How Are Griefers Able to Spam Everyone On a Sim?

[Whirly Fizzle]

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Has Linden Lab officially stated that there are more Firestorm users than SL official browser users? That is the received wisdom. Could LL verify that and state it? Oh, they didn't. Oh, they won't. OK, well, see point one then.

LL have stated this before at the TPV meetings inworld.
TPVs do get viewer stats directly from LL & we can see how many unique users we have, number of sessions, hours spent inworld & crash rates etc.
@Oz Linden may answer your question.

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I downloaded it once to see if in fact that was easy to use, and also to check the group title change since this is so confounding to so many tenants constantly -- and Firestorm makes them relog to kick in a title change in a group, which the SL viewer doesn't make them do, one of the many reasons why I think it's better. 

There shouldn't be any difference in behaviour here between the LL viewer & Firestorm.
This has been a long standing problem in all viewers.
If the user who is already a group member is added to a new group role that has gives them additional abilities, then they will need to relog to gain those new abilities in the group.
It's a bit hit or miss though - sometimes the new abilities will be available without a relog.

If a user is invited into a group to the role that already has these abilities, a relog won't be needed, at least as far as I've seen.

[Whirly Fizzle]

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I have tenants that hate Firestorm, as I do, but they'll download it and use it once for the "find things" feature. I give them the free Searchbert to use instead, but Searchbert can only go in a certain diameter in a certain distance so Firestorm is "better" when people really get desperate. I downloaded it once to see if in fact that was easy to use

Depending on how your land is set up & the rights you/your tennants have on the land - there is a similar feature to Firestorm Area Search in the LL viewer you may be able to use - but it's unfortunately limited to displaying objects that you either have the right to return or edit, or objects that you own.

In the top menu bar of the viewer, go to Build -> Pathfinding -> Region Objects.

Region objects will show all objects on the region that you own, plus any additional objects that you have the rights to edit/move or return.
If you have estate manager rights on the region, it will always display all objects on the region.

I presume you have the rights to return all your tennants objects Prok, so this should work just fine for you as a substitute for the Firestorm Area Search.

[Prokofy Neva]

12 minutes ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

LL have stated this before at the TPV meetings inworld.
TPVs do get viewer stats directly from LL & we can see how many unique users we have, number of sessions, hours spent inworld & crash rates etc.
@Oz Linden may answer your question.

There shouldn't be any difference in behaviour here between the LL viewer & Firestorm.
This has been a long standing problem in all viewers.
If the user who is already a group member is added to a new group role that has gives them additional abilities, then they will need to relog to gain those new abilities in the group.
It's a bit hit or miss though - sometimes the new abilities will be available without a relog.

If a user is invited into a group to the role that already has these abilities, a relog won't be needed, at least as far as I've seen.

On the regular SL viewer you do not have to relog for a new group role in which you were already a member on another role. You do on Firestorm. Firestorm goes through glitchy periods sometimes where even two relogs and resaving just doesn't work on groups.

I don't do invites. The tenants change their own role. On the SL Viewer they do this right away.On Firestorm and others they have to relog.

 

Re: Viewer statistics

First, let me point out how TRULY AWFUL IN EVERY WAY it is that the coding Lindens have office hours where interested parties and fans can come

But Governance and Community don't have office hours, ever.

They used to years ago. But they stopped. Truly unfair.

And once again, I realize you can fetch this number from a special office hour from these special Lindens. I'd like that made available officially for all of us because I do not believe self-reports, and one Linden might be anecdotal or out of date. I'd like the company itself to state unabashedly how many residents are using its viewer and how many are using Firestorm or others. The end.

[arton Rotaru]

 

[Callum Meriman]

5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I'm asking for a good use case of spamming everyone on the sim and I don't see one.

You might not see it as a good use as you are only renting in the mainland and don't have the power of estate manager, but each day I need to reboot one of my regions.

My bot jumps in, spams everyone in the region with a message stating that there is a reboot coming and to please finish up what they are doing, he apologises and mentions the region will be back in 5 minutes, then waits 60 seconds and performs the region reboot with a 2 minute timer.

