BOT places! List them here!

One of the creepier sights I’ve seen in SL
This is high above Echo Island and they were all just there dancing.
Of course I have no idea if these are bots at all.

OBTW…I removed the names to protect the innocent bots. Maybe their master didn’t know they were having so much fun and I would hate to get them in trouble

OBTW2...I do enjoy hunting bots...its what i choose to do in SL from time to time. deal with it!

What a disappointment this thread turned out to be. When I read the title, I was looking forward to adding my place to the list, but nobody has added any places

In another way, it's not disappointing, though. If I expected people to learn from this forum, I would be disappointed, but I don't expect them to learn when the truth goes against their personal preferences, so it's neither disappointing nor surprising that the majority of posters in this thread haven't got a clue about bots - ignorant about them - just hot air, and no knowledge. Zaphod knows about bots.

Well, I've written a bot, so I know all about them Okay, probably not, but here's what I do know...

It is primarily the sim and not the client, either human or bot, that decides what information gets passed around and ultimately downloaded to the client. That is, there is only so much that the viewer can request. The rest is offered up by the sim, whether you ask for it or not.

So, people running a thin bot client are reducing the load on their own computer, but they aren't necessarily reducing the load on the sim, the asset server or their own bandwidth. In fact, a full client with a few tweaks can be as efficient on these resources as a thin client. My own client, which is just a modified full client, can reduce draw distance to zero (reducing load on sim and asset server and on my own bandwidth) and turn off 3D graphics (reducing load on my machine).

The most important thing a bot can do to reduce resource use is stand still and reduce its draw distance. In the released client you can only reduce that to 64, but a bot can reduce it to zero. This makes a huge difference. Far less bandwidth used between sim and viewer and far fewer hits on the asset server. I'm assuming most traffic bots do these things.

Since bots tend to sign in and stay signed in, they hit the login queue very infrequently.

There are some things a bot can not reduce. Last I checked a sim sent all sounds in the sim to every avatar, even if the avatar had sound muted or was out of range of any sound sources. I don't know if this is still the case.

It's hard to quantify without seeing LL's server code, but it's highly probable that traffic bots use far fewer resources than human-controlled avatars. Even a human camper would use fewer resources since they tend to stand still.

Phil. Please educate us. Tell us of all the wonderful advantages of bots and their benefits to Second Life and its residents. And by all means list your bot locations. I’d love to pay them a visit.


More efficient at what?...for who?

Hmmmmm, looks like you got off with a lot of hot air... Entlighten us then.... What's the beauty about bots?

Another thing..... I have put up a board, where all can come and add a picture og the places with bos, also a note if you like. Come have a look at more than 50 bots, very nicely protected by invissible prims, so it's ricky to get to them... I had a longer conversations with the uy, you can see his name on the board too, but he couldn't tell me any reason to use so many bots... Come and have a look or add your own
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Denmark/45/66/29

For those who find it difficult to accept truth when it goes against their personal preferences...

1. Concurrency does *not* cause the system to buckle.

2. Bots don't prevent anyone from logging in during the periods when logins need to be disabled. They don't cause logins to be restricted - people-operated avatars do.

3. In the past, I've offered to prove that bots don't cause any noticeable lag, but nobody took me up on it, simply because those who want bots to be bad don't want to know the truth. Silly huh?

4. If you want to know the truth, don't listen to your preferences. They don't make any sense.

5. Get on with your own second life, and leave others to get on with theirs.

the one in pink is hot!

can I have her name please?

Not all bots are equal.

Landbots, and perhaps some other kinds of bots, place extraordinary demands on the services (through database queries, and maybe extreme teleporting).

Camping bots use up sim resources in order to game the traffic/popularity metrics, and this has very bad effects for neighbors in the same mainland sim. (It's similar to when someone opens a very popular and/or high script usage operation next door to your mainland parcel. And it turns out that in this scenario, the bots and scripts go together.) There's a larger issue here, but it's proximally a bot problem.

There are also griefing bots that are used to deliberately disrupt things and harass people; it goes without saying that those are "problem bots".

There are also some perfectly reasonable uses of bots that should not represent any problem at all. There are some things, like automated store attendants, and messaging, that can best (or only) be done by an avatar. These kinds of bots probably impact the system less than a human operator would. In any event, they are just doing the jobs that humans don't want to do. I don't see any problem with them.

Blaming bots for the instability of the grid and the deplorable quality of service that Second Life delivers is simplistic, and most probably wrong. But there are some kinds of bots that are real problems.

Nobody knows how many bots there are, what kinds, and what their impact is. Linden Lab pretends to know something about it, but I don't believe they really do. The company also has various adgendas that cause me not to believe even their statements about how many bots there are, overall. "Bots" is a nuanced collection of issues, intertwined with technology and policy considerations.

