Dancepad Bandits

I suspect if these are young people living with their parents (or older people in their parents' basement for that matter) then the electricity issue isn't very relevant. Some people are that skint .. and that sad.

LOL. No they don't. LSL is ENORMOUSLY limited (wanna know how many people are in *any* sim you're not in? can't do it. wanna teleport to a specific set of coordinates? can't do it. wanna join a group? can't do it. etc.). A customized client could easily do all these things and many, many more with a talented enough programmer.
Yeah, provided that theory doesn't rely on LSL, you're onto something. Your mIRC analogy falls flat here because we know that the capabilities of LSL are VERY limited. First difference that springs to mind: You can manipulate your private 1-2-1 conversations on IRC with bots (even using PMs for a private file server or search engine). Now go try and implement that via PMs with LSL. You can't. Go do it with the client source code if you're clever enough because you know what? It *can* be done.

Any smart camping pad owner uses his own bots on the pads, so he pays no one out but still gets his traffic up, even heard cases of people just permanently locking half a dozen alts in a skybox above their club to affect traffic.

In the end they are just pulling themselves if they think people fall for it "oh wow what a top club with all these zombie campers to socialise with."

Not smart to use bots on your own pads.
You always have the risk your bot fails and a real user sits on it

Better to lock the bots in a skybox with nothing to do.

I've seen camping bots sophisticated enough to target dance pads even if they've been moved around, reacting on being unseated forcefully (switching to another free camping device) and reacting on the usual presence checking like a dialog box popping up now and then stating "Click on Yes or be unseated".

Yet on the other hand I've seen bots having severe communication problems... A bot farmer had his malfunctioning bots making dibs on the same dance pad even if other pads were still free.

Furthermore, I've already theoretized about scriptable ways to mislead and/or trap bots to allow legit avatars use the camping devices.

I'm not against camping devices in their entirety. It was my way to get some starting money in SL as well. What I detest are either those club owners overdoing them and - in response to it - either zombies or bots taking up all the slots. A good example for camping/dance pads (at least in my point of view) were those that still require attention from the user every now and then and have a limited payout per user so that nobody can hog such a device for half a day... plus the club owners having an eye for bots and making short work of them.

What's the alternative...? Money trees? Had little luck with them and I think they're even easier to be harvested by bots than camping devices. Teleport in, grab everything that looks like money, teleport to next location, rinse and repeat.

I set myself to camp while i had my dinner and this is what happened. I must point out that i was stood infront of a row of about 8 chairs waiting for a vacancy. One "Gentleman" stood up after earning 96L :-

E***** S*******: excuse me
E***** S*******:: I was trying to reset myself
Me: don't worry, i am just faster than you. Time to give somebody else a chance
E***** S*******:: what kind of smart ass remark was that suppose to be... oh, I see, you're a hedonist
E***** S*******:: shouldn't surprise me then
Me: poor looser


To earn 96L @2L/10 mins = 8 hours. Must have set his alarm!!

Just to add that the chairs in question have a 100L limit then they boot you but you can start camping again straight away so i noticed that others would stand and then camp again before they got booted. Presumably checking that nobody was around.

I know of one island SIM that has set their dance pads to pay you $2 or $3L's for 10 min of dancing but after 10, doesn't matter if you've been dancing for an hour, you're still only going to get your $2 or $3Ls unless you stand up and sit again. Certainly would make having a bot there fairly useless, unless those bots know to stand and re-sit every 10.5 minutes.

Another problem this tactic has caused mirrors what Del just talked about... you get dance pad stalkers. People who walk up to the full dance huts and watch for the first person to stand. As soon as you do they swoop in and take the pad and seem to have no remorse. In Del's case... I feel no pitty for the tool bag that had been there 8 hours and earned $96L's. It downright pissed me off that someone ganked my dance spot for $2L. I didn't have the patience to wait another 10 mins to steal it back from the wench bag and I have a personal moral issue using those tactics on others.

The only time I have ever camped, it was twenty minutes to earn some rather nice eyes at a shop that had just opened. I plunked my avi down, wandered away from the computer, took a shower and came back. I waited until the time was up, got my eyes, stood up and went about the rest of my virtual day.

These days, if I need Lindenage, I just wait until Tuesday. Before I'd signed up, though, I dropped a few bucks out of my PayPal account and that served me nicely for quite some time, especially after playing a very generous sploder at a dance club I used to frequent.

I don't see the point of camping. Truly. A single dollar buys more Lindens than hours of camping can provide.