New Bot: The Estate Owners Fight Back!

I think what is snagging people's sensibilities is that SL started much like an artists' colony where people created for its own sake. As major changes such as buying L$ for cash or buying land for cash entered SL, the ethos changed to a profit driven world. Someone in this thread had used the term "luddite" when I think they were referring to "old school" players who would prefer that the game hadn't shifted focus.

It has shifted focus and insofar as it continues to attract eyeballs it will continue in that direction. There is also much discussion above about "opt-in" or "opt-out". It appears to me that the only way to "opt-out" of this shift is to stop playing (which I have).

It was nice while it lasted. UNLESS

To those concerned with people teleporting into their bedrooms - I believe this can be solved by setting your parcel's teleport destination to a specific location. I haven't actually tried, and this might only work with landmarks, but if it works like it should, it would even force them to that spot if they tried to teleport via the world map.

As far as I'm concerned this bot isn't even particularly useful in finding items for sale. A large percentage of things that are purchased are not even purchased through the 'for sale' box being checked - they are purchased via vendor scripts. Especially the multi-item vendor machines where you can scroll through the items.

So is this bot really even that useful? Not to me. I know I have no intention of using the website to find anything. Between SL's search and SLExchange, I can usually find what I'm looking for.

Well, Malachi, I think we can have business - even real-life business - and still function with respect for others.

coco

Things that break the ESC search tool:


1. Landing Points / Telehubs
2. No transfer items with a sale price
3. Opting-Out
4. Unchecking the "For Sale" checkbox
5. Security Systems / Ban Lines


Now you will notice that in that list of 5 items, I have not included "Fake Prims I made with the names of high price items". Why? Because if I'm looking to get a Starax Wand that someone left out with a $0L price tag.... well I'm going to make sure Starax is listed as the creator. Same for a Sexgen, or any other high price transferable item.

Im losing my idealism quickly about how people are in SL.

These last few days have damaged it worse than the last few months.

We cant even seem to get a token nod towards an appreciation wed like private Second Lives.

I didn't say anything about useing fake prims to "break" the bot. Or to set up stuff with names of things made by other people. I just want to fill their site with listings for stupid shit. I'll even put some freebie stuff in the boxes, just in case some poor noobie happens to find one they won't get an empty box. lol

By the way, there is an OPT IN system at GimmeWeb. They give you a ball, you drop your stuff in the ball and your shop name and whatever you named it should appear in the browser searches.

Well, I said should because I didn't figure yet how to make it recognise my keywords. It has several flaws, is not ergonomic but the basic idea is good. It doesn't let you search for "alpha beta" as it will return you all the alpha and all the beta (or if there is a way it's not mentioned) and it doesn't search the creator/owner names.

This leads me to think that an OPT IN browser would better come with a SL vendor, you would have to add a line to the vendor notecard with the keywords:

NAME=Pillow
DESCRIPTION=Super soft pillow (no mod/no transfer)
PRICE=10               
KEYWORDS=furniture,pillow,house,super,soft

Then the vendor contacts the website each time the notecard is changed and updates the entries. This could be a proprietary script as long as the notecard is clearly identified, all vendors could be adapted to recognise the tags so you wouldn't have to write another notecard. If you dont use a vendor and simply a click buy prim then you would put the tags in the description and let the bot do its job, though the bot woudln't work if it doesn't recognise the tags.

Now if people were smart they would use public tags, so different companies could use the same vendors.

They say they are "saveing" our search lol

http://news.com.com/Rescuing+search+in+Second+Life/2100-1043_3-6161697.html?tag=news.1

I put landbot on sale, why it is not listed there?
http://search.sheeplabs.com/core/search/?SearchAction=search&SearchString=landbot

Exactly. The ESC search bot is following the same rules as a normal avatar.

If I had the time and the patience, I could visit every Sim, right click on every object I see, make a note of the information that is revealed, and then collate and publish that information. The bot it simply much more efficient.

I believe that this was mentioned earlier in the thread, but all night I kept coming back to this same idea. Why is the Grid Shepard any different than the Google web bot? Both of these systems gather information that is freely available to the public. This info is then massaged and spit back out in a more useful, searchable format. Both systems also have a simple way to 'opt-out'.

So the 2D Google is a fantastic resource, and the 3D Electric Sheep Company is the devil? I don't get it.

