Should bots be allowed?

thats fresh coming from the owner of 1400 adfarms

How subtle is "never downloads textures or other normal viewer data" or "constantly tp's around and never stays in one spot for longer than 5 seconds and does nothing but buy land" etc?

Bots are going to have a very atypical usage of the entire system compared to any resident. Even the usage pattern between a landbot and a land trader is going to be substantially different.

agreed

But can we really expect LL to track this efficiently when they can't even seem to keep their billing operations running properly?

Oh, so now bots and legitimate land owners are bad?

I see.

Keep digging yourself in deeper. Hypocricy suits you.

Realistically LL would never track it in the first place for that purpose. They stated again and again that they won't enter into a technical arms race and will just admit defeat prematurely.

I just wanted to point out that I don't think they're quite that subtle to detect .

nope. they are all good as they are part of the game as you well know being an adfarm baron yourself.

And the accuracy of your assertions distressingly proves it. *envisions the Landbots goosestepping through Linden Land ala Paris 1940*

*nods* Good point. There are ways and ways.

After a few years of gaming in MMO's, I've realized it's impossible to completely ban bots. Every game has tried, but the most notable for me was Lineage 2's Game Guardian system. Yeah.. it worked.. for like 5 seconds after an update before someone would hack/worm their way around it. But I'm not talking banning them, merely not allowing them access to one bit of functionality that makes them 'work' in a very resource hogging way.

I can see the system flagging an account that meets the requirements (which includes accessing the search) and even having a Linden approve shutting down the functionality, if needed. Wanna see if we have far fewer problems with search after something like this?

Most of the 'harmless' bots do not use the search, given that their jobs wind up being window dressing/looking pretty.

...

The problem with trying to thwart landbots by throttling searches is that it just means teh bot owner opens an arbitarily large number of bot accounts so that he can still do the same total number of searches. It's not as if accounts actually cost money to open these days.

The solution is to design the land sale system such that any bots that are used to game it can't cause significant lag.

A captcha? Hmm.. yes, I could see that for buying land.

Is that what it's called?

With open source, CAPTCHA is easily defeated by bots.

how?

Grab the captcha image, place it on a gateway webpage that randfom web surfers need to respond to in order to access all the free pron they can make their eyes bleed with.

Alternatively, several popular captcha systems presently in use can be reliably decoded by some moderately simple and public source programs.

Bots are fun!

I wish I could build one.

I know there are mean bots around, but that is no reason to ban all the bots.
Plus it is impossible to ban them.

I think that it would be most useful to definte the word "bot". To me a bot is a modified viewer client designed for a certain purpose to sever its master. A greeter bot or a row-bot, though might be called a bot but its really just a script.

Also too, with concern of the "land bot" thing people are quick to point out the instances that land sellers have mistakenly bungled thier sale and lost money, but to be true to commerce we need to remember that its not just the seller that has gotten bitten, there was a good market at one time for a person to make money flipping land, "land bot" pretty much killed that, just think that ther would be no Anshe Chung, and none of the media hype around Anshe Chung, if land bot had came in her time. Not that Im idolizing Anshe Chung, but her success was the driving factor for many hopeful investors that came into second life, and her press coverage is what really got LL the publicity that they did. Just ask any of the "used to make money" people like Sarah, or Raymond that actaully made a good chunk of change from fair and legit land transactions, landbot put the " land baron" out of business. I myself used to make 1000+ USD a month flipping land, but I stopped when I had to invest 500 USD to make 5USD, not saying it was totally the land bots fault, but it was in part. Im not bitter about it though, as a human I have the ability to adjust to my enviroment better than a bot does and I found new avenues of profit

Now there was copybot which was not a modified client but a scripted object, I beleive. LL did take action on it rather quickly as they could clearly see the damage it could do. Landbots and searchbot are products of opensourcing, both use a modified client and both create "victims". When a modified client is used to create "victims" then this should be the true defintion of a bot and that bot should be illegal

Easy.

SL is open source, therefore the correct answer to the question is somewhere in the server. By looking at the source code, anyone can locate the data, query it and pass the data to wherever it needs to go.

It would do nothing to prevent anything, other than introducing more bots to an already beleaguered system.

Copybot was not a scripted object. It was a bot much like any other bot, with it's own account, login and avatar.

LL didn't take any action other than to say the use of copybot to make "unauthorized" copies could be sued by DMCA holders. In other words, they did nothing.

I agree with you about taking something away from everyone and giving it to a few, flies in the face of community and fairness.

Off-topic, but copybot was/is an actual bot. It was (one of?) the first bots based on libSL (which is what most bots are most likely based on since the official viewer source is just too clunky for what a bot needs to do).

http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/11/13/copyrights-and-content-creation-in-second-life/
http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/11/14/use-of-copybot-and-similar-tools-a-tos-violation/

(Those posts could probably serve as an illustration of why comments auto-close after reaching 100 now )

Wow this is an awesome point.

After recently making a specific point about being availble 24/7 for Broadly offensive AR's ... it really does seem LL is focusing its "police budget" on the wrong thing.

I'd love to see more 'greeter bots' in SL. If anyone could make a decent greeter bot to replace those flat cutouts that are currently used to sell drinks at bars in SL that would be a massive improvement. I could see bots being used in stores as automated sales assistants and even as rudimentary tour guides in some sims. Also for AI research. Another potential use for bots would be as an automated 'police' on island sims with powers to kick & ban greifers / troublemakers.

So far we've mostly seen negative / greed-driven applications of bots. There's bound to be plenty of constructive uses. Bots are tools. Even though they have their own accounts, they're patently not on the same level as an account with a real person behind it. What is needed are cast-iron guidelines and rules as for the use, implementation and deployment of bots on the grid. Bots are here to stay whether people like them or not.

I dont know if its all that terrible an idea.

It should be possible to have Land sales be "Manual" as a default setting, while "Automatic" would be availble for those users who choose it.

That way people who dont want to confirm their land sale can open a seperate window and change their land selling to "automatic" (like it is now)

While the average novice land seller will have to confirm their sale, since they wont have switched "Manual" off.

You left out #3: People who dont think the "stupid" people are entirely to blame.

Ive never lost my land, nor have I profited off land sales ... yet I still have a lot of sympathy for the people who get land swooped. Just becuase they changed the system from the original doesnt mean they made USEFUL changes for their target audience.