Today's thread on bots

That's the way i see it ..word for word.

I missed that post - sorry

Yes it does - many times over every month.

impressive- take my hat off to you!

Don't let go of it though - I might sell it as a new range of products

1 bot uses less resources than a real person, therefore we need to limit real users numbers and allow infinate bots
Better yet why don't LL just allow us to leave accounts logged in even if out computers are turned off, that would be great just login a few hundred zombies and forget.

People using bots are frustated designers that cannot make a good business work with his own hands, befores bots i have seen many people suceed without the bots.
Phil Deakins every time i read your posts i am more convinced that you dont have resources to suceed, poor you!!!

Aaw. Did you enjoy that excercise in puffing your chest out and pretending to be strong? LMAO

FYI, I take between US$4000 and US$5000 out of SL every month - after all expenses (tier and premium). You are perfectly correct, of course. It really sucks being a "frustrated designer that cannot make a good business work with his own hands". I cry about it all the way to the bank Poor me!!!

To get a complete solution to the bots issue, I think it would be worthwhile to make their use a bit more commonplace.

Perhaps someone could put together a simple to use bot resource kit, with an easy to use light SL viewer that can load up, say, 50 bots. It would only have to be light on the client side, as we all know now that bots do not use up any server-side resource, so impact on servers is clearly not relevant. Perhaps LL could release something like this?

LL could also make bot account registration a bit easier. Perhaps have an option on sign up to have 50 bots automatically registered when you do a standard free sign up? It would probably be good if traffic results could be biased a bit towards bots - say give a 200 per cent traffic bonus for any bot that is on your land? Maybe there could be a bot incentive scheme, so if you register say 10,000 bots you get entered into a draw for a 500L prize?

Just some ideas. I am sure that they would not cause any problems if implemented.

The funny thing about this bot discussion, especially the parts where Phil gives his opinion, is that most form their opinion not based on facts, but on feelings.

Most of us realize from the arguments that were given over and over again, that traffic bots are not the biggest strain on the system. They hardly use resources. But, they give the user an unfair advance over others. So the people using bots, must be bad designers, that they need the bots.

Now let me draw you another picture:
As a starting furniture shop (few months in business) I think I do make nice stuff. The only thing I need, are people in my shop who can decide for themselves wether my stuff is worth the price. So people have to be able to find me.

So what are my options?
- Optimising my parcel for Search All. For that I can try to get people to put my shop in their Picks. But paying them to do so, is wrong according to people. At least thats what I read here. It is unethical.
- Optimising my parcel for Places Search. Equals using traffic bots. Because that is what my competition does. If you read Phils postings well, that is what he did. Implement bots, because the competition already did so. Competing means using the available tools. But it seems to be unethical.
- Do nothing above, as some of you want.

Well for the moment, I did optimize for Search all, and I see it works. Though I am not even near Phils results Next step would be the bots, but for the moment I will not.

Bottomline is, that bots methods are approved by Linden Labs. They know Phil uses bots, they know I use the pay for picks. They even helped me finding out wether "no payment info" accounts picks counted for Search All.
Linden Labs gives us the system, we optimize for it. They think traffic should count, so people use bots. They decide picks are the thing, people use picks.

One more thing.
When talking bots, try to separate traffic bots from land bots.
- Land bots TP all over the place, and use resources. How many I do not know, but resources they use. Apparantly they can TP 23 places per minute, which probably does put a load on the system.
- Traffic bots sit in a skybox, do not move, and as far as we know hardly use resources. They might put a strain on some people feelings, but not on the system.

For the record, I do not like botfarms. But I prefer to use my common sense when discussing them.

MARCEL FLATLEY
There are many ways to sell, and one of them is on webpages like ONREZ, another way is to have a good and big list of friends, those are important for you to be known, i dont care if my neighbour uses bot for traffic, i dont believe on that, dont tell me you are competing to all the designers that do the same to you, there is plenty of places in SL, is not going to happen that you will not have customers, the problem here is that in a moment SL will be without clients because all will be BOTS. BOTS USERS are trying to sell the idea that they needs that because theirs competitors will make their business fall down to a precipice, and that is not true, if you use the common sense you have to think that by mathematical probability you always will be visited by new avatars, here is not RL, you dont need marketing fidelity services so your client will go back to buy you again and again, most of the people that comes to a good traffic land are searching for camps, i never search for furniture or clothes, i just follow my insticnt around the HUGE SL....thats how mostly people desire and should walk around, trek around, you will discover awesomes places, and stuff.
Having BOTS around is just making all the numbers, saying quantity of residents, quantity of visitors, economy to be all inflated, false and changing the spirit of this virtual world, to compete with others i prefer RL, where real money is and i prefer to be in SL a virtual voyager, creating things, meeting nice people and not trying to be the "smarty" of the class for some 4,000 or 5,000 U$D, that by the way each day means less compared to the euro. I play fair, i am not in the jungle of the RL, i am here to have good times and not get stressed, and bots are stressing in many ways, i feel right now that all i am saying is the idea of many people that "thought" that this would be a place to be, and not a place to compete.

Linden Labs is ok with bots? They should wise up. This newbe is getting tired of TPing someplace, moving over to visit a group, and--oh just campers..

Why in the world they would let a free account count for anything I do not know. I would not mind if they required all to pay. I will miss the college chicks, but it would free up a lot of this problem I believe.

I guess LL has a problem, if they kick out all bots, their traffic numbers would plummet.

Nemesis,
Though your piece is hard to read, I will try to respond in my best way.
- The options where I can sell my stuff I do know, I am on SLX and to some extend on Onrez (sales there were so low I didnt care to put more stuff on there). But thanks for pointing it out.

