Should bots be allowed?

I'm AWFULLY tired of hearing this charge.

I'm in neither category.

There is such a thing as people objecting to theft and pillage, even when it doesn't affect them directly.

coco

Why so much anger?

Been thinking about this - in the past, when there were such delays, there were no landbots though, right?

Secondly, if it saves even those people who don't have a chance to check in their "about land" before the landbot gets it, it would be worth it to have a delay.

coco

It's easy. Outlaw landbots.

Or you can regulate it.

If you want to do more, there is plenty else that can be done, including all the techy ways for determining who is a bot. And none of it would break SL.

(It always amazes me when people say something is "impossible" mainly because they don't want it to happen, or say something is "impossible" and worthless to try mainly because it won't be 100% foolproof.)

It's not that it can't be done. It's that LL doesn't want to be bothered to do it. They love bots way more than they love residents. They think bots are cool.

Remember copybot? It took hundreds of shopkeepers going on strike, and that to get out to the real-world media, to get LL to even state something as simple as, "It is against TOS to use copybot to copy items not your own without permission."

And even THAT didn't happen until after LL had already published a love letter to LibSl on the blog.

They declared it illegal finally only because everyone was closing up shop, and it was making the outside media. Not because they wanted to. They applauded copybot; they loved its makers (still do).

But once they DID make that statement, we were oodles safer. Because despite what some people think, making a law against crime does in fact deter crime, in addition to giving the victims of crime recourse.

As long as stealing from other residents is not against the law, people will continue to steal from others and enrich themselves doing so.

coco

Ehm... let me get this straight. You bought land without informing yourself about the usual land prices, which can be done with one look into the search menu (a search bot). In RL, people even compare the prices of tomatoes before they buy them. You had no idea how much real money the price of L$30k might equal, despite having bought the money at some point. For some reason, you blame it to "crooks and land bots" that you bought a tomato for $120 and call it "serious abuse"?

It's unbelievable that the question "Should bots (software applications that run automated tasks over the internet, according to the Wikipedia) be allowed on the 3D internet" results in a 12 pages long discussion. It seems that too many people mistake SL for a MMORPG.

my thought exactly aleister. you can't blame someone else if you don't know (or ignore) the value of lindens.

no one forced gina to buy that land. no gun to her head. no arm twisting. no blackmail.

i'm really getting tired of these people who don't use common sense (not knowing the value of L$30,000 --- REALLY!), don't check and double check what they're doing in a land sale, and don't take responsiblity for their own actions.

if you make a mistake, please own up to it. i've made my share. and they are MY fault. no one elses.

i don't blame everyone in sight (including LL) for them.

You Sir will soon be ignored

and muted too ... can't wait.

Should scams be allowed to run rampant on the internet with no repercussions just because people should know better?

If so, why do we have anti-spam laws?

Do we? Never heard of them. I can not see how spamming can be considered illegal. Now, let's be clear about what we are talking about here, we are not talking about phishing or pharming. We are talking "spam" as in unsolicited commercial mail, right?

http://www.spamlaws.com/federal/can-spam.shtml

Or, for that matter, why message boards, for example, have rules against spam. SL is not the equivalent of the internet, it's the equivalent of a specific website, with its own rules and regulations. Rules that, as many know, can be changed at any time.

Exactly.

I am so happy that the option to put people on my ignore list is there.


egon, you have no compassion for me? I have no respect for you.


Next one.

i did not say i have no compassion for you.

on the contrary ... i DO.

but to blame others for your not knowing the value of L$30,000 lindens .. THAT i have no compassion for. that was your own doing. not the person selling that 512 plot and CERTAINLY NOT linden labs.

Wonders who's the lucky one...

Thank you very much for the link. As far as I can see, in itself the spam-can law doesn't address scam issues at all, just the spamming of "whatever".

That said, can we actually relate spam to land bots? I don't clearly see the relation between the both of them.

Yes, there are laws about sending unsolicited commercial emails. In the last month the FBI arrested the "King of Spam".

Please, be sharp for a sec, if at least I wasn't at the time!

This trick was aimed at first land buyers and newbies OBVIOUSLY.

So you too support that kind of practice - tell me?

Do you have any respect for someone charging a First land 512 sqm for 30K, next to other
parcels that were first land a minute ago?

I was so excited that I clicked buy without buying, do you know why, I couldn't even think that there were crooks using bots outhere, so such a practice.

You know what? As I can already tell we are not going to get along, you are on my ignore list as well.

*grins* I'd normally agree, but in at least one kind of bot (or is it two?) an unfair advantage is created and resources are being used. Not all bots are bad, because they don't all do one kind of thing, like they do in an MMORPG.

And wow, this has gone off topic badly. Can we stop with the 'I'll mute you niener, niener," for a bit at least? Obviously, to many of us this is a serious topic in both pros and cons. We really don't want the thread locked, do we?

Aleister Montgomery won the price for being the last ignored in this thread! Congratulations.

At this point I am just wondering if Gina is not just another forum troll Soon she will only be listening to herself.

And to get back on topic. Bots are not the problem here. I can agree that they might represent unfair advantage due to the speed they work at.

I also agree with the fact that detecting bots will be technical difficult, so instead of trying to ban them, we can do one of two things:

1) Improve the selling land UI to ensure more safeguard and warnings are set up before someone actually accepts the conditions.

2) Implement a policy that will ensure the fallback option for both, buyers and sellers.

crooks using bots? what bots are we talking about here? you bought it at the asking price. or are YOU a bot?

you can charge anyone anything you want. doesn't mean someone will buy it. i set a 512 for sale at 9,999,999 just to see the wording in the sale. i left it there for a day at that price.

unfortunately, no one bought it.

You can make all the rules you want, but if you have no way of enforcing them, what's the point? It's certainly not impossible to detect a bot and figure out how to block its entry to the grid. However, that having been said, it would require such tremendous resources to figure out how to do it that it would vastly exceed the resources of a major research facility.

This is far from being an easy problem - the fact that bots use exactly the same connection protocols and issue exactly the same kinds of instructions to the grid that people do makes them nearly impossible to detect when in use, except by hand - people can usually tell a bot when they see one (though in some cases even this is difficult - you have to watch the avatar over a really long period of time to make the assessment, and watch everything they do to be certain).

Remember that what appears easy to do for a human is frequently not easy for a machine to do, and vice versa.

It's possible that Linden Lab thinks bots are cool - it's also possible that Linden Lab itself uses them to perform routine grid maintenance (hard to know, though). But whatever Linden Lab might think of them, they can't be reliably blocked without also blocking legitimate users, and we as citizens are already having enough routine connection problems without adding that.

Egon, you are a crook and broadly offensive.

Captcha. It was suggested in another thread, why don't we use a captcha in the buying end?

i would have been a crook chris.. but no one ever DID buy that land. i guess gina never saw it. sigh.