The Friday Thread (early)

Well, I'm a tad insulted that they think we wouldn't notice.

It's probably just a *huge* coincidence.

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/land/blog/2009/04/23/conclusion-to-the-blog-post-on-bots#comment-761994

According to this Jack went to some camping place today and told them camping counts as bots so GTFO.

Also, shops will have to take special precautions that models are on parcels that do not appear in search. I suppose that means cutting a bunch of 16s out of your parcel or some crazy thing. Could be annoying, I have a couple of bots on my parcel but I'll be blown if I'm going to cut 16s out of it.

Anyway, one camping place down only about 5000 more to go. At this rate we'll be traffic bot free by Christmas 2015.

I will not be cutting a 16m2 parcel just for a Group Invite bot.

I really hope they are not swinging full tilt from one extreme to another.

Originally it sounded like they were going to provide a way to tag the bots directly. I guess they decided to avoid actually doing any programming.

Nah, that never happens! Well, hardly ever, except when they decided that "for sale" signs on full sized parcels were adcuts, and... um... ok, It happens a lot.

I was kinda surprised when I heard that they were starting in on the non-botfarm side this early.
However, given the certainty that the bots-in-a-box would tend to migrate to being "good" bots, the move would be a rare 'thinking ahead' one.


Besides...
there will be huge drama...

It will be a major distraction from the Adult thing.

Cynical, but probably accurate.

That's a very surprising piece of information. I just re-read the blog post and the *only* things that are now outlawed, according to the blog, are bots that are used to inflate traffic - both camping bots and pure traffic bots, but only bots. There is no indication that normal av camping that increases the traffic count is also against the ToS.

I don't really mind cutting a piece out for 4 of my 6 store models, but I wonder how Jack would view my castle guards that patrol around different parts of the sim, walking over more than one parcel. There is no way to cut a parcel out for them.

Why on earth don't they do the only sensible thing and swap the traffic rankings for the GSA rankings, filtered by places. The way he's doing it is pure nonsense, imo.

I noticed that traffic seems to be stuck at 76942 , which coincides with the time the BOTs policy went into enforcement. I'm cynical.....its too much of a coincidence.

Ultimately Good bots are supposed to be registered and not count towards Traffic.
They shouldn't be closing down camping that has real avatars.....noobs will suffer ultimately

That's not Cynicism - That's Reality. Cold Hard Fact.

According to what Jack's reported to have said, that "registration" will be "put them on a 16m2 parcel that has search turned off".

While that number stays conveniently "stuck"....a number of other factors are going to play out during the "stuck " time......

.......campers will be put into place.....10 new members will join.....2000 couples will have prim babies that grow into "little ones"....half of those couples will have twins.....2000 guys will create an alt to spy on their girlfriends.....5000 guys will create an alt to get away from their girlfriends.....the Good Bots will create an alt to spy on their new Good Bot girlfriends....then they'll have twin babies with the Good Bot girls they ran into while spying......then their babies will have babies......most of that generally happens within 5 days........

It will all even out. Don't worry. We'll never notice the effect.

The sting in the tail with that blog posting is:


Read it all


It's not really surprising that action agains gaming on the ground has gone beyond the simplest possible literal interpretation of the words in the blog post.

I think that there is a huge culture shift going on inside LL. They are suddenly looking at the world with new eyes. Maybe the Adult thing really loosened them up and got them to think about the things that residents get up to.
They took action against ad farmers.
They blogged up front about (on the face of it) bots-in-a-box, but I feel that a ball has started rolling, and it's not going to stop.


Your castle guards may escape for a while or even a long time. What would put paid to them would be a systematic use of that technique to game search.
While such bots are small background noise, they are probably no more attention-grabbing that someone going AFK in their workshop for long periods.

The moment they become a noticeable and widely-used systematic technique, they are on borrowed time.




I can totally understand why you object to Traffic as a Search weighting.
Anyone on a mainland parcel (even a full sim parcel) will always be outdone by someone with a private island.
Even if the mainlander develops a system to maximise their bots by pulling them in and out dynamically as required to leave avatar slots available in a sim, they would be lucky to have 30 bots running a lot of the time. 20 bot is more achievable 24/7. A PI merchant can have twice that with no problems.

That's not a "sting in the tail". That comment was a reason for announcing that *bots* that are used for inflating traffic will be considered a ToS violation. The blog was very specific about that.

I don't know what universe your brain is in, Sling, but your last paragraph made no sense at all. If you *really* want to know why I've been against inflating traffic rankings for a long time, search this forum, because I already stated the reason here, and it has nothing to do with your theory. My new system could outdo anyone who is/was using bots/camping in my field. And, when I was shouting to get rid of traffic bots, I was at #1 without my new system. It's only relatively recently that 2 or 3 regularly got ahead, and that was before my new system. Also, if PI owners came into the category with a lot more bots than I could manage on mainland, it would be nothing for me to buy a PI. I already pay for a full sim, so the extra would have been very little compared to what I make from it.

The point about those is that LL can't tell me to create a parcel for them as they are now. They could tell me to create a parcel and confine them to it, or they could tell me to dump them, either of which would be a phenomenally bad thing to do to a customer. The store is in the sky, and the castle is on the ground - an attempt at making the ground a little more interesting than just rock, and the guards existed long before the first "bots" blog was posted. There is no way they could reasonably object to them, and yet they do inflate the traffic for the store. Various Lindens will come to various decisions about such things, and various places will be advantaged or disadvantaged according to the various on-the-spot decisions of individual Lindens.

There will be a *lot* of that around before long, and the whole thing will be very cloudy, with some people gaining in the rankings on account of it, while others are told to remove them, and nothing will be clear. I don't see any reduction coming about in the affecting of the traffic results. They will be just as affected by bots as before, but the numbers will be smaller.

Within the last hour, I was chatting with someone who was looking at a sim that had almost 80 or 90 bots before the ban. They aren't there now, but he saw something else instead. He saw green dots in the water. Then they all left together, then they all returned together, and then they all left together. I wonder what they could be