Fun with Traffic Bots

I haven't been playing SL for a looong time. But the recent uptick in discussions about bots, especially those that increase traffic counts, got me curious about all the hoo haa, so I went in to see what these things were.

In the process, a friend told me about a fun SL glitch.

If you find one of those sky boxes filled with dozens of bots (usually at 5,000 meters up and higher) and you can somehow rez a prim, you can knock them out of the sky box. Simply rez a big one, (she likes flattened spheres) and make it physical. Now, in Edit Mode, lift it above a Traffic Bot's head and slowly drop it down. The bot sinks through the floor, waving its botty arms as it does. This works for the full body bots AND the misty water-colored-memory ones, too. I watched her play Whac-a-Mole with a whole sky box of bots that she cleared in 10 minutes.

Maybe club's could offer this as a game?

If someone mess's with a bot, does the bot have the right to AR them? How could it? Even more worrisome: Is Bot Griefing a sin?

LMAO next time you go bot hunting, TAKE ME TAKE MEEE!!!

Me too! Me too!

Whack-a-mole, LOL

Just say 7 hail lindens and you will be resolved of any sin.

I'm going to try that lol

Wack-A-Bot the fastest growing sport in SL.. This will be a riot seeing hunched over bots all over clubs and stores...

heehee, The wiser SIM owners now bury them underground in a cave without access.

Julie

Hmmm TNT maybe? pull them all to the surface? lol

I bet this doesn't work very well if the bots are sitting on a prim.

I've always wondered why trafficbot runners don't bother having them sit on a prim anyway, to turn them non-physical.

Probably that would be more effort than just pressing "log in" on the 50 clients they have running on a single machine

Not quite as much effort as making content at the place real people might actually come to see, but quick and easy is the name of the game I think

I found a bunch of bots on one of my residential sims yesterday and as I was evicting them from the estate, instead of simply vanishing they would all slowly sink through the floor with arms waving, like you mentioned, as if they were being pulled into the depths from whence they came by invisible ghostly hands.

I've seen bots used in games before. Guy with a club used lots of camping bots to drive up traffic (for what, I don't know...he never ran events and I never saw more than three people who weren't camping or an employee there), and kept a couple of them clustered inside a shooting range.

this is funny, i have seen some bots on a place I was shopping at. i will try this when i see some again

Yes it's funny, but be careful. Harassment is ARable.

I helped kick out some bots from an estate recently, and discovered something interesting: An avatar that has their home point set to the land they're being banned from, will simply be teleported back to that same home point. We had to eject the land owner for multiple rental violations, but since his home point was on the parcel he just flew up in the air and then came back down. A fellow EM wanted to try parceling off his home point into a 16sqm plot until he left. I don't think she did, but it would have been pretty funny XD

For more Fun with Bots, check out this blog I found recently: http://slwtf.com/ He often talks about bots, and knocking them out of their boxes XD

Thank you for confirming that for me! Two of the bots I was trying to get rid of kept re-appearing back on the parcel and I was all OMG HAXORZ until I wondered whether they had set their home locations to that very parcel.

And actually the 'Teleport Avatar Home' option in region tools didn't have any effect, and that's probably because SL was all WTF THEY'RE ALREADY HOME LOL.

Its probably against the TOS ..

but a SIN? No.

I would think it is possible to make a bot that can file an abuse report. It could use the bump and push list to get names from, I would think. Bots could pool their records of bumps and pushes to determine chronic bot attackers and file abuse reports for repeat offenders.

But a bot ain't a person. How can it be abused? It's a scripted object at best. Maybe it enjoys the attention. And how can it file an abuse report? Its owner would have to do any filing. And the owner isn't being abused directly, since the abuser has no idea who the bot owner is (although I suppose one could guess pretty easily).

I think the bot owners should chill and enjoy the attention their goons are getting. Hell, the bot boppers are actually generating REAL traffic for them and isn't that the whole point of the bot charade?

