Should bots be allowed?

You aren't really tuned in to the whole "SL is a buisness, SL wants customers" thing, are you?

I am more tuned into the "if you are an adult, you take responsibility for your own actions." thing. Hitting the Sell Property button without checking to see that every thing is right is careless. Carelessness has consequences.

This is one of the few times I have to take issue with Chris; my views are libertarian too.

I think the heart of the debate here is the wrong debate: the old divide between those who want the safety of being "protected" by an enveloping authority from the vicissitudes of life and those who demand that people take responsibility for their own lives and their own actions. In that debate, I am entirely on the side of "take responsibility." The world - and SL - need a lot more of that, IMO.

But the heart of the debate is not the real issue here, I think. Responsibility is - but I think in this case the responsibility rests almost entirely on LL's shoulders. Think about it. LL tells people to sign up for SL. One of the main attractions LL offers is owning virtual land. People sign up, some "buy" virtual land, and of course the time comes for some when they want to sell. AND LL DOESN'T WARN THEM THAT IF THEY DON'T DO THE TRANSACTION EXACTLY RIGHT, EVEN WHEN THE LL INTERFACE PUSHES THEM TOWARD THE ERROR OF CLICKING THE SELL-TO-ANYONE OPTION, THAT THE LATTER OPTION CAN MEAN THAT THEY WILL BE SCREWED OUT OF WHAT CAN AMOUNT TO SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF RL MONEY. AND THAT EVEN A SPLIT-SECOND EXPOSURE, EVEN WHEN IT IS THE RESULT OF AN SL BUG, CAN DO THE SAME. Frankly, I think that is irresponsible - and the irresponsibility lies with LL.

It is worse. OK, someone relatively new does the responsible thing: He educates himself about land. What does he do? He reads the About Land notes, which say nothing about landbots or the risks in selling. If he does not read these forums - and probably something like 95% of the Residents don't, judging by the concurrency numbers vs. the number of views - how exactly is he supposed to know that landbots, which he is unlikely even to imagine might exist, are poised to pounce on slight miscalculations he doesn't know are miscalculations when he wants to sell? Maybe he gets lucky and an SL friend who happens to know about landbots tells him. Probably, he doesn't hit that particular jackpot.

I think the responsible thing on LL's part would be to warn them. If people knew from the gitgo that this kind of thing can happen, how many of them do you think are going to let themselves in for this particular kind of raping? I would guess you could count those on the fingers of one thumb and have a thumb left over. But LL does not do that. Nor does it put up an adequate warning pop-up during the sale process. Nor does it even make sell to a person the default choice instead of sell to anyone.

Someone who does know, and is stupid or careless and does the wrong thing anyway - well, he took a dumb risk and got burned for his trouble. But someone who does not know...sorry, Chris, I think that is different, and I think it behooves the keeper of this little minefield - LL - to take responsibility and fix that. It's not like they haven't been hearing about this over and over for months and months, you know.

Okay, so you're driving down the road and a pedestrian steps carelessly in front of your car. You could have stopped in plenty of time but instead you just run them over. That's the attitude that you're advocating here. Of course it was their fault for being careless. It was also yours for not caring.

I sold my land for a little less than what i paid for it which seemed fair to me as I really needed the Lindens at that point. All the land around me had never been built on but had changed hands of land barrons in the month or so I had that land, i was worried that I might not sell my land at all.

Selling it the instant i clikced sell was a relief, one less thing to worry about. Of course it isn't fair and if I had put 1 linden instead of 10k I would have been extremely upset but at myself not at the person or thing that bought it.

Bots are just loopholes that clever people have made because there is profit to be made if you are clever. I'm kind of glad we are allowed to be this creative and find ways around the system, you never know when you yourself will find a loophole and make money!

Just trying to look on the bright side of bots, cos if we start banning everything that isn't fair we are apt to end up like the USSR where lack of incentive caused apathy and stagnation. This is the wild west of capitalism, embrace it!

Simple solution to the landbot issues: Do the same thing many forums do, to prevent bots.

Pop up a verify purchase image, and have the purchaser type the letters or numbers they see in the image. No one's perfected a character recognition program for image based codes, so that would bring bot purchases to a screetching halt.

Simple, effective, and easily within guidelines.

The Lindens could probably put this into place in a day, since the forum generation and comparison code has already been written 100 times over.

that's not exactly fair Chip, legally the driver has a responsibility to stop and is trained from day one to look for pedestrians until it becomes second nature to slam on the brakes.

