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13 hours ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

How about if avatars are color coded on the map according to how long its been since they changed location.

green for active, moved in the last hour

yellow not moved in two hours

orange not moved in three hours

red not moved in a day

brown not moved in a week

black not moved in a month 

 

I could terraform and decorate a region without moving, and that would easily take a day. I'd go from green to red.

I wouldn't want to add that feature to the world map. It's slow enough without having to query every avatar on a region to find out its movement status.

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9 hours ago, Tari Landar said:

Avs must "move" at least once a week, unless there is a week with literally no restarts at all. Even when using a program to log an av (scripted agent or otherwise) in, movement would be detected when they came back online. Yes even if the av always came back online in the exact same spot and a human, or program, never really moved the av out of that spot, it would be initially detected as movement on login. This would be as easy to "game" as anything else is, so I'm not sure how effective it would be, unless one is only interested in the number of hours an av was in one place. But then. I've seen people who play TE have their av(s) stand in one singular place for literally hours and hours on end, lol. 

At any rate, it's pretty easy to tell when a parcel/sim is using a horde of avs to make a place seem more populated, it takes very little time to tp in somewhere and one can tell if there are actually people at the location. I have tp'd into countless places that LOOK like they have loads of folks-all those green dots. Then I land and..not a soul in sight. If my goal was to find other people, I'd leave, and I have. More often than not my goal isn't to find people,  though, so it doesn't bother me in the same way it does others. I get why it does, I'm sure it can be a nuisance for them. However, it's just as easy to tp back out as it was to tp in, so I would consider it a minor annoyance, at best-if I were looking for other people anyway. 

I forgot about restarts, but I had hoped people would see I was being facetious.

As for discovering if a place is populated by bots/alts, I do that all the time, tp in, check radar, cam in, see 20 bots/alts on a platform, and leave, probably never to return.

When I use the inworld search (I never use the web based search)  I look for places that have reasonable traffic (10 to 20 thou?) but show as currently empty on the map. I'll tp in, look around, if I like it, I'll join the group or at least take a lm, because high traffic and currently empty means to me that it has events that are well attended.

Edited by BilliJo Aldrin
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5 hours ago, Parhelion Palou said:

I could terraform and decorate a region without moving, and that would easily take a day. I'd go from green to red.

I wouldn't want to add that feature to the world map. It's slow enough without having to query every avatar on a region to find out its movement status.

Well don't worry, its not gonna happen, that would be a lot of extra info to collect and store. I'm impressed that the map shows avatars at all since its a constant real time update. 

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On 2/26/2019 at 8:53 PM, CoffeeDujour said:

Wandering around looking for signs of life, dots on the map .... bots on the map more like. I've been at this for an hour going region to region and I've yet to find a real person.

Bots .. lets have them shown on the map in a different color, keep the green dot for real people, this is a social platform, let us at least see where the real people are.

I automatically think of bots as traffic bots, and not for the porpose of being seen on the map (apparent popularity). I've realised that it's the latter that this thread is about and it seems to me that the most straight forward answer to your request is simply not to show avatars that are registered as bots on the map. It would be very easy to implement. The downside would be that, when traffic bots aren't visible on the map, they take a little while to find and report if the high traffic land is search enabled. So maybe colouring registered bots is probably the better answer.

BilliJo's suggestion of taking movement into account is no good because bots can be programmed to move. Not long ago I had a bunch of them wandering all over the sim. All run by one small external programme in conjunction with some inworld scripts. The suggestion might have been tongue-in-cheek though.

Edited by Phil Deakins
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1 hour ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

I forgot about restarts, but I had hoped people would see I was being facetious.

As for discovering if a place is populated by bots/alts, I do that all the time, tp in, check radar, cam in, see 20 bots/alts on a platform, and leave, probably never to return.

Oh, I did know you were, lol. But, knowing some people, it's entirely possible that someone would come along who didn't, and think it actually possible too, lol. Much easier to cut that off first ;) 

You do the same that I do, well assuming I was going there to find people. Those are places that if I see are simply trying to inflate popularity/traffic/whatever, I won't return, because I'll know those aren't very likely to ever be actual people. If I'm not there to find other people, but for some other reason, I'll just ignore and continue whatever I'm there for. 

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On 2/26/2019 at 3:53 PM, CoffeeDujour said:

Wandering around looking for signs of life, dots on the map .... bots on the map more like. I've been at this for an hour going region to region and I've yet to find a real person.

Bots .. lets have them shown on the map in a different color, keep the green dot for real people, this is a social platform, let us at least see where the real people are.

Couldn't agree more. This will help flush out stores that use bots to up traffic as well. I see entire bot farms stashed in the Linden homes as well, taking up avatar spaces. They need a colour on the map. Maybe some other label also inworld when you mouse over them.

