BOT places! List them here!

Sounds more exciting than camping or those people whose idea of logging into SL is visiting their accounts pages to transfer cash out.

You have no excuse for that statement. It's not as though you missed the previous discussions. You are totally wrong, of course, but that's nothing new. As a matter of fact, you are trying to swim against the flow of opinion in this forum, and making no headway. However...

Let's see you you put your evidence where your mouth is. Now don't back off just because you can't do it. It's a public challenge that I make to you personally. You made a statement that you claim as a fact - now back it up. Refusal to do so will be seen as you walking away with your tail between your legs - well and truly beaten.

On the other side, in the past I've offered to put my evidence where my mouth is, and the offer is still open. I can prove that the type of bots you mentioned have no noticeable effect on a sim's performance - no lag. What can you show, let alone prove? You should think before you post. It's like I said earlier - all mouth and no evidence - not even any discernable thinking.

If you can provide a good reason why bots are bad for the sim or grid, then I'll remove my 20, but I'm perfectly entitled to have 20 avatars logged in simultaneously (21 when I'm in as well), and as long as I'm entitled to it, I'll continue to have them all in, and I'll sit back and laugh at you personally when you can't log in, and mine are all in.

If you ever worked for MSN, then you should know why MSN search didn't make it. Everyone in the search engine business knows. Perhaps being inside gave you too much of a diffferent view of reality. I'll enlighten you, if I may...

MSN search was too late on the scene, and it arrived with nothing noticeably new. It was too little, too late. When it arrived, the popularity horse had well and truly bolted. I'll explain.

In the past, search engines were not money-makers to any significant degree. They tried all sorts of ways to make money. They generally turned themselves into portals, but it was still not a worthwhile money-making game, and MSN wasn't interested. Instead, they used other engines' results, and didn't have a search of their own - just like Yahoo!. Then Google came along, and was different. It was different because it was clean - not a portal - and it's results were a *lot* better in terms of relevancy than any other engine of the time. It became very popular - the #1 search engine. Then they added AdWords, and search suddenly became hugely profitable. So much so that others tried to enter the game, using Google's model. Yahoo! entered, and has done ok because of their existing popularity at the time. Some time later, MSN entered, and failed. But none of the entries arrived with anything noticeably different, and they failed to make any significant inroads into Google's popularity. The MSN site and search (using other engines' results) wasn't popular like the Yahoo! site was, so it didn't have that to help it.

That's why MSN search is a failure. It wasn't rationally thinking people like Zaphod who caused the failure of MSN search. It could never have succeeded without bringing something noticeably new to search, which it didn't do. MSN invited me on an all expenses paid visit to Seattle, as part of a worldwide team of search engine experts, to help when they were creating their engine, so I do know what I'm talking about.

Another reason for the failure is the name, MSN. So many people are so against Microsoft that popularity is an uphill battle for them. People don't realise how much Microsoft (Bill Gates) did for us all, and how much we all owe to them. They didn't intend to be such knights in shining armour - they were just going about their business of making money - but we are all beneficiaries. On the other side, people think Google is absolutely wonderful, and can't do any wrong. Those people are wrong too. Google has done, and still does, some very unscrupulous things. They are not the super-clean, super-good outfit that people imagine. Both of the popular views are wrong, but both views are very popular, and that's what counts.

Incidentally, I'm not saying that Microsoft doesn't do any wrong, or that Google doesn't do any right. I'm only talking about the popular views, and how they affect the success and failure of their search services. An example of the vastly different levels of popularity is what was known as the "Yellow Peril" (before either Google or Microsoft got involved in it). It is done by programmes that are known as "scumware", that are installed in people's computers without them knowing about it. Microsoft was talking about adding something to their IE browser that would turn normal text in other people's webpages into links when viewed in IE. That's what the Yellow Peril scumware does, and it would have been such a *very* wrong thing to do. Interfering with other people's webpages like that is *not* what scrupulous companies should be doing. The outcry against it was such that Microsoft backed off and didn't do it. A couple of years later, Google decided to do the same thing, but the outcry was very small, and only from the relatively few people in the search business. And so people who use the Google toolbar may not realise that it alters parts of some of the webpages that they view - very unscrupulously. It demonstrates the popularity differences between the two companies, and how Microsoft has an uphill struggle to succeed when success depends on general popularity.

