Today's thread on bots

Ok, first, bots aren't people, they're programs. As such, they should not have the same rights as people. The basic right of any human-controlled avatar on the grid is access.

Too many bots in one place can deny access to a parcel or region due to limits in the platform.

Bots are used to game Traffic (as is still exists)
Bots are used to game land sales.
Bots are used to collect data on residents and parcels.

People make the argument that LL MUST allow bots to continue because they themselves use them (Testers). This argument is invalid. I cannot put red and blue flashing lights on my car, but the local government law enforcement can and should. I also cannot own a functioning tank, yet the government owns thousands to protect my country.

Bots should be outlawed. There is no single function that a bot can perform that connot be performed by a living resident. Need a mannequin to model your clothes? Hire another avatar. Need 20 people milling about your store to make it look like your product is of a high enough quality to be worth what you're asking? Hire 20 avatars. Need someone to go out and look at land prices to find the cheapest plot of land? Get off your prim couch and look for yourself. Even bot farmers admit they only got into farming because the system is flawed.

So the obligatory question:

Is there any valid reason to continue the explosion of bots on the grid?

Computers should be outlawed from the internet too. Everything a bot can do a person can do as well. Searching the web? Collecting news stories together? Organising huge groups of people working together for a common cause? Delivering information efficiently to millions? Just hire people!

So the obligatory question:

Is there any valid reason to continue the explosion of computers on the internet?

People can't shout far enough to be heard across an ocean. Your correlary does not match. Also, there is still a human element to computing on the web. Otherwise it would just be Skynet talking to itself. There are automated programs which can enact denial-of-service attacks on websites. These are also sometimes called bots, and are actually illegal.

/me peeks in, sees another "yes it is...", "no it isn't...", "yes it is..." thread starting...


/me runs away...

No it isn't.

Well people can't move as fast as bots or remember as much information or calculate conclusions from that information so quickly either so I guess your "correlary doesn't match" either. Also there is still a human element to bots in SL, i.e. they trade land with and for people and all that information they collect is ultimately delivered to a person, the traffic figures are driven up in order to help or hinder some person. Otherwise it would just be bots trading with themselves (just like a modern stock exchange actually). There are automated bots that harass people or try to steal money from them. These are actually quite banned by LL. (just like a person doing the same thing would be)

LL could simply open a separate sign-up portal specific to bots (with separate last names like Bot, Machine, Automaton to make them easily recognizable to the rest of us) which requires payment info/link to a main account with payment info and a - honour-based - (publically visible) disclosure entry on what the bot's purpose is.

There's no reason why a legitimate bot owner couldn't follow that procedure, so outlaw rogue bots with account seizures (confiscated land and L$ sales from the main account would more than pay for enforcement) as well as for a bot that does something other than was disclosed.

Land and estate tools can then add a separate option for bots with "Allow all/no bots" or "Allow only ..." which should fit the needs of the majority.

Fair enough.

...but is this all neccessary to the point of causing problems for paying human-controlled-avatars. (I'm going to shorten that to HCA from now on.)

Interestingly there already is a voluntary registration process that is used whenever a bot connects to the grid. Every connection string contains my name, email address and the name of the software I'm using to connect with. LL could just publish that information if they really cared about that idea. Then people would comply or not as it suited their purpose I suppose.

Well, not sure if it's valid exactly, but there's a lot of stuff that one might well want to do for which no functionality exists in LSL scripts, but which can very readily be done with bots. Immediately fulfilling a request to be added to a group, for example. Such uses are certainly valid, but whether it's valid of LL to forever relegate scripts to the role of slightly brain-damaged stepchildren is a matter of debate, I guess.

But bots are *massively* more costly to SL resources than would be the corresponding script functionalities. Landbots are a prime example of this: lots of capacity that might be used to populate our Maps is given over to bots mindlessly searching the land for sale listings in search of a bargain (now in coordinated bot teams, since any one bot or user can only look at so many listings in an interval). I really wonder if LL wins in this tradeoff between fantastically inflated concurrent user counts and the lag they entail.

Much like the shop one can't enter because the bots are using all the sim resources?

accually legally you can own as many tanks as you want the part that is controled(unconsitionally i might add) is the firing pin for the main gun,i was a wepons systems repair when in the army i can take one of those out almost as fast as a tanker can

hence why I said "functioning tank"

The issue isn't bots

The issue is Second Life has not been adjusted for the changes Bots bring.

Land Bots ==> The interface on buying and selling land still basically assumes its human controlled Avatars doing the buying and selling.

Search Bots ==> No provisions have been made to automatically keep them from snooping your stuff or even staying off your land.

Traffic Bots / Camping Bots ==> No provisions have been made for distinguishing between human controlled avs and these dummy accounts.


For example - If a normal account registered as "human traffic" and a bot account registered as "bot traffic" and these metrics were separated in the search --- the fact that there are traffic-bots would be entirely manageable.

would Linden eliminate bots?

Cant see they would as they love to pump out those Daily Sign up notices (hey were getting close to 13 million!... some are actual people!)

and the Daily log in Totals ~ 50,000 to 60,000 a day.

If they eliminated Bots those totals would fall to well under half or more.

Try to explain to thier investors or business partners what happened when daily log ins drop from ~50-60K to ~10-20K in one day........

Really the only bots that rely on QUANTITY to get their job done are Traffic/Camp bots.

