Serious Action Needed: Adfarms and Bots

Dear Linden Labs,

More and more, Second Life is being harmed by three pernicious practices: Adfarms, camping bots, and traffic bots.

Each of these issues affects SL on several levels. They use disproportionate amounts of resources, degrading the overall service and its level of performance. They suck money out of the economy without creating anything or providing any sort of service in return. And, in the case of adfarms at least, they make the SL landscape ugly.

Using camping bots to sit on someone's camp chairs is bad enough. It takes income away from individual newcomers, who aren't yet skilled enough to create and sell content. Some of the people running camping bots are running whole armies of them, making a significant Real Life income by sucking money out of SL. This is hurting Linden Labs as much as it harms Residents, because it takes away money that business owners might otherwise use for expansion.

Traffic bots are another problem. Recently, we've seen the practice of using 30, 40, or even up to 80 bots crammed into a hole, or lofted in a skybox, for the sole purpose of inflating an operation's traffic figures. The people running traffic bot farms aren't sucking out money, but they are distorting Search results and creating lag problems for visitors to the sims where they operate.

Ad farms don't work, as advertising. Few if any reputable SL businesses use them to advertise -- they know that most residents boycott businesses who use adfarms. But the ad farmers set their 16 square meter eyesores for sale at extortionate rates. If their neighbors want any sort of peace or attractive scenery, they're forced to pay the ad farmers to remove their eyesores. Some ad farmers also use temp rezzers in their small plots. Like the traffic bot farms, this creates lag for everyone.

Ad farms, camping bots, and traffic bots: These are three of the five major issues facing Second Life (the other two are griefers and grid stability issues). Linden Labs may not want to deal with these issues; the creation of bots, in particular, might seem as if it's helping to make SL look good, with more registered users, more concurrent users. But they are parasites. Like all parasites, a heavy infestation can kill the host. As a mentor, I've already seen newcomers encounter these practices, and leave SL in disgust when they learn that LL will do nothing about them.

LL has always taken a "hands off" attitude to the problems, on the grounds that they are resident to resident disputes. I would suggest that these problems are more than that. The people who practice them have found loopholes...in the technology, or in the rules, and are exploiting those loopholes to the detriment of all. Just as it's LL's job to fix bugs in the software, it's your job to plug up these loopholes.

Solutions to all of these problems have been put forward over and over again; I won't re-hash them here. But it's time and past time to take action. Get rid of the parasites, LL. Before it's too late.

When you buy that 16 sqm ad parcel (or a few) at high prices, you usually also go up to the next tier level. Results in a net gain for LL. on the other hand, you end up paying heavy tier for little gain in space or prims.

Well said, I wonder if we all make it a notecard and each send it to a dozen Lindens.

will only lead to them turning even more blind eyes towards us.

Very nice writing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There is one large problem, ever since LLABS placed -multiple switching . The game change forever................indeed this was done to allow the -multiple of avies on one computer ( not including 2 or 3 computer or more some chinese gangs doing these days) Money farmers are doing in the game. LLAbs has washed their hands on this issue and nolonger cares. All they care about are these times of crappy misguided and totall fake number see chart below...........



Alone with the laughable footage they added for our viewing pleasure

here
There are a view people i repect on the gathering of information for this. But others are just people out of their minds. As they say VR numbers for a VR world.............

"They use disproportionate amounts of resources, degrading the overall service and its level of performance."

You made it sound like a bot uses *more* resources than the LL viewer..

It is a valid point though, as all a bot does is sit there, yet it is wasting bandwidth and simulator time just by being there, bandwidth and simulator time that an actual avatar could be using to move around. Also due to a bug with phantom objects that prevent avatars from becoming phantom when they sit on them (http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-264), all bots camping on a plot also add to complexity of physics calculations.

Compared to this, a legitimate avatar moving around uses very little extra resources, but is actually using the system. Not to mention a plot of land with 70+ bots may only have a handful of visitors at any one time. For example, my business gets about 10-15 visitors a day, if I had 70+ bots on my land to boost my search results then I might get 20-25. The gain of 10 actual avatars comes at the cost of 70 idle ones.

I agree with everything you said, except this last statement. I have yet to see a single viable solution to these issues put forward. Which is why they are still here bothering everyone. If you have one, don't leave it unsaid, please. Making adfarms invisible on your land isn't a solution, making plots a minimum size isn't a solution. Removing traffic is a halfway solution at best (search will still be distorted by keyword abuse). Banning bots is a nice idea, but completely impossible, unless maybe you want LL to as you a trivia question ever 3 min to ensure a person is there. Is there any i've missed? Indeed, lets purge these horrific social problems from SL. But it needs a real solution.

People want to cure disease, hunger, homelessness, and war in RL too. And many would say the solutions are simple in these cases as well. And yet, we still have them. There never are easy solutions.

I've seen solutions proposed that sounded workable to me, Darien.

Adfarms: How about the proposal to allow Residents to visually mute others' objects, the way we can mute their chat and IMs? That would be more effective than just making them invisible from your land. If that's not feasible for some technical reason, there is always the Casino Solution: Have Lindens fly around the grid, respond to ARs, and simply delete adfarm builds the way they delete slot machines.

Traffic bots: LL should respond to ARs against traffic bot pits by deleting the bot accounts and permabanning the person who registered them. Other good solutions that would require less police work include (as you suggest) deleting or de-weighting traffic as a search rating factor. Or only count visits by Premium residents, although I don't like that one as well. Some locations attract newbies, and they shouldn't be put at a disadvantage. Keyword gaming would still be with us, but we can't solve ALL the world's problems at one go.

Camping bots: There are procedural solutions already available. I've discussed one of them in the Resident Advice forum recently in the thread "Bot Free Camping". I've seen at least one anti-bot camping chair for sale on SL Exchange.