Whatever about the sim drain, I would question your use of "entitled" in this case.

In order to be entitled to (have the right to) log in 21 accounts simultaneously, the TOS/CS should be giving you that right.
There are indications that LL does not approve of people running large numbers of accounts -- nevermind logging them in simultaneously.
I understand that LL have had limits on the number of accounts that can be linked to a single email address. That would be a clear intent on their part to limit things. Creating new email addresses in order to work around that would be less than clean-handed.

I have an alt that I log in simultaneously from time to time in order to test things. I can see good uses for single or small numbers of bots.
I can understand that LL would rather try to rely on people's sense of decency rather than come out with some hard-and-fast rules that would be abused by barrack-room lawyers, and possible would restrict good innovation.

In relation to sim resources:
If people can have bots on their land, then the numbers of avatars on a parcel should be limited in proportion to the land that they own in the sim.
I've had the experience of having land in two sims where a parcel owner has filled the sim with a combination of bots and warm bodies.





You are having a bad day? Got out of bed on the wrong side?

If you really do mean what you wrote above, then I believe that any reasonable person would consider you to be a person of low worth.

I actually asked LL about it not too long ago, and the reply was that it is not against the ToS, so we are all entitled to log in as many avs as we like. If we all did it, then the ToS would probably be changed, but not many people do it.

Filling a sim is wrong, and will be dealt with by LL. I own half the sim, so I guess my numbers are in keeping with your idea. But I also have the number of avs in the sim on the bot's screen all the time, and I remove some bots when the sim is getting fullish - I watch very carefully when it goes over 30 avs. After all, I do need room for people to get into the store.

I got up too early - middle of my night Lindal is someone who has shown herself to be very dislikeable, so I'm happy enough saying that to her at any time of day or night. But many people in this forum already think that I am a person of low worth, and I don't mind adding more reasons for them to think it. There are people here who I also think are of low worth, and Lindal is one of them.

I still don't think bots are the core problem here Lindal. They are simply being used in the same way as campers. To artificially increase dwell, and improve search ranking.

So then the problem really is dwell, which Linden Lab have yet to sufficiently address, even though they've been talking about it for more than a year now. But again, in these scenarios, we're talking about local resource consumption for the most part. Not grid wide bottlenecks. Like everything else in SL that can be exploited for personal gain/advantage, people will exploit it. I still hold that the problem boils down to behavior. The value of dwell has been spoiled for those who play fairly, by those who don't. So across the board, it's worthless. Get rid of it, and you probably get rid of 90% of the FUD regarding bots.

I suppose it's yet another case of LL doing the headless chicken dance, with the left hand barely aware that there is another hand somewhere in the vicinity, never mind knowing what it might be doing.

That reply you got from Anonymous Linden is a classic kick to touch.

If that is policy, then the policy must logically be that any email address and/or payment info can sign up an unlimited number of accounts.
Is this the case?


Who knows? Not even LL appear to know.


This says that there is a charge for alts, but appears to be no longer correct.


I've seen a version of the TOS that had a (For example five accounts per user" tacked onto that.

Edit to add:
However.... "Linden reserves the right to limit the number of accounts that ....."
This means that you don't have "the right" to sign up more than one account. It is simply that LL currently allow to happen. If it were a right, they couldn't take it away.
In practical terms though, the current effect is the same.
Edit end

It does appear that there is a hard limit of 5 accounts from the comments in this JIRA
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-2289




But then.... *which* TOS should be read?
http://secondlife.com/app/help/rules/tos.php ?
http://secondlife.com/corporate/tos.php ? -- a completely different document!





Are there other differing current TOS pages?

Are we allowed to select a TOS that suits us?
Groucho Marks: "These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others"



Overall, there appears to be a corporate intent on LL's part to limit the number of accounts that a unique individual can have (leaving aside the question of concurrent login of such accounts).
We then pick and choose our Lindens and/or a particular TOS in order to find a combination that does not explicitly tell us NOT to do something.

Phil’s just a grouchy bot.

Wait I get it. Its more then ironic that someone selling low prim furniture be such a supporter of bots. Phil you are brilliant. Support hogging resources with your zombie bots so others are forced to make the prim sacrifice.

But wouldn’t you rather have 20 potential paying customers on line?



Oh I guess not.

