Should bots be allowed?

that plot wasn't next to hers...

You can make a rule against murder, but that won't automatically prevent all future murders.

You can make a rule against using Copybot to copy other people's items without their permission, but you can't keep that practice to zero.

But laws don't exist because they immediately prevent anyone from doing the thing ever again. They exist to establish rule and policy, to discourage the practices (which they do), and to keep the society beneficial to its citizens, who will also have some hope of recourse if they are victimized.

Without such policies, where it's dog-eat-dog, society doesn't benefit. If an on-line environment is lawless and encourages dog-eat-dog exploitation, with no recourse for victims, people leave.

When people were shutting up shop en masse in an absolute REFUSAL to continue on if LL were going to allow things to be copybotted, LL had no choice but to declare that practice illegal.

Their simply making it officially illegal did wonders. And it means that should we catch someone doing it, we DO have recourse.

If not outlaw, they can at least regulate the bots.

(Is there such a thing as a functional society with no regulation? Where - to simplify it dramatically - if you drop your purse on the ground, someone else can snatch it and you have no recourse?)

Regulation could consist of the sorts of built-in delays, escrow plans, bot sign-ups and limits, and the myriad other ideas that people have come up with.

Those ideas show that it can be done (in a myriad of ways), because the ideas spring from real life in the first place, where lawlessness and officially allowing a small portion of the population to prey on everyone else is not the norm.

Personally, I prefer the outlawing of landbots. They exist only to get advantage over everyone else, and to ensure their owners have to do the least amount of work possible. Set up the bot - beat out all the people - put the money in the bank.

coco

I've no doubt LL would use bots, and it's a legitimate usage to gather data over 10,000 sims or check they are really online

I put my 512 up for sale for a bit just to see what the interface looked like. (I put in a price of 50,000, so if somebody did buy it, they'd be welcome to it.)

It does tell you what you're charging per square meter when you type the price in.

You do have to select whether you're selling it to anybody or a specific person. If you don't pick, the "Set Land For Sale" button is greyed out.

You also have to choose whether or not to sell the Objects on the parcel with the land. No default is set, and the "Set Land For Sale" button remains gray until you choose.

Just below the "Sell the objects with the land" option are the following words:

"REMEMBER: All sales are final."

When you click Set Land For Sale, you are given a dialogue box that says:

"The selected [parcel size] land is being set for sale.
Your selling price will be [price] and will be authorized for sale to [Anyone or Username]."

And you click OK or Cancel. And ta-da the land is for sale.

Now, for some people this may be enough. For others, this appears not to be.

Supposing we added one more radio button below the one about the Objects. One would be something like "Notify when offer is made" and the other something "Sell Immediately."

Sell Immediately would be what happens now. Somebody clicks Buy Land, pays the money, poof, it's theirs.

"Notify when offer is made" means you get a dialogue (and, ideally, an email) that "Hoofydink Somebody wants to buy your land for L$[price]." And then it's up to you to yay or nay the deal.

Now, it's possible that people might do things like cancel the deal and raise the price a bit when they're landbotted. But, you know, I'd think the free market would love that sort of thing.

Thoughts?

You told me you'd ignore me in two threads already. Anyway, I don't support tricking newbies out of their money. But I do support a free market, where people can sell their wares for any price. No one is forced to buy the wares, and the market will regulate itself by people refusing to buy overprized things they can get cheaper elsewhere.
Btw, I fail to see what this has to do with bots?

Hi All

Sorry going back a bit, someone alerted me to this thread...



I set up sllandlist, you might be interested to know what happened. Some time ago the one alt I was using to gather info for this site (it was a free advanced land listing site) got suspended out of the blue no warning for 3 days, on the grounds of doing unreasonable number of land searches. I immediately emailed and called LL explaining what it was doing, asking them to let me know what would be a reasonable number of land searches etc. I approached various Lindens in world and got told to wait for support to get back to me, one of them said something about the number of searches an average user would do and vanished. After about 3 weeks I happened to buy enough land to get myself onto Concierge support level. I went through the concierge support system with a text chat and a phone call and a day or two later an email popped out of the LL support machine.

