Bot's

Now all of you must've seen a bot in your time on SL.
I mean C'mon, their everywhere.
Why isn't SL actually doing something to stop this?

The reason: they can't.
Why don't they crack down on new AFK rules and create scripts that pick up several mouse clicks that are repetative and all similar.

Or ask us to fill out a CAPTCHA Form (the box with letters or numbers) to verify our login. I'd be happy to fill one out if it means less Bots.

Will SL go forward on this?

Weee! Another bot thread. I'll start.

First question: Why?

What exactly is so bad about bots that you want them banned? Frankly I get so much work done automatically using bots (pricing land, group invites, market analysis, welcome bots, money management, lindex trading, monitoring estates) I couldn't imagine trying to run a large business without them.

Do you go out into the real world and make bots do you work for you? I mean, do you sit at home whilst a bot walks out your door, drives to work and then does all your work for you...

Is there another bot that satisfies your wife/girlfriend/partner? I mean, that's what you're getting at. People are using BOTs to do everything for them when they should be doing it themselves. Making the Game Better for us players.

No automation, just real people. Which is what Second life is all about.

Am I right?

I ordered some stuff off Amazon just earlier, then I used google to find a web site. It's harder to build bots in the real world because of the infrastructure requirements but if you ever drove a car or owned pretty much any product whatsoever you'll be sad to hear it was built by physical robots. Do you think your computer chips were hand carved?

Could you humanly make a computer chip? Don't think so.
Could you run your business without BOTs, Ooo, Indeed :]

Put it into perspective and you'll see...

Actually, it would be impossible to run my business without bots. Not least because it fundamentally relies on bots to buy land but also because it's too big and would require too much labour to be profitable.

Could we have this conversation without the internet which is essentially a huge mass of bots? Ooo, I guess we could use carrier pigeons. Put it into perspective and you'll see...

Also (not a double post), Most chips are humanly made in China, if you research :]

Who was the net created by? ;]

Come on! I'll pretend you didn't say that if you concede that bots are essential for any efficiently run business.

Seriously, Research it. :]

I certainly would if I could.

There are legitimate uses for bots, it's the ones that cause real performance or fairness concerns that we need to crack down on. Such as land-bots, and (most important IMO) the traffic bots that unfairly weight parcels.

These have different solutions, and once implemented there will be no reason to run them anymore so they'll disappear.

Some bots I don't care too much about. Traffic bots aren't overly ethical (at all) but they don't add much load to the grid and the poor traffic system is a mess anyway. The only thing that bugs me about them is that their owners tend to try and convince people that they _are_ ehtical, which is just silly.

Other bots are not as obviously mostly-harmless to the grid.

How often does each one of your groups land bots execute a search and how many of them do your groups run, Elanthius?

Well, I can't really give away industrial secrets like that but suffice to say it's a lot. When was the last time you had a problem with the land sales search?

Are you implying that hitting land search hard has no effect on the rest of the grid?

When concurrancy peaks and most-everything starts to grind to a halt, do you throttle back your bots?

If I detect search is slowing (i.e. parcels exist in search but not in reality) my bots back off until it clears up.

Also, I am implying (guessing) that hitting search has no effect on the rest of the grid.

Thank you for that.


This would be a good question for a Linden office hour. Not sure which Linden would be the right one to ask, though.

I think most people would agree that the burden of proof is on you here, Elanthius. If you know you're pounding the crap outta Part A, you can't (reasonably) say that you're just gonna assume that has no impact on Parts B, C and D.

Anyway, I think this all answers your original question on why some people don't like bots. You're just one of several (many?) landbot runners. Do you know of _ANY_ that have done due diligence into how their actions impact the grid?

It's an interesting question. What would constitute proof one way or the other in your opinion?

Good question.

Maybe something like a transcript at a Linden office hour or forums posts where you've asked about it.

Like ad farms and pornography, I'll know it when I see it.

You CAN"T possibly ban all the bot though. and shouldn't. traffic bot, maybe, but not all other bots. As there're now greeter bots, AI tour guide run by bot accounts. security bot that detect grifters and many other kind of remote-management bots.

Personally, I want some of the AI-controled bots myself, so it would add scientists and security guards to my usually vacant labs.

SL need NPC characters, if they would want to remove the bot.

If people want to run a few bots, fine but when they run 100 just to bump their traffic or farm camping, it's blatant resource hogging.
Mass botting due to the current infinate anomous alts sytem we have is the problem.
The increase in population over last 6 months seems to be bots not residents. the fact that offpeak population is getting closer to the normal day population indicates a lot of 24/7 accounts online to me.

No, seriously, Elan they use child labor! Only Chinese baby fingers are small enough to place those bits so close to each other. I SAW IT ON DISCOVERY, MAN!

You're old enough to remember the times where they shut down search altogether (or parts of it) to lessen the overall load.

They might have fixed those - to us - hidden interconnected pieces now, but historically it doesn't seem like a good bet to say hitting search doesn't have any other impact.

They've done some rather odd things in the past as well to cope with load (remove the in-world transaction history, remove ratings, proposal to cripple group chat, block profiles, block group member fetching, etc) that you have to wonder why those things would have a global impact rather than just impact one specific subsystem.

Can I be pedantic and ask why there's an apostrophe in the thread title?

It's early morning and I found it annoying....

Everyone posting here is a bot. This thread belongs to bots.

Bleep Bloop.

This is *exactly* why I said I think the burden of proof is on the landbot runners, if they're going to claim that their actions don't hurt the grid.

They also throttled search->land to once every 10 seconds or so.