The same could be said of any popular location in any given sim. If a free sex place moves into your sim there are going to be issues, the difference there is that you have 40 different people occupying the slots. That's why bots are blamed for problems, because 1 person is using multiple slots.

Sounds almost like a LL bot - since LL has decided that bots aren't a problem and they control grid-wide data, even as they mislabel it ("profits" or don't explain the algorithm ("land prices are L$ 7.25/m and holding", saying that we have to rely on data, not anecdotes, is at best disingenuous. Most of us don't join SL to go around and gather statistics. And if they don't come from LL, the stats are no better than anecdotes. And so, back full circle we come....

What I have observed, repeatedly in one particular location, are newbies asking questions of a group of camping bots and getting frustrated. In one, the manager (who was actually throwing the bots out) told the newbie that they were talking to bots and would get no answer. The other, another real avatar (pardon the phrase) beat me to it while I was checking the avs on the walkway (all no groups, no SL, no RL, no response).

Bots do degrade the experience, no less than if you walked into a bar in RL and no one talked to you - or anyone else. You don't come back and you find another, friendlier bar (unless, of course, you are simply looking for a place to drink to oblivion). Well, a lot of the former friendly places in SL are either empty or full of bots but still lifeless. Some are dismantled and the emptiness is spreading from the center. Believe what you will, a sim of bots is not equivalent to a sim of avatars with humans behind them. If you think it is, then you have a different impression of what SL is about. And if you agree, then you can't believe that they provide equivalent SL experiences for others.

I really wonder how long some places that were relatively full of real avatars (with a smattering of bots) last year are going to last now. I have a folder with a list of landmarks that I check briefly weekly, more or less, and they are dead. Once busy. Avs talking to avs. IMs, newbies asking questions of others. Dead. An apparent bot akilter saying "busy".

Say what you will, you remind me of a friend that claims that since the evidence is ambiguous, any effort to curb global warming is unnecessary. The real chance that it will be too late by the time action is taken doesn't seem to be an issue for him. So be it. So with bots.

And load testers, my bot. How wonderful they are showing up where there is sufficient controls to make them useful as feedback. As someone that has used loadtesting more than once, I'm guessing no and no way...

By the way, in my opinion the mismanagement of the showcase tab is the other killer. I don't know how they get on that list, but some of the 'showcases' are incomplete, dead or lifeless. With all the truly wonderful builds and places on SL, the ones on the Showcase list as often as not are deadly. No avs, poor organization, no clear sign to the places featured, in two cases the places featured were walled off as under construction. Who is being paid to get on that list, anyway? In RL USA, someone would be calling for a grand jury investigation...

Cael, I don't think I've really been all that clear on this one point - where I am coming from is an overall perspective. The grid as a whole. That is where I don't see the issue being a huge problem, and where I don't buy into the "oh my god bots are killing SL" warcry.

I understand and acknowledge that at more localized levels, there are problems.. both social and technical. They mostly center around gaming of dwell. It's pretty awkward thinking that filling a sim up with bots (or human campers for that matter.. remember those days?) to drive traffic up.. with the net effect being that the sim is useless.. has any benefit at all. It defies any logic or reason. I wholeheartedly agree with that. But people who game traffic have proven beyond doubt over the years that as long as there is benefit (real or perceived) to doing it, they'll keep doing it, with whatever tools they have at their disposal. In this sense, I contend that bots are not the core issue, rather traffic/dwell is.

On the other hand I'm reminded of something George Carlin said in one of his comedy "news" bits.

"A man shot six people on the downtown bus today, then asked for a transfer and shot six people on the crosstown bus. In order to prevent this happening in the future, authorities are discontinuing the transfer system"

I don't know what the solution is, other than to deprecate, or just remove traffic entirely. We could probably look 2 years back in these forums, and see almost an identical conversation about campers. They could ban bots tomorrow, and next week we'd be bitching about the new method people are employing to game traffic.

The impact of traffic bots on the grid is really beside the point. Even if there's absolutely no negative impact on grid performance due to thousands of traffic bots (which is highly unlikely to be the case), artificially inflating traffic numbers is fraud. It's a deceitful way of improving search ranking at the expense of everyone below them in rank that earns their numbers honestly. It's the ethical equivalent of false advertising and shows a completel lack of integrity. Why earn something when you can just steal it? Even if it could be demonstrated conclusively that traffic bots were destroying the experience for everyone else the bot runners would do it anyway. It's about greed and nothing else, and just the fact that someone runs them to obtain fraudulent numbers tells us all we need to know about their character and ethics. They don't care who it hurts if it results in personal gain.