It turned out (and someone on these forums had found this out somehow weeks before I did) that one day someone was looking at the land search system and found that less than 20 accounts were using nearly all the search resources. They then suspended all the relevant accounts. There was no policy behind it. I'm not aware of them doing this again although they might have. If anyone's interested I'll be setting up the site again, it would be back online already but I have to deal with new releases breaking the code all the time and I'm waiting until they do 'message liberation' because that will change things again, and after it it should be easier to maintain the system in the future. I've cut the frequency of searches right down but I have no guarantee LL won't view it as an abuse and ban me again because they won't define what an abuse is because they want to retain the right to chuck anyone off the system as and when they want. To say that doesn't provide a stable environment for business is an understatement.

I can see various uses for bots which are entirely legitimate and which will extend what can be done in Second Life. I'm not going to say what as I might well develop some one day! However while LL make no systematic effort to remove abusive uses of bots, they also make absolutely no attempt to support constructive ones.

Of course not. If someone uses a bot to deliberately annoy people with spam, to steal content (thinking of the infamous Copybot) or to somehow trick someone out of their money, it should be dealt with in the same way as if the bot owner would do this in person.

But that also means, if a bot does something perfectly legal, like buying land that was set for sale to anyone, I don't see why it should be worse than buying land in person. Bots in form of software-controlled avatars basically perform the same actions as regular, user-controlled avatars. These actions can be legal and TOS-compliant or not, and the bot owner should be judged in the same way as any other avatar user.

Yet when it happens to LL, when they are exploited, they complain about it.

Bots were made within the capacity that is Second Life. I hate landbots as much as the next person. I don't think there's any way someone should ban them though, so long as they aren't breaking the law.

Copybots don't fit into that, because they did break the law. So it's not a completely straight across the board sort of thing. Some bots shouldn't be allowed, other bots are deplorable but not illegal.

Except that "should be allowed" does not have to equal "is legal". There are plenty of things that are legal that are undesirable, and this is a private system... LL is not only free to, but should be encouraged to remove undesirable elements as need arises.

Bots that automated tedious tasks are fine.

Bots that perform so far beyond human capacity that no human can compete with them are not the same thing, however.

"Greeter bots" and such, a human could do all that, the bot just frees humans from having to do it. Realistically, no human could even possibly compete with landbots in their field. Their responses are too fast.

There's a lot of things in Second Life I find undesirable, that someone else finds desirable. It's in an area where it's up to the individual to decide how they feel about it. Landbots technically aren't stealing. They are faster, for sure, undesirable? Maybe. Depends on who you ask.

Hence what the ongoing discussion is about. But from an objective perspective, I fail to see how anyone who does NOT profit from landbots could find them desirable. Neutral feelings about them, quite possible. But actually desirable? They add nothing to anyone who doesn't profit from them, and they hurt *everyone* in the lag they cause, among other problems.

As an aside, if the best you can say about something is that it isn't "technically" stealing...

It isn't stealing. It's purchasing, from the original owner. Who is the bot stealing from? You? You who are interested in purchasing the land have as much claim or none to it as the bot did before it was purchased. It isn't your land yet, so the bot has not stolen from you or anyone else. I don't like landbots either, coincidentally, especially when I was trying to find land. Very frustrating. Not illegal.

In "honest" land purchases, where its a legitimate sale at a low price, it's not stealing, just annoying.

The growing number of losses to mistakes, however, are less defensible.

If I'm giving my friend fifty bucks and drop the bill on the ground by mistake, someone who swoops through and picks it up is still stealing, ethically even if the legal jurisdiction says otherwise (as it does in this case).

Then you shouldn't have let go of the bill until your friend had a firm grasp on it. There is an option in the land sales to specifically sell to a person by name. If you are selling to a friend, then you put their name in it.

If you are selling to anyone, then anyone can buy it, including the bot buying the land for the land-baron who owns it.

Assuming that most Landbot owners run 10 or so bots, I wonder how they would feel when they be came near useless because some other owner set up 1000 landbots, nothing illegal about it really is there?
How about if everyone ran their own bots and we brought the grid slowly to a grinding halt in our quest to all make a few bucks.
How many of these landbot, campbots, searchbots, copybots etc things are loose on the grid anyway, are all these FPS reductions login problems, etc being caused not by updates but extra bots online?
On the grave yard shift the numbers online keep climbing, but yet the number of people we meet about is declining. More & more often unanswering residents spend hours hovering on borders between parcels for sale, gold bots are queing up at camping pads too. These bots would be there on dayshift to. So if you assume at midnight there are say 1/2 the number of actual people on line compared to midday and before bots we used to have around 9000 people online at night 9 months back I wonder really what percentage of residents online are bots? 3000, 5000, 10,000?

Ah yes. The traditional "blame the victim, they should have been more careful" logic.

