An odd thing I've noticed in a few sims...

There have been groups of people up REALLY high in the air... usually 12 or more... just standing there. Almost all of the people in these groups are wearing one of the free outfits given with a starter character, are doing absolutely nothing, and have no information whatsoever in their profiles. The few that do have something only have the most basic of info, if that. All of them are also very recent creations; usually within 1 to 4 months.

In one case, I found them standing on a platform. In another in a single prim, sealed box. But in all cases, they were standing above vendor based sims and areas. My question is this; what effect, if any does this sort of thing have? I can only assume that they are random created groups being used to boost the appearance of population in that sim, but does it have a negative effect on SL as a whole?

Also, is there in place... or SHOULD there be in place... a system by which unused accounts would be terminated after a certain amount of time? For example, if there is an account that hasn't been accessed in a year, shouldn't an email be sent to the account owner, asking if they've lost interest in SL and inviting them to cancel their subscription if so? If they don't respond, should that account be closed, assuming that the person who used it is either no long available or to disinterested to even reply or take action?

And should accounts that have been online, but do basically nothing at all be given the same treatment? If there is an account that is active in the way of being online, but not otherwise active... never IMing anyone, moving, building, etc. in any way, shouldn't that account get the same consideration of being cancelled? I would like to see a more accurate representation of population overall in SL, and I would think all these seemingly dummy accounts (who knows? Maybe there IS a group of people who rez in at 700 meters into an empty box to stand around doing nothing. ) crowding sims just lags them and makes them less functional. Also, I would think having to deal with the bandwidth issues would cause trouble as well. Am I wrong?

Hi, Darena. You have discovered camping bots, which are multiple avatars all operated programmatically by one person. They are indeed intended solely to boost traffic figures for a person's location.

The rights and wrongs of this are discussed endlessly in the forums, but not actually in this section of them. Currently, these and many related topics are being discussed in the thread discussing LL's proposed "Traffic Reforms". Take a look:
/327/99/256222/1.html

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These are BOT, Avatars with dumy accounts.

they are used to boost traffic counts in search.

these are not exactly legal and should be AR Abuse Reported.

The effect they have is adding load to the sim, reducing sim and viewer performance and taking up useable av space in the sim.

Trafficbots actually, Camping bots move from sim to looking for camping spots to earn money from, whereas Trafficbots are either owned by the shop owner or hired by the shop owner to falsely increase the lands Traffic count to make it appear higher in the search system.
Problem is someone runs 20 of these, then the neighbour shop runs another dozen, then you only leave room for 8 real people to be in the sim actually buying stuff.
Many of them do so because everyone else is doing so.
Generally best to avoid purchasing at these places, as real good stores will have real customers walking around.