Whatever happened to making better products to get people to go to your store?

The meer fact they have to "game" search with Bots suggests they cant attract enough people with thier Quality so they have to use devious devices to make it look like people go to thier store often.

So we have established that Bots don't drain SL's resources as a whole ... but can anyone suggest a way they benifit SL as a whole? Sometimes it seems to me that some people think bots are so wonderful everyone should have 20 or so...just to port around and be your posse.

Here , here.

The problem with bots in general can be summed up in a single sentence from this thread, amusingly from a supporter of bots:



Bots have many useful purposes, can perform many useful tasks. But you only need one asshat with a shitty attitude to make their usefulness a mute point.

Those making that claim have no more evidence to support their assertions than those who claim they do drain resources. The only real conclusion we can draw is that no one has enough information to quantify the true impact of bots on the grid. They do have a definite negative impact on everyone whose rightful position in search ranking is usurped by dishonest merchants who cheat their way up the list.

That's an interesting statement, because SL isn't "about" any overall thing. It's about what each individual makes it about for themselves. Some individuals are against bots, and that's their choice. Some individuals are in favour of bots, and that's their choice too. The first group cannot say that SL isn't about bots, and the second group can't say that it is. What they can all say is that SL is or isn't about bots - for me. Quite often in this forum, people talk about what SL is supposed to be, but they are wrong. It isn't supposed to be about anything in particular. It's just an environment, in which each individual makes it about what they want for themselves, and some choose to make it very different to what others choose, or would prefer. That's just the way it is.

Nope. There is always plenty of space in the sim for anyone who wants go to it, and traffic bots never prevent anyone from being logged in. If there weren't enough space, I'd remove some of the bots. See my next response for an insight Btw, have you visited them yet? If not, you should. They are a friendly bunch, and they enjoy a bit of company.

You obviously don't have a business - RL or SL. Let me tell you something. The presence of bots is no indication whatsoever of the quality of the merchandise. I get so many compliments for my stuff from people who don't know me, but who choose to come up to me, or IM me, to pay me compliments. People do go to the store because of the quality - they are taken there, or sent there, by friends who have been. It happens all the time. What the bots do is reach other people, so that more people can go to the store. Makes sense, huh? Somebody posted about it being greed, and he's sort of correct. Show me a business in any world that doesn't seek to make as much money as it can. That's what businesses are for - making money. He can call it greed if he wants to, but he owes his very livelihood to such greed, as does everyone who needs an income, and who works for a business or company.

We don't have to game the search. We choose to. We can settle for word of mouth, and still make a decent amount of money, but there's no reason to.

Yes. I can suggest a way. I make top quality, low prim furniture, and if it weren't for the bots, fewer people would ever see it. Not everybody who goes to the store buys something, but many do, and when I'm in the store, some of those people come up to me to both compliment and thank me for making such quality furniture, from such low prims, and at such low prices. If it weren't for the bots, many of those people would never have found the store. So there you are. Not only do the bots not drain resources to any noticeable degree, but they do something positive for the SL population as a whole.

I refer you to the public challenge that I made a few posts back. I'd previously offered to prove it, which I'm sure you saw, and I said that the offer is still open. But those who prefer not to know, and to hold onto their misguided opinions because they hope they are true, choose not to see the proof For the information, the sim where my store is has 23 avs in it right now, and is running at 45 FPS and between 1.0 and 0.99 Time Dilation, with a Total Frame Time in the teens of milliseconds.

This is true, for as long as LL as an organisation fails to deal with people who subvert the system.
Ban traffic-bots and we are left with camper-bots.
I would class human campers who leave their avatar camping while they do something else as camper-bots no different to someone who runs a whole farm of bots.
Do away with traffic/dwell as a Search factor and a lot of problems to do with avatars jamming up a sim will disappear.
If parcel owners want to give money to noobs/whoever then they can just give it.

The new method taking over from traffic is Picks.
This is is being dishonestly abused just as traffic was/is.