I pointed that one out already: Googlebot scrapes, saves and makes both the index and the cached copy available.

Somehow I doubt ESC - or anyone for that matter - would be all that pleased if the real SL equivalent of Googlebot scraped up their latest build and made a cached copy of any search indexed build/prims available on demand, in addition to linking to the original.

If you have a website, you can access restrict portions of it and there is no sneaky camera to bypass that, or you can disallow Googlebot on both the site and the subdirectory level, no such thing is possible for Grid Shepherd.

If someone actually wants to be listed in public database of commercial items put on sale, it's in their best interest to opt-in and they're very likely to do just that. This removes potential large number of false positives (people who didn't opt out because they weren't aware of existence of such service) while ensuring everyone listed is in fact listed because they wish to.

Would it mean the number of items listed would be lesser than what's recorded with 'gotta catch them all' approach? Most certainly. But looking at eBay, Amazon or other opt-in services like that (even SL-related) it hardly seems to be a problem for their owners, and neither did these ventures fail to "ever take off the ground" as it's been implied a strictly opt-in system for sure would.

Good morning i tend to disagree on that one, if a LL employee posts on a blog with their Linden name then as far as i am concerned they are representing the views of LL. I work for the security services RL and if i posted on a website with my governmet email address it would be assumed that i am posting the views of the MOD, therefore we have instructions never to post like this im sure LL has a clause like that in their employment contract

Peace

I do think that filling the search site with useless information to render it useless as a search tool is absolutley the correct thing to do, its not breaking anything that ESC own and it is sending a clear message to ESC that this opt out service, will not be tolerated by the residents. Its not against the TOS to do this and sometimes things call for this sort of action, especially when ESC have not co operated with the resi's in this matter and just assumed they could do it and people would'nt care, but we do care.

If we as a community allow ESC to get away with this faux pas it will open the floodgates to more opt out services arriving here, but if we as a group make the search useless maybe then ESC will come back to the drawing board and address the issues raised here in this thread and the other thread, and thanks to Kitty Barnett for the timeline , i would imagine ESC have no intention to do anything about this as they would have in the last 2 weeks since this has blown up, so i encourage all the residents to do whatever we can within the TOS to render this project useless and force ESC's hand, to rethink this cock up.

Peace

Sorry if I missed a previous post asking about this - haven't had enough coffee yet - but ESC's excuse for springing this on everyone without consent was that pure opt-in systems tend not to work very well, right?

But... these are the people who brought us SL Boutique, a pure opt-in system. Are they saying that SLB is a failure? Lots of people who are selling items put them for sale on SLB.
Why wouldn't they think that the same people would be receptive to opting into a system that gives people teleporting access to their SL stores?

Foisting this on all kinds of unsuspecting people when they already have a customer base they could have easily marketed this service to makes no sense, and they're bringing a lot of hostility on themselves.

On the other thread about this issue, I jokingly suggested that people list for sale "Grid Shepherd - free to good home, tends to wander into places where he is not welcome." That thought amuses me. Feel free to take it.

Then Id say you were spying also.



Peoples' Second Lives arent websites.

You know I just love the forums. The things I read are just too funny. I keep a slush pile of a funny forum posts and this one is the best one yet for the year 2007.
What will you do? Call the cops? "Hello cops someone is trespassing on my make believe land" I am sure the police will enjoy the chuckle as well.

So must bluster and blow for a handfull of bites and bytes. Oh boo hoo somone found your automatic sex bed with 345 posistions and optional chicken attachment.

Keep posting I need the laughs. I will be setting out a box at my place with pitch forks and sabbots for you guys.

Rox

Well of course, But Linden Labs doesnt really have this level of corporate responsibility. Thus, just becuase Torley said it - it doesnt make it LL's official policy.

Many people likely have a point. LL's offical policy wont be made clear at all. They will wait for the controversy to clear, then after weve given up complaining - They will list it along with other sites as "Neat Third Party Systems that are availble"

Exactly like they did with the Ratings stuff.

Actually, this is not opening the opt out floodgates. Several 'resources' alread have, one ratings site in particular requires you to pay to read whats been said about you..and you cant opt out without paying.

As for the searchbot..whats the problem? Unless you're selling freebies...

