Should bots be allowed?

it allready does that

Comments like these may be appropriate for landbots, but not for bots in general. Not all bots consume an inordinate amount of resources. In point of fact, my bots consume less resources than you do when you are signed in, guaranteed, if for no other reason than that they simply never need to download textures or sounds or other things that the average human avatar requires bandwidth for.



Here is a link to a bot that I built: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgOMpQgVevo

It's purpose is to engage in melee combat using Combat: Samurai Island weapons. Most people who've encountered or fought against it find it entertaining, and it serves as an excellent training tool for those individuals. For me as a developer, it serves as an excellent debugging, feedback, and development tool that allows me to collect actual "real-world" usage data in a clear and concise way so that I can have a relatively good quality assurance cycle before I release a new version of the CI products "into the wild".

This kind of "hard" data is difficult to gather for Second Life products in other ways, and I think that the usage of bots to perform automated regression tests and unit tests of Second Life products is an important and growing area of usage that would benefit a great many of us as consumers of said products.

It's quite sad that of all the potentially different types of bots, people are generally only aware of the ones that get buzz on the forums and equate that to the totality of possibilities. These forums are extremely unbalanced in their coverage, and quite sparse in real information.

There are a myriad possible "good" uses for bots, that don't in fact cause any strain whatsoever on the Second Life system, and for that reason alone I strongly believe that a blanket ban on bots is insupportable.

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Yeah and I think this is a common assumption. Call me a marshmellow but i don't think new people to the land game should have to pay such a steep price for not having an adequate understanding of how the land sale system works and the complications caused by landbots.

I agree with what someone else here said, it works on a technical level but not a community level as has been demonstrated so many times by all the angry landbot threads over the years.

The problem is, you misunderstood my metaphor just as many are misunderstanding the situation.

The attendant was just doing what he was told. The system is just doing what it's supposed to do.

I won't disagree that land purchasing (like many automated systems in SL) needs an overhaul for various reasons, but blaming all your land troubles on bots that are more efficient than you at playing by the rules isn't going to solve anything. If they change the current system there's going to be another way to use the system to your advantage. It's the nature of automation and business in general.

There are already safeguards (no matter how arcane) that can prevent unwanted sales to people other than who you want...but you have to turn these functions on for them to work! Take responsibility for your property!!

The more I think about it the more I like the idea of some sort of delayed reaction from when you put land up for sale and when it is listed. Maybe 12 hours or something substantial. Along with the going debate issue I think it would also help with buyer's remourse and give the seller leverage if someone came along and really wanted to buy it before the land was on the "market".

I don't see why it would be a hard adjustment to make on LL's side. Anyone smell a JIRA? That's really the only way this issue will be brought to LL's attention, anyway.

Hmmm... If that is true why are the sellers not checking that the sale type, amount asked and sale two settings are correct? If it is doing this I feel no sympathy towards those selling land at 10 time less than intended, or forgetting to set it to sell to a particular person rather than to anyone, they should look over these things when asked to comfirm them. Infact I think it only asks if you wish confirm the sale and not specifically the perameters of the sale it's self. I will do a mock sale when I get home to see.

The lst time I spoke to Robin Linden which was many months ago, she said there was something in the works to address the landbot issue. Since then i haven't heard anything about what they might do about it at all.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/01/09/cory-lindens-town-hall-transcript/
Ideally, just being able to identify bots would be a step up. Couple it with a checkbox (unchecked by default) that determines whether a bot is allowed to buy land you have up for sale, and you effectively kill the profit in running a landbot without actually banning landbots.

Additionally, a flag (unchecked by default) that determines whether bots are allowed on a parcel/sim/estate altogether will help with situations like ESC's sheepbot and enforces a true opt-in.

Of course, what Cory said there is probably a hollow "feel good" statement. If you're not going to stop bots because "people will make them anyway", then you won't enforce an identification policy either because "people will cheat anyway".

