Traffic Bots Against the TOS of LL?

If .....if ........if..........if the Moon was a square cheese!


instead of "Planes, Trains & Automobiles".....we have "Assumpions, more assumptions.....and yet more assumptions"

Actually it's basic math, not an assumption.

That was the speculation at the time. The gist of the convo was-

"What if everyone ran bots, look at what would happen"

Why would me postulating some if's when people were discussing "if's" be unusual?

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There are assumptions on both sides of this issue. Because all the facts are not available.

Thats it... I'm going to "game' the system.....



I got in the beta...


Gaming at it's best.


There's just more important things to do then argue with the incorrigible.


After breaking free of the Lich King's control



It is now time again to fight for peace and justice.

For those who may have missed it the first time I posted this link, here is a pretty good article about how they figured out that there were at least 10,000 bots on the platform at any one time. This article is from April of this year:

http://www.massively.com/2008/04/28/peering-inside-how-many-bots/

More then just guessing, someone who did care actually went out and did the research.

10,000 bots out of say an average of 60,000 concurrent users. Not too big of a step to think that maybe not everyone has their bots running all day and all night, and that there are certainly many more then just 10,000 in the whole SL platform.

Shit...there i was thinking you were a professional "twister"
My bad!

Because at the moment Phil's bots are deemed acceptable. If everyone did it, there would be resource issues, resource issues lead to AR's.

Someone asked me to meet them in a sim not long back, I couldn't tp in as it was full, eventually I landed in a land rental office. The reason the sim was full was because of a sex club. They were hogging all the resources. The person trying to rent land there is on a hiding to nothing. That's more of an issue than Phil's bots.

If somewhere else busy moved into Phil's sim, hey, his bots are in peril.

So it's ok if only a few people do it but if everyone did it it would be bad????

But it's not bad now?

And honestly, rather then clouding the issue with what might be better or worse then trafficbot running, let's do try to stick to the topic.

I vote we put a new info hub on the sim then.

Basically yes, it's a common sense issue. When Phil's bots cause resource problems they're bad.

Like people don't complain about those

You have completely misinterpreted me several times in this thread, to the point you thought I was off the deep end - I do not think it was intentional misunderstanding.

All I suggest is that everyone tries to remember that that happens all the time.

So as soon as everyone starts using trafficbots they will finally be seen as "bad", but as long as only Phil uses them they should be defended?

How is that common sense?

Thats like saying a certain amount of petty theft is fine, that we shouldn't do anything about it until it gets out of control.

Sigh, Pie you asked why Phil's bots are acceptable now. I don't defend traffic bots, I don't see he value they add to the world as a whole.

There was a guy putting banlines on 16m plots, not long ago he got AR'd. He was miffed, I thought it was funny but he made a fair point when he said there's no consistency. He's right, there is no consistency.

As Phil's bots aren't currently deemed a problem by LL, they're allowed to stay. If they become a problem, they won't be allowed to stay. It could be tomorrow that they deem them a problem.

Not really Colette and you know it. Petty theft is against the law, where in Second Life law does it say bot running isn't allowed? When he crosses the line, and it could be in terms of resources one day, then he'll be told to stop it.

However, generally the authorities prioritise based on what's the bigger problem. As it stands Linden Lab don't seem to be too bothered about the bot issue.

this is all very true.

At least they aren't deemed enough of a problem by LL to do anything yet ..

So we should ask for volunteers that own private open sims... so we can fill them with bots to boost traffic to them till LL takes notice.

Well thats true. Trafficbots aren't against the law.

The Lindens have grumbled about them before though.

Ok, point taken.

But maybe we're have two different conversations without meaning to.

I guess I'm not really asking why his bots are acceptable. I have stated and will repeat, I have nothing against bots. I do not have a Bot Issue. I have an underhanded asshole issue. I have an issue with people who try to swindle as much money out of this platform as they can with complete disregard for what they are breaking in the process.

I guess what I'm really asking is why Phil's gaming of search thru the use of bots is being defended now when as soon as they eliminate traffic as a search metrics for the very tactics Phil is using, people will rightly be able to point to those using trafficbots to game search and say "That's another part of this rather engaging and interesting platform you screwed up for your own greed and amusement. Thanks a lot buddy".

Bots aren't the problem here. It's the people using bots for nefarious purposes that are the issue. It's not Phil's 50 bots, its that the practice Phil uses his 50 bots for makes it so that in order to compete with him, one has to also employ 50 bots. If Phil has 100 competitors, then Phil's use of bots to game traffic and thereby make his competitors go out and do the same, that's 5050 bots just from Phil gaming search and 100 other people trying to keep up with him.

That's why what Phil is doing RIGHT NOW is wrong, whether it's currently against the TOS or not. He is breaking a system thru his own greed, his own sense of "winning the game", or just by "competing with" himself... whatever his reasons, he is purposely doing something that if everyone did, it would be determental to SL as a whole.

It is the practice I have issues with, not the bots that do the dirty work.

Agreed, there are a couple of things that are in danger with this whole parcel name thing, one is branding, some people hardly have room for the brand, lost keyword space you see. The title should definitely carry less weight, I mean if the parcel names were largely unique then they'd be relevant if someone searched for them, but at least they'd have a proper name.

The other is frustration is amongst people searching, finding a whole heap of parcels with the same name is annoying.

I have sympathy with your view, I don't see what traffic bots add to the world as a whole. Traffic to me though was never a sensible metric for umpteen reasons, not just Phil's bots. Part of the problem though is that we have a search system designed for places, not business. Business needs require a different approach to search, both from a business owner and consumer point of view. Business parcels probably shouldn't appear in show in search places, they should have a different mechanism. I've heard people before suggest yellow pages type listings.

My island could appear in places, details of the businesses there other than parcel names would appear elsewhere.

There are some things however that are gone for good on this platform, one is possibly the everyone play nice mentality, that was gone before I arrived, that was why despite a lot of blurb about first land on the website when I signed up, it wasn't actually available. I wasn't exactly happy about that.

The new advertising system is also something that I can see changing the shape of advertising, as someone else pointed out on the thread about it, it may not just be inworld ads appearing on these networks, certainly there will be scope for outside advertising. That's another change from what we're used to.

No I didn't know that, Mort, and the reason I didn't know is because it isn't true. There are no "slots", as you put it. There is the capacity of the system to handle whatever loads are placed upon it, and that's all. That's why we see logins disabled due to load at varying concurrency levels.

..and Bots contribute to the load.

OK.

However, you also say that there is nothing wrong with spamming search engines.

There appears to be a contradiction in your postings.

Could you please clarify?
You appear to be saying that although a search engine may delist a site for breaching guidelines and spamming the engine, there is nothing wrong with spamming the engine.