If they got rid of the traffic popularity system, that would immediately eliminate the camping bot issue. That would probably benefit nearby land owners in terms of stability and performance. If they got rid of land bots and their ilk, that would probably help things, too, I bet. If they simply got rid of all bots, I think that would have negative consequences. But I'm not sure offhand how to even reliably identify bots; I see Turing test issues, idle timeout issues, technological warfare, and other problems looming when you look down this rabbit hole.

In the end, if Linden Lab addressed the issue much at all, it's not clear that the overall benefit (to the grid or to viability of SL itself) would be significantly positive.

Not a very satisfying answer; Sorry.

Why would I want to educate you - again? Haven't you read all the bot threads here? I'll tell you something though. Bots are a great benefit to me, and I don't care about the people who are against them. It's not my job to make them happy, is it? Good enough?

[added]
Feel free to visit them. They aren't difficult to find

Bots serve a purpose and bots aren't going to go away.

However when people can't login, it's only natural they're going to blame bots, especially as there are known concurrency issues.

When people can't get into a sim because it's full of course they're going to be annoyed about bots being there.

Filling a sim to the extent that people can't get in, is absolutely out of order. It may be natural for people to blame bots for taking places that real people should have, during disabled login periods, but we are supposed to use our brains, and all the evidence that has ever been put forward in this forum has shown that bots are not the cause, and that they don't hog spots while real people can't get in. Some types of bots add to the reason for disabled logins - those that hit the asset server, such and land bots - but I believe that th vast majority of bots are for traffic, and they don;t hit the server at all.

With all due respect Zaphod, you're making a number of assumptions which have a pretty shaky chance of being true.

1. SL uses a streaming push protocol to the clients. These clients still get sim information, even being thin.
2. Although improved a lot by Havok 4, any avatar (whether bot or human) consists of a full physics model, and is impacting the sim in this manner. When they're in walls, they even can cause constant collisions.
3. The 3d culling (when in walls) or LOD (when high up) will hide most 3d information sent to the other clients (the humans) about the bots in a sim. Still, a significant amount of information has to be processed and sent to the clients concerning the bots. (Animations changes, clothing information, names info etc. etc.) This information is probably also transferred between all the bots with the sim as central server. (Although this is an assumption, not knowing the finer details of SL transfer protocols in this respect.)
4. Any avatar still requests their clothing, shape and inventory basics on login, even when run on a thin client, so they still hit the asset servers and database.

I do agree on two points you make. One that bots are only a result of a deeper lying problem with traffic. And the second assumption, although only hinted at, that bots have multiple very functional and useful applications within SL.

This is not my point though. My point is that they do affect the overall grid performance negatively. As do all avatars. If they wouldn't, we wouldn't need the grid resources in the first place
I agree that the significance of this impact is debatable and should require some objective study. (And objectivity means: NOT assuming they don't impact the grid and base your reasoning on that...)

In my opinion, any use of items negatively affecting the grid, in whatever amount, only to increase traffic in unethical ways is doing damage.

After periods where SL is down, or periods where concurrency is high, the login servers queue the login requests. If bots are logged off, many use a cycle to relog. This means the fill up the login queue as much as humans do.
The end result is that humans have to wait for bots to log in. So in that sense they are hogging the login server queue.

Again, in how far this has an impact on people's experience is debatable.

I'm just trying to make a point that the 'bot defendants' are as guilty of blatant assumption as the bot haters.

If a bot never sends the server any AgentUpdate packets (those tell the server where the client wants your avatar to move, and are normally sent about ten per second) then the avatar never becomes physical. This is why some bots are phantom.

But bots don't join the login queue. Just like all avatars that are logged in when logins are disabled, they don't get logged, so that's not a problem. If SL is down for a while, then everyone joins the login queue - people and bots. Everyone gets in quite quickly, so it isn't a problem either.

I doubt it very much.


Point taken. Apparently we're still using UDP for a great number of tasks where TCP would be more efficient. Almost 2 years ago, Cory said they were moving to more efficient protocol, TCP. This evidently has not yet happened, to any considerable extent.


Do you have any data which shows just how much of an impact this is having on grid performance overall, much less the isolated simulators within which this is really a problem?


This sounds all about agent presence, which of course given that we're still using UDP to convey such information, it is obviously very inefficient. Again, my bad, but on the other hand, where are the costs for this inefficient communication method applied and realized?

But those queries are few, and quickly served. It's highly dependant upon proximity and number of agents within "presence proximity" to the bots or people logging in. Not something that can be quantified in any practically usable way. This is, however, probably the biggest hit on the asset system that bots present. Good to point it out.



Exactly. In some cases they most certainly affect grid performance overall. In many other cases they do not. I just don't believe that the majority of grid issues and login restrictions have anything to do with bots. The performance impact is likely negligable. It's astounding that Second Life still seems to rely so heavily on UDP, but given that it has to service so many agents today, it might still be the only viable option. The question there is whose cost is it? I doubt it's Linden Lab's, or that it has any noticeable impact on the average Joe's experience in world.