Comments like these may be appropriate for landbots, but not for bots in general. Not all bots consume an inordinate amount of resources. In point of fact, my bots consume less resources than you do when you are signed in, guaranteed, if for no other reason than that they simply never need to download textures or sounds or other things that the average human avatar requires bandwidth for.



Here is a link to a video of a bot that I built: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgOMpQgVevo

It's purpose is to engage in melee combat using Combat: Samurai Island weapons. Most people who've encountered or fought against it find it entertaining, and it serves as an excellent training tool for those individuals. For the CI community, it is entertaining and stands out as an attraction not offered elsewhere. For me as a developer, it serves as an excellent debugging, feedback, and development tool that allows me to collect actual "real-world" usage data in a clear and concise way so that I can have a relatively good quality assurance cycle before I release a new version of the CI products "into the wild".

This kind of "hard" data is difficult to gather for Second Life products in other ways, and I think that the usage of bots to perform automated regression tests and unit tests of Second Life products is an important and growing area of usage that would benefit a great many of us as consumers of said products.

It's quite sad that of all the potentially different types of bots, people are generally only aware of the ones that get buzz on the forums and they then mistakenly equate that to the totality of possibilities. These forums are extremely unbalanced in their coverage, and quite sparse in real information.

There are a myriad possible "good" uses for bots, that don't in fact cause any strain whatsoever on the Second Life system, and for that reason alone I strongly believe that a blanket ban on bots is insupportable.

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The issue remains that bots aren't detectible (as far as I know) as far as the system is concerned. They show up as regular avs, have their own money and their own names/payment info. That's what I've been led to believe anyway.

No feature modification or addition can replace vigilance, diligence and personal responsibility.

This brings up something interesting to me. Why do people want LL to be LESS involved in resident affairs in some threads and MORE involved in others?

"Leave me alone but take care of all this stuff for me."

Is this a case of everyone wanting to eat the bread but no one wants to help bake it? You want to be your own "community" but you want someone else to do the work to keep it running smoothly?

You can either have LL police the entire system to standards of THEIR choosing (which we all know not everyone agrees with) or you can be left to your own devices and be responsible for you and your neighbor.

You can't have both in RL, why should we in SL?

That's about as useful as LL's "we'll restrict how many times you can search in x seconds". It hurts humans far more than it hurts bots.

There are about 2400 mainland sims. For the sake of argument lets say it would take a bot 30 seconds to scan a sim (it's likely significantly less). It would only take 12 bots 100 minutes to scan the entire mainland over for parcels for sale.

Chances are that you'll have a few seconds to a few minutes of breathing room, but you won't get much more than that because they'll all just throw more bots at it.

Absolutely!
Banning bots is like banning creativity.

To borrow a (bad?) metaphor :_
Bots don't kill people, some programmers do.

Well, this goes back to my original statement of having to pay attention to what you're doing and being responsible for your own land.

If that land is set to be sold to only one person or is set to a ridiculously high cost as a place holder then it doesn't matter how many seconds a landbot takes to scan sims. Your's won't pop up for them unless they're willing to pay a ridiculously high amount for your land...in which case you win!

There have been a lot of posts about how there's something wrong with the land purchase system but none about what would solve the issue so far. What would you guys, the SL "Community" suggest?

This is true, the Nozzles for diesel are a larger size. It is not possible to put diesel into a normal car. The reverse isnt much of an issue since gasoline will not ruin a Diesel Engine. You can actually drive a diesel on gasoline it will just clatter wildly, at which point you could drive it to a location where you can have the gas removed. Gasoline has actually been used to help start Diesels in cold temperatures since it combusts at lower pressures.

If the Diesel safeguards as an example, perhaps selling land should be made just as foolproof.

IANAL
For the uninitiated, it's short for I Am Not A Lawyer ... as opposed to I am ANAL.

There is a concept used in legal systems of what a "reasonable person" would do or think.

