LL - Let us count the bots!

I make furniture. Therefore this is focused on the furniture traffic ranks.

Do a search for "Furniture" under PLACES>Shopping: [x]Mature

The first page of results listed by traffic rank goes from a traffic of 119,940, down to 6050.

Counting the bots starting at a traffic score of 10,000 and higher gives you about 1000 bots just for Furniture results.

I am pretty sure it is 1000, as I have gone to 8 of these places and counted about 550 or so bots, give or take a few dozen.

The top 5 places alone account for 330+ bots.

The concurrency numbers are crap. Absolutely bogus. And today since i am in a non-kool-aid drinking mood, I feel like expressing my fear that all is not going well with SL and after being here 5 years I am actually fearful that there will not be another 5 years for me to have.

When i see 66,000 people "Online Now", i know its a LIE. Yes LL, it is a LIE because you are misleading people into thinking that 66,000 real people are logged in when its really something in the area of 56,000 people and 10,000 bots.

They need to start killing the bot clients down to 5 per computer or IP.

I am in such a sour mood after thinking about this for the past 48hours.

I need a alcoholic beverage.

A little sunshine and fresh air may help too.

goodness... hey i will trade you my defunked pc problem and i will rant about the bots if you like..... i know I am only 1 person in that 66,000 .

so cheers /me clinks glass to yours

I got to say after spending 2 days helping a male friend shop for clothes, many many many of the results in serarch were for the same damn stores just worded differently.. explain that to me please...

I live in the country. I get plenty of that with the yard work i have to do along with many many many mosquito bites.

i get pissed when they use keywords that have nothing to do with their stores or clubs..to me that should be outlawed..thats how they get on all these searches..

People can argue 'til the cows come home that trafficbots do not increase asset load, but as long as they connect to the inventory, then yes, yes they do. I do agree, limiting them to a certain number per an IP would be great.

Phil not saying much

The estimates I've seen put the number of bots at roughly twice that many.

20,000 bots in world???

If that is true then we are all being scammed.

lol. What is there for me to say? I don't mind if LL lets us count the bots, although I'm not sure exactly what that means.


Incidentally, estimating the number of bots isn't realistic, even for estimates. I've no idea how many there and I know that nobody else does either.

I think even that's a low estimate. I haven't worked on it in a while, but I have a project to determine how many people are actually at their keyboard...

http://greendots.typepad.com/

I don't have enough data to say with certainty but my feeling is that in sims with five or fewer people there are 10%-15% bots, and in sims with more than 5 there are at least 50%. Perhaps a lot more than 50%. To guestimate the overall percentage of bots I'd have to count the number of sims with 5 or fewer vs more than 5 avatars. I have the code to do that but haven't run it on a large piece of the grid, yet.

I think the number of bots (including afk campers) is in the 40% range. Conservatively.

Traveling the grid randomly looking for people to talk to is a depressing project. If I think too much about it I have to conclude that SL is already dead and those of us who are left are just fooling ourselves.

40% of what? The number of avs logged in varies widely during a day - from the 30ks to the around 70k. If it's 40% of the high 60ks, you're saying that, at some times during the day, almost every logged-in av is a bot which, of course, isn't true. Remember that bots stay in all the time.

A much easier way is to consider the low number of avs each day and make a guestimate as to how many are bots. If the low number is, say, 30k and a large part of the worls is awake and using SL, then the number of bots is considerably lower than your estimate.

The idea that 5 or less avs in a sim = 10%-15% bots, and >5 = at least 50% bots doesn't work, of course.

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Would the OP like to explain what's meant by "LL - let us count the bots!"? Why do you want to count them, and how can LL enable you to count them?

People will just work around the IP limitations, or MAC address limitations, or whatever. They just need to close the client, or find some other way to enforce the no-bots rule. Not sure how technically it could be done, or if even LL cares.

The concurrency numbers are in the 40K-65K range. If the number of bots is constant that'd mean the low concurrency of humans is in the 14K range. Yes, I think it is nearly that low.

I say nearly because I don't think the number of bots is constant. I think people power their machines up and down during the day, and I think they pay more attention to their bots staying connected while they are home and awake. And those that are running bots for events (like clubs) aren't running as many bots during off hours.

I suspect that human concurrency varies during the day between 20-40K and bots 20-25K. That is, at min concurrency hours half are bots, and at peak hours 40% are bots.



Why? It's based on observation, not guesswork or wishful thinking. I've actually gone out and looked, examining every green dot I can find to determine what they're doing. I'm finding that in less-populated sims most are real people and in heavily-populated sims more than half are bots. There are, of course, exceptions. I'm talking about overall numbers.

many corporations have many employees that all share the same IP. if you limit IP, you limit REAL paying customers.