Objectivity, by the way, means (at least partially) not assuming anything, one way or the other, that cannot reasonably be assumed and factored into the analysis as a reliable constant. Your definition seems to be one sided.

Cheers, and thanks for the respectful debate. I might be proven wrong on several counts, but at least it will have been done respectfully, without insult to character.

I thought the interest list was push and stuff like textures was pull.. Seems like that's the way it should be since the cache is all client-side.


Again, at least for inventory, I think that's _mostly_ a pull operation since the inventory is cached locally.

Hey Zaphod...

You keep asking for peoples "data". Ya know when i worked for MSN i ran into your type all the time, always throwing back at peoples faces asking "wheres your data". Well, i work in the same business as you...

so Zaphod...

WHERE IS YOUR DATA?

Well? I'm waiting on your contacting Linden Labs and asking them to give you all the data they have on the entire asset server, database cluster, routing cluster and server cluster.

Lets take a look at this for a second folks...

1: Zaphod will NEVER be able to back his side up, he doesnt have the "data"

2: On the flip side neither do the folks who are argueing against Zaphod cause they can hardly walk into LL's head office and ask them to hand over all the data they have pertaining to network traffic.

Its networkers like you Zaphod that drove MSN search into the ground...never willing to bend or budge from their perspective always thinking "i am right, you are wrong".

Bot farms now look more like ghost parties than zombie gatherings...

As long as bots are used for deception SL will be a third class, crooked environment.

For me it has nothing to do with concurrency, although I've felt bot lag, lag happens anywhere there are a large group of avatars. There are probably many more bots in SL then anyone knows.

Though I don't agree with a number of things Zaphod says, I think you're going a little far here, Victor.

There may not be performance stats available on how the various back end bits of SL are impacted by bots but SL isn't exactly a mystery - there's lots of info around on how things work. The various mailing lists, AWG, Linden office hours, open source viewer, etc, etc.

I don't know why people always get so worked up about traffic/camp bots in particular. They're certainly sleazy but everything I've seen and read and talked to people about leads me to think that they're really a tiny part of the problem.

If you think basic traffic/camp bots make any kind of serious contribution to the grids problems, I encourage you to participate in one of the many ways that are available to learn more about how SL works.

Unless you yourself have data, what in the world is your point? My type? You mean the type who insists that people show proof to back up their claims? If you notice, I'm really not making any groundbreaking claims here. I'm simply asking others who are to show their own cards. And once again I guess I also have to ask (which I guess is too much to ask in this sleazy place) for people to be courteous in the process.


It is the burden of those making the claims to show proof. I would be happy to see what information I can find by making contact with Linden Lab. At the very least, Victor, get the name right. It aids what little credibility you have. In the meantime I will continue to research this, and provide whatever "data" I find, whether it supports your position (whatever the fuck that is) or mine. Fair enough?


Yes, let's.


But I have the same anecdotal evidence that you do. My experience simply gives me cause to interpret it quite a bit differently, and perhaps more objectively than you do.


It's hardly necessary to walk into Linden Lab's head office, although I've been there, to obtain the data necessary to form an opinion on this. It's right in front of us. Yes, it's very subjective, but that doesn't preclude a somewhat objective analysis of it.


This statement simultaneously baffles and amuses me. Thanks, I think.

True. I'd like to take the opportunity here to mention that I understand and agree that not all bots are deployed with good intent. There are asshats who use them for malicious purposes. But it is true that they aren't going to go away.


There were "known concurrency issues" long before bots showed up on the scene. And the issues with concurrency are really nothing more than probability problems, insofar as the probability that asset server saturation rises as the number of concurrent sessions rises.


Of course. I can offer no argument to the contrary. I can say however, and quite factually, that people would be equally annoyed by human controlled campers if they were there in place of bots. It just happens that the opposite is true today. The problem is not who is occupying the camping slots. The problem is that the camping slots exist at all.

The problem IS bots, Zap.

Perhaps I shouldn't have said "camperbots", because a bot sitting in a camping chair is not the correct image. That's bad too...but economically, not from a performance standpoint. Camperbots are a drain on the economy, letting their operators leech away Lindens while putting nothing back in.

What I should have said was "trafficbots". I'm thinking of the the skyboxes or pools or hidden rooms full of 40 or more bots, just sitting there to build up a place's traffic numbers. THAT'S a drain on the sim's resources and a definite source of lag.

Umm, actually you're right in a way, without bots there would be people camping, but with bots there are the same number of people trying to find camping spots and bots filling them.
It doesn't matter if 100 bots would have tho logout to let one person in, it's just extrodinarily greedy and stupid when the grids crashing and transactions failing to cling to keeping your bots online to make more sales by bumping traffic or hammering the crap out of the asset server as they TP continually from sim to simlooking for land to grab or empty camping pads.
The issue is not bots, but morso the fact that LL allows people to run infinate numbers of them for free.