffic" to ever go away or for LL to ever really do much more then lip service to the issue. The convuluted TOS is a pretty effective tool for keeping this sort of practice fully functional.

LL loves trafficbots. Probably more then Phil.

This was a very good thread, with logical discussion. I wondered how long it would be before it took a down turn. Can't we make this one a bots thread that just discusses the pros and cons, and keep low blows out of it? Just for a change, huh?