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18 hours ago, BilliJo Aldrin said:

for a whole month?

 

I know of one.  My alt army is online whenever I am not and they are playing tiny empires. They don't move. they don't talk, they don't respond if spoken to.  But they are quite busy, I assure you; they are playing a hud based game that wants responses every 3 minutes.

Most of the time I have them sit on dance pads because it amuses me to see them dancing together. One of them occasionally travel to different blues clubs looking for good music streams

Edited by kali Wylder
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On 3/2/2019 at 2:48 PM, kali Wylder said:

I know of one.  My alt army is online whenever I am not and they are playing tiny empires. They don't move. they don't talk, they don't respond if spoken to.  But they are quite busy, I assure you; they are playing a hud based game that wants responses every 3 minutes.

Most of the time I have them sit on dance pads because it amuses me to see them dancing together. One of them occasionally travel to different blues clubs looking for good music streams

This is literally why we can't have nice things, and all because you want to play a 'my meaningless internet points are bigger than your meaningless internet points' mini game with less depth than cookie clicker.

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It's still not clear to me after pages of responses:

Is the proposal that we should be able to distinguish the registered "scripted agent" avatars from everybody else?

If there were a reliable way to distinguish bots in general from non-bots, that would have happened long ago. Whatever criteria we'd propose for making that distinction would be obsolete almost immediately as the bot-runners learn to defeat it. I just don't think that's worth exploring.

So, back to making user-visible the registered-bot distinction, what would be the effects? 

  1. We wouldn't be lured to map locations full of non-traffic bots -- those that serve Group-chat supervision, issue direct Group invitations, other common chores for which the Lab was too lazy to expose throttled script APIs.
  2. No change to traffic bots, of course, because they're necessarily illegally unregistered (else they wouldn't count as traffic).
     - The skyboxes full of traffic bots would still look like busy clubs on the map, same as always, and
     - Bot-inflated parcel traffic wouldn't get any less inflated
  3. [ETA: No change to Tiny Empire-playing alts, I guess, who presumably don't feel obliged to register.]

So yeah, I guess #1 would be of some benefit, but either I'm missing something or I'm too jaded to see all that much value here.

Either way, this thread has me considering whether to register myself as a bot. I mean, what's the downside? Most of my land isn't even listed in Search, and I certainly don't care to have my presence boost anybody else's parcel traffic count. (Now, if other, traffic-driven landowners really want my avatar to count, I might be willing to flip a "bot or not" switch if they meet my price for contributing traffic -- sort of "camper-dictated terms of employment.")

Edited by Qie Niangao
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I like your last sentence, Qi - that's what the laugh is for.

58 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Is the proposal that we should be able to distinguish the registered "scripted agent" avatars from everybody else?

My understanding is that the proposal is for avatars that are registered as scripted agents.

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@Qie Niangao

Since registering 'scripted agent' status came in, users have not been able to know whether or not an avatar that is not their own is registered, which means that, when a user comes across a bunch of avatars that could be traffic bots, s/he is unable to know whether or not they are.

If the land is not in search, it doesn't matter either way, but when it is in search then it would be useful to know whether or not a bunch of avatars that appear to be bots, are there just for the traffic count. If they are, they can be reported. If they aren't, it's better not to keep reporting a bunch of avatars that may well be bots but are not breaking any rules.

So I think that it can be useful to know whether or not an avatar is registered as a scripted agent.

Edited by Phil Deakins
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@Phil Deakins

Oh okay, so this way we could avoid reporting avatars we think are acting like traffic bots when they're already registered as (non-traffic) bots.

That makes sense, I guess... but only if we assume there's some point in reporting avatars that act like traffic bots that are in fact traffic bots. Do we think the Lab ever actually does anything with such reports? (Or maybe they'd take such reports more seriously if they weren't so likely to be mistakenly filed on already-registered non-traffic bots?)

Or maybe there's a whole bot-hunter game that would be more fun to play this way, even though the Lab files all such reports in the bot bit bucket.*

_________________
*Yes, this whole post was an excuse to mint "bot bit bucket" and now I'm trying to make it a thing.

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20 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

But to be fair, I don't think there's any harm in announcing those that are registered.

It will increase pressure to force registration of so far unafffected bots... so work causes work... and what will be the benefits? Security orbs will start shooting down bots without reasons and grid surveys will cease...

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51 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

Security orbs will start shooting down bots without reasons and grid surveys will cease...

Sounds all too likely... even though the "without reasons" includes the fact the good bots are exactly those self-declared ones. We know landowners are cray-cray protective of their pixel properties, so some will use any excuse to practice their marksmanship.

One wonders, though, how much the survey bots are already thwarted by closed-access regions owned by those same "big hat, no cattle" ranchers. Maybe they'd never see the criminal drug-dealer rapist registered bots anyway.

