Bot count, the sequel: 52%

Agreed Rha.

The only people qualified to do a survey are LL.

OK so you choose to personally call me an idiot? Thanks for insulting me personally.

I asked the questions because what I see are skewed figures that are complete bollocks.

What exactly is the test that someone is a bot or a camper? could I have failed it in the past (IE could I a real person have been called a bot or a camper in the past)

I live on mainland, travel to various locations, and I would state that most of the AVs I meet are real people, they are generally talkative, so in my experience far less than 52% of people are bots.

The sample is not representative (less than 1% of sims are checked and only on mainland), the criteria for being a bot is an interpretation but it's presented as FACT, when it clearly isn't.

Oh and my hidden agenda? You tell me. I own the land a club is on, I own the land Dani's mainstore is on, and I own some of the land I call home. I own no bots or campers and will not entertain them on my land.

So come back to me when you have cold hard facts. Then maybe I'll listen.

But that is still subjective. LL actually could get an accurate figure very easily by extrapolating IP data from it's server logs.

Can you defend that assertion?

Sorry you are confusing science with statistics.

Science is completely objective, that's why experiments in identical conditions can be repeated time after time and the results will be the same.

Statistics aren't completely objective

Sorry you are confusing science with statistics.

Science is completely objective, that's why experiments in identical conditions can be repeated time after time and the results will be the same.

Statistics aren't completely objective

So, what is a bot. What is the objective test to prove an AV is a bot? Let's start there, shall we?

Just as an observation, Anya was not counting sims, she was counting avatars and bots, so the 1% of sims counted is entirely irrelevant. Her figure of 591 avatars is greater than 1% of the number of concurrent avatars over the sample period, and is statistically significant. All sorts of correction factors need to be applied to obtain meaningful information from this data, but criticising her for collecting raw data in the first place is misguided.

No, I'm not confused.

We do need to tighten up on our observational criteria, though.

Easily.

They have access to the one piece of factual data that could prove an AV a bot or not.

The server logs. This would list the IP addresses of all logins, the dates and times of login, activity in regions, you name it, it would be there.

Some fairly simple analysis of that data would provide an accurate figure.

Your alts would have activity, be it rezzing items, running through your tests or whatever.

A bot stands there.

You defended a point you hadn't made. You've defended the assertion that LL could do a good survey. I agree.

You have not defended your original assertion, which is that ONLY LL could do it.

Banning traffic bots, without removing traffic rankings in the Places tab search, would make matters much worse. The current bots that are well out of the way of people would suddenly adopt new roles that would bring them in range of people and cause more lag than before. Forget about banning traffic bots - push for a change in the Places tab search that will make them useless.

Who else has access to the critical data?

Rebaking textures I suspect sends back a confirmation code to state it has been done. Once that code is known, bots can be programmed in to send that after a predetermined time to answer the request.

When you rebake textures, the client actually uploads a new texture, which is used as the texture of your avatar as seen by everyone else. The bot client would have to include the texture upload protocol to even comply. Also, the server can pick which textures it asks the client to bake together (it can send a "you just put on new clothes" message with any texture it likes) so it would be quite easy to use it as a challenge, although as you mention it would add some load.

I used to camp. I ain't a bot.

One thing that seems odd to me is that I've been working on an automated system to detect and count bots. We have this network of 16sqm parcels in over 1000 sims. Anyway, the project isn't working yet and maybe I'll never put in enough effort to finish it. Either way, the weird thing is that I went through about 30 or 40 sims testing this out and I saw about 10 avatars and presumably none of them were bots. How are you finding these very busy sims with thousands of people in? Whenever I move around the mainland I find it's usually 1 or 2 people per sim with very rare busy sims.

It would be interesting to know how many bots there are on the grid, on a daily average over a week or so, but this sort of sweep isn't going to give any such indication.

It doesn't matter, you're still a bogus green dot confusing social searchers.

I just don't like the interpretation of the data.

100 avatars seen
50 of those avatars are bots or campers
50% are bots. QED

I used to camp. I ain't a bot.

/me beeps again.

As for the wider question of identifying bots, I would hazard a guess that the best method would be by Profile analysis, as all the bots I know that reside on a sim near me have nothing in their profiles at all except a single group membership, and most have the same birthdate.

It matters if the OP wants any credibility.

If you don't know if I'm a bot or not and count me as one anyway, all that tells me is that the OP made a conclusion that SL was full of bots then got the numbers to back it up.

Forget about banning traffic bots - push for a change in the Places tab search that will make them useless.