Are Free Accounts Throttled

[Qie Niangao]

I haven't looked at any bot software in years, so maybe it's improved a lot, but otherwise a problem may be that the code is both unreliable and tricky for bot-runners to program effectively. So if the bots get relogged to infohubs by SL, some just don't make it back to their intended station by themselves.

The thing is, for a very large class of bots, they can perform their function pretty much regardless of where they are on the grid. (The underlying cause is the very strange way LL develops new features, first with a complicated viewer UI, only later getting around sometimes to exposing a secure scripting API. This is why bots are necessary, and why griefer viewers are possible.)

Still, I doubt many bot runners really want their bots at infohubs: "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded." Having many other avatars in a region slows down anything a bot wants to do, so it's in the bot runner's interest to move them somewhere less crowded. They may just not have bothered to make that happen automatically, or whatever they tried to do doesn't always work.

If this were really a big problem, one possibility would be to incentivize bot-runners to stamp their bots as "scripted agents" by giving them special high-performance regions where only scripted agents get sent when their last position / home location is full at time of relog. These regions could have physics (and maybe other stuff) turned off. If the bots never left, who'd care?

[Prokofy Neva]

On 6/22/2018 at 8:22 PM, Klytyna said:

I NEVER have to manually type my pasword in, when logging into SL, becausze...

I use the "remember me" option, in the viewr, that little tick box right under the name and password boxes.

My viewer stores my user name and password in a config file, When I log in, it sends this data to the SL servers.

Bot programs can also store the bots name and password in their config files, and send it to the servers, NOBODY needs to type in a password for a bot to automatically relog. They also don't have to have a home location set, as when they log in, the config file tells it what slurl to enter in the data sent to SL's login server.

Believe it or not, you can do a direct login to a specific slurl in normal SL viewers, bot programs do this a lot faster though. They are NOT limited to "last location or Home", no more than you or I are

Bot programs are NOT just a copy of the SL Inferiority Viewer that you use so badly, they are radically different concepts, many have NO rendering abilities at all, for example.

...

Sims do not automatically pop back online instantly during rolling restarts, it can take 10/15/20 mins, depending on how weird things are getting at LL, or if the reset also involves a new server code rollout on that channel.

Bots get kicked offline when the sim restarts, they try to automatically relog, some bots will have a delay programmed in to allow the sim to come back online, because it's not time critical to what the bot is for, mapping bots etc., are in no rush.

Since a logout could have been a restart or simply a dropped connection, some try relogging instantly, and if it is a restart and a slow one, on relogging they get shunted to an Info Hub. What they do then depends on what they are programmed to do, and how well.

Remember, not all bots are "traffic scams", there are many uses for bots, some stationary on one sim, others, wander continuously, like SL's famous chat bot, Hal Titanium (though I'm guessing you havn't seen Hal, because if you speak to him, he wont go away.

Why should they HAVE to explain to YOU. You're nobody special, not an "authority over the Info Hub".
 

Yeah, I have "remember me," too. But it doesn't work. For some reason, I'm always forced to type it out. I use Opera.

Yeah, you can put "Ahern 128,128,0 or whatever, but a bot wouldn't know what to put that would be a good option.

Sims do not take 10 minutes on rolling restarts. Do you log into SL and do you have sims on the mainland?

If it is not time critical, why does the bot hurry to log back in NOT TO ITS HOME but to random infohubs, which it junks up with its presence?

The lion's share of bots in SL are used for traffic boosting. All you have to do is look at all the bots stacked up on infohubs and see where they come from.

The next large group is various sex businesses.

If there is some educational use like a museum, that's nice, but it's a tiny, tiny use case. I haven't met the "famous" chat bot so I guess he is't so famous.

Since I'm maintaining sims with tutorials and freebies near three infohubs, one of which is a resident-run Linden infohub, I care about the bot issue and that's the right thing to do. Once again, they take up avatar slots, which are sometimes scarce on busy sims; they lag sims; they confuse people; they are annoying. The Lindens need to have their wranglers behave better with them. The end.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

21 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

I haven't looked at any bot software in years, so maybe it's improved a lot, but otherwise a problem may be that the code is both unreliable and tricky for bot-runners to program effectively. So if the bots get relogged to infohubs by SL, some just don't make it back to their intended station by themselves.

The thing is, for a very large class of bots, they can perform their function pretty much regardless of where they are on the grid. (The underlying cause is the very strange way LL develops new features, first with a complicated viewer UI, only later getting around sometimes to exposing a secure scripting API. This is why bots are necessary, and why griefer viewers are possible.)

