Landbots - What can be done?

Following on fron Weedy's 101 thread, I thought it would be an idea to start a thread discussing what, if anything, we can do about landbots.

Seems to me that there are some glaring issues with SL that need to be address, landbots being one of the more serious.

At the risk of creating a monster, do you think there's any virtue to setting up some sort of pressure group to lobby LL about issues such as LandBots? Do enough people care about the state of SecondLife to be able to come together make ourselves heard?

There are always going to be bugs with SL and there are always going to be people who think they know better. But there are some things, landbots and traffic/camping spring to mind, that I really don't think we should have to put up with. I think it would only take a slight shift in LL's policies to make SL a much better place for the vast majority of us to work and play.

Vale

I hasten to point out that I am not a programmer, but given the will it seems to me that LL could trace the base account generating rapid repeat queries and hit it with a ban for say 24 hours. Befor I knew of their existence I fell victim to one of these bots while engaging in a simple land swap with a neighbour, I was lucky and the controller immediately corrected the grab but I could so easily have lost two good plots. In my view it is tantamount to being mugged and should be delt with accordingly.

I think you could but it would take massive effort. I have some ideas but right now, I am busy putting together 3 new businesses in SL, and working on logistics.

People have also suggested 'throtting' the searches, limiting the number of searches one can do in any given period of time.

Throttle and tracing accounts/IPs. That's two ways LL has of dealing with the landbot issue and neither seem prohibitivly difficult or expensive to implement. But how do we get LL to listen?

Vale

I'm busy trying to get my business off the ground too, so I know the feeling. Still, I kinda feel like if I don't do anything to make things better then I've got no place complaining about the problems I can see. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

I think I'm going to set up a group next time I'm in world, bringing people together seems to be the first logical step.

Vale

Here are the steps I'd take:

Change the UI so that people don't keep "accidentally" selling their land. Perhaps there needs to be a Gift button or something that you can use to transfer land to another person for free. Perhaps five more warnings would help, I don't know.

Monitor the various subsystems for overload and throttle appropriately. (note I still maintain that bots apply massively less load on the servers than real people, but the future risk is still there)

Of course I'm biased, but beyond those two small issues I don't see that there is a problem that needs solving.

For me the answer is simple. Half decent Capchas and a TOS change, both of which diligently enforced. The Lindens claim that the latter wouldn't work as botmasters would be more subtle and would find a way around it, however, there are enough realtors and their friends and concerned residence to turn in bots whenever suspected. There are too many folks out there with a vested interest who would be happy to report on bots if they were specifically made a TOS violation. After the first handful were investigated and caught, and their masters banned, I think most would-be botmasters would think again before creating a bot and risking their accounts and inworld aquisitions. After all, if you are building a landbot, you probably own some land already, and having the Lindens confirm you as a bot and loosing all the land you aquired before being caught, with no appeal, would take care of the rest.

The matter is convincing SL to make working bots a TOS violation, not just for land sales, but content creation, etc. No bot should unemploy real life SL residents.

Not to go too far from topic, but i'm wondering how a bot could be used for content creation? Especially in a manner that could put others out of work.

If a bot could be made that would build objects from scanned blueprints, where the builder/botmaster only had to texture the structure afterwards, what would be the use of all the house builders in SL? Any SL industry, that is currently purely competative, could become oligarchic with a good enough bot, and when markets go oligarchic, a large number of small business owners go out of business.

Has anyone tried?

My experience has been that posting comments in the LL blog or here in the Forums is having zippo impact on LL’s decision-making process. We are only talking to ourselves. Like masturbation, it feels great, but you ain’t makin’ babies.

If you want to have impact on their decision-making process, you must get out of these forums and blogs and into their faces. Faces contain eyes and ears, and those are what you need from LL.

I know of three very good ways to make contact with eyes and ears. The easiest two: emails directly to Linden Lab’s upper management and phone calls directly to upper management. Getting the numbers and addresses is easy. Calls made early in the day, right when they start, are the most likely to be picked up. (If all else fails, snail-mail still has lots of oomph.)

