Bot Farms for Traffic?

How many people do you think use this approach and do you think it should be tolerated or not?

Here is what I am talking about:

I was doing a check on the Popular list of the 20 sims on it to see how many people were campers. I went to each sim and manually counted the best I could the number of campers. Out of 1872 avatars 1172 were in camping chairs. That is about 63%. However most of the ones NOT in chairs were standing by chairs waiting for them or have been kicked from them. Out of the 20 sims on the list 2 of them had no campers I could find and looked like people were actually doing stuff. That accounted for 191 avatars.

Now when I was at one sim I could not find the numbers of people that showed on the map. So I put on my flight script and up I went to see what was in the air. To my surprise I found about 50 avatars standing on a invisible platform doing absolutely nothing. No camping, no talking and no moving. I took a snapshot just for the hell of it. Then all of the sudden they all were GONE! This happen with in second. I took another snapshot. Both snapshots have the time on them proving they all logged off at the same time. I waited for a while and sure enough they all logged back in at the same time!. This is obviously someone with a server farm running multiple clients on multiple computers and has them scripted to log on and off at the same time.

Here is some pics:



Later I logged back in to see if they where there again and sure enough. Even had a new bunch in the corner.

wish I had the wherewithall to do this and boost my traffic too.
A great idea.

Looks like a pretty disgusting practice to me. As long as LL continues to use the worthless traffic numbers these type of things are going to exist.

Listings should be the same system as the classifieds….same as RL

“Pay for placement”

Who gets paid??

Campers or Linden lab?

That first pic is actually quite scary, like an abbatoir for avatars....

2 lots away from my home, across the border to the next region, is this guy running a small furniture shop and he does this with about 15-25 of these bots... all huddled together in a small box 500m in the air. Even though the avitars aren't in my sim, the lag caused from that many child agents is really noticible (class 4 sim). I keep wondering why I see "avitar abuse" on the blotter, and why doing this kind of thing doesn't seem to qualify (he's been reported numerous times by nearly all the neighbors). I mean, they're cheating/gaming the system to gain an unfair advantage, AND they're wasting valuable region resources for all.

This is why the other worlds do not allow more than a few connections from the same person. Most don't even allow you to create more than one avatar. I can understand 2-4 for people with roommates and husband and wife type of situation but anything over that should be axed.

I blogged about my feelings on the popular places tab a few weeks ago here. http://www.your2ndplace.com/node/554
That category needs to be altered or gotten rid of. All the popular list shows new players is where to camp, or apparently who has the best bot campers. I think it gives new people a sad view of second life.

you know.... this whle camping bot thing spiralled out of control te minuted they quit limiting it to 5 alts per email.

makes you wonder WHO is secretly getting the profits from such decisions.... and which of those is Nick Portabello mushroom's bots trying to camp his way back into the black. LOL

limiting the number of bots to emails is pretty worthless anyway. I can sign up for dozens of different emails in a day.

Dare I say it? Yes I must....there needs to be payment verification on all avs. Each primary av should only be allowed a certain number of alts. Problem solved regarding the bots.

Again, the easiest way, however, is to eliminate the entire worthless traffic report. Then there'd likely be no need for bots or campers at all.

so it makes the system slightly crooked ...... thats not a suprise really is it, the whole search on SL is broken. I for one can not imagine HOW somebody can get away with paying 100,000 a WEEK on advertising in SL *gasp*


Theres no easy option....

I wonder about that as well.

Second life should only count premium members in traffic

Its better than completely eliminating traffic as it still does show you which places people visit since premiums visit most places in the same ratio as non premiums so a place with many premiums is popular to everyone.

Only counting premiums eliminates using bots and campers to cheat the traffic system since premium members rarely camp or are bots.

Alt farms. I hate them.


"What are the consequences of creating or using illegitimate alts?

When we find people with accounts that have not been paid for and are in violation of our policies, we may, at our discretion and in alignment with our Terms of Service, take any or all of the following actions:

- Prevent them from creating additional accounts
- Close some or all of their accounts until payment is made
- Close all of their accounts permanently"

That's actually a great idea.

This is just sickening, and confirms what I suspected about there being as many possibly more bots then people online, wonder when bot runners will finally work out the lag they are causing by leeching the system is driving people away as nearly as fast as new bot owners are racking up more bots.
It may be a surprise to them that bots don't buy anything other than land. Between them and adfarms, all is lost.

Trust Humanity to ruin our first attempt at a virtual world with greed and ugliness.

Bring On SL 2, New Grid, New Company Name, real rules, roads, land zoning, just wipe the servers and start again.

It can't be hurting them, or they would have stopped doing it by now.

I also like the idea of counting only premium members for traffic.

BRILLIANT !!!!!!!
It's the kind of thing that would be *very easy* for LL to code. No need to write a replacement system.
It should kill the abuse of Search overnight.


Shout it from the rooftops!!




In the meantime ----
Go to that box and push the avatars into arrangements that make up appropriate words / shapes. Take pics.

It seems Argent Stonecutter never migrated this to the JIRA (and I can find no other proposal for the same thing) so I've added one here:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-792

Excellent. I just voted for it. As you stated in JIRA, it's not the perfect solution but a quick easy temporary fix until the entire problem can be resolved.

I don't shop at places that do this. I've also found that there's generally a good reason these places use bots: They're usually so hollow and tasteless no one would ever bother going there without the misleading traffic boost.

Why not limit it to payment info used? These are people that actually put money into the system, and would reflect a broader base of shoppers.

I like the idea of any alts must be registered to a paying member with a cap as to how many alts one can have. I know I couldn't do without my alts to either test products or just "get away" from my second life...

The only search that I see that uses the traffic is the places tab and who really looks for places to shop in that tab? I'll bet most people use the All or Classified tabs to look for places to shop. I use the All tab myself as the Classified tab just shows who can afford to pay the most to be higher on the list. So far the All tab hasn't let me down when looking for something.

Cortex - you have something there! Let's hope the Lindens read this and finally make a wise business decision.

I`m kind of confused... Isnt it the premium members who are doing this alt farm crap? Because don`t you need to be premium to own (main)land to begin with?


Or do you mean it should only count the dwell of premium consumers?


Sorry, I`m not catching on...