Still, I doubt many bot runners really want their bots at infohubs: "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded." Having many other avatars in a region slows down anything a bot wants to do, so it's in the bot runner's interest to move them somewhere less crowded. They may just not have bothered to make that happen automatically, or whatever they tried to do doesn't always work.

If this were really a big problem, one possibility would be to incentivize bot-runners to stamp their bots as "scripted agents" by giving them special high-performance regions where only scripted agents get sent when their last position / home location is full at time of relog. These regions could have physics (and maybe other stuff) turned off. If the bots never left, who'd care?

I don't know what you're talking about, really.

That is, yes, in the abstract, maybe there are large fleets of bots performing some abstract functions that don't "need to be anywhere".

But the lion's share of bots that one can see stacked up on dozens of infohubs are definitely in sim-related tasks:

o traffic boosters -- pretend "helpers" -- some may issue group invites, but given that you can also click once on a prim and then again on a link in chat to join a group, why use up resources on a bot?

o sex clubs -- they dance or whatever

o greeters at other venues

All of these types of bots need to be on specific sims, in specific venues or businesses or non-profits, not somewhere else.

That their minders don't miss them is because a) they are lazy and don't log on really, much like forums dwellers; b) their businesses aren't all that, or are actually failing (some bots are labelled with names or groups that you can trace back to lots with hardly any traffic on it; c) or conversely, they have so many bots that they don't miss a few, say, in a sex club.

Bots should not collect at infohubs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Qie Niangao]

2 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

That is, yes, in the abstract, maybe there are large fleets of bots performing some abstract functions that don't "need to be anywhere".

But the lion's share of bots that one can see stacked up on dozens of infohubs are definitely in sim-related tasks:

That may be true of the infohub bots, I really don't know. Just to be clear about what I meant, one of the largest uses of bots is to overcome limitations in the Group function, especially sending invitations and monitoring group chat, which don't depend on location. Another very well-known use (which has probably diminished) is the "land bot" function of scouring the Mainland "for sale" listings to grab sub-market parcels before others get to it. At least in the larger operations those were specialized bots that tasked other bots to teleport to the site, buy the parcel, make land settings, etc.

There are probably other commercial bot uses, too, that I'm overlooking. Anyway, for all I know, their owners may have properly programmed them to return to station when they wash-up at infohubs.

If owners do not go to that trouble, though, every bot on the grid would end up at some infohub every week or two when their assigned location restarts. Any fix for that will involve some incentive to get them back where they belong.

[Solar Legion]

1. Opera is a web browser, not a Second Life Viewer - if you're having issues getting your Second Life Viewer to remember your password, contact Tech Support.
2. Sims do not instantly come back up, on average - they simply do not. When Linden Lab restarts a Sim manually or when it is part of a Rolling Restart the entire server machine is being told to restart. Outside of Quantum Computing (still a ways off) no server or personal computing machine can be told to restart and instantly boot as well as run the software i had up prior. It just doesn't work that way.
3. The vast majority of Bot/Automated accounts are tied to specialty viewers that require minimal input from the end user to function. Most of these utilize functions you can find in a normal Second Life viewer- such as the ability to have it remember passwords or to log directly into a particular Sim.

You seem to still - after all of this time - be under the rather mistaken impression that your view of Second Life is the only one that matters. Well guess what? That is wrong. It is just as wrong as those who believe that everyone wants to explore or use vehicles or whatever ....

One of these days, understanding will actually dawn on you.

[Klytyna]

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Yeah, I have "remember me," too. But it doesn't work. For some reason, I'm always forced to type it out. I use Opera.

It doesn't work for you, probably because you are tech-illiterate and don't RTFM.

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Yeah, you can put "Ahern 128,128,0 or whatever, but a bot wouldn't know what to put that would be a good option.

The "Bot" doesn't put it in, it's stored in the bots config file by the bots owner... Bots don't use regular viewers where somebody has to type everything every time it logs in...

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Sims do not take 10 minutes on rolling restarts.

There isn't a computer built, that INSTANTLY restarts it's hardware, operating system and application software at the push of a button. That you don't know this makes your claims about how long restarts of the grid take, utterly worthless.

I once got a JOB, working for an SL Merchant older than you, because he spotted my avatar standing at a sim border waiting for HIS sim to come back up, and we had a 10 min conversation while we waited...

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Do you log into SL and do you have sims on the mainland?

