Bots exploiting moneychairs

I have a friend, newbie, that told me about a bot exploiting party at a market earlier today. He was tp'ing in for the moneytree that is also there, and wondered about what all those white clouds was doing there at the lucky chairs.
Then someone said that it was bots, and he realised what was going on. After 10 minuttes or so all the moneychairs was empty, because these bots kept sucking the money out of them. Someone im'ed the owner and reported it to sl. My friend took a picture of it too and send that for me, and my god, it looks bad...I thought that bots did rezz...but these are just white clouds. There was about 25-30 of them apparently.
The most strange thing for him happened after the chairs was empty. The bots disappeared, but there was one guy that kept saying in german that it was not his bots. Nobody had accused him of anything,. but he said it again and again. My friend was very suspecious of that this could be the botowner, without being able to prove it.

How can we prevent that things like this happen. The poor owner lost a lot of money in a very short time, and I bet that those moneychairs won't be filled again too soon now.
I have seen the different discussions about having and using bots here, but is this exploit really ok? And how many of the botowners that use their bots for cheating traffic are also using them to exploit everything that can pay out?
It makes me mad that someone is doing this to the owners that are helpful to new people that comes inhere. I know that there are huds and groups too for looting the chairs,lol. But at least they have to fight eachother for who comes first.

Does anyone have any idea of how to stop this? Can a bot be orbited? Or being shot to tp'ed home? Will weapons work against things like that? Or is it really something that we have to accept? What do you think?

What are moneychairs?
A bot is like any other avatar, so yes, they can be orbited, banned, etc.

for all intents and purposes, while inside SL, a "bot" is just another regular avatar that can be caged, banned, ejected, shot, trampled upon by wild elephants, and whatever else you can come up with.

Happened to a friend of mine a few months ago - he lost about 4,000 L in a very short time. All you can do is ban the offending names, but honestly, the owner can always make more of them. One could AR every single one for fraud, but personally, I don't expect LL to do much about that.

Botswarms are just a fact of (Second) life. One of my friends once rented land to a camping chair merchant. The demo camping objects were infested by such swarms every couple of days, because the poor things couldn't discern between demo and life camping chairs.

We solved the problem by installing an "if you camp here for more than 3 minutes you get ejected and banned" script, but that's not an option in the case mentioned by the OP, of course.

You found your biz i sl - private investigator, or botbuster.
I',m hearing lots of complaining about "bots". Lots of so colled bots are bored people who fool itself to earn with camping etc.. Poor owner lost x money..
I know, poor owner would like to pay 1 per 60min and he is expecting someone will be near keyboard one hour for 0.0038$ ? And of cos, after camping he must spend some 500-1000 at his "chopping center". I wouldn't expect so.
I started as camper, lucky chairs (someone wants to pretend not knowing what is), exploder and so on. I also reailized that majority of eploder nation is using multiple accounts to go to exploder.
Would it be good to ban all said? I dont think so.
Big portion of sl traffic is paid traffic. We are paying each other to pretend traffic, but I think that make sense too when you learn more about sl economy.

Solution? If you are one of poor owners just switch off your money givers or accept the fact you are dealing with "bots". If you have time, sit downthere and look their profiles, and ban, eject, ban, ban.. time wasting too, unless you have time to ban x milions of residents.

Paying bots is investment on long term. If you are good and lucky enough, with time you will find buyers between those bots. There are other, more natural ways. Build your unique beautiful place and people will visit you. But thats much harder than feeding bots.

The "poor owner" got what s/he wanted and paid for - traffic - so what's the problem?

Well, not exactly - these aren't camping chairs, but lucky chairs that give out money. With an alphabetized team of bots, it's pretty easy to drain them of lots more money than they would have given out normally over a few days. The friend I mentioned before has lost 4k in no more than 10 minutes. The traffic ones gets from that is certainly not worth THAT amount of money...

Yes, thats because gettin paid traffic is not about spending bigger amount of money. And I'm sure your friend learnt something from that 4k school.

I am hoping a side effect of the new age verification systems LL is putting in place will be an end to large numbers of unverified accounts. Since a RL person is supposed to be limited to a certain number of avatars (I believe it's 5 per account), hoards of avatars might vanish because the owner cannot verify his identity and age for *all* of them.

wow they are going to be knocking out a lot of stuff this year it looks like..
all these changes to come..

I really dont think this is ok.
Moneychairs are the same as normal lucky chairs that a lot of malls and shops use, but the difference is that L$ is not copyable and therefore they can get drained. People use both types of chairs to give away.
I know that its a kind of commercial act, that makes people visit, but you dont stay that long for a chair because it only works if your firstname letter is matching the chairs letter, so when you got what you came for you leave again. So the traffic must be a lot less than camping.
30 bots coming and sucking it all in 10 minuttes is not useful for anyone except the botowner, and if it continues and grows, then people will stop use those chairs, because it is not anymore a win/win thing.

