Are your human employees registered?

This came up across the street.

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/general-sl-discussion/37099-second-life-bot-policy-no.html#post823403

It regards a story in the Blog "Atomic Valley":http://atomicvalley.com/?p=909

Evidently, a store owner received a disciplinary notice for violation of the anti camping bot/traffic gaming policy for using live avatars as models/customer service reps.

The only idiocy involved here is that of LL coming up with "Scripted Agent" rather than "Non-Traffic" as a way of getting Traffic to represent *live visitors* to to a parcel.
After that particular extreme idiocy, the only other idiocy is on the part of those who refuse to see the principle involved and nit-pick over what they read as the letter of the law.


The articles quoted mention an anti-botting policy.
There is no such thing.
There is an anti-Traffic_Gaming/Manipulation policy.

It's very simple.
People who are paid to be on the parcel should not be counted as Traffic.

We don't know when LL are going to adjust the Traffic algorithm to exclude avatars with Scripted Agent status set at the time.
It seems from the LL response to the store owner that even if LL might not jet have modified the algorithm, they require non-Traffic avatars to have Scripted Agent status set.
That's logical.
What is asinine is the term "Scripted Agent"

I guess I'm going to have to cut a tiny parcel under my store to put the pose stand on if I have my friend's alt model for me again.

This is interesting. I forget who it was but we had a thread a few days ago about exactly this. Someone's friend left his av as a model in her store while he went off to RL work. She was asking if it was ok. I said that, at the moment, it's fine because registering is voluntary. It seems I was wrong. I registered all my bots very soon after the 'scripted agent' blog was posted, and I've registered 3 more since then when I was experimenting with the bots programme.

But this brings normal employees into things, so it's different. Were the avs on the posing stands any different from avs on dance poles, for instance, or from av employees who walk around the place helping customers? They are all manned by real people at the keyboard and they all talk to help customers. I don't the difference in any of them.

However, from a traffic point of view, should any of them be unregistered? Should manned av employees that move around the premises be unregistered? One part of me agrees with Sling - that they should all be registered at the time they are doing it. Another part of me thinks that it's getting absolutely ridiculous if manned employees, such as club hosts, DJs, poledancers, store helpers, and such have to be registered as well as bots, especially since there is no way for an employer to know whether or not the employee has registered. It's unworkable because of that. I honestly don't see any difference between avs on poles and avs on posing stands, as long as they both talk to customers as and when needed.

ETA:
Thank you, Ral. It was you who I was referring to

The intent is completely different.

Noone's going to stick around in an empty club so you need "staff" there to keep people who come over. Whether or not their traffic should be counted is debatable but those people are going to be there even if their traffic isn't counted.

Completely different story for a store where you don't ever need people to be there to make your store work and campers are always used for traffic inflation.

I flagged Trill as a scripted agent, even though she's only on when I'm using her. Sadly, of the three, she's the one that winds up in the shop for more than 5 minutes and sometimes I wind up idle whether I like it or not.

But I heartily agree, "Scripted Agent," with the description of "Bot" is rather a misnomer. I just didn't want to inflate my shop's traffic with her.

This thread is as pathetic as the cut 'n' paste from the LL blogs.

Damn. Here I just picked up an application to be a model at one of my favorite retail shops. I don't want to a "scripted agent"..........I want to be an avatar.

Well, really, I just want a chance to wear some of those fanastic outfits.

Apparnetly some of those gaming the system and having their massbotting skyboxes shutdown are now dobbing in anyone else they can.

This summer when the traffic policy came out, I wrote that technically under the policy, if I left myself logged in to Second Life on my parcel while I watched something interesting on television, rather than logging out and then logging back in a half hour later, I would be violating the policy. Everyone laughed at me, because despite the wording of the policy, surely it would only be enforced against bots and not live avatars. Well guess what - every second your main avatar is logged into your land, and you are distracted by something in in real life but don't log out for the one minute or half hour or whatever, you are guilty of impermissibly gaming traffic.

Yep there are people apparently just wandering around ARing anyone who doesn't respond to a question..................
If it has this much drama on single avatars think of the misery & unbridled evil it is bestowing upon our upsatnding massbotting community.........................

Lemme get this straight...