He could use the "broadcast to region" tool - but I actually found people were confused by that and preferred to know in IM.

I could conference it, as that is pretty simple in you just make a list of UUIDS, but I generally try to do all my scripting in 5 languages, and that means iterating the people in the region and indiviual IMs. So, when the bot teleports in and starts spamming everyone in the region he is also checking for the client language then sending the IM in English, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese - depending what the client prefers.

As I don't do any of this with inworld scripts - the IM stage - for 25 people - is about quarter of a second to perform.

My bot also reboots my rental regions in a similar manner every 3 days - except he is a little more patient on those and will normally wait and watch silently for 2 hours for an empty sim - after which he spams everyone in the region with a 10 minute delay.

 

Edit: With Easter coming up, I am likely going to use a sim spammer again for my egg hunt. I will space the placement of the eggs and then when each one is placed have my bot spam all people on the region with a "Ready... Set... GO!" message, and then another spam at the end saying who found it and how much they got from it.

Edited March 1, 2018 by Callum Meriman

[Prokofy Neva]

Land on the Mainland is purchased and while you may call it "renting from the estate manager Governor Linden," in fact an island "owner" is only doing the same, at another level in a different form.

And no, dear, I have an island and a homestead and I have had them for more than 10 years.

I actually find that this idea that you "need to reboot every day" is for the birds. Long observation and testing of this has proven to me that you do not need to do that at all.

If you monitor the collisions and scripts that is not necessary.

And I don't experience lag even on these sims that aren't "constantly reset" with multiple tenants and pets and such.

It's absolutely insane to have a bot come in and take up an avatar slot and waste script time when the estate manager panel lets you announce over a kind of public address system anything you need to.  Of course, we get it that somebody with hundreds of sims might like a bot that goes from sim to sim doing all this unnecessary re-setting but a) it's unnecessary b) it's not proven as a vital function that should therefore enable griefing of other people with spam.

Anything you want to the avatars on that sim, like "Save your work I'm going to reset the island" can be said on the estate menu. Are you unfamiliar with this feature?

Oh, and there's this: the system ITSELF gives you timed warnings when you click to reset a sim and people realize when that comes they need to save up their work and leave.

So this is TOTAL TOTAL overkill, not at all a valid use case, and just a kind of Fisking.

The idea that there is some kind of valid use case involving sending notices to everyone on a spim in 4 languages is also completely and totally edge-casing. The sim-wide communicator could easily have a message pasted in with multiple languages all at once without any bots. Since you have to program and click on a bot anyway to get it to do something, pasting and clicking on the estate panel is the same thing, and therefore the bot is not justified.

Most people in any language can understand numbers and realize the sim is resetting and they need to save their work or not put out any items -- although of course most people aren't creators or developers so this "save your work" idea is even more arcane.

The idea that bots "need" to reboot sims every three days is also completely and entirely misplaced. That has never been proven and is in fact not necessary as anyone else who runs a sim knows. It's just "urban lore" and "habit" and "received wisdom" that perhaps even the Lindens imagine is true but they should test it and find it is not. It is wear and tear on servers to keep resetting them all the time needlessly.

As for Easter Egg hunts, you don't need a bot there, either as you yourself could use the public address system. The idea that you would come online, program a bot, then send a bot out like a dog to do the same thing you could do yourself in real time with cut and paste just boggles the mind.

These are not valid use cases. If they are precious to you because you like to play with your dog-bots, that's understood but none of them are "necessities" and none of them justify leaving these functions open to be massively used for griefing.

The Lindens will likely find a way to throttle this, or hopefully make the entire feature of "conferencing" only an opt-in globally that you can opt never to have ever, from anything. Believe me, most people don't need to leave spamming portals open for over-happy party kids or your Easter egg hunt once a year.

 

 

 

[Hintswen Guardian]

9 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Once again, I oppose the export of ban lists precisely because they are copy-pasted without thought and without clean-up and without awareness.

And yet your own ban list is publicly available at your office.

