Scripted Agent D-Day is Jan 20th

Given their penchant for doing just that, I'd have to agree. LL needs to stop making policies they don't want to enforce.

In itself, the announcement does not affect Trafficbot runners in any way.
All that will happen is that avatars registered as Scripted Agents will cease to add to the parcel Traffic score.

It depends on whether or not we have all registered the bots. Those who haven't, will need to know the change - and I expect plenty who will need to know the change, just like I expect LL to largely ignore them.

I think there will be a lot of changes in the traffic numbers on the 21st, but I also expect a lot of no-changes that will stay that way for a long time.

The problem as i see it is.. There are so many places STILL full of bots.. and nothing done. Yet, they take random places and send warnings. How do i know this? I got AR'd and a warning letter sent to me about *gaming traffic* on a sim i DON'T EVEN OWN.. and happen to be BANNED FROM. A sim i have never set foot on.. owned by someone that owns what they see as a *competition* business, and banned me cause they don't like me...while.. i still see the same bots in the same places. This is just another case of LL's screw ups... move the adult content to adult land, but let 50%+ slip under the radar, Send warnings about gaming traffic with out investigating while others still get away with it. Ban gambling, but its still on, screw up search and not fix it, and now this. I am all for be gone with the bots... but.. if they are going to make a law, it should apply to the entire grid, not just those they choose to confront. Guess it all depends on who you know.

I was thinking more along the lines of less people using bots, they will still count in concurrency figures as far as I'm aware but I foresee plenty of people simply not bothering to log them in.

Teleporting bots is an almost certain situation.

BLADE RUNNER! Paging Harrison Ford...

I bet a lot of bot farmers won't even notice the fact that their bots aren't helping their search rankings any more. Those rooms full of silent, spooky avatars will still be around, lagging us out.

eh....

Their bots will continue to inflate their rankings.
This is on a reasonable assumption that they never registered them as Scripted Agents.

Some of them may have kept an eye on Blog statements and registered their bots in the knowledge that they would still inflate traffic until LL created the code. Assuming that they continue to keep an eye open, the implementation of the change won't surprise them.

My knowledge of Botting is very sketchy, so I'm wondering: has there ever been any incentive for people TO register bots as Scripted Agents?

(If not, then...surely most people would have registered their bots as if they were ordinary avatars, since the whole point of gaming traffic is to make it appear that Ordinary Avaters are spending time on one's parcel...?)

The incentive is coming now, with the dawn of the non counting in traffic thingy being made to work. Enforcement will be the key.

The only incentive to register bots as scripted agaents starts on the 20th. The incentive is to avoid being penalised for gaming search traffic.

The whole point wasn't to make it appear that real avs are spending time on the parcel, but that may play a bigger role after the 20th. The whole point was simply to improve search rankings, which is different. It may amount to the same thing in some people's minds, but it's actually different. For instance, I was never interested in whether or not people thought my store was popular. I was only interested in it ranking highly.

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My bots aren't going anywhere, btw.

All bots are just ordinary avatar accounts. The accounts are created just like any other account. They are simply alts of the person running them.

The Scripted Agent status is just a new flag that the account owner can set (and unset) on the account. There is no particular incentive until the 20th for anyone to register their bot accounts as Scripted Agents. Doing so made no difference to anything. It is impossible for anyone but the owner and LL to know whether or not an avatar has the Scripted Agent status.

After the 20th, some bot runners may move some or all of their bots out of obvious bot boxes and spread them around as models or whatever. They still don't necessarily register them as only LL can tell if they are registered or not.
Some bot runners may simply keep their bot in a box as they have done without penalty since LL banned them. They will wait for LL to warn them.

When bot runner move their bots to the ground, they can still have them generating Traffic by simply not registering them.
Basically, they can begin to Traffic-bot without it it being apparent. If you look at 20 model bots in a store, there is no way of telling if any of them are registered.
You might smell a rat if you kept an eye on the numbers of other avatars in the place over a day, but if you ARed them, you'd just be guessing.
In any case, it could be unclear. 15 of those 20 bots could be registered bots providing a cover for 5 unregistered bots.




The *only* thing that has changed is that the honest people running bots for non-Traffic purposes will be able to lose the Traffic for those bots if they register the accounts.

Blondin Linden seems to have a particular dislike for traffic bots; he's often asked people to tell him about bot farms on Zindra and I'm sure he wouldn't mind hearing about them in other places too (sorry, Blondin, if you're reading this...).

It did actually. It gave them immunity from penalties while fulfilling their purpose (adding to the traffic score).

It may have done. Who knows?
It's clear that there are blatant bot farms around the place still.
If LL left a box of Traffic bots alone just because they were registered that's pure 100% looneytoons as the registered scripted agents are meant to have some function to perform, be it modelling or greeting or whatever.
I think Maggie Linden would make short work of a skybox full of registered clouds.
(See the URL in my sig line)

Whatever the case on that, it's about to become water under the bridge.

It is so - and pure 100% looneytoons. A guy posted twice in the blogs the he kept ARing some traffic bots and a Linden eventually wrote to ask him to stop doing it, because the bots are registered as scripted agents so they couldn't cite them. They couldn't touch the bots. I posted about it here.

Are landbots supposed to register as scripted agents?

All bots (scripted agents) are supposed to register.