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4 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Or maybe there's a whole bot-hunter game that would be more fun to play this way, even though the Lab files all such reports in the bot bit bucket.*

 _________________
*Yes, this whole post was an excuse to mint "bot bit bucket" and now I'm trying to make it a thing.

Any similarity to “Zombie Hunter” games?

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8 hours ago, Fionalein said:

Security orbs will start shooting down bots without reasons and grid surveys will cease...

GOOD.

Bots that show up places never bring any value, if anything they negatively impact any real people at that location.

Remember money trees? They got new players a little spending money and taught them god like camera control in the process.

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6 minutes ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Bots that show up places never bring any value, if anything they negatively impact any real people at that location.

Got to agree with that.  Took me a while to work out why accounts were showing up on my skybox daily at about 1000m above the store when the store has a fixed landing.  Now the orb boots and bans.  I am sick of it.  It's rude and intrusive.  I would have no issue if they just landed at the landing point and left but why this 1000M overide is beyond me.  couple more meters and they would be in my bed.

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11 minutes ago, CoffeeDujour said:

GOOD.

Bots that show up places never bring any value, if anything they negatively impact any real people at that location.

Remember money trees? They got new players a little spending money and taught them god like camera control in the process.

The grid survey bots do not cause any harm and are there for only a few seconds. Rarely ever fully rezzing as they are there for such a short period of time.

As a matter of fact, if you are the sim owner or you are "renting" a full sim and have full estate rights, all you have to do is ask* (nicely) Tyche Shepherd to stop the bots from coming to your sim and she will. The information she provides is valuable to many residents as well as LL.

 

*I did ask, nicely, and the bots did stop landing on my homestead.

Edited by Selene Gregoire
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1 hour ago, Selene Gregoire said:

I did ask, nicely, and the bots did stop landing on my homestead.

Just out of curiousity: Why did you ask them to stop? You know what Tyche's bots do, so why would you ask them not to do that on your homestead?

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1 hour ago, Qie Niangao said:

Just out of curiousity: Why did you ask them to stop? You know what Tyche's bots do, so why would you ask them not to do that on your homestead?

It was a long time ago (many years). At that time we were having problems with bots hanging out at the LZ and as I didn't want to unwittingly ban any of Tyche's legitimate bots, I asked her to stop them. It was easier on us both that way. I didn't feel right asking for a list of her bots (none of my business) and waste my time having to go through the list and remove her's. She understood my request and honored it. That's what counts. 

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It appears that bots are generally thought of in negative terms, but they shouldn't be. At least those that are on their owner's land shouldn't be - not automatically, anyway. One example has just been mentioned - Tyche Shepherd's survey bots. They are not a clear example because, although they do something that some people appreciate, they do land on everyone else's land without permission. They perform a positive function, but they are invasive. They are positive or negative depending on your point of view.

I have a few clear positives examples of my own. One are the castle bots that I used to have when I had a castle and almost all of the sim it was in. They were characters that mostly moved around the castle and sim, guarding it, although one was a maiden who was imprisoned in the tower, waving a handkerchief out of a window, hoping for rescue. Another set of bots were just avatars that moved around the sim in no set pattern. That was the most recent set. And yet another set were store models which were on scripted furniture for potential customers to see the animations without needing to bring a partner.

Apart from the store models, which were registered, they all added traffic counts to my land. The land they added counts to was not in search. All of them, though, made the sim on the map appear to have moving users in it, which brings me to my point...

Regardless of what anyone else would like the map to show, it's my world and my imagination, and what I do in it is my business. I enjoyed creating the bots systems. It was a significant part of my SL hobby from time to time. The other side of my point is that it is nobody else's business whether or not I have a load of bots on my land, making people think there are real users there. If people assume that they are real users, it's their business, not mine. We don't have to arrange our SL hobbies to suit other people's preferences, and we don't have to arrange our SL hobbies so that other people don't waste a few minutes coming to realise that the avatars they see are not real users.

In a nutshell, bots are not a negative. They can be used negatively, but it's the use they are sometimes put to that's negative, and not the fact of bots. So please don't shoot them on sight.

Thank you for listening :)

 

ETA: A few little stories about the bots...

1. One of the store models on sex beds sometimes got tips from guys. She was on a bed on her own, ready for someone to join her. She was sometimes treated (talked to) as though she wasn't a bot, even though the signs there said she is. The male model that was on a bed on his own never got tips.

2. There was a sex bed in the tower room that the maiden was in. Once in a while a guy would try to persuade her to get on it with him. She couldn't, of course.

3. I watched as a female turn up at the castle and tried to get one of the guards to have sex. Someone had told her that that particular guard was good for sex, and I think she was trying to find the form of words that would trigger it - sort of a password that would make the bot stand up and have sex with her.

Edited by Phil Deakins
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