BOT places! List them here!

Both Phil and me clearly said that as soon as LL does not allow our practices anymore, we will stop it. For others I cannot speak. Neither can you, by the way.

They never did say anything against it, the only people speaking out against it are a handful of people in this thread. Another handful disagrees with the anti group, but they are wise enough to bail out after making their comments. Phil and me are not, we do like to be here somehow

So I will tell you again: Linden Lab did never speak out against traffic bots and picks camping. As long as they do not, they allow it. As soon as they do, and I would continue, I would be ARable. Now I do not know where you get your definition of allowing something, but in my world, things that are not allowed, are forbidden. Not forbidden, equals allowed. Not too hard to grasp, is it?

And please, coming up with words like Phillogisms... should I counter that one with Slingoisms? Relax, I won't, still having a good laugh over it all. People trying to redefine the meaning of the word allow, people telling me I derail a topic at posting #703, you really need to come up with something better.

BTW: Your example of camping bots is not really relevant, as you know (I guess, at least) that Phil runs his bots high up in the air. The do not camp, but stand still. Did you ever try the lag in the Sim he is on?

Funny, most people wouldn't consider the potential for hijacking an account "harmless".

What???

Slingoism?
Nah! It doen't rhyme with Syllogism.

Any justification for a behaviour that is based on LL not explicitly forbidding it is bogus.

LL have their hands full.
They acknowledge that they have some big and difficult issues to deal with. Extortion and non-extortion ugly advertising will tax their resources for some time to come.
Gaming search is a far less obvious problem by comparison.

Simply staying within the letter of the law does not turn a cheat into a decent person.

Hijacking an account even? Some accuse that is Kitty. Seems, if that is true and backed up, Phil will soon be out of SL. Someone using an exploit that has the potential of hacking accounts, and not telling LL, must fear to be banned.

Now, we just have to sit back and watch. It will feel lonely, discussing with you all on my own

You keep swinging around, don't you.
Weren't you just saying that LL does not allow Picks Camping and Traffic botting? Weren't you trying to give the word "allowed" a whole new meaning?

You forget I do not have to justify my behaviour to you, I could not care less to be honest. What I am saying is that what I do is allowed by Linden Lab. Now you can come up with another thousand of postings that say you think I am cheating, and that I am not a decent person, but isn't it time to admit you were wring in the "allowing" part?

No it's not. Specifically asking LL about it, and getting the green light (specifically allowing it), and specifically asking LL (Jack) to forbid it, but it remains unforbidden, make the practise perfectly above board, and the justification anything but bogus.

Read what it says and not what you think it says.

I'm not accusing you of doing that, I'm just pointing out that the potential for it is there, it's not a "harmless" bug.

You both seem to love reading things that aren't there .

You said the exploit is harmless, I contested that it has potential for harm which in no way implies that Phil is using it as such.

75 pages? TL;DR (yay, first time I get to use that since I learned what it meant Xp


anyway, after reading several of the pages int he beggining, I was inspired to propose the following new feature:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-8638

for the ones too lazy to open the link without knowing what it is, but that would open to vote on it if they knew what it was, I'll posthere the current text of the proposal?

Yeah, do that and then invert the numbers.
The only people would would be willing to put up with yet another inconvienence -- even a minor one -- to logging in would be those who would gain some benifit from it. That would be the traffic bots in this case.

No, I did read what it said. If Phil detected an exploit and is using that without telling LL he found it, and it is really as dangerous as you make us believe it is, he could be in trouble. Now I do not think it really is that dangerous, but that is another issue.

You're pointing out that the potential to hack someone's account is there in that little exploit? I'm imagining now how it might be possible, but I don't know if it is. If it is, we have a saying for such things... *Fucking hell!!!!*

*IF* it is possible, why the hell did you describe it in this thread?

Am I still getting the wrong end of the stick?

[added]
On a further few seconds of reflection, I feel sure that it isn't possible.

One possible reason why LL haven't outlawed traffic bots is because they would need it to apply to all sim - mainland and private sims - and they may be very reluctant to force the way that resources are used on private sims.

I'd love to see what the Linden actually said in writing since Phil trots it out all the time

Yet ANOTHER personal attack Phil?

I think you are lucky many of those who dislike traffic gaming also tend to be those who dislike heavy forums moderation.

