Should bots be allowed?

least liked? lol i have plenty of freinds thanks. and i never overprice anything. yeh I buy ad plots here and there which i wish to keep so set the price high. no one forces you to buy them. i want to have a nice big portfolio of adspace which i may be lucky enough to sell to a big corp one day. this is no crime. except in your eyes.

i have no view on bots. but i have a view on people trying to control SL

It isn't not taking your word for it.

As I couldn't find the thread (the forum search isn't particularly good at finding specific threads), I dont know the details e.g.

was the delay discussed a few minutes or a few hours?
was it a predictable delay or a random one?
was it for all search listings or just land sales?
were there many landbots about at the time?
etc.

A lot of this context might mean that peoples response to a predictable 5-10 minute delay in land sales only might differ from whatever the issue was then - hence the poll

Matthew

You'd have to wait 24 hours before you could resell it, obviously. And if you spent the money and couldn't refund in full, then either you deal with it or you buy some Lindens.

Yes, it would change the way we do things slightly, but, then, so did getting rid of First Land (which was dropped, in part, because of landbots snatching the parcels up before actual humans could get to them.)

well the delay varried dependant on how busy the system was. granted it was down to system lag and it could be anywhere from 5 mins to 2 days! but i still think having a delay will not stop stupid people giving their land away.

first land was done away with as LL realised they could make more money and increase demand by not giving any land away to noobs. no other reason.

delays delays delays. this will never happen either. LL encorage buying and selling of land as they make lots of money on it. putting all these delays in place would simply dampen down the market which i can assur eyou they do not wish to do

24 hours is not THAT much of a delay. And I don't see Linden as your surname, so you're not exactly in a position to speak for Linden Lab.

I think this is a great idea. How hard can this be to implement??

You're better off sticking to making claims about threads that don't actually exist than to make claims that are easily disproved:

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/02/20/first-land-program-to-end/

Here you go again with stupid accusations.

Our group happens to own the singlemost number of 16m plots in SL, so your responses again have proven you have no idea what you are talking about other telling lies about people you've never met or dealt with.

I can tell you however, our group buys ALOT of 16m plots, but we refuse to buy from you.

For 2 years we donated use of the land to a Masters student (among other projects).

I doubt you do anything meaningful, ever.

no but my sisters aunties bestfreinds wifes mothers dogs grandmas sister is married to the best friend of the housekeeper of on of a linden so im in more of a position then you

serously though im just pointing to the blatently obvious. all these silly suggestions will never happen. alot of poeple on here live in a fantasy world (other than sl). i have been watching how LL operate for years and can see clearly how they promote capitalism and are proud of the SL economy and would not change it to the detriment of there business model.

hangon a minute. let me get this straight! your accusing me of being an eviL troll because i buy and sell ad plots and all along you own THE SINGLE MOST NUMBER OF 16m PLOTS IN SL'?????.

now i see why you are so hostile towards me. YOUR A COMPETITOR!!!!!

hypocrosy at its best. dont ever critisise me about 16m plots ever again! you are unbeleivable you realy are!!!

Okay, you've made your point on how you feel about it. CAPITLIZM R00LS. Fine.

Would anybody ELSE like to provide me with some feedback on the notion so I can refine a possible JIRA request accordingly?

Unlike you, we don't sell our plots for ridiculously high prices for the purposes of extorting money.

In reality, we don't sell our plots at all, because they are used for data collection for important projects and we do so completely within the rules of TOS. I thought you were for that? Obviously not. You are just a troll who hates on people for no other reason.

We use our plots for legitimate reasons, you got a problem with obviously, but that reflects badly on you, not us.

i just told you i buy for legitimate reasons. id rather not sell them either which is why the price is high! id rather you didnt buy them from me as i wish to keep them. is that so bad? no need to call me names.

Why don't you just set the land as Not For Sale if you don't want to sell them?

sorry Cy, i didnt mean to highjack your post. but ive been attacked and i have had to respond accordingly

because if someone realy needs that spot they can still buy it off me if they must. but id rather not sell it if its just for traders

What a crock of crap.

If you didn't want to sell them, you wouldn't set them for sale.

I bet your dog eats your homework, get alot of flat tires and your uncle dies alot.

sorry i refuse to respond as you are an adfarmer

I'm no ad farmer. We own 1400 plots. You will not find one sign, ad, spam or annoyance on any plot.

Perhaps you should reflect upon your accusations of name-calling, for your own sake.

ok i only own about 300. (no signs or ads i might ad)

but you are the adfarm baron!

*doesn't bother to read the rest of the posts before posting her own*

I've seen some bots used in perfectly acceptable ways, such as store mannequins, giving us the view of that skin or outfit without having to rely on a just vendor image. I've even seen them used to display poses. I can see them being used for other forms of entertainment too, if the program driving them gets complex enough.

I've seen them used in some of the most annoying ways possible, such as the landbots and copybots. While the latter might have some beneficial use, the former does not. The former only chews up search functionality/resources and denies newer users of reasonably priced land. Frankly, I think that the search function should be denied to ANY bot.

I was going to say there is a problem with distinguishing between bot and human, but come to think of it, it's not that hard. Track the resource usage when it comes to search.. even a 'land baron' who is doing it by hand is going to still be slower and less efficient than the bot.

Also.. make it a requirement that one must be there 'physically' to buy the land. Escrow the L of the payment for at least one minute to give the other party a chance to say, "No, I will not sale!" If the sale falls through, the person buying gets their money back. Might make buying and selling land a bit slower, but.. I'd put up with it.

One point which gets missed here is the multiple use of bots. If you think one bot is bad, in reality it's much worse than that.

LL in thier infinite wisdom, throttled the search to 5 searches in 25 seconds. Any more, you get blocked for 60 seconds. This killed any potential for non bots to compete. In reality, they compounded the problem with search pressure.

You see, there are two kinds of land bots. Search Bots and Buy Bots. To workaround the trottles, the bot people use MULTIPLE bots to do the searching and then feed the data to buyer bot. People only see the buy bots, but there are alot more search bots than buy bots, and they are hidden from view.

It adds insult to injury, to impede the average resident's ability to search, while bots continue to exploit it.

While it may be easy for a human to tell the difference between a bot and a human, it's not so easy for the Linden Lab servers to tell the difference. The analysis and identification of a landbot requires some fairly complex heuristics which are, frankly, fairly subtle. Add to this the fact that a bot may be built to serve practically any purpose, and the task of detecting a bot solely by its behavior becomes almost insurmountable.

Also, since the connection method bots use are identical to those used by humans, there is no straightforward technical method for detecting them either.

While I do think that the use of bots gives some people a distinctly unfair advantage, I don't think there's really anything one could do about it that wouldn't severely break SL as a whole.

A human cannot possibly search precisely every 5 seconds, 24 hour hours a day. LL is wholly capable of tracking, recording and enforcing disproportionate use.