We sensed this all along. There are times when I see the 66k concurrency and I still almost feel lonely. And I'm a bit reclusive -- it's hard to make me feel lonely.

A question...how many bots can a sim handle? I know the op talks about counting hundreds in only 8 locations. I thought that more than 40 avs or so and thing start to get weird. Just curious. I know on the sim where my land is and on other sims there are no bots but when there are more than about 50 avs, all bets are off that things will work right. On the sim next to my land, there are often 30-40 campers and i know that does impact that sim quite a bit. The store next to mine used to have alot of campers all the time and it was always like walking through mud in my store. With the campers gone, things are now fine. Just curious if bots act the same way, then how can there be such high numbers in so few places.

i went out to one joint with bri and there were nearly 90 bots running on the sim, all crammed into little huts thousands of meters in the sky. i think if the bots are high enough out of range and arent doing anything they dont affect the sim too much.
i am coming around to opinion that if we are going to compete with these junk shops we will have to employ bot tactics as well, since ll is seemingly never going to get rid of the traffic metric.

Some day Second Life will be fully automated and no one will have to log in at all.

Maybe LL will make a TV show about Second Life and we can all just tune in and watch what those crazy bots are going to do this week.

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

There is a footnote to the statistics page of this website that goes



Did you catch this line?:
All numbers are rolled-up among avatar "alts" to the Unique Customer Level.

Doesn't "Unique Customer Level" make you think LL has a really good idea of how many human beings are engaged in their platform?

Do you think "Unique Customer Level" is a number thats ever going to make the front page of the website?

It's said that for some time now - over a year, at least - and yes, LL does have a pretty good idea of how much of the population is bots.

The problem is that if they go after bots, the bot writers will make them smarter and harder to detect. Then LL has to make their detection smarter to catch the new bots, which will drive the creation of even smarter bots. Rinse. Repeat. This is what they're talking about when they say they don't want to get into an arms race.

If it's not bots gaming traffic, it'll just be something else. Better the evil you know, I guess. :\

If you really don't like bots, vote with your L$. If I go shopping and find a place that's full of traffic bots, I go elsewhere.

The grid only has about 30k regions on it...

The fact that Phil ..

Who has 20 bots and is thus leaves a 5% human and 95% bot footprint;

Claims that the grid concurrency couldn't possibly be 20% or 40% bots

is pretty ironic.

I think the issue is performance and representation - and that's not directly dependent on the number of bots. More like what they are doing and where.

Getting rid of them would help, I'm sure, especially during high load times. Yes there are some very light-footprint bots, but... that's not all of them.


performance issues:

A good idea might be to let every computer hooked up have one bot. One. Or X amount of performance if it can be quantified effectively - say asset hits per hour, or suchlike. Maybe during light use periods there can be more, but... limit this if possible. This is the biggie. Taken 10000% of the number of asset hits in an hour that a typical human does? No more bytes for you!



representation:

Been logged in 37 hours? You are a bot. Yeah, even if you are a human that's idling and camping... yep, you are being pretty botlike. You just lost your green dot status. It's now silver grey. Want green dot status back? IM a particular avatar that will give you a Turing Test, or a Voight Kampff. No I'm not joking - a captcha image is a good start. "Happenin' Places" will be called out as honest, or otherwise.



raison d'etre:

Get rid of reasons why bots help. Traffic? Change how it works, such that any avatar on the grid X hours has 1/X effect on traffic. It's kind of that way now, but not enough.

Why even bother having traffic numbers at all? Sorta like using a phone book, the only numbers there are the ones you dial, you don't know what's there until you go there. The itemized list of products, prices and services on the search page is enough for a person to decide if it's worth teleporting there or not. Leave it up to classified advertising, event planning and word of mouth to bring in new business. Bots will become useless. Maybe it'll start giving these new players and incentive to learn building and other creative skills also. Have free open air market space like we use to have for those that are putting out an effort.
There is a lot of things a person can learn in SL, it shouldn't be all about money.

Hmmm interesting about the idea that when sims have more than 5 people they ahve 50% afk. I would say that s VERY wrong. For one im stndingon a sim with around 20people ehre. One is afk and none are bots.


I find it shocking that you all say you can never find anyone to talk to O.o I think you are going to the wrong places to be completely honest.

YEs thre are bots, but rarely feel lonely in SL and can always find people to talk to and not just one or two *shrugs*

I make random visits all over the grid. I make two kinds of surveys. One, I visit sims with more than about five avatars. *Overall* these are more than half bots. Of course there are some sims with a lot of live people. There are more sims with a lot of bots.

The second kind of survey is to visit fifty sims each with 1-5 avatars. These are mostly live people, but of course there are exceptions. Sometimes they are all bots. *Overall* they are real people.