The Pros and Cons of the searchbot system are discuseed in these threads

/327/8d/178576/1.html

/327/96/178132/1.html

/128/0b/176557/1.html

Actually, no. These are the people who BOUGHT SL Boutique from it's original creators, after SLB was up and running.

Electric Sheep came into existance AFTER SLB was founded. It may, or may not, consist in whole or in part of real live individuals who also created SLB. But As far as I am aware, the original creators of SLB sold the site to Electric Sheep, and did not join them.

As for the Google argument... I am a web sysadmin in real life. It is trivial to keep Google out of a public website, because they wrote it in a ethical manner that respects the Internet conventions for keeping spider and web crawler programs from indexing your site. It is trivial to keep Google out of a private Corporate Intranet, as well, by banning its passage through edge servers or firewalls. In SL we have no such protections. I can ban their bot by name, and it will STILL stand on another parcel and list every prim owned by any individual not explicitly opted out. There is no convention or standard that I can apply to protect my SL assets from this sort of intrusion as a class of attack.

It is trivial to keep any person on the web from seing a web page before you're done building it. Because you can build that page in an off-line editor. But there is NO way to set something for sale in SL in-world except to edit it live, in-world.

Because of the speed that this Bot can work at, it can at least partially scan your property even if you have security orbs set to prevent intruders from entering your parcel. And because it gives users of a site the precise 3D coordinates of the 'merchandise', and a TP link to that spot, a thief can TP in, buy an underpriced item, and TP out before a TOS-Compliant security orb can eject them from the parcel.

As a merchant, I can tell you this is worthless to me. It DOES NOT and CAN NOT list the majority of what I sell, even if I were to opt in. All it does is put me at risk of losing valuable merchandise for myself or my customers.

The sheepbot is a thief's tool, It's worthless as anything else.

With the exception of one item, it was spot on with mine. Even filed 2 DMCAs.

I was shocked to learn about the ESC search engine, and the method in which the data was mined. While I don't agree with what they are doing, I didn't think it affected me personally.

I don't create or sell anything, I don't own land, or run a business. SL is just a social networking platform for me.

But just for kicks, I plugged my name into the Search Engine.

Wait, what's this? An object showed up .... Hold on!! Those are the roses I received from my boyfriend, which are placed next to the bed.... in our rental home!!

A search of his name also turned up some items. These are freebies that are free to copy, so hopefully no worries there. All of our items are also locked, but I'm not sure if that helps or not. I have unchecked the for sale tag in my item, but yet it still shows in the database.

The suggestions here are to ban the bot avatar, erect ban lines, opt out, not to worry about it or join in a protest.

Hmm, I don't have ban powers, nor could I place ban lines if I wanted to - which I don't, quite ugly and would ruin my view. Not worry = lets see, someone anyone can TP into my home, next to my bed for crying out loud! Good thing the security orb is on, and if they TP in while we're there, lets just say they will promptly be booted off the sims surface.

Guess that leaves Opting Out as my only choice. I will also avoid all ESC builds, websites, etc like the frickin plague.

Oh, and SLB? I cant find anything there - why don't they work on a better search engine there, rather than SL as a whole.

Hmmmm

Just occured to me theres a "when Life hands you Lemons" side to this argument.

You can use the Spybot to provide you with free advertizing.

Simply Put out a Prim for sale with your Ad as the name

To get to the top of the 0L search list - do the following

"Ad goes here" L$ 0 <goes in the name line>
L$ 0 <goes in the Description Line>

Set it for sale for L$ 0

You could game it one step more by adding L$ 0 to your parcel name and Parcel Description.

Also you can literally make 100 of these, 1000, whatever.


And then could also ..
Spread them out to incluse the L$ 1
"Free"
and so on.

Since you didnt ask the spybot to scan these items - I dont see an issue.

Well, This account will soon do its part to start filling their database with bad data. The L$2 prims will clearly be textured as warning signs for the honest users of the site, and when touched they will give a notecard explaining the dangers presented by ESC's unauthorized and ill-concieved data mining, as well as directions and a landmark to the opt-out site.

The names will be tantalizing to thieves expecting something for nearly nothing, but I will not use actual "brand names" without explicit permission from the content creators.

And at least one of these decoys will be right next to a security orb, set to TP home any person who gets close to it, with the TOS-compliant 10-second warning. I want to see how often that one gets "bought" in spite of being in a secured area.