BOT places! List them here!

Hi all.

As a little follow up on my last tread from yesterday, I thought that we can show, how many places uses bots. LL says less than 10%, I'll bet it's way more.
Right now, I'm at Dragonfly Design right here: http://slurl.com/secondlife/DragonFly%20Oasis/39/145/736 where there's 41 bots. You have to move the camera to the walls to see them, but they're there.
Know a BOT place could spell it different too but I've better not, haha.

List it here, so we can show LL and so many more, that don't think it's a problem!

Regards Dino

i dont know where they are...and i dont worry myself about it..or spend time looking in walls really...

I guess that makes me weird....hurrah for weirdoism!

Fai x

I have a bot that sits in my land store office to send out group invitations. You can find her in Steamboat sim. Her name is EmmaLeigh Tolsen.

Wow. Talk about an exercise in futility.

The bots, if they exist in such large numbers, are actually a benefit. If they are indeed causing problems with grid stability and usability, then they are simultaneously raising the bar for the developers, and quite possibly accelerating the process of improving and scaling the grid by exposing weaknesses and vulnerabilities that might not be exposed under human-user load alone.

Personally, I've never had any negative experience in-world that I could honestly attribute directly to the presence of bots, and I doubt that anyone else has either. Seriously.

Zap, I'd say that the camperbot farms create a "negative experience", as they lag the sims they are in so badly.

Other than that, I have no problems with folks using bots as fashion models, greeters, or other forms of slave labor...although I think it would be a public service to hire a noob at camping rates to do this.

I can sorta agree with you on the camperbot thing, but only to a certain extent. The underlying problem there is camping, not necessarily who (or what) is doing the camping. This problem didn't manifest itself when bots showed up, it has been here for years.

Hmn... wouldn't this go against of the "naming names" rules on this forum?

Then I guess you don't get around SL much and/or just ignore threads like this:
/327/3d/271262/1.html

There are a few DJ's going around that have their own little "Fan Club" they say they will bring to events to get the job when they are just zombie bots they are running. Not to mention several clubs that use zombie bots to make it look like people are there.. Then the places that advertise camping but have their own bots in the camp devices.



Saying bots are a good thing to load the grid is asinine. That is what the BETA grid is for. People pay good money for SL to run smooth, especially premium members, and if any of their problems in SL is because a large percentage of the concurrency is bots then that most certainly is a negative experience. SL would get a lot more REAL people to stress the grid if the grid was usable after 60K are online. Bots are hogging up spots were real people would be if SL ran smoother.


But to each their own I guess....

I do get around SL a bit. I also don't assign much value to a post or a thread whereing the posters make claims that they can't be bothered to support with factual evidence.


It's already been successfuly argued that not enough PEOPLE, much less BOTS, inhabit the beta grid to conduct sufficient load testing.

And what difference does it really make whether it's people stressing the grid or bots? The grid is still being "stressed" afterall.

And you have given no factual evidence to support the assertion that bots are hogging up spots where real people would be if SL ran smoother. What does that even mean? That bots are somehow displacing humans? I don't buy it.

And people pay good money for SL "as is, no warranties written or implied". That it run smoothly is merely an expectation, not a guarantee. That it does not run smoothly because of bots is nothing but an unfounded assertion.

Your logic is very strange... If someone can't get into SL because there are bots on the grid then yes, people are being displaced. If people CAN login but can't play smoothly because of to much concurrency because of bots on the grid then yes, they are being displaced and will probably not return.

You first say it is a good thing for bots to stress the grid then say there would be no more people to play SL to take the place of those bots if they disappeared. Strange logic. If LL wanted to stress the BETA or LIVE grid they could very easily setup their own BOT farms with thousands of bots all running scripts and macros. They obviously do not want bot stressing their grids...

If there wasn't a monetary value to bots they wouldn't be there. Every time I see bots it IS A NEGATIVE EXPERIENCE. So speak for yourself not everyone else.

Lets not forget the principle of it. Legit business's shouldn't need bot to increase their traffic score to make their place look busy.

You ask for proof yet you say you travel SL... If you travel SL the proof is obvious.

He reminds me of a former minister of hiways in my province who was pulled over doing over 90 mph in a 50 zone... he said he was "just testing the banking" ...... you know.. stress testing the roads for the greater good of all!

Until you can prove that at any time, ever, even one person was denied access to the grid because bots were on the grid, I'll continue to take the more rational view that the few times they've had to disable logins have had NOTHING AT ALL to do with concurrency, but rather with load problems on the asset server, which bots probably very rarely even touch.


Huh? "then say there would be no more people to play SL to take the place of those bots if they disappeared." <-- I said that? When? Where?

The only way LL could possibly load test on a scale equivelent to agni would be to duplicate it, with the same hardware, same number of users, same asset database with the same number of assets. It's not possible to any remotely practical extent. The only reasonable option is to find the weaknesses on agni, while it's being used, and fix them. I assure you they don't care much that a small percentage of connections to agni happen to be bots.



It is a negative experience every time you see bots because you've made the choice to demonize them for reasons that only exist in your head.

Legit businesses probably shouldn't have needed campers to increase their traffic either. Bots are not the core problem there, but rather the behavior of the business owners who employ such measures to artificially boost traffic. Bots did not create this problem, and there is little evidence that suggests they've made it any worse. So in that sense, no, the proof is not obvious. What is obvious is that sims are still being lagged to hell in a handbasket because morons think it necessary to populate their parcels with 40 agents. This problem is not new and unique to the advent of bots.