Emails and letters and phone calls to their corporate partners don’t hurt. Just be on-topic and use respectful language and mention you will be leaving SL if these problems do not get addressed and won’t be using their products either, thank you very much.

The third, IMHO, is the most powerful and should receive the fastest response: “The PR event.” The LL offices are in a major American city. Many players of SL are from that same major city/region. It's also a very politically-active city, so you could recruit non-SLians for the event, I'm sure. I could see gathering a decent number of RL people with signs and chants and staging a good old-fashioned protest just outside their offices. Starting a march from downtown, past any large newspaper or TV networks offices down to LL, would also be great “spectacle.” The media loves spectacle, especially when you alert them of it happening the day it is about to happen. (An email to the photo editor/news desk the day before will get noticed.)

LL loves spectacle, but not negative spectacle.

What is said on the placards is critical. It should not be general rants, but specific charges/requests: “LL ignores the needs of its customers.” “LL must listen to its customers.” "Customers want to be heard." Or something like that.

I’d also see if the teen gridders would join forces with us. They often have more free time. And more energy.

CAPTCHA will kill the bots.

Will or could? Are the Lindens actualy going to implement CAPTCHA or is that just another resident suggestion mooted in the forums.

If CAPTCHA is going to be introduced then there's no problem, landbots will soon be a things of the past providing it's done well.

Vale

how abut Website Captcha land purchase confirmation?

No ones proven the LIndens want to kill the bots yet tho =/

I really think that's the jesus bolt if this thread. There are solutions to the bot problem, the real mountain to climb is getting the lindens to listen.

Despite the bugs and lag etc, my only real problem with LL is that I feel abandoned by them. They should be here in the forums, listening to their customers concerns and answering questions. Maybe they have good reasons for not doing more about bots or camping chairs abusing the traffic system, but they need to tell us.

Vale

They probably don't. They make more money with the bots.

I personally believe LL's overall position on Land in general speaks to some degree to the bot "problem" - The current land based business model that some of you are currently profiting from has a shelf life attached to it. We don't know what that life is, but I suspect Mitch Kapor has a much better idea than he's letting on - We all know that in many cases, solving a singular problem Linden Lab style often involves throwing the whole thing out. First Land being a prime example.

The point: It may very well be that they are not pleased with the bot, and would prefer that it go away, but are questioning the benefit of applying development time and money into solving a problem that will eventually go away anyway, when the simulator software can be had by anyone(?) and the commercial aspect of land trading is effectively removed.

--end speculative crystal ball talk--

Have you contacted Weedy in world? I wont speak on her behalf, but she may be willing to give out scripts that will send the bots to their home. She told me about these scripts in the other thread; they have a list of keys which are bots and bot owners. (Which some bot owners seemed to be mad about, lol)

Why not simply encrypt anything dealing with land, so that only the proprietary viewer has access to that functionality? Since there are constant updates to the viewer code all they need to do is constantly rotate the encryption algorythm so even if someone finds a way to break it that would only have it for a short while.

Honestly, anything that can and has been gamed in the past should be encyrpted.

All excellent suggestions, so I quoted your post in its entirety.

Yes, many have tried. The groups Social Action of Second Life, headed by Reverend LeShelle, and the group Mainland Realtors Association have both done extensive work trying to end this problem. A core group of residents, namely myself, Weedy Herbst, Sarah Nerd, and Joy Iddinja, have been directly involved in most of the steps that have gone on so far. We've done extensive canvassing of various Lindens ... Philip, Robin, Guy, Torley, Jeska, and Chadrick being some of those. We've cornered them in game informally and at official meetings, and have IMed, emailed, and telephoned extensively. I've personally sent around 40 or so emails to them myself, and have received only three brief "We're working on correcting the situation" responses. Well, they've had two and a half months to correct the situation so far and the only changes they've made have actually benefited the bots.

