Second Life Residents logged nearly 400 million hours in 2008, growing 61% over 2007

presonally i am going to start aring bot farms as unfair use of a regions resources

Hours up but how many are alts just sitting there camping and how many are bots?

How about real figures like how many people are in SL not how many AVs?

Well, yes. For every rental group I need one premium alt to donate tier and one to make sure two avatars are in the group if the renter silently quits it.

I could change my system to one of those places that rents land with all renters in a big single group with limited rights so sure I could adapt. But basically then I'd be doing something entirely different from what I am now.

I already did..
I once visited sim with 10 bots.
The lag was terrible, and it lagged the entire grid
I do believe by ARing the bots-owners, you can help solving this problem.
Linden Lab, needs to make a new policy and ban BOTS from their servers.
Rule violation results in a - suspension of your account.

Like they do with the other policies.
Although the other policies dont make sense, a Ban Bot policy would be useful!

What about those of us with multiple real users (and machines) in the same household? We're behind a local router and SL sees us as a single IP address at our ISP.

OK, so you probably mean another devaluation of existing private sims like the 40% last year? You guys really like to play with fire if you are thinking such. Are you?

If so then I have a suggestion for the next blog:
Thanks to all residents that invested in the grid, Big Brother will take it over from here. We don't need you anymore. We apologize for your loss and appreciate your patience (NOT!! gna gna gna).

Well, time to attend the office hours of Jack again...

I have long campaigned against the use of bots, once I found I couldn't enter my own regions when a neighbour filled the sim to capacity with bots, now I find I am unable to log in when it hits 70k+ online!!

Last night was soooo much fun and very revealing, logins disabled, it was only us folk previously logged in that were still here. Issues abounded and as we tried teleporting or uploading textures etc we would crash. Who then do you think made up the majority of the (at one point 29k) avitars left online? The traffic bots of course, that hadn't crashed because they were inactive!

Lets get this clear now, bot farms are regarded by LL as an abuse of system resources, I have had this confirmed by Jack and action taken. I urge anyone affected in their own region to file an AR

LL also set up a group for communication on the issue of traffic and in its early days much productive dialogue was produced and LL offered the carrot of a new system, now unfortunately the groups been left to die, as has the new system. Or do you know different Zee?

LL Traffic Future Founder (now retired) Jeska Linden
Join this group to learn more about the new traffic system, currently in design. We will be holding inworld discussions with interested Residents to brainstorm about the future of Traffic.

So dear Mr Zee I think by now you are well aware that theres an overwhelming concern from a majority of respondents in this forum that the issue of traffic/bots/associated metrics needs to be addressed urgently. The recent failures of the system to cope with such high usage have brought this to the forefront. So communicate with those responsible for making the decisions on our behalf now, please, before it's too late.

I am well aware of the many sides to the bot issue;
low lag bot farms with basic avis exist and cause little sim performance degradation,
mainland sims cannot have 20 bots on a 4096 effectively limiting the access to others,
traffic bots are good for LL business, good for the owners too,
remove the bots and the owner will probably close shop, LL figures will go belly up again,

LL promote your green credentials and help stop this waste of electricity! I want to know if the new traffic system exists, if not then may I suggest, as others have here, remove traffic from seach places, or remove search places, or make it web based as in ALL.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE BOT FARMS NOW!!

..and MANY other MMOs use it, not just the "popular" ones.

While this may come as a shock to some folks, a lot more people DON'T play WoW than play it.

Feel free to list them all, right after you've finished being ridiculously pedantic. I explained how those logins work.

And right now are 71,261 users online.. and guess what?
''Logins to Second Life have temporarily disabled. Please monitor the Grid Status page for updates.''

I am getting so tired of this.
I mean, why dont they invest in new systems, extra capicity etc.
Where does the money go that we pay?
Please Linden Lab, work on that first, everybody gets sick of it.

So I visit the Grid Status page.. and guess what?
No information at all, Nothing..
Of course this is nothing new, we all know whats the reason that they disabled the logins. But it would be professional if users can find some extra information..


((just went through the grid report page... here is a copy)

''[RESOLVED 8:01 pm PST] All login issues have been resolved and functionality has been restored.

[UPDATE 7:36pm PST] Logins are open but functioning intermittantly. Our technicians are working to resolve the issue.

[REOPENED 3:09 PM PST] Logins have been restricted again. Please watch this post for continuing updates.

[RESOLVED 2:26 PM PST] Logins have been re-enabled.

[REOPENED 2:01 PM PST] Logins have been partially restricted again. Please watch this space for continuing updates.

[RESOLVED 1:46 PM PST] Logins have been re-enabled. LindeX should also now be available.

[1:27 PST] The Linden Exchange is temporarily disabled. You will not be able to purchase or sell Linden Dollars from in-world or the website.

[REOPENED 1:08 PST] We are continuing to have problems with the database. Logins have been partially restricted again.

[RESOLVED 11:26 AM PST] Logins have been re-enabled.

[11:18 AM PST] Unfortunately we are having continued problems with the database. Logins have been partially restricted again whilst we clear a momentary database bottleneck. We expect to re-enable them very shortly, and In-World will not be affected.

[9:47 AM PST] Logins have been restored and all inworld services appear to be functioning normally. Please feel free to resume your regular activities, including purchases and rezzing.

[9:39 AM PST] Technicians are currently investigating an issue which may interfere with inworld functionality. Logins are blocked. Please refrain from making inworld transactions and rezzing no copy objects for the time being. Please monitor this post for updates and further information.''

Linden Lab, reading your own log, should make you wonder whats going on and most importantly, how to find a solution! You have to agree that we cant go on like this..

yes it sucks that they don't update the grid status page quickly enough.

But your first paragraph can be answered if you just simply read the blog and kept yourself educated....

Just adding to the number that think the traffic bot situation is out of control. But please don't make this into yet another unenforceable TOS administration issue! The simple solution is plain:

GET RID OF THE TRAFFIC NUMBERS.

Ditch this as a search metric entirely. And announce this loud and clear. I realize this will damage the concurrency stats more than you might like to let on. My own suspicion is that up to half of the population online at an average hour is either bots or campers. Remove the merchants' incentives to place these and the vast majority of them will go away in short order. It will restore trust in the long run and also give a bit of breathing room on the servers. Then us actual people might be able to log in when we want to!

Win - Win! The only thing you'd be giving up is an inflated metric.

I guess this "conversation" is over then...

Well i for one feel i learned lots i felt i was really really listened to and that me taking the time to post my thoughts and feedback was yet again a worthwhile use of my time. /end sarcasm.

I am opening a new Thread with a Black List of high traffic regions where traffic is gamed by using bots on large scale ( > 4 ).


Feel free to publish them too up there

/327/d4/303537/1.html#post2295675

Its no more difficult than the query you run to detect viewer versions. 99.9% of all bots use the libomv (formerly libsecondlife) and the library reports a different channel (version) than the viewer does during login.