Its a shame that good things are ruined like that.

The market that got hit was a very little mall. Not many shops, only a few campingspots and a moneytree. If it has been a bigger place with many chairs, i can only imagine how big the loss could be.

I wonder if it is more or less organized. Maybe a ring of financed bot-collectors that is draining every single thing they can find, and then cash out to the "investor". Would you also think that it would be acceptable then? I bet its a business that pays off....

i remember a club that i was doing a build for..they had this prefab club on the ground and never any traffic..

i remember when we were just sitting in there talking he would make jokes like..
should i put out the sploder to see if any new bots have joined the crew lol
legal sploder by the way..
he used to call it his pig call or something like that..i can't remember.

every one of them looked all ruthed at first but over time some people got original with their bots and set them up in club clothes and skins and even would dance..soon as it paid out we would pay in again to see them come back..
we would say hi to them knowing we would get no response..

the things you do when you are bored lol

then after we were bored would go this other club we knew with people in it and all the same bots would be hanging around the sploder or money ball or whatever it was untill it paid out ..then leave until the next round started up..

and this is why you build limits of time and amount into these things...

yup..anything that gives out free money like that you are going to get bots..and they are gonna stay and feed until there is nomore money coming from the thing..unless they are cut off

Not everyone wants just traffic. Some people would actually prefer that avatars run by real people come to the store. People who can communicate and socialize together. They also see money chairs and money trees as a way of helping new citizens that have not found a way to make money yet. And they also occasionally hope for a customer who might see something they like and purchase it.

no circuit breaker into a device that gives money is asking for trouble.

Yes, but it's hardly a case of "poor owner". S/he put the chair up for the traffic, and got exactly that. S/he will have learned something from it but s/he still got what s/he paid for.

Lucky chairs don't work like that from what I've seen. People do hang around them when the stuff they give is worth having (from a decent creator such as Awesome Designs). Some people come and go, of course, because they've been TPed in to use their letter and nobody there can use it. The people who hang around want the letter to move on as quickly as possible. The point is that lucky chairs are there, not for people to come and go quickly, but for people to be there hanging round if possible - the more, the better. So the money chair got what s/he paid for. It wasn't quite what s/he'd hoped for but that's because s/he chose a poor system for her aims. If it lasted for 10 minutes before the money was gone, 25 bots would have generated 250 traffic points, which is what the chair was there for.

that is still not an excuse for these kind of bots to exist at all..these are not traffic bots ..they are lazy ass peoples bots taking advantage..it's one person taking up 40 (or however many bots they have roaming sl)spots in areas that have money chairs or camping chairs..

thats 40 more or less users that cannot get to them..
now add up all the other lazy asses doing it and you have a lot of new people that have more of a right to sit there than one talentless can't get up off their ass and create anything loser with 40 more or less bots picking off new peoples shot at maybe picking up a few lindens to get something they want..

these kind of bots here are reason enough to have a 5 alt limit if nothing else..

i have a new name for these bots..Welfare bots doing nothing and getting paid..

I haven't read all the posts, but aren't there money chairs that you have to imput a command/text every once and a while to stay on?
Get some of those perhaps.

interesting idea to create 28 bots for each letter in the alphabet.
then use a libsl custom created program like "pikkubot" to automatically sit on the money chairs when the specified letter appears.
ive seen it happen before and the money drains quick, really quick.

great. i think i need a new keyboard. mine seems to be missing 2 letters, and i don't know which...

So, wait...the complaint is that bots are gaming a system being used to game traffic?


What was that old saying..."no honor amongst thieves."

ArchTx - you know I adore you, but I have to disagree.

No one "needs" to make money in SL. There are a bajillion freebies of very high quality hosted at all sorts of places like NCI -- it isn't like it was when we both started and freebies were mostly crap. For someone who does not want to spend any RL cash here, they can live very nicely without needing to ever spend a dime of RL money.

The only thing camp chairs, lucky chairs and money trees do is funnel money into people "farming" them -- usually to be cashed out and not injected back into the SL economy. For someone looking to get the exposure of newbies looking for free money, there is no reason why they couldn't get their own set of bots to keep the chairs occupied, funnel the money back into their own account, and still get newbies TP'ing in looking for the chairs.

For every one person out there doing something geniunly charitable, there are 10 doing the same thing to game the system. Camp chairs and lucky chairs are traffic gaming strategies, pure and simple. If the owner wasn't gaming traffic, they would have a Money Tree out or a freebie cache.