9 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

1) You're also trying to chunk up the issue and try to separate out various functions of bots THAT DO NOT INVOLVE SPAMMING and trying to derail and distract the discussion at hand.

I am just trying to get it into your head that just because a number of functions can be used together for malicious purposes, doesn't make those functions bad. Next are you going to say the llGiveMoney command is bad and should be removed because someone can send you a scripted item which requests permission to send all your money to them.

9 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

BTW many of the things you think are glorious and wonderful about bots are also accomplished by simple prims with old fashioned scripts even of 14 years ago like "visitor log". You don't need to take up an avatar slot on a Mainland sim with these laggers to accomplish this task.

Show me a "visitor log" which allows you to track the position, movements and items looked at and I'll switch to that. All a visitor log will do is tell you who visited your parcel/sim. Some may give you more detailed information eg. visit length or count however the highly detailed positional data available to players and bots is much more advanced than scripts have access to or can process in a timely manner. I also never stated any of my use cases were for mainland. I had large experiences in mind while mentioning them as it is more useful to know if an entire corner of a sim is not being visited rather than a part of a small parcel.

9 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

There are also other systems beside bots that have multiple message systems to reach staff.

Sure, but all of these systems deliver messages to the staff's local chat. If your staff are somewhere busy these messages can be easily missed, whereas a bot will deliver these messages to a completely separate IM window allowing these messages to be read even if they are at a crowded event with a lot of people typing. These systems also don't allow multiple staff to send IM's to customers, IM's allow these messages to be found in customers chat logs easier if required, it provides a single source for all staff to contact customers from, and once again allows these messages to be noticeable when local chat is busy.

9 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

But again, a bot does not have the intelligence to look for themed groups.

Do you have any evidence to support a claim that these bots are even looking for groups in a particular theme? They just hit any open group.

9 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Do tell me how a bot finds rental groups.

As above, what difference does it make if it is a rental group or not? Bots can and do spam any open group, not just rental groups.

9 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

So unless the bot is scanning every group in its entirety and only joining open ones -- a function one can concede it might be able to do, as much as a load on the servers that might be, how can it pick out open, large groups for maximum effect with its racist spam message to have maximum shock and anger value? I suggest that takes human malice, not bot action.

It's not that hard to get a list of large groups. As for telling if a group is open or not, this is trivial for a bot. 

9 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I downloaded it once to see if in fact that was easy to use, and also to check the group title change since this is so confounding to so many tenants constantly -- and Firestorm makes them relog to kick in a title change in a group, which the SL viewer doesn't make them do, one of the many reasons why I think it's better. 

If you however mean when you change what the group title of a role is, it requires other people to relog to see and set that new title... It doesn't do that either. I tested it however did not record it as it would require more pixels and even longer to upload. Either changing the currently selected title and saving or clicking the refresh button will cause the new title(s) to show.

9 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

There isn't an option to NEVER get conference calls?

Firestorm has it, I know other viewers have it too. If your viewer doesn't then I suggest you submit a feature request to the developers.

4 hours ago, Callum Meriman said:

He could use the "broadcast to region" tool - but I actually found people were confused by that and preferred to know in IM.

Thank you! That broadcast tool is the worst way to notify a region of something!

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Land on the Mainland is purchased and while you may call it "renting from the estate manager Governor Linden," in fact an island "owner" is only doing the same, at another level in a different form.

And any mainland that is abandoned or owned by LDPW is also rented from the company that owns the datacentre the servers are in. Whats your point?

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The sim-wide communicator could easily have a message pasted in with multiple languages all at once without any bots.

Because a long message written in multiple language is really better than a short IM from a bot written in a language you understand. Frankly if I get any message sent in multiple languages I am likely to ignore it as spam no matter where it came from.

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Since you have to program and click on a bot anyway to get it to do something, pasting and clicking on the estate panel is the same thing, and therefore the bot is not justified.

The time spent programming the bot is easily saved over time.

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

As for Easter Egg hunts, you don't need a bot there, either as you yourself could use the public address system. The idea that you would come online, program a bot, then send a bot out like a dog to do the same thing you could do yourself in real time with cut and paste just boggles the mind.