Selling land for 1/10th of so of what it is worth would seem to be unreasonable. It is not impossible that someone would want to do that, but it is generally unreasonable.

If the system were to warn a user that what they were about to confirm in a land sale was 'unreasonable', then that might help.

Something between "Frightfully sorry to bother you , but..." and "Hey Bozo, you're about the sell the farm for 1L$" would be appropriate.

It would be better for LL to draw attention to the possible unreasonability of a proposed transaction rather than being pressured to adjudicate on the unreasonabliity after the event.

You would think that is possible.

A big pop up "Warning you are about to sell your land to Anyone for 75% below market value, are you sure?"

Still without educating the public about Bots there are still people who will look around and then click "yes".

One landbot owner suggested a Transfer Button .. since the concept is less complicated than "sell for 0$".

The lack of a warning about unreasonable prices is not even a small part of the problem. Nobody in their right mind thinks that $1L is a reasonable price for any size of parcel. The real root of the problem is, as you pointed out, that so many people don't realize that $1L is not *SAFE* when set to sell to anyone. That the amount is unreasonable is generally very well known to the seller, and is frequently quite intentionally low.

Even those cases where a trailing digit is mistakenly omitted, resulting in a 10x price difference, are only generally problematic because the resulting buy happens within mere seconds, and would not likely be avoided by the suggested warning. It's a well-studied and well-documented fact that users are generally over-quick about confirming things, often to their detriment.

Agreed!
I should have added the bit about warning people about bots. Otherwise they would most probably think, yes, I'm selling to this person at that price for a reason, so OK

In another thread, the OP had looked out beyond even the sim they were in, saw no other avatars that might swoop in, and set up the deal. The rest is ....

Bots that take advantage of gross mistakes are not part of 'the game' that people signed up to.

The comparison is not with putting diesel oil in a car designed for gasoline. The error strikes me as more like the universal practice of designing cars so that you cannot start the car when it is in gear. That is a careless mistake anybody might make when distracted or in a hurry, and it can ruin the transmission. So, car designers make it impossible, seeing as how they want people to come back and buy their cars again.

Same with LL, it seems to me. These are people demonstrably willing to put RL money into SL. I wonder how many of these people who got screwed over by landbots and were told it was their own fault have stayed in SL. Why are the owners of lnadbots so important that LL wants to cater to them rather than the probably far more numerous people they screw over and the word-of-mouth they spread around in RL? Talk about ill-advised marketing. THIS LOOKS EASY TO FIX. WHY NOT DO IT?

And they deserve to lose every last customer they lose because of this. They can choke on it.

And the bot runners deserve to have no residents left to exploit except each other. That's not going to happen, but they deserve it.

Letting a few residents take advantage of others with exploits and allowing the ones taken advantage of no recourse - it makes me sick.

coco

How about some sort of test to buy land? Rather like what most free email sites and forums do, /exactly to prevent bots from signing up/? Click "buy land", and then the person has to enter a code thats displayed as a garbled image.

Viola. Doesn't ban bots, but largely neuters the worst problems from landbots.

Or maybe put it as a test for sending a search query, to eliminate the botspam lagging up our searches.

The more I read your post Reitsuki the more I like it. Well thought out and I believe minimal work for LL.

In RL, I want the police to be involved in preventing theft and fraud. I do not want them regulating sexual activity between consenting adults.

Yes, you can argue I don't actually GET that in RL, but it's hardly unreasonable to want it in RL or SL.

- Should bots be allowed?


In RL we had sodom hussein - remember how it ended up for him?

What worries me is that people like that are still on the loose in SL:


http://www.knowprose.com/node/17505
http://www.knowprose.com/node/17554
http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/04/09/ui-bug-costs-second-life-user-thousands/
http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=12066

I want justice, nothing else - nothing less.

... wow. Seriously.

That's like Godwining a thread, except I have a deep seated fear that you aren't being sarcastic.