But yeah, we should have sympathy for those who accidentaly hit sell when they didn't mean to, perhaps we can have a charity to help them out, i dunno, it's not like we're heartless but legally there's no 'take back' here, just because a bot buys the land instantly doesn't mean it forced you to click sell.

but there's no law against small print that screws millions of people over daily in the real world, credit cards, mortgage loan rates etc, there is already a precedence in real life that says buyer beware and if you make a mistake you are screwed.

Are you advocating we make SL a kinder gentler world than the real one? Should SL be a Utopia that coddles our less astute citizens, should we all share the land evenly? Where does the 'fairness' stop?

Well why not?
Why should fairness stop anywhere?

I think "fairness" stops at LL stepping up to the plate and addressing the unnecessary dangers they expose their customers to through LL's own carelessness - especially after having the problem pointed out to them ad nauseam on these forums.

That is called taking responsibility in my book.

Sorry, apples and oranges. If you put land up for sale to anyone, you are getting what you ask for, anyone, even a bot can buy it.

Life isn't fair, it never will be.

In the real world, there are not automated land grabbing bots, that search available land, and buy anything they see at predefined value levels.

The only thing this would do, would be to force land sales to be completed by humans, not bots. The bots would still give real estate agents an advantage, since they could sniff out good deals quicker then the human eye could, but because a human being would HAVE to be at the other end monitoring them. that would also give non bot users a fair possibility of still aquiring a good deal as well.

It's a win win for everyone, and also gets all the land grubbing BS away of the lindens eyes, so they can concentrate of fixing all the broken stuff in SL.

Some simple solutions would work wonders for fixing so many issues.. like givign us a locally stored encrypted database, so our INV wouldn't be lost any longer.

So therefore we should not try to make it fair?
In Second Life, we have a better chance to make life fair. It's a smaller world. Why not try to use the chance?


Is this a different take on the Augmentist v. Immersionist debate?
The Augmentists maybe have to have a Second Life that all the warts of First Life. Maybe they rebel at the very idea of a society that is kinder and better than the one they feel trapped in? They fear the levels of dissatisfaction that would raise for their First Life?
The Immersionists maybe are thinking "Let's build a better world".

It cost nothing to be kind.
OK, sometimes it costs a little bit of time.
If someone can't spare the time to be kind, then why should a person waste their valuable time in being actively unkind?



Life will never be fair?
Your world, your lack of imagination.


NB: 'You' not meaning Chris here. Meaning all of us.


I've been screwed over in life, more than once.
The day I let that get to me, the day I let that poison me - that's the day that I might as well be dead.


Let the sun shine

To quote Adrian Belew:

"All the world is a cannibal
Even time itself will eat us all
But thats no reason to be a jerk
You either make it better or make it worse"

I guess we know which Chris intends to do.

Yet in the Bragg case LL disagree. He found a loophole, he exploited it, they made the mistake, they didn't like it.

You know nothing about me or my motives Chip.

Second Life isn't real life, it's supposed to be entertaining and fun, that's what people pay for. When people feel ripped off, it's no longer any fun and they bail.

Even entertainment is not fair.

landbot downloads image, links it to a pron site as a required component of casual visitors seeing teh free pr0nz, defeated in nanoseconds.

http://www.boingboing.net/2004/01/27/solving_and_creating.html

Alternatively, landbot uses one of many public domain algorithms which read those more reliably than the Eyeball Mk I.

http://sam.zoy.org/pwntcha/ shows how easy captcha is to defeat.

Having a bunch of angry customers is not ideal. Companies should strive to keep their customers happy within reason. This is one of those times.

You seem to subscribe to the "too bad so sad" business model which will only send your business down the pooper after a while.

LOL!
Somewhere else I wrote the like of:
"Never wrestle with a pig. The pig enjoys it. You get covered in muck"


Amend that to:
"Never wrestle with a sad pig. The pig sort of enjoys it. You get covered in muck, and you get soooooo f'ing depressed!"

trust me, I want to make the world a better place, you can see that in my art, but fairness can become cloying if it is not kept in check, I don't want this to be like a video game with unlimited lives instead of one where you have to fight for your levels, you know what i mean.

I just posted a poll asking if you have lost money to a land bot. I am curious to see if this is a widespread problem. I have sold numerous plots of land, I have never had a problem with losing money to a landbot.

But when you get down to it, these transactions are not people doing business with LL, they are doing business with other residents. It is the other residents who have the "too bad, so sad" business model. All LL is doing is providing a place for us to do business.

I've been here since 2004. I've seen so many threads about this. Only about 5% of second life residents read the forums on a regular basis by the way (so your results may be skewed if you're trying to get an idea of what happens to the majority of residents). But when it does happen to them, they seek out the forums even if they're not forum regulars to complain about the money they lost.