As above.

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The Lindens will likely find a way to throttle this, or hopefully make the entire feature of "conferencing" only an opt-in globally that you can opt never to have ever, from anything. Believe me, most people don't need to leave spamming portals open for over-happy party kids or your Easter egg hunt once a year.

Have you ever even made a suggestion or feature request regarding this? I mean a proper one sent via the correct channel to the right people, not just a forum post or a blog post about it.

[Qie Niangao]

This thread seems to have gotten hyper-specific about something that isn't really that central to the problem.

So first, I'll make it even more specific: Let's just stipulate that some Estate managers want to use bots to notify everyone present in a region of something or other. Is there any occasion where that would be done better using the Conference mechanism, rather than a host of individual Instant Messages? That is, what's the use case for a bot rousting everybody in the region into a shared Conference channel specifically?

Zooming one click back from that specific issue: As I understand it, the project of this thread is to find a way to control the damage done by spam bot griefers by finding something they're doing that could be limited or throttled or somehow bot-proofed, and/or to give victims a tool to exclude themselves from the damage. We know that some TPVs have the ability to suppress Conferences, and that opt-out ability could be made a grid-wide feature (again, I think it should be done server-side, but that's just compulsive system engineering). But even if Conferences weren't available to griefer bots, wouldn't mass Instant Messages pose a similar problem?*

Another click back: There's more than one kind of damage done by spam bot griefers. As I mentioned earlier, the Conference participants are not the actual target of this griefing -- rather, they become unwitting ammunition in a very personal attack on Prokofy. A technical solution to the griefer spam bot problem that lets participants opt-out of Conferences may be worth doing anyway, but unless the vast majority of residents choose to opt out, the same griefing can persist against the real target, just needing to collect more potential "ammunition" participants.

To that deeper problem, I don't see any easy technical solution. It's a matter for Governance.

____________________
*Throttles control the volume of script-originated IMs, but I'm not sure what throttles apply to IMs sent from viewers/bots. I'm not seeing it listed on the Limits page.

[Callum Meriman]

[Love Zhaoying]

9 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The end.

Oh good, last post.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

9 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The end.

Oh good, last post

You posted more! How confusing. Please never write a book, people won’t know if there are multiple endings, or what?!?

[Ghost Menjou]

5 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I actually find that this idea that you "need to reboot every day" is for the birds. Long observation and testing of this has proven to me that you do not need to do that at all.

 

Rebooting daily is indeed silly, however sims do memory leak and it's good practise to restart the region weekly or at least bi weekly, especially in our case where we have a lot of vehicles coming through, and combat takes place.

There's no real indicator as to why the sim is lagging, then it's generally due for a restart.

[Callum Meriman]

My rezzers fire off about 15 physical waves each minute. With the memory leak in the physics engine, after a while the surfboards stop responding as fast as they should.  A quick reboot brings it back to competition standards.

Easy to watch it creep up in the Ctrl-Shift-1 panel under the physics details section, Memory Allocated.

[Phil Deakins]

12 minutes ago, Ghost Menjou said:

Rebooting daily is indeed silly

It probably would be if it were just one sim, but Callum (I think it was Callum) had referred to mutliple sims. Prokofy's comment that you quoted was an irrelevance, and was just contrariness, presumably just for the sake of it because it's pretty much all she does. (I've never come across anyone who can get anywhere near Prokofy's level of permanent contrariness). She said that she has an island and a homestead, so her claimed "Long observation and testing" doesn't exist because she doesn't have the experience of multiple busy sims.

Edited March 1, 2018 by Phil Deakins

[Love Zhaoying]

28 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

"Long observation and testing" doesn't exist because she doesn't have the experience of multiple busy sims.

But..but..SCIENCE!!!1! Wet brained technocommunists!!! Evil coders!@!&! CONSPIRACY LL DOESNT CARE!!!22!!! 

Edited March 1, 2018 by Love Zhaoying

[Love Zhaoying]

Fun fact: “use case” does not apply to every coding / programming paradigm. There are many project management paradigms including Six Sigma, Scrum, Lean, Agile, Waterfall.. and they do NOT all include “use case”.

