Landbots buying land which is not for sale.

Landbots are buying land which is not for sale.

I tested this a few times this morning.

If you make an error setting your land and cancel, the window CLEARLY displays the land is no longer for sale, but a few seconds later, the bot buys it anyway.


Here's proof: http://members.shaw.ca/weedy_herbst/images/not_for_sale.jpg

Hmmm, thats messed up.

Yet another reason land bots need to be banned into oblivion.

I think they are just very fast. So even in these secs that the land was for sale , before you cancel, the bot just bought the land.
I don't believe there is something more than that.

I wonder the confusion you could cause by slicing up a decent sized bit of land int 16m sections then letting all the bits go in a checkerboard pattern so different land bots get different bits for different owners

I'm not sure I get it.

Did the land go up for sale, even for only a second or 3, or not? If it was never actually for sale, that's a pretty serious bug and should be reported.

It sounds like you're saying you cancelled the set-for-sale dialog before finishing it, but the landbot managed to buy it anyway?

But also says "no longer for sale" which implies it was for sale at some point..

/me is confused

The picture doesn't prove anything. There's nothing establishing that the payment shown is associated with the parcel that has an about land dialog displayed.

Maybe a video clip would be better.

I replicated it 5 times in a row.

Set a plot for sale for 1 to 2 seconds. Cancel the sale. The floater will revert to not for sale, but a few seconds later, the land sells to the bot.

This could not happen if a human attempted the same proceedure, because they will get a message returned "This land is not for sale".

Bots use functions dissimilar to the viewer, which causes the cancelled sale to be ignored.

What ever happened to err on the side of caution?

In that case, you REALLY need to go to Tools -> Report Bug and write in your reproducible steps and mark it as "Exploit".

This sounds more like a "race condition" where the bot sneaks in prior to the "not for sale" being recorded or displayed. Nevertheless, as noted above, this is on the razor's edge of being an exploit; report it (for whatever good that might do).

Technically, I don't think this is a bug - the land did get put up for sale and somebody bought it before the server was told it's not for sale any more - but it might be an interesting feature to have land sales not go through for the first minute or so after the parcel gets listed.

Given the number of "but I didn't want to do that!" posts we see here, it might be a good idea anyway. I'm sure LL gets a lot of support requests related to such things and giving sellers a chance to say "woops!" right after they click the button and fix mistakes might reduce their support load a little. Somebody JIRA this and I'll vote for it.

I don't believe this is true. Bots can only use functions that are provided to the viewer, and when I wrote my land bot way back when it used the same functions as the viewer, which is quite easily demonstrated through packet logging.

Looking at the protocol right now, I cannot see any functions which would be available to a bot that are different and could ignore the canceled sale. The responsibility for determining whether a parcel is for sale lies with the server, and every developer knows that you validate your data at the client and server both. Linden Labs has done a pretty good job of server-side validation from what I am able to discern, and have not left functions available for *any* kind of client to get around such things.

It is far more likely that this is a race condition. This is a very serious problem if it exhibits the kind of reproducibility that you describe, and Linden Labs should endeavor to fix it as soon as feasible, but it is an edge case and does not add weight to the "substantially different than the viewer" argument.

You cannot make uninformed statements like that and expect Linden Labs to take them seriously.... They know full well what functions the bots use, even if the average resident does not, and it's not unlikely that they will call such statements "FUD".

I understand that you are trying to research the ways that landbots exploit the system to gather enough evidence to force a resolution, but surely you understand that the situation you describe above is an edge condition and most likely does not happen on a regular basis? It is probably not prevalent enough to be considered a serious exploit.

I guess this explains why for 4 months I was too slow to find First Land for sale...and then Linden Labs decided that I and all the other paying customers were not worthy.

So sick of this type of behaviour being not only tolerated but encouraged by lack of action.

Bots can certainly only use functions which are available through the client; they can however use them preternaturally quickly, to a degree which may show up problems which simply never arose before, because human purchasers would always take half a second or so to respond.

I would second the idea of reporting this as an "exploit" if it's reproducable. These are taken seriously.

True, they certainly can do so very quickly and it does obviously demonstrate a shortcoming in the server-side validation and so should be reported as an exploit. I just don't think it's an earth-shattering exploit, since I still maintain that it is an edge case.

Here is a bit of trivia for you:

One reason that land bots are so much quicker, by the way, is that unlike humans they don't have a black "teleporting" screen that visually eases the transition between locations and makes sure that at least most of the new location is visible. Once they get the packet that tells them they are connected to the new sim, they can send a parcel purchase packet to the server. They can literally purchase a parcel before someone standing on that parcel sees them appear (I've done it several times in the past).

So, even if a bot starts teleporting at the precise same moment as a human, and they both have the same ping times, etc., and even technically arrive at the precise same time, a land bot will win out on the purchase.

A bot does not necessarily have to repeatedly search as fast as a human to still beat them to the punch, even though they probably will to help ensure that they get there first.

This is on top of the fact that a bot need not click on the ground or the button at the top of the screen, they just send a packet In this sense, even the fastest human will be limited by the user interface whereas a bot is not.

Landbots don't use a graphical interface. Downloading all that graphics info to your client is one of the main things that lags human tps.

Exactly. That much is probably obvious to many, so I thought it was worthwhile to also explicitly point out that for bots the teleport process is functionally much shorter.

Welcome to Secondlife if u peruse the archieves for these forums u will find this is just one of many things that LLs play ostrich over, whilst treating the customers like mushrooms.

They stick their heads in the sand whilst keeping the customers in the dark and feeding us Bull***t

But thats just my opinion unless you know others that share it

Well, as far as I know landbots weren't involved in the first land problems. It was a case of a few people gaming the system by creating armies of alts and using them to buy it all up. But it is noteworthy that a) LL set up the system that allowed them to create so many alts, b) LL let the fact that they were doing so drag on and on before they reacted, much like they're doing with the landbot issue, and c) when LL did react, they threw the baby out with the bathwater by doing away with first land altogether rather than employing one of the many easier, more fair fixes that had been mentioned time and time again on the forum.

It's also indicative of why I should read the entire thread before responding.

I reported it a such. Several days ago. No response, even though they claim to investigate exploits immediately.

Not that I'm holding my breath though, but rather expect them to equivocate as opposed to fix it.

As I said before, I replicated this 5 times in a row.

Zor explained it in this post from Resident Answers:

/327/5f/173768/2.html



Clearly, the floater indicated, the sale as cancelled and the land is not for sale.