We've also done other things -- Weedy and I have been distributing free scripts that will tp known landbots home (available at http://www.slexchange.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=201573 or you can IM me in world and I'll send you a copy). These scripts have some effect. Most landbots teleport to a random spot in the sim rather than directly to the parcel they're buying in order to avoid banlines or other security measures that might be in place against them on the parcel itself. They then purchase the parcel remotely. If that random spot happens to be a parcel that's running the tp home scripts, the bot will be tp'ed away before it can make its purchase, thus allowing a human to buy the parcel. I've witnessed the success of this several times myself, where I'll see a parcel come up for sale in search at a landbot attractive price, get an IM from one of my scripts running in that sim that "such-and-such-landbot) was tp'ed home from (said sim)", and then go to that sim myself and see that a human resident, rather than a landbot, has purchased the parcel. But there's a lot of mainland to cover, and currently the hindrance they pose, even though well over two hundred people are running the scripts, is minimal. But the more people who run them, the more effective they'll be. It's the shotgun effect. Moreover, although bot users constantly make up lies about those scripts here and in other forums claiming people will get banned for using them, they're nothing more than legal LSL commands used in a way that does not violate TOS. These particular scripts have been inspected by Linden Lab and declared ok to use, and hundreds of people are currently using them without any problems. I've been using them for over two months myself.

We've also been active in spreading the word about landbots and the problems they pose for everyone.

I do hope that you and/or others reading this thread do form a group or groups to help oppose landbots. They're just the tip of the iceberg of a problem that will only get worse if allowed to continue unchallenged. SL should be a world where everyone has a fair shot at living their dream, not just an elite group who can completely commandeer an entire aspect of the world like land dealing. Monopolies are the death of a free economy, and in rl they're usually prevented by official bodies. The same should be true here in SL. It's just a matter of getting LL off their collective a**es to do something about it.

I'm completely at your service to help in any way I can, and I'm sure Weedy, Sarah, and Joy feel the same way.

As long as we are forming lobby groups here are two more:

Stop the Killer C's: Camping, Casinos and Cutting plots for advertising

Fix the Lag Already!: a group pressuring them to make performance issues their top and only priority.

If you want to sellyour land to a friend why not price it higher than its value so it is not attractive to the bots and the refund the difference once the transaction is completed. It seems bots are only interested in undervalued land, that they can make a quick profit.

Perhaps there would be interest in an external land listing site.
It would give sellers the chance to meet the buyers, and when a sale was ready to go through they could simply set the land to only sell to that person.

It wouldn't stop bots on the grid, but would give newbies somewhere to actually secure a fair priced piece of land and allow those who are against bots to decide who they sell to.

Iv thought about creating a land buying site with the use of ... BOTS.
Such useful productive and benifical things arnt thay?

As for what to do about them, Id say there going to be a fact of life until LL.

Besides greifing, Like it seems to be some users policy.

You can come up with idea's and send them to the bot masters.
Id welcome any positive Idea's to help the situation.

I my self have been working on raising the quality of my bot to assist those who make errors on transactions.

Things like auto marking the parcel back for sale to the seller for less then so many per sqm.
Are already existent and in place.

As for bots replaceing content creation - that will never happen. Bots are not creative, nor are thay smart. This will never happen any time soon. Thay will assest in content creation, to the extent of there programming, I could say have my bot set up a house on every property I do, but that house is always going to be the same - its going to be a replica every time. Thay are unable to truly create.
Though I do admit you could do some crazy math and get some neat effects. But the effects would be the programmed math running though the bot, not the bot creating.

You don't need to jump through hoops to have a safe land exchange. Land can be sold to a particular person when you set up the transaction process.

When I sold out my first parcel of land (to upgrade to a larger parcel in another sim), I sold to a neighbor. No one else could buy the land because it was set to sell to her and only her.

Actually im positive if the Linden Labs said "Land bots are illegal"

More than enough people would be willing to AR the bots to make them poof.