Anyone who throws around the term “use case” demanding to know a “use case” for a scenario, who is NOT a professional programmer or Project Manager - is just babbling.

[Solar Legion]

5 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Fun fact: “use case” does not apply to every coding / programming paradigm. There are many project management paradigms including Six Sigma, Scrum, Lean, Agile, Waterfall.. and they do NOT all include “use case”.

Anyone who throws around the term “use case” demanding to know a “use case” for a scenario, who is NOT a professional programmer or Project Manager - is just babbling.

You'll have better luck with a brick wall ....

[Rex Cronon]

there might be a few ways to make these conference calls less annoying:

-popup a captcha each time somebody wants to start a conference call.  it should make it a little harder for bots to start a conference call.

-require those that start a conference call to pay like 5$L(or let the person specify how much wants to be paid to accept conference calls from strangers) to each person that is not on their friends list:)

[Lindal Kidd]

On 2/22/2018 at 5:10 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

Also keep in mind that these griefers aren't bots anyway. It's more a question of how either a real avatar or a scripted agent could go around joining so many groups.

It could still be a bot.  The operator would simply put the account under live control long enough to join the group, then put it back on autobotpilot.

[Ghost Menjou]

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-214706 

Please vote here. 

Edited March 9, 2018 by Ghost Menjou

[Callum Meriman]

2 hours ago, Ghost Menjou said:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-214706 

How is rate limiting going to stop someone using a bot swarm of 20 bots to conference 150 avatars each?

The problem is better solved by

• giving a conference call a session level mute - leave it and it's gone with no returns,
• by adding in a way to block conference calls from non-friends
• to make them opt-in/out on the first one you get.

Rate limiting, as per your suggestion, is too easily bypassed.

[Ghost Menjou]

1. I think it already does as such, but they can just start a new conference which will get a new id.
2. Already exists in the most used clients like firestorm
3. That could help.

When I say rate limit, a time out between conferences. Also a limit  on how many people you can have on a conference.

What's stopping someone from making 20 bots and IMing all these people? There's /some/ rate limiting that is indeed bypassed. It should be far stricter.

After group convo bots became ineffective they moved to conferences, the next step is gonna be IMs.

Rate limits with a behavioural check would be great, oh hey this account is trying to start a giant conference call out of nowhere, LIMIT. Oh this account has IMed a non-friend, and another one, and another one with similar text and they aren't in the same region hmm time to prevent them from sending IMs for now.

[Ghost Menjou]

Conferences can be avoided easily for now, just use the built in ignore from non-friends function.

I am more worried about the next step which is gonna be IMs. Arguably LL might want to start looking at traditional email filtering techniques at some points like bayes filtering but that's gonna be hella hard on resources.

 

Either way, feel free to file JIRAs. It's gonna get more results than arguing what YOU think is better.

Edited March 9, 2018 by Ghost Menjou

[Love Zhaoying]

14 minutes ago, Ghost Menjou said:

Conferences can be avoided easily for now, just use the built in ignore from non-friends function

Last I checked, this was not a feature on LL viewer, but was in Firestorm. Last year I used Firestorm for a bit for that reason, then the chats died down.

15 minutes ago, Ghost Menjou said:

Either way, feel free to file JIRAs. It's gonna get more results than arguing what YOU think is better.

The OP (Prokofy) can’t file Jira’s. One reason she posts so much here, I guess.

[Ghost Menjou]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Last I checked, this was not a feature on LL viewer, but was in Firestorm. Last year I used Firestorm for a bit for that reason, then the chats died down.

The OP (Prokofy) can’t file Jira’s. One reason she posts so much here, I guess.

1. Yeah it's not and someone might suggest that feature to LL. IIRC they are already aware of that request though. FS users far outnumber regular LL viewer users though..
2. I was more referring to the dude that was telling me I was so wrong with my jira suggestion while not filing his own. Of course it's easier to complain on the forum than file JIRA tickets.

Edited March 9, 2018 by Ghost Menjou