So, if I am in my shop standing around, I need to register my avatar as a bot because I am gaming traffic.

If I hire someone to help me out with questions about my product... I am gaming traffic.

If I go afk to get a sandwich, I am gaming traffic.


Okay, LL. I get it... I think.

So we're not allowed a bathroom break? People get distracted in RL all the time. Or even, deep in various IM and don't see local chat for a while.

no it is more like..would a model be considered camping if they are on a pose ball in your store getting paid by the hour.. or would they be considered not camping.
some would say it is camping if it was a real person..some won't..i guess it all depends on the G-Team rep that shows up..

i have to agree they are getting goofy because if they don't show some way to tell the scripted agents that are registered from one's that are not registered then it's just a stupid idea anyways..

they don't want to get rid of the number manipulation in my opinion..to me it is more like..here gimmie your butt i want to blow smoke up it again lol

Maybe the Emerald people can add automatic silent person ARing as another Paranoia feature.

Naaah........just alt-cntrl-p to make yourself phantom. Then you can claim you were ghosted.

Hmm... when my business partner and I are working on stuff, we quite often so do on a building platform above one of the shops; we're not doing this to "game traffic" but because it's convenient, but I guess we're artificially inflating traffic for the shop beneath. And, to make matters worse, we're both frequently half in SL and half in a third-party programme like Poser, Gimp or LSL Plus.

Sounds like maybe we should not making products in the same place we sell them....

People who are working are not bots. At least, unless a store has a zillion 'models' or 'security' those are clearly staff. Especially if manned by a live person behind the avatar.

I mean...what is with all the heavy handedness lately. It's as if they WANT to drive out small business from SL.

Actually, I don't think LL is even thinking of anything like the popular thought here in this thread. It's all about "what if". A person can still be a hostess, model, dancer, helper, or any other employee in SL and not be considered a "bot" or some scam to game the system. It's the same old game of "lets find fault with anything LL states as policy". LL has finally taken to heart all the screams about traffic gaming and have put into place a few policies that attempt to stem that practice.........and people will find fault stating far fetched scenarios suggesting LL has sinster motives.

It's a game played often here.

Peggy this type of post is what I am replying to. This does not sound imaginary.

And what was the response to that store owner when the store owner broght to LL's attention that there were live avatars behind the suspected bots? We don't know that part, do we?

One can make any claim one wants to make.........and no one can prove otherwise. That's what makes this game so interesting.................and fun

It literally took longer to upload the pic than to find a bot farm.

Pick any point on the map with more than 5 people and no event star. TP, fly up, watch the bots.

There is one sure fire way to end traffic bots. Stop counting traffic. It has been requested for two years that I know of.

It will never happen. NEVER. Because if traffic was not counted then the bots would be unnecessary and thus would never log in to boost concurrency. Do you really think the average live person who logs in plays for 40+ hours a week? I have seen well documented studies showing well over 50% of the residents logged in at any time is a bot.

LL will continue to make a few busts where people have 3 or 4 models so they can claim they are enforcing the policy but anyone can spend 5 minutes and find out that this is just smoke and mirrors. Why? Because LL benefits from traffic bots. They need the numbers as much as the owners of the bots need traffic.

[ETA]
Do not forget. We were told not to report bot farms for a reason.

i agree 100% ..If they really were going to do anything about traffic they would have started at the top of the list and not the bottom getting a few..
We would have seen real results by now..

Actually I think it much more likely that its a deal where LL isnt hunting for bots in small businesses (if they are at all) but when one is brought to thier attention they are reacting in a "predictable" fashion.

I suspect the real culprit here is a competitor or a vigilate group out hunting for such things. We may have been told not to report them but I know good and well they ARE being reported. Otherwise thing slike this wouldnt be happening.

Well, actually we do know that part. That is, we do if we follow the link provided in the OP to http://atomicvalley.com/?p=909, where we find what purports to be the whole correspondence between the storeholder and Frontier Linden.

Frontier's response to the store holder is apparently that, while the employees may well not be bots, "traffic calculations are still being artificially inflated," so the store holder should either ask his live employees to set their status as scripted agents while they're on duty (i.e. pretend to be bots!) or create a small parcel, take it out of search, and tell them to stay there, where they won't be counted as traffic.