Mistakes happen. A mistake allowed to fester for too long should come with a sting to remind you, yes.

Landbots prevent the mistake being correctable, though.

In real life, by the way, that dropped bill would still be considered theft if someone ran off with it. The veneer of the land sales interface seems to legitimize things, but it doesn't, not ethically. Again, mistakes happen. It's not reasonable that a fairly common and apparently easy to make mistake should instantly cost a person a huge sum of RL money just because someone else wants to make a little bit more profit.

I guess you could boil my argument down to this: It's not "illegal" in the sense that it doesn't violate the terms of service, but it darn well should be.

But this has nothing to do with a bill. Yes, it would have been theft, but we are talking about someone setting land for sale. They are on the land, they rightclick it to bring up the wheel, go to the info, click the "sell land" button, it brings up a little window, they type in the amount, select "Anyone" or "Specific User" to sell it to, select whether or not they will "Keep objects on land" or not, and then click "Sell"

Now the land is on the market, by their own hand. If it's bought by a landbot there really is no victim. The person selling the land got the money they set the land for. The bot got the land it paid for. You are right, mistakes happen. There was one on the forums a few days ago. I feel for the people who feel screwed over by landbots. They accidentally set the land for less than they should have (I've sold many parcels and not once made that mistake. I always double-check, why can't they?) and a bot came in and bought it in a blink of an eye, before they had a chance to correct their mistake. But that still doesn't make it stealing. They posted the sale, by their own hand. It was the sellers own fault, not the land-baron with the landbots. So yes, I am blaming the so called victim.

Yes, your example would be theft. But in this case, the owner of the bill was too careless to look down and spot the bill. Then they walk off. So the fifty is laying there for the first person to pick it up.

With the exception of software errors, the "victims" are the ones to blame. They refused to show a reasonable level of care before they hit the sell now button. People should not be protected from their own stupidity or laziness.

Lol until you become the victim, then I bet we'd hear something different.

Good software, good games, good customer service and good retailers do NOT punish a customer when they make a mistake. Period. Anything else is bad software, bad service and a bad retailer. Period. This is an easy problem to solve:

1) Ban bots and confiscate the land under the TOS, abuse of system resources.
2) The current dialog, then if the conditions are met, a second, lengthier dialog explaining that the user will sell their land for what is much less than market value, and do they understand and want to proceed.

I bet not. No one is being "punished" for their mistake. Time and time again LL has been very specific that they will not meddle in land deals between players. So it's out of Linden Labs hands. You make a mistake, another player capitolizes on it. Boo hoo. You should have read more carefully. The current land-sales window has plenty enough warnings in it without having to have yet another popup warning me that I am selling my land for cheap or not. I checked to see how much I am selling it for.

Also, land value consistently fluctuates, the value of land itself is rarely what land is being sold for.

So if you pay cash for something and the store owner gives you too much change back from your $20 bill, and you keep the extra, you regard that as ethical?

Sure. He handed it to me. Where does it say I have to hand it back? Money passed from his hands to mine.

I'm not talking about what people each day consider "right" or "wrong." I personally would hand the extra change back to the shopkeeper. That does not necessarily mean that is "right" or "wrong." Is it wrong from a legal standpoint to walk out of the shop with the extra change? No. The money was passed, legally, into my posession.

The land was sold, legally, into the landbots posession. Just because someone feels like they are being cheated does not make it so.

If I keep fighting this battle I am going to paint myself into a position where everyone thinks poorly of me. Honestly, I hate land-bots as much as the next person, they jack prices up and ruin people's experience. But the arguement is are they breaking some kind of rule, and I don't agree that they are, and I wont just start agreeing that they are because people view them as "morally detestible."

I agree 100%, I despise the use of landbots yet the use of these bots is perfectly legal until LL decides it's not, and ppl need to realise this. True, if my land was snatched right from under my nose I'd scream hellfire too. But in the end I'd simply have to accept the fact that it was a perfectly legal sale, being for $L7 or $L7000 makes no difference.

Mandy C

I do not have a victim mentality, so I will never be a victim. I may make mistakes. I may have others try to prey upon me. But these will just be part of living, an adult adapts and overcomes. This whining "Oh poor me, someone needs to hold my hand." mentality is something I have never understood, not in an adult anyway in my 2 year old it is reasonable.

Yes in instances when there is software failure, LL should fix the problem. But in the case of carelessness and laziness the bots are not the problem. These people would still be whining if the land had sold 3 days later to a human.