The Zyngo palace beside one of my parcels is running a best avatar competition.
In order to enter you have to join the group and have the place in your picks. Then you get you friends, your alts and their alts to vote for you. In order to vote, they have to join the group and put the place in their picks.
It's a totally dishonest way of scoring higher in Search.

It's really funny that the operators found that *they* were being gamed by entrants to an extent that it was reducing the number of people that could be bothered to enter. The gaming of their contest was killing the contest. That is sooooooooo beautiful!
The contest was initially a month-plus event with a L$10,000 prize at the end of it. They've now changed it to a weekly contest with a 1,000 or 2,000 prize.
The group message that went out announcing the cancellation of the old contest and the creation of the new was a ROFL for me. They were indignant that someone would game *their* contest. They obviously didn't care to consider that their contest is designed to game the SL system.


The only solution to these forms of gaming is for LL to outlaw the subversion of Search in general and to remove parcels from the search index for steadily increasing periods when they are found to be gaming.

If people are annoyed that competitors are scoring higher in Search, they can go look, and if they find that the competitor is gaming the system they document it in an AR.

..because why bother settling for making a decent amount of money being an honest person when you can make a ton more money by being a lying cheat?

It doesnt matter how good your furnniture may or may not be... it only matters that you've decided to cheat the system by "choosing to game search" (slight paraphase there to your own words) to make yourself more money.

If that's who you want to be, there's no point in wasting breath trying to turn you into a moral person.

These conversations always get a bunch of different issues sorta bunched up, which makes them harder to follow.

One issue is faking traffic.. Except for amoral business owners, pretty much everybody agrees that faking traffic numbers is, well, amoral. Personally, if I go shopping and spot a whole bunch of traffic bots, I move on right away. They lose my business and I will happily and patiently explain to newbies or anybody about what the deal with traffic bots is. These businesses are trying to cheat people, plain and simple.

Another issue is non-gamed traffic.. In other threads, people have brought up the perfectly valid point that traffic doesn't really give you any indication of how good a store is. One example would be a store that has spent much time & effort into being very low-lag and is laid out so that people can get in, get their stuff and get out quickly. Such a place would likely have low traffic, even if it had the highest quality product on the grid. On the other side, traffic can be a good indication of the quality of a social place - looking for a cowboy bar and find 10 in search? You're probably more-or-less safe in thinking that the ones with high traffic (again, in the theoretical world of non-gamed traffic) may be better. There's also many examples in between.

Another issues is the impact of traffic bots on the grid. Having written a libsl bot recently, just to see how it works, I really don't see how a traffic bot would have much of a drain on the grid once it gets logged in. Yeah, there's some server that needs to keep track of the fact that it's logged in and maybe some other stuff that lets people see more green dots on the map but I think that's about it as far as impact to the grid.

People really can't (rightly) say that the impact of bots can't be known or that nobody has data either way or any of that. These things are not hard to write and if you do write one, you'll see that they're pretty stupid animals - if you don't explicitly tell them to hit up the back end servers, they're not going to.

The crowd that's looking for ways to make the grid a happier place, concurrancy-wise, would be far better off doing a crusade to stop people from clearing their caches at every login. Or going around to popular places and helping the owners make their build be lower-lag.

edit: and another issue is impact of traffic bots on the local region. Though I have no idea how much one of these things impacts a sim, it sorta has to be a lot more than their relative impact to the grid itself.

Well as a complete novice I admit on this bot issue, I am a positive contributor to the SL community. I will say that when logins are restricted to keep ppl out who actually use there avatars and pay good $ to be in SL, because of the abuse of selfish ppl using bots to get more $ in sales sucks. To me its common sense that its a direct correlation stopping me from logging in when this occurs.

oh to add Lindal is a great upstanding Lady with more class then others who are just so grouchy.

So you're not really up to speed on what bots really do but it's clear that they're the problem?

Yes I sent one of my alts who subsequently got hit on by one of your bots. They are now partnered and demanding to be upgraded to Premium and planning on starting an alt/bot family of their own.
Does this mean you and I are In-Laws now?

Then, because you're a complete novice, you aren't very well informed. It might seem to be common sense, but it isn't. There are plenty of threads on the topic if you care to undate your understanding of it.

It looks like it, but I *don't* go to wedding, so they needn't invite me. I must remember to give my bots some lessons on where to buy furniture for marital homes