General anti-bot actions: Do away with free accounts, except for a 30 day free trial of the service. Return to the policy of no more than 5 alts per registered user.

I hate this next idea, because it would inconvenience a lot of people. But maybe we need to do away with the -multiple switch in the client, and limit SL access to one avatar per computer. The people who really, really need an alt on line at the same time as their main probably have more than one computer, anyway.

I'm sure there are other good ideas out there...maybe a way to render the stripped-down viewers that are used to run bot armies non-functional?

Yes but we still try reduce, them, instead of just saying, let them continue to fester & grow till we have the perfect answer one day that keeps everyone happy.

Well free accounts might and will solve the problem, but it need to be added with doing away with -multiple switch as well.

Problem is there was a person over a year ago that cried the 5 avie limit per account was outdated............... She cried and cried bla bla bla Even posted a vote about it.......... But now look at us? its a nightmare. I hope that cry person is happy now. This is why llabs needs to do some real thinking before doing these brainless ideas. Role play my rabbit tail! It was for other selfish reasons.........

The multiple switch isnt the only way to run several clients.

One bot doesn't but with it's 30 fake resident pals, they use a bit.

Just wanted to get in, in case anyone is misinformed, that if you want to do camping on your land, you will hurt the sim alot less by having 30 bots than by having 30 chairs.

Good guess, but incorrect. Bots do not require this feature; they run a separate program built using the same toolkit and parts as the SL client, but it's not the SL client.

The -multiple switch is terribly helpful for those of us who need to test scripts, and has nothing to do with bots.

Please explain why this is so.

It would be true if all the campers were doing something like chatting or sorting inventory. The script resources used by a camp chair is negligible, and scripts don't cause physics or display lag anyway. It's a common misconception that they do.

See above about the -multiple switch being unrelated to bots. And I bet you're not much of a scripter, or someone who has to test what changing object permissions and ownership causes when building complex products. Running multiple avatars is very helpful for that!
Wild guess, and far off the mark.

Regardless of these small quibbles, folks who would like to see bot farm camping decrease should consider voting for this JIRA entry:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-1052

which proposes to get rid of traffic stats. Ranking places by traffic is the biggest single cause of camp farms, which exist only to deceive searchers into thinking a site is popular. If we don't rank results by traffic, camp farms will disappear. When the camp farms go, the camper bot armies will disappear.

One for two. I'm a terrible scripter, a complete non-scripter. I'll leave that to geniues like you and Qie. I DO, however, need to use an alt for testing on occasion. That's why I said I hated the idea of one av per computer. But, even though it'd be an inconvenience, I could live with it. We have, let me see...six computers in our house.

The -multiple switch is a godsend to builders, scripters and roleplayers. But taking it away wouldn't affect bots, which don't USE the standard client to access SL in the first place!

I have legitimate reasons for having a dozen or more accounts. Part of that is related to doing business as a Builder, and part for roleplaying. I sometimes do have as many as four accounts logged in at once, from one computer. But I can't see a legitimate reason for more than 4 to 6 concurent logins from the same system.

Do I have multiple computers that are capable of running SL? Yes... in two different rooms in my house, and one is only barely capable of accessing SL. Very few normal SL Players are that likely to have multiple high-end systems arrayed on a single table, like a computer lab at a school, where they can swivel their chair and use half a dozen computers at once. On the other hand, some Chinese gold-farmer that is running bots on a rack full of cheap knock-off hardware can and likely will have dozens of systems at their disposal. A bot client can run on much lower spec hardware than is required to actually use and enjoy SL.

The big problem is that since LL REFUSES to link every account to a verifyable individual real-world person, they have no way to know that those 30 ruthed avatars sitting in a pit aren't owned by 30 individuals. Not unless they trace the CURRENT IP address of all of them to the same system when investigating a complaint.

What we need is to make it clearly a bannable offense to hog resources or to use bots maliciously. Don't ban the gun, but ban doing harm with a gun. With the client open-sourced, there is no way to prevent bot writers from making new bot clients that skirt various defenses. But LL *could* make it very clear that an AR against a bot farm would result in the permenant loss of all associated accounts and assets.

Too bad they care more about their sign-up stats than they do about the playability or welfare of the world they run.

The primary problem with all of those is that it requires the Lindens to take action. Their track record isn't stellar in that regard. So far the only two times they have taken serious action (Gambling, and now Banking) has been when serious legal action was looming. (i guess you could thow age verification in there but it's not in effect yet). So call me a pessimist, but I don't see any of these happening. I certainly hope I'm wrong.

But 0 trafficbots will be a crapload better still and not cheating.
And we can't compare people running 2 or 3 clients under -multiple for building and permissions testing to people running 50 limited load bot clients per PC on a rack PC's for traffic or campingbotting to goldfarm SL.
.

Yes, they do. Very little action, in some cases, but yes. That's why the title of this thread is "Serious Action Needed".

i think camping is a essential driving part of the SL economy, i know loads of people who gain income with it, and spend it on rent, clothing , gadgets ..etc...
removal of it might very well have a very large impact, also i think a "veteran" resident is very able to filter those camp-locations.

Ad-Farms, why not install a fee per parcel owned, small enough not to hurt legit owners, big enough to accumulate on loads of 16/32 sqm's ?

Umm so camping makes money for the economy, please explain in more detail how people can keep taking more money out of the world in RL by camping than people put into the game?
People putting money in drives the economy, 90% of the population just shuffling it around or withdrawing it doesn't improve the economy.

You don't get it. You can't have a net movement of money out of the world, each LindeX sale can be matched to a corresponding LindeX buy. Money transfers hands, one person making some and one person losing some (and LL skimming a little off the top).