Bots?

Sling, it is the opposite: LL does NOT have a policy AGAINST it. Example: face lights are accepted? You know they are.. but lemme read on the TOS where they stated: "Face lights are accepted...", obviously you won't find it anywhere, but you won't find the opposite as well, so the conclusion is pretty logic.
You should post where you read that those bots are against the TOS, not asking Philip to post where he reads that they aren't, the TOS contains what is against the rules, not the whole rest (again: it's logic!).

It doesn't work like that, as you would know if you read.

So in fact you are mostly guessing and could be right or wrong just like anyone else.

That is not a very nice thing to say, agree or disagree with a person but do not seek to demean them or their contribution. Shame on you Marcel.

So you are now trying to discourage discussion on this topic.

That's OK I mostly done saying what I want to say anyway except to say that it seems to me that in a conversation about bots, load and logins that a known bot herder and an ex-bot runner will never be proven wrong so perhaps you are right discussion about such topics with such people is pointless.

Good night Marcel.

You didn't even suggest that I was possibly mistaken. Stop waffling. I said something happened, you said it didn't happen - you made out that I'm a liar.

You need to ask them about that. For everyone else, the fact that they don't even suggest that using bots is wrong/bad/against their wishes/etc. is a good enough indication that bots are acceptable to them.

You will never get one, because they are not realistic. That is not the point either.
As soon as they decided to use traffic as a metric to get a good search result, it was quite logical that people would use that knowledge to get a good ranking. At that moment, traffic became useless. Wether its camping or botfarming, the traffic doesn't have a thing to do with popularity of a place anymore.

I'm multi-talented.
It's natural to resent people disagreeing with you, especially if they've been funny.

You'll just have to live with it.

If you believe, for instance, that paying for picks is no different in principle to paying people to walk around with signs promoting a parcel, then you should work on developing that sort of logic. In time, you could become very funny.

This is a thread about bots.. and u ended with a proposal to remove the free accounts, it would be really the time to open a thread: "OMG! Second Life is gonna die"... and it would be the only time that the sentence would be true!



Wakeup! The *new accounts*: many ppl are joining Second Life because it is FREE.. and not just for one month.



This is Second Life, not WoW... i'm paying for my satellite dish TV abbo, that doesn't mean that i would pay for anything else i do (actually) *for free*.



I've replied: client tools.. i don't need to have the account logged in to sit and chat, i need to build.

No it's not an organised thing at all, Business owners D,E,F & G now having seen that bots are acceptable business practice for competitors A, B & C for the last 12months now sick of low sales because of their silly ethics give in and install their own traffic bots, G says hmm B is already running 10 lets see if this knob goes to 20. A week later H , I & J sudenly realise they have been shoved down the ladder and bots are AOK, then it's just free for all, everyone run as many as you can on any shop you got. Stuff the groaning servers LL will upgrade it to handle the extra load tommorrow no problems.
Meanwhile Goldfarmer A has just reinvested their camping gains on another 10 PC's and bigger bandwidth drop another 100 campbots to bounce around the grid.
Goldfarming B sick of the competition and Blizzards foul policies on botting in WoW and other MMO's deversifies, shuts down half his WoW clients and loads up this free viewer his brother just got him 100 copies of that boots another hundred campbots into Secondlife.
The population base is changing, there are less real people and more bots. Because everyone believes bots make easy money <Kukching!>
Prety soon the real population is going to be something like the peak minus the minimum multiplied by something small. And considering most of that population expect to withdraw cash out and not put it in, the economy isn't going to get better.

That may be so, but someone (I forget who) said that, when capacity increases, bots increase to use it up (my paraphrase). It doesn't happen like that - that's all I was saying. Bots and people continue to increase, as far as I know, but it's not specifically related to increased handling capacity. It's the other way round - handling capacity needs to be added to handle the increases.

Yep and most of them don't think we are even worth paying nothing for and leave anyway. Free accounts are ok, unverified ones arne't which is what allows the whole bot thing to get completely out of hand in the first place the ability to anonomously run as many accounts as you like.
You want a free acount fine, you want 20, how about forking out some cash?

Yes but can LL planned upgrades keep up with the increase, it appears not this month 65k has been the absolute limit for a month with things getting borky over 50k, that used to happen every weekend now it happens during the week.
I'm not noticing any more people about, and I'm not hearing people announce record sales figures either which leads me to ask why are LL spending money, time & resources dropping bigger more expensive engine upgrades into the VW Beetle so it can tow more & more trailers full of freeloaders & undead across the country side?

