Serious Action Needed: Adfarms and Bots

true but 30 bots owned by one resident use up a lot more resources than the next resident who only logs in one account at a time.


Its not so much the per account resource use, but the per user resource use thats disproportionate.




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(I'm sure you know that, Im just stating the obvious)

Yep that's it, something for nothing theory.................
Camping bots don't buy thay take out.
Campers inworld only shuffle inworld money around.

you have figures on campers withdrawing money from SL ?

i think: its mostly shuffling money from businesses to people, and 90% of these people will spend it again.

As if LL are going to produce real figures, go for a lok arounf the green dot loaded islands and open your eyes, they are doing better here than in any other online world because LL encourage them to come in and milk us.
Shuffling money doesn't make money, making content makes money for the creator. Campbots don't create anything but lag and false traffic figures.

Remember, when you sell L$ on the LindeX, someone else gets it.

Remember when you put $10US in a piggy bank, then shake it around in the piggy bank as much as you like, you still only have $10 to take out.

Gold star, Tegg!

As far as I can see, there are only three things in the SL economy that add value to the world: Land, content creation, and entertainment. The last item could be considered to be another form of content creation, but I split it off because the "content" created is very different from the objects we usually refer to by this term.

Land: Created at whim by LL. Land has value, despite the arguments of the crowd who says it's only a metaphor for a data service. Maybe so, but it can be bought and sold, and the more there is of it, the larger the overall SL service becomes.

Content: Could be clothes, skins, buildings, or the like, or can be combined with land to increase the end value of a given location. Content represents time, effort and skill, and as such it has value.

Entertainment: Live or recorded musicians, plays, machinima, photographs, dancers and escorts. All represent, again, time, effort, and skill. The various entertainers in SL add value to the world and are paid for it.

If you deal in any of these fields, you are contributing to the economy. It may be directly, it may be in a very roundabout fashion. But you're adding value. People are willing to convert real world money into L$ in order to buy your products.

Campers take money out of the economy without adding value. Even if a particular camper takes her money and buys something with it, that money circulates around and eventuallywinds up being paid to a camper who cashes it out-world.

It would be a terrific master's thesis for someone to work up a computer model of the SL economy, with all sources and sinks, and run some test cases...

Yes, as I stated, when they have a real legal motivation to do so. They have no motivation to do anything about camping or adfarms. There is one line of the blog post about Banking should make things clear:

"Usually, we don’t step in the middle of Resident-to-Resident conduct – letting Residents decide how to act, live, or play in Second Life."

They may not THINK they do, but that is shortsighted, as I tried to make clear in my OP.

Bank failures sucked money out of SL in large, visible chunks and produced the potential for lawsuits.

Camping sucks money out of SL slowly, L$2 at a time. But it adds up. By one credible estimate, perhaps 20% of the residents online at any given time are campers. That's a LOT of lindens going bye-bye.

That may be, but it's really an assumption. Who is to say the people who gather lindens with bots don't use those lindens in world? They may use it to pay their tier, go shopping, etc. I think you would find a greater drain on the economy (i.e. people cashing out lindens to RL dollars) would be content creators. Many make some doodad, sell a bunch of them, and post a tidy sum to their bank account every week.

I'm sorry but I feel trying to say only campers take L out of the world is a very weak and inaccurate argument. Truth is there are people in every segment of SL who do the same, and probably in far greater amounts. Note that I'm not saying I'm in favor of camping, but rather that you'll need more than that to push LL into action.

Not actually defending camping, but... The L$ to pay campers has to come from somewhere. I would suspect that real world money must be converted to $L's in order to have resources to pay the campers, who then spend the money on products and/or services in world.

While there are many good reasons to dislike camping, I don't think this economic fantasy is one of them.

As to these armies of camping bots, I am not seeing them in very many locations. Most of the campers I see are wearing OK skins and decent clothes (probably purchased with those camping $L's).

Content creators and real estate owners also end up cashing out profits to RL dollars, so I just don't follow the argument as you have stated it.