Last time you fraudulently claimed that I have never logged into SL, I pointed out that I have a my.secondlife.com page, with screenshots taken in-world, and that you had made a fool of your self, publicly. You did it again.

Been on SL nearly 6.5 years, and the fact that I know a damn sight more than YOU about viewers, how SL works, in fact pretty much everything relating to SL, should have warned you that I've spent a lot of time in SL, in fact, bearing in mind how little you know and the "every few days" appearances of yours, it's quite possible I've spent MORE hours inworld in 6.5 years than you have in twice that...

I don't need to own a sim, Madlands or otherwise to know how they work...

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

If it is not time critical, why does the bot hurry to log back in NOT TO ITS HOME but to random infohubs, which it junks up with its presence?

I said SOME bots do non time critical jobs, and some bots DO NOT have a fixed starting location, they wander, like "Hal Titanium" the FAMOUS SL Chatbot ( thgat yopu don't seem aware of his existance is yet more proof of how little you actually know about SL ).

Bots whos functions are dependant on a specific location, such as store greeters etc., DO hurry back to their place of work, WHEN the sim finally comes back up, which DOES NOT happen instantly.

Bots do not "hurry to log back in", they attempt to relog because they have been instructed to do that when logged out, and they can log back in a damn sight faster than you can, because they can send user id and password and prefered login point a damn sight faster than any human.

They go to RANDOM infohubs because thats what relogging when the sim you were on resets, does, to people and bots...

Relog on [sim down during reset], get automatically shunted to random infohub, attempt to TP back to [sim down] over and over until it finally comes back up, thats why many bots eventually LEAVE the infohubs.

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The next large group is various sex businesses.

 

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

o sex clubs -- they dance or whatever

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

they have so many bots that they don't miss a few, say, in a sex club.

Actually, that's not true at all...

Most commercial sex businesses in SL, rely on TIPS to the house tip jars, from customers, who don't tip bots...

They tip for service received from ACTUAL humans who emote in IM's or local chat, use voice, etc., not silent unresponsive bots.

The kind of sex place that used bot hookers and dancers is the kind run by clueless people 10 years ago, the kind that all went under because NOBODY tipped the bots...

Bots cost MONEY, you have to have a spare pc to run them, uses electricity, etc. Have to BUY the bot software.

Why PAY MONEY to use a bot to do a sex-worker job badly and earn no tips from unhappy customers, when you can get REAL HUMANS volunteering to work in your club, for a share of the tips, costs you absolutely NOTHING. If they don't earn tips, costs you nothing, fire them, get another volunteer, if they do earn tips, you take a cut, and are making more than you would using bots.

Sex Clubs do not employ armies of bots.

Crappy old Jazz Clubs from 2006 with piss poor traffic? Whole different story...

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I haven't met the "famous" chat bot so I guess he is't so famous.

He's more famous in SL than you, and unlike you HE has a FAN CLUB!

https://my.secondlife.com/hal.titanium

 

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I care about the bot issue and that's the right thing to do.

You are STILL not the boss of the infohub. Your IMing every avatar at an infohub and ORDERING them to leave because you THINK they are a bot (probably because their last name is resident, or they are not payment registered, or you just don't like their sort of avatar...) is TECHNICALLY "Harassment", and you could be subject to multiple AR's, especially from humans who you order to leave, then demand explanations of their presence from, when they tell you to stick it in your ear...

Maybe that is why a Bot has a fan club and a vast amout of comments on their profile feed...

And you do not...

 

[angeoco]

On 23/6/2018 at 12:16 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

The point is, logging on to SL doesn't seem to me to be something that can be an automatic function because you can't paste the password, you have to type it.

The Firestorm command-line has an "--autologin" switch, which logs in as the last saved user, and "--login myfirstname mylastname mypassword" which logs in as a named user. They only work if RLV is not enabled. And of course you can login manually using your saved credentials, just click the "Log in" button.

[Solar Legion]

3 minutes ago, angeoco said:

The Firestorm command-line has an "--autologin" switch, which logs in as the last saved user, and "--login myfirstname mylastname mypassword" which logs in as a named user. They only work if RLV is not enabled. And of course you can login manually using your saved credentials, just click the "Log in" button.

Actually the automated log in switch is present even in the official Linden Lab provided Second Life client. Here's a handy listing of all the switches.

But the one that spawned this whole tangent not only will not see this post adding in more information (and offering a correction) but will try to use your quoted response as a springboard for their own abject hatred of anything even remotely open source/unofficial.