Linden action against landbots?

The problem Linden Labs face with blocking land bots is one of principal - there's no way in principal LL can detect the difference between a land bot talking to their servers and a normal client. I actually use the libsecondlife technology myself to run the site described by Suzy above (http://www.sllandlist.com). Pop over to the Resident Run Websites forum under Improved Mainland Search Site to learn more. It took me about 20 minutes to sort out this 5 second block in my code so it doesn't bother me, and I don't need to hammer the servers because I only do an update every 2 hours. Setting up a load of alts wouldn't be a difficult thing to do so this change has only harmed users and not bot runners.

I suspect LL may eventually pull land search functionality out of the client and put it on a website, in which case they could used established technologies to stop 3rd parties grabbing the land search data using automatic systems. Hope they don't do this because it will break my site!

Bots should have special "BOT" accounts so their actions can be monitored.

I do not see why they are entitled to normal resident accounts.

I agree with that in principle, but like Christian said, it's currently unenforceable, because there's no way for LL to tell who's a bot and who's not. It might be possible with some changes to the system, but I'm not sure what they would be.

It seems to me the real issue is not how fast bots can refresh search, though, but how fast they can parse the results of search and make a decision based on those results, compared to a human. There doesn't seem to be any way that can be regulated short of, well, just banning bots.

Client validation can be and is done. Since at least the time of Xpilot (~1996) there have been people recoding clients to give them game advantage. Using digital signatures, a "hack-less" server could ensure that an unmodified client was connecting.

LL could do the same thing, allowing LL released clients to validate themselves to the server while open-source variants could not provide those credentials.

Has anyone of you supporters of bots played other online games? I just dumped Lineage, it's bot infested, about 20% real players, 80% bots.
Heavily increased lag? Yes.
Messed up economy? Yes.
Botowners/users have great advantage over others not using bots? Yes.

Now, bots here work differently than in other online games but the outcome will always go into that direction.
For thousand players of several online games bots are the reason to quit. Now some of you might think "Hey, less peeps here, less lag, thats good".
Really? Just for example, say.. there are 2.000 players which play 'fair'. 600 of them quit, leaving only 1.400 left, right? No, because... what about the 40.000 bots????

It's not a question of supporting them. Like Christian said above, there's really no sure way to detect them.

And if roughly 15% of that number were PKers who only wanted your loot. Heard they changed that, but I have no desire to go back to Lineage 2.

I don't know how I feel about bots in general here. I do not like the Landbots as much, but there are other 'bots' such as used to model in stores that are okay.

I said Linage, not Lineage 2, wonder why everyone knowing Lineage associates that name always with Lineage 2...

I know that there a some bots which are usefull. But if LL lets this continue, the number of harmful bots will top the numbers of the usefull ones by far at some point.

Sorry, my bad. I wanted to post this together with the rest i wrote in another thread that has people that like bots.. like/support. I should have been more informative about that

Now you know why the population of SL is so high.

But then the bots would move over to simply scraping the page, with each bot on its own proxy. It probably wouldn't help stop the bots, but it would reduce the number of active accounts online.

It might also reduce some lag. The bots would no longer have to interact with the login servers or the asset servers, and the sims wouldn't have to track them. There would still need to be one bot in game to actually TP and buy the land, but the xx amount for searching would be outside the game.

It would also help sites like yours to come into existance. Scraping a page is a lot easier than creating a bot.