- would you care to explain how there would come a moment where there are only bots online? Because no matter how hard I try to imagine, I cannot see your point. Bots are not somehow pushing people off the grid you know.

- of course if I do nothing to get found, I will get some accidental visitors, but you must agree with me that the better you can be found, the more people will find you? So it is useful to try and do better in search, if you want to have business.

Try for example a search on "low prim furniture".
Do it in search all, and I appear on third place. All because of search optimalization, I started on 14th place. So now, when people want low prim furniture, they will (in general) visit me as third shop.
Do it in Places, and I am on 21th place. Meaning that people in search for low prim furniture, will try 20 places before mine. Probably purchased what they need somewhere within the top 10, so never end up at my place.

- Now I have no insight in your finances, but if I knew that I would make 4000-5000$ per month by firing up 20 bots, I would not be typing but firing up bots The only reason I do not, is that I am not at a point where I think they will make a big difference.

- Now you say you play fair. Which implies that I do not? If that is so, I am very curious why not. Do I do anything not permitted? And how do these bots stress you? Why do you let them stress you?

That is my main point in fact, to you and all people sharing your feelings. Where do they come from??? Those traffic bots do not harm you, do not push you out of second life, and as far as I know they don't even use much resources. So why do they stress you people? I mean, as said I am not a great botfarm lover either, but they never stressed me. If you do not wanna shop at a botfarm parcel, don't! Just do not let it stress you so much.

Scout,
You have a big point there, the reason that they do not say goodbye to traffic is probably they want the artificial login numbers to stay.
As I stated many times before, I am in favour of only premium accounts, and max 5 avatars per account. But lets face it: If I would make 4000-5000$ per month, I would pay those 4 premium accounts I need for 20 bots laughing Only good way to get rid of traffic bots, is say goodbye to the current traffic system. And I never heard a voice against that.

sorry if you misunderstand my english, english is not my native language, so it is the spanish.
however i do understand what everybody says here
scout makes a good point, i did comment somewhere about that, i guess it was about the premium account, i do believe that there shouldnt be FREE ACCOUNTS WITH SAME PRIVILEGES OF A PREMIUM ACCOUNT, everybody should pay to linden and there is no need to have parallel "SLifes" in all this real estate and islands business, pls, i am not saying i dont like island, but ALL TRADE SHOULD BE BETWEEN PREMIUM ACCOUNTS, the idea of having FREE USERS OF SL and let the opportunity to have land, creates a distorsion between FREEBIES and PREMIUMS, maybe you will say you dont get the point, but i think is clear enough, if we all pay accounts we all have same opportunitys and difficulties to grow up in SL, but with freebies i only get stupid bots upside down in landscapes, or dranw in the ocean, horrible outfits standing up like zombies in many places, and each day in more and more, so, if this is your idea of SL good for you, truly is not mine, and LL has to do something about it!!

Nemesis,
English isn't my native language either so no worries

However, I indeed think you do not get the point. Premium account only will not kill the trafficbots! As I said I am in favour of premium accounts only, but a well running business can afford a handful of premium accounts when it is good for their business.

Funny thing is though, you can travel Second Life without ever meeting a traffic bot. Avoid the high traffic commercial areas. Explore the mainland, look up some threads in here about best places to visit. If your idea of a great second life is exploring, go ahead! A great world is waiting for you.

My idea of a great second life is building, and with it came setting up a moderate business. And a great world is waiting for me too Live and let live, and do not let people who think different from you, bother you. Either learn from them, or ignore them.

Greetings, Marcel

You are absolutely correct. What you want SL to be is exactly right for you. Of course other people want it to be other things, which are exactly right for them. All you need to do is accept that SL is different things to different people, and you'll be just fine

In other words some people can justify deceptive behavior and when in babylon be like babylon, and others would prefer people to have ethics instead.

It's nothing to do with ethics, as you well know.

Tip of the week:
If you were to take a minute and actually read the post that I replied to (I quoted it in my reply post to make it easy for you), then you'd know what what the reply was about and you wouldn't have changed the subject, as you did. Believe it or not, reading posts actually does work

Anyway, it doesn't concern you. You are leaving SL, so don't try telling nemesis what his SL should be like for him. That's his business - not yours.

I am going to visit your "FAMOUS BOT HELPED" shop, and as designer will give you my opinion, i only hope you are not reselling FREE STUFF because that for sure is unethic.
I will visit too the other lands of these BOTS DEFENDERS soon, i have the idea that nothing new will be on those places, one prim furniture sounds like FLINSTONES FURNITURE, anyway if bots are getting you rich, good for all of you, by my side i will always fight in SL against them and against monopolic practices, to acquire the search only for you anyhow, for all of you bye bye and keep safe your IDIOBOTS

To Rebecca, all my love to you hun, we all know that we are lots of people tire of all this, at the end, when servers burns out, linden cannot control their asset servers problems, this will have to change.....kisses

Feel free to visit my store, and the others. It will be quite an eye-opener for you, and you'll be able to write things with the experience of actually having seen things, and not from the point of view of disregarding facts, and shoving your personal preferences down other people's throats. It's the first step in getting know what you're talking about

The only demographic to which traffic should be important are shop space landlords and the people that rent space from them.

Someone looking to put up a shop is going to be willing to pay extra if they know the space is more heavily visited.

Hopefully they're smart enough not to be suckered by bot-camper fraud... but I'm sure it happens anyway though.

--
SL is like Las Vegas: Your real money goes in, but what happens in SL stays in SL. But summing up the city of Las Vegas as "a game" doesn't sit right with me. Same goes for SL.

They're both places in which people are playing a wide variety of different games (real estate, politics, popularity, tourist, ...), which, to me, makes SL more like a place, like a stadium, casino or city. Not a (singular/specific) game.