I think you claiming that your counter arguments actually *proved people wrong* is stretching things a bit.

how would traffic bots (or ratter their owners) benefit from having the traffic system ignore bots? people could still login without answering the captcha, I don't see this affecting the amount of real people logging in negatively as you seem to be suggesting it would...

Or perhaps its the fact that trying to tell who is a bot and who isn't is impossible without sitting there and observing them in person.

It should be obvious how difficult it would be for the Lindens to enforce a trafficbot ban.

It is worth pointing out that ..

In section 4.1 of the TOS you do agree not to use any Exploits.

Oh well, in that case...
No argument with that, but it is the implicit exptrapolations that might cause trouble ...

(a) ... because it is allowed, it is ethically acceptable.
This would seem to be the case for P & M. It is a widely held philosophy, disproportionately by the financially successful who find it helpful. Others believe that ethical responsibility should go beyond this convenient baseline, which makes their lives more complicated and constrains their financial progess. Each of these points of view generally derived from something other than rational argument (i.e. unless you are a full-time moral philisopher, perhaps). Therefore it is futile to argue where this difference is the basis of the point at issue.

(b) ...allowing it implies tacit approval.
This is incorrect. Approval is a possible cause for allowing, but equally it can be because disallowing is (presenty) unenforceable. Phil's whatever "in writing" is irrelevant here because it cannot be introduced as evidence. The fact that you two honest chaps would cease and desist immediately upon the publication of a blog entry is creditable, but does not solve the problem because others less responsible would not. As Sling says, the adfarming ban fiasco is more than sufficient evidence of that.

Note that I am not asserting that LL disapproves; merely that, as far as I am concerned, their approval or disapproval remains a matter of conjecture. LL, quite properly, generally avoid regulation wherever possible. Thus the banning of an activity that residents have developed is an action they will only take in the most pressing circumstances. This is also clear from precedent.

To return to the original subject of the thread ...

I have just returned from a little trip where I stumbled across a very unusual (to me at least) traffic bot colony. In contrast to the usual concentrations, these bots were dispersed widely, horizontally and vertically, and were each hidden in their very own invisiprim sphere. I would probably not have found them if it were not for the fact that a few had solid prim shoes on, which, of course are not hidden by the invisiprim! Using the appropriate rendering settings, the spheres appeared in all their glory.

I am not going to say where they were, because a witchunt is not useful, but there is an interesting point here. Phil's traffic bots, while out-of-the-way, are not hidden, which is consistent with his open defense of their use. These new bots have clearly been carefully concealed. Thus it appears that, unlike Phil, some traffic bot users do perceive a need to conceal that activity.

(I will admit it is possible to construct a rationale that does not rely on the motive of concealment, but for the moment I will prefer Occam's razor.)

Because I didn't think of that particular possibility until I was already replying to Marcel's post and it suddenly occurred to me while rewriting; I'd been thinking along an entirely different line originally.

"Potential" refers to the fact that it could be possible in theory, but I'm not about to try it in practice to see if LL took precautions.

The point remains that noone except the person responsible for the actual implementation can understand the implications of unintended behaviour.

I'm thinging that if I could opt out of the test I would. The only thing that would happen if I did opt out would be my traffic would be ignored. Yeah, great, as if I really cared. Check mark bypass every time and I go on with SLife. I think this would be a typical response.

Now, If I owned a club/store/whatever that I wanted traffic numbers to affect, I would use the captcha test to be sure when I was at my place I counted. If I were using a score of alts/bots, I would be sure to manually enter the captcha test every time -- and let them sit for the rest of the day.

Tigro, I'm not trying to slam your idea. I'm just wondering if you have a way to catch the potential "gameing the system" that will surely come with any system.

my suggestion of using a captcha system to verify if the account was logged in by a real human or a bot would help that a lot, of course some people could manually login their bots, but that would quickly get impractical as the number of bots increase, and they wouldn't be able to relog automaticly (at least not without stopping from being seen by the traffic system)

but my suggestion is about the traffic system ignoring bots and not commpletly preventing bots from connecting to SL

my suggestion isn't the perfect solution, not sure there even is one, but it would help reduce the size of the issue

I think LL wants a magic bullet solution that basically makes the problem go away without somehow decreasing the number of people logged in, the number of active accounts, Nor does it inconvenience any non-bot resident.

Basically they want Traffic and the new search to work perfectly as they intended with no gaming, but without them having to do any enforcement or look like either the good guy or the bad guy in any way.

Helps to remember they are Hippy-Dippy.