Most bots are designed to get as much work done as possible with as few bots as possible.

may be true, and I will admit i've only been playing here a month. But I have been playing On-line games for 8+ years (Evequest / Lineage / Wow) and in every one of them Bots in one form or another is a problem.

As I wander around exploring I see Tons of avatars still in the original newbie clothes sitting at tables, Dancing. lounging on Bench's.... they FAR outnumber the Avatars walking around the stores... seems most Models are Bots too, makes me jump when one "talks" to me

I am not sure how bots work in SL,nor how LL is dealing with bots.
However,since SL is more or less a game, because of my past work experience for Acclaim Games Inc,I can sympatize with LL and their possible issues on dealing with bots.
In my opinion and experience, it is almost impossible to stop bots. You can limit their access,you can ban them each time you see one,but eliminate them is almost impossible, me thinks.
But again,I am not sure how LL deals with bots

The thing that really scares off investors is the extremely poor retention rates. There is no point in having 13 million signups if 12,900,000 of them have said "I cannot use this product, I am not logging in again."

A good bot wipeout - either economically (making them be premium accounts) or preferably through other means (which should remain secret, but would probably involve monitoring bot activity, or preventing en masse multiple log ins from a single PC) would enable scaleability of SL, improve retention rates, boost the economy, and give smaller traders a chance to stay in SL, and allow for more innovative content.

I wonder how many amazing people, out of the 12,900,000 that have said goodbye to SL, have been lost to the community forever.

Hmmm.

When there are problems with stuff, people (we the) start looking at stuff around us and generally laying the blame for our woes on it.

Bots are a good place to start. Colette said it well. SL isn't set up to handle them. SL is still not set up to handle megaprims for gods sake.

Wasn't there a petition last year signed by thousands of residents begging LL to get it together? What happened about that? "Fix stuff," we said "before you add new features".

Instead of fixing stuff they gave us Havoc 4, mono, a jira, the slowest help "portal" on the planet, took away inworld help, hid ratings, lowered ban lines, decreased visible inworld presence, and let Strife have a holiday.

Instead of fixing the underlying problems, once again we've been given shiny stuff to hide it all as in windlight, and dazzle.

Meanwhile crossing sim borders results in a gamble, will I get there with my shoes and hair in my ass, or will I just keep drifting forward till logged out? TP's are somewhat more reliable, though ymmv.

Now we've got this bot thing happening and it's clear that stuff is just not going well with them.

Yes, bots can be cool. In the same way as any software can be cool. It's cool to have a calculator at the end of your mouse. It's cool to be able to automate SL stuff with them, such as group invites.

But when a bot is used as a tool to game a system designed for humans, that's wrong on several levels.

Wrong because LL have lost control over the situation. They no longer have the ability to count real users. That's not great. Not an optimum situation at all.

Wrong because the land game is now broken. It was arguably broken before bots, but now it's just hopeless and broken.

Search is completely broken. Want to find a truly popular spot? Sure you do. So do I. To be honest, I haven't even bothered to look for about 2 weeks, as last time I did, all I found were campers and bots.

The conversation with a camper bot is completely one sided. Not that I don't mind talking about myself, it's talking to myself that worries me.

Events are being used as a sort of free advertising system, I guess in desperation residents will try anything to get the word out.

Thing is, it's all happening because the residents involved have a highly inflated ego.

They think that because they've found this "trick" of using bots either for land buying, or traffic gaming, that they are somehow entitled to abuse this knowledge.

They think that they are demonstrating some "higher" form of intelligence, and thus deserve to be at the top of the search results, or to buy the cheapest plots of land *because no-one is stopping them* and well, they must be really clever.

Bullshit.

I remember my boyfriend cursing aimbots in on line shooter games.

I remember the guys at the office cursing them too.

I call foul. In any other online community using bots to do anything is an offense punishable by banishment from the servers.


Why should it not be so here?

First we have tons of threads regarding the VAT. then tons of threads regarding content theft and now tons of threads regarding bots.


wah, wah, wah

If people spent half as much time doing something creative in SL that they spend bitching and moaning in the forums then they might actaully find SL can be a really neat place.

I will say right now, I intend t use two bots in my store to show off clothing designs. The bots are regular avatars that were created by a human player and one of those avatars I use to work on builds when I don't want to b bothered.

To those that do not like the idea of bots being used for this purpose, don't use them; but also do not try to take away the rights pof others to use them in a dictatorial fashion.

Remember. when they came for my neighbor I did not speak up. When they came for my mother I did not speak. When they came for me there was no one left to speak.

The best way to make SL better is to pressure LL to improve the stability of the system, instead of complaining about something that YOU don't like but do not take into account the others in world they can and do use them for quite legitmate purposes. You opinion may be different, so be it.

we call that camping.

The same can be said for the viewer client software.

Scripts aren't people, they're programs too.

You want scripts banned too?

The real issue is PEOPLE exploitating other people in secondlife.

Kindly stick to that issue and stop demonizing all the people that run bots without being exploitive.

people are behind bots.... well, one person. still, there is a human in charge, ultimately.

well.... i sure hope so anyway. LOL

Thanks for the ad hominem attack. For your information, when I'm inworld, that's exactly what I do - for about 30 hours each week. I really don't think your statement added anything constructive to the conversation.