... dude. any given sim has a maximum number of avatars allowed on it. usually that number is 60. the sim owner can configure that number in the estate tools, even though 60 is more or less the maximum that a sim can handle.

now, imagine, if you will, a bot farm with 40 bots, to generate fake traffic. these bots use 40 of those 60 logins. meaning?
yes, right, you won a cigar, only 20 "real" people can enter that sim at any given time.

q.e.d.

if you want more proof, ask the owners of a club called sammy's and brittas playhouse, they had guests complain about being unable to go to events there until they got rid of a botfarmer on the same sim...

Dude, and I submit once again that the problem IS NOT BOTs. Before bots, there were campers. What's the bloody difference? If asshats didn't create these camping opportunities to begin with, there would be no issue. You're overlooking the core problem here, and blaming bots for the stupid behavior of land owners.

There are some good uses for bots, like as store models, but most of them are simply used to deceive people into believing a location is popular when it's really not. Whether or not they cause resource or concurrency problems on the grid is unclear, but how they're mostly used - to create a fraudulent impression of popularity - isn't debatable. It's a sleazy tactic, and it's worthy of naming and shaming imho.

This is where I'm supposed to bring up landbots, right?

Camp/traffic bots are pretty harmless, IMO. Dishonest? Yes. Still mostly harmless in terms of impact on the grid, though.

But any time you hear about LL having to shut down search, think about how a landbot must work in order to show up within a second or so of setting your land for sale.

Bots are insidious in nature. A single store owner can see himself using bots and think no harm no foul here it's just a couple of bots to help bring up traffic. A few bots on a sim won't cause too much lag or shut out legitimate users of a sim. But taken as a whole with thousands of store owners each employing 'just a few bots' the number swell to what did LL say? 10 percent of the population? To the point where bots help push the database server into overload and SL refuses to let people log in. So yes. I guess that I haven't experienced in-world where a bot has truly ruined my experience because the only time they do ruin my experience is when they stop me from logging in.

With all due respect Bree, you're making a number of assumptions which have a pretty shaky chance of being true. There is zero evidence that bots have any impact at all on the database load. It's in fact more reasonable to theorize that bots have less impact on the asset server than the average human controlled client. Think "army of camping bots written specifically for the purpose of camping".. These are likely very scaled down, barebones clients, with no codified interest in the world around them.

During the times that login restrictions are imposed, again, it is generally due to asset server issues, not necessarily concurrent logins. It just happens that one way to mitigate the load is to restrict logins, or in worse cases, force people out. If we're knocking on the door during this time, a thousand bots leaving the grid at once doesn't necessarily create an opportunity for us to get in. The grid is locked until the problem is fixed.

Given the distributed architecture of the grid, a few bots here and a few bots there, even if adding up into the thousands overall, is not likely to negatively impact the overall grid performance. Particularly so if few (if any) are actually doing any database queries.

All we really have to support the "bots are sucking the life out of SL" idea are misguided bits of anecdotal evidence. I honestly believe that more reasonable, objective analysis could very easily point to the opposite being true.

You're absolutely right about that. I stand corrected. I don't really know how seriously landbots impact search performance, but it's certainly probable that they do to some extent. I think they are an even bigger social issue than they are a technical one.

Out of curisity WHY would you spend your time in sl hunting bots from sim to sim?
Is your sl life THAT dull? LOL
Man if all you can do in sl is hunt bots go back to WoW you'll have more fun lol

Well.... We were talking about what's wrong with SL, and one of the things is bots. Please show me, where I spend my time by chacing bots. I work on an island, where I spend a lot of time building, servicing the residents and take care of my shops, not that I have to answer for my doing in SL, and esceciallity not for you, who I don't know at all.
Try to get facts, before you try to make an ass of others... It goes right back at you!

BTW, just so you get a little more to know, I don't play WoW.....

Oh....... Also, don't you have anything else to do, besides making these absolutely useless replies???? Just of curiosity.....

I am going to caulk this up to you either being ignorant or have a vested interest in bots. I am not going to continue a discussion with someone ignoring the obvious because he doesn't understand how newtworks work or is using bots to his advantage. Either way you are not worth my time. Try learning how networks and servers work. You seem to think 60K connections uses the same resources as 1 connection.

Anyway have a nice SL. I don't play SL to talk about stuff I do daily at work in the forums.

Y'know I have been able to login all the time for the past few weeks so I don't have much of a problem now. Crosses fingers. I probably won't be able to login now that I've said that.

I have a project underway to determine just what all those green dots on the map are up to:

http://greendots.typepad.com/

It's not exciting reading. When I've done this for a while I'll have to come up with some kind of summary for what I've found. I also have automated monitoring and reporting tools in the works, but realistically not the time to finish them any time soon.

I am neither ignorant, nor do I have any vested interest in bots. I happen to have made a fair living working with networks and servers almost every day of my life for the last 20 years. Not only are YOU the one making ignorant assumptions about bots, and how they may or may not impact various performance metrics of the grid, you are now also personally attacking me for having a fundamentally different (and probably better informed) opinion on the subject than your own.

At no time did I even come close to suggesting that 60,000 connections "uses the same resources as 1". So please, stop telling me I've said things I haven't said. I'm keenly aware of the impact this level of concurrency can **potentially** have. I am also extremely skeptical that the impact has much at all to do with bots. The average camper bot just isn't written to do a whole lot of anything, except sit on a connection. When the asset server gets heavily loaded such that it starts to give way, it's much more likely that it's Brenda on a shoe shopping spree than it is bots.

And frankly, if it weren't bots camping, it would be people camping. There's no difference, other than the bots happen to be vastly more efficient.

You're obstinately holding onto a position you're incapable of supporting. So you resort to getting personal and flinging insults at me. Yeah, you have a nice SL too.