This is going to be a rant, sorry in advance


I'm more than willing to put this to the test so long as the bot is in a public place, i.e an info hub, or welcome area, or on a private sim not owned by the bot runner. What a bot runner does on thier own land is no business of mine *unless* it is obviously affecting the performance of the sims *sharing* the processor, and that includes the overhead on database queries for landbots.

If a bot is used on a free account I dont see it as being an issue at all. In fact I see free account bots as being a drain on grid resources, and i delight in getting full value from my premium account by tossing them around at every opportunity.

As for filing AR's against chronic bot attackers, exactly what would be the charge? "Prevention of gaming the traffic system" seems to be missing from the list of offenses in the pull down.

3rd party bots which gather statistics (non ll bots) are also fair game. I am not here to participate in your business model, nor do i care about the success of your "SL business" to the point you do.

I do care that people think they can be an "Online Gazillionare" by running a bot in sl, because it's false. It does not scale.

I also care that people think that running only a few bots is ok. It isnt. It does not scale.
At 4 sims per processor it takes one person to screw up the experience for many.

Bots which stand in one spot everyday clad in invisiprims logging chat are fair game and an abuse report.

If there is no human at the keyboard able to interact in a meaningful way, and the account is a free one, it's fair game.

If it's a landbot on a private sim, it's fair game to be perma frozen, free account or not.

I cant bring myself to comment on mainland landbots, and as there is a wealth of comment already in this forum, best i dont anyway.

In conclusion, i look forward to the day a resident AR's me for abusing his/her bot. That is one fight i am choosing to pursue.

Oh, this is Second Life. Not Second Bot.

Whisper~

I didn't say that bot writers should make bots file abuse reports, or that I think it is likely that they will, only that I feel pretty sure it is possible for such a thing to be done.

I know, just had to vent

Not quite, it's a program running a library that makes LL think it's a normal avatar. It could file an abuse report the same way the rest of us do, by submitting a ticket using that same server/client interface.

However, I doubt bot writers would bother with it, unless they thought it was fun, or the whack-a-mole game becomes endemic and problematic. My guess is it would be far easier for the bot to detect it's not where it belongs and simply teleport back to where it was placed.

Whispering's opinions are valid opinions, but LL will have a different opinion of what's "fair game", if push comes to shove.

So, whoever said to take care was dead right. Whacking avatars out of the sky (without regard to the reason the avatar is there) is likely to be considered griefing by LL. Have fun with it if you like, but don't be a repeat offender in any one place or you're likely to run into trouble. And don't whine too much if you find you're AR'd.

Also, whoever said that this wouldn't work for seated bots is correct, so it won't work on typical camper-bots (those which earn lindens by sitting on someone else's camper chairs).

I actually had a long discussion with Dan Linden about something similar to this...
In a sim that I work at that has the entire sim as one plot, when ejecting and banning folks, they do not actually get removed from the sim, they simply just go to the corner, and then fly back to where they were. upon leaving they would then be banned (however we did not test the "home" location thing...
the only solution we could come up with, was to parcel off a small (16sm) section in the corner of your sim (this is if the entire sim is one plot) and when ppl are ejected/banned they will be stuck in that one little piece

will have to catch dan next time I see him online and see if he would be willing to test the "home" location thing...

(the way he explained it is when ppl are banned/ejected it removes them from that plot, if that plot is actually an entire sim, then it doesn't know where to send them, so it sends them to the 0,0 cords)

weird eh?

That was me, and it was meant. Your advice not to be a repeat offender is also good. It's one thing to have a bit of fun, but it turns into harassment and/or griefing if it continues (take note Rocky). And don't forget that you may not be the first person to do it to a particular set of bots, and there are not many people who will give everyone one free go, so it's risky even doing it once.

Regardless of what some people think of bots, they are avatars that are operated by people, and interfering with them is no different to interfering with any other avatars -harassment or griefing, or both. It doesn't need a bot to auto-AR - it just needs the person to AR. So be careful out there.

A technical thing:
I tried it with my bots and it worked. So I changed something and I haven't been able to make it work again. They are not sitting and I'm interested to know if anyone else can get it to work. Anyone want to try?