Well rendering a system useless for personal gains sure sounds like an exploit to me.

I was told a long time ago, by an IBM technical employee whose job is in SL, that LL do it all as cheaply as they can - cram too much into too little space. My assumption is that they don't imcrease capacity nearly enough to cope with the not too distant future. Maybe they can't afford to do it, but that's where the answer lies - sufficient capacity, and in advance.

LL did finally get around to saying that's not out of the question. The latest iteration is they they "may charge" the ten bucks each if you make an "army of alts".

It sounds something like an exploit to me too

But it hasn't rendered the system useless at all - it's very useful. What it's done is make the system work in a different way to what was intended.

The difference I can see with this argument is most bots are online for 168 hours per week, very few real residents acheive this and thaose that near that might as well be counted as bots in my book anyway

That would be the War in Bear perhaps?
Does one of your alts run a DJ school by chance?

Hmm so you really believe LL management is 100% perfectcly happy with bot usage, that's a little tall a claim I suspect, they may accept it but "perfectly happy?" can you really claim that?

LOL. No, it wasn't that thread - and no I'm not. Someone started a thread a couple of months ago because one day there were suddenly a lot of avs who were penalised for alt abuse - 14 day bans, I believe. That was the thread.

No I can't really claim it, but it depends what is understood by "perfectly happy". They may be merely accepting of it because the numbers look good or for whatever reason, but they may not be deleriously happy with it, and may even wish they didn't exist. But either way, they are perfectly happy to currently accept their presence and uses - otherwise they would surely have said something against them, even if it's just something like, "we are thinking about it".

It's not as though it requires them to do anything technical to get rid of bots. A simple announcement that they are not allowed would be enough. After that ARing any remaining bots would clear the vast majority of them.

Correction:

To be honest, I forget which thread I actually posted with the quote in, but that was the thread that caused me to get the LL answer.

Well I have heard at least one Linden tell us it is a topic of discussion, which leads me to believe they aren't perfectly happy, they just don't know what to do yet, or aren't ready yet. Trouble is LL don't want to create work by hunting down bots, they need to make them unfeasible or uneconomical to run large numbers of them, they snowed themselves when the adfarming thing went down, make a few token arse kickings then when we calmed down went back to allowing them to continue with a little less brazenness.
They don't want to police the grid.
Bed time for me in OZ, 10:30pm have fun and place nice ...............

We'll see what transpires in the future. For now, we can safely conclude that bots are fine with LL.

True, I even said that myself before. The only thing I can use in this discussion is my common sense, and my IT knowledge, but no one outside LL knows exactly how things are actually running.


Again true, it was not very nice. Taking Slings contributions to this and the other (older) bot thread, I think I am entitled to respond not that nice. Still I was not demeaning Sling, he might as well be a very nice guy. My remark about the fun postings in the past was ment sincere. When I was demeaning his contributions in this and the other thread, that was on purpose and quite valid. If my opinion is frowned upon, no problem. When I am either mocked or even called names for it, I feel entitled to express myself less friendly as well. And it won't get less friendly then this, don't worry.

Good night to you as well
Partially true. Since most of the discussion is once more based on what is right and wrong, I direct people to the right way. There is only 1 party that can say what is right or wrong, and that is LL. We can discuss the effect those decisions have, but we cannot tell eachother right or wrong. Phil as well as myself, have heard from the Lindens that bots (Phil) and Pick rewards(me) are no problem. So if people really feel different, so be it. Most is indeed said.

One more thing though: Did you miss my earlier posting about discussions? They are not ment to prove someone wrong. They are ment to make people think. So if your goal is proving me wrong, you will have to bring very strong arguments, or quit right away. If your goal is however, to make me think, well you succeeded already. Most of the sensible postings I tend to think about That is why I like a good discussion after all!

Vittorio, I am perfectly awake, thank you very much.

Also I am perfectly aware that SL and WoW are not the same thing, what I did was showing that people are actually willing to pay for amusement in an online world.

My opinion is that giving away the free accounts is the stupdest decision they ever made at LL, and I am entitled to that opinion. SL is not going to die if they stop the free accounts, but it will change.

The reason this came up as an argument in a bot thread, is because I think it is one of the ways to get rid of bots. As long as free accounts exist, and traffic is an important metric, bots will keep on running.

The advice about Sleek was just a friendly ment advice. If not applicable, just forget about it.