's where I got all my L$ to purchase all the nifty stuff I own. At least, that which wasn't given to me for free.

The bots are being run through a dos box I believe. And these traffic-botters are sticking hundreds of bot avatars into skyboxes or hidden places and seem to get angry if you call them out or check out their bot-farms.

This is ridiculous. LL needs to get rid of these traffic-bots or do away with the traffic stats. All too often, I'm looking for something, see the high traffic searches first, and they turn out to be crap, often resold freebie stuff too sitting in empty malls with no avs in sight.

Genuine places and good stores don't need bots to sell their stuff.

I lost my land to a Bot! i am still fairly new and I wanted to buy back my land from my group and didn't really know how to go about so I put my 10,640 sq.m. waterfront mainland up for sale for a dollar, I thought that i had put it for sale to myself only, but apparently not because in less than a minute a bot bought it. I tried to talk to them face to face no response, I tried to IM her no response, I tried to send a note card, auto decline! Now I know this has happened to a lot of others and nothing is ever done about it. Now who would sell land for a lindin dollar when they just paid 210,000 lindins for it. This is obviously an error and should be delt with as an error. I also had to remove my camping because of bots! These Bots are making SL an unpleasent experience!

I've been actually trying to figure out how to "attract" bots for my own twisted amusement.

Let me know when you work out how, I got a shooting range set up for them

I have a "camping spike" aka Vlad the Impaler waiting for one.

Who is incorrect? you didnt read the post did you......?

Very much agreed. "Hands-off" may have been fine at first and even noble now, but it simply is not working. Like any large *closed* system, government, and/or economy there must be a "God-figure" because the lack of openness prevents the ability to properly self-correct.

The only question I have is Linden Lab management truly so clueless as not to see this? Apparently so. It should have stepped in with the genesis of much-needed controls at least a full year ago. (Aside from those forced upon it.) And if so, as was stated in another thread, Second Life has outgrown the abilities of Linden Lab to properly manage it. It's time for business professionals to move in and Linden Lab focus only on the technology. (We might even end up with a stable grid and client!)

Does even one Linden Lab employee have a M.B.A. from a reputable business school? If not, it's no wonder it *appears* LL is sacrificing the short- and long-term welfare of SL residents only to line its pockets with more gold. If so, then it is also clear that the "business" focus is not on the happiness and well-being of SL residents. We're just cannon fodder.

Of course the money to pay campers comes from somewhere. It comes from the merchants who have camping chairs on their parcels. Where do they get it? It's an expense, and therefore it's paid for by sales. In other words, the cost of camping is built into the stuff you buy.

So yes, ultimately camping money comes from the real world...everyone who converts US$ to L$ and buys SL merchandise is contributing their little bit to the campers.

Which is why I'm anti-camping. But I am not so rabidly against it as to want to outlaw it totally. I think people can do a lot better things with their time than camp...but that's just me. If you want to, go ahead. There has to be SOME way for the new resident to earn a few L$, after all.

What I am adamantly against is campbots. These are nothing more than a way for the unscrupulous to suck money out of SL without contributing anything. You're right, they aren't too widespread yet...but they are spreading fast.

I agree, Lindal, and I also feel the best way to get rid of the behavior is to get rid of the incentive (the traffic stats).

Yep the profits made by people cheating the search system pay for campbots, and campbots have spread, the Goldfarmers who leech WoW, CoH and other games are here too, and laughing at how easy it is here with automated campbots compared to other games where they actually have to pay 10yo kids a bowl of rice to play WoW for 12 hours so they can sell their stuff.
Yep get rid of traffic completely is the only way, LL did their half arsed fix which had zero effect, I'd rather walk from sim to sim looking for things than use a cheat infested system.

I see the same Adfarms i did 2 years ago. You call this action taken by LLABS? Frankly it seems they only taken action for the ones wanted and left the rest.....typical

Hehe. I laugh because my friends called me a Chinese Goldfarmer because of my camping chair stuff.

I said, "I'm not a Chinese Goldfarmer, I haven't got someone else doing it for me yet."