Where is the super-secret botnet forum at?

[Israel Schnute]

It used to be that I had to put up with dozens and dozens of squatters on neighboring abandoned parcels.  With so many unrelated avatars all showing up at the same spot, I can only assume they have to get the coordinates from somewhere.  Then the land went to auction and problem solved.  Until the new owners finally abandon of course.

Now I'm getting a steady stream of bots teleporting into my sim at 3524 yards in the air multiple times per day.  Each one staying around for only 45 seconds of course.

Does second life have some type of darkweb forum for people who don't really do anything constructive to pass along landmarks?

[Fritigern Gothly]

You sound rather fed up with these jokers, and I can't blame you.
If I were in your place, I would simply place a security system up at 3524 meters (not yards). Set its range to a 92 meter radius, no warning and 0 seconds timeout before they are sent home.
This should affect only those that TP to that location and if they are really bots, the fun of TPing to your region will soon wear off.
You can use one of those free visitor counters to see if the traffic indeed decreases.

 

[Clara Hollyberry]

45 seconds sounds about right for the time a cluster of avatars will wait for a scheduled land-tract in  a game called Tiny Empires.  It would be a daily occurrence if that's true.  

Formerly-abandoned land is useful for TE players to quickly en-masse log in, wait for their prize, and log out again.  If that's what's happening then there's nothing dark-web nefarious going on  just a bit of a nuisance if it's now your land, but disabling their scripts will make them seek different pastures. Again, *if* that's what they're doing. 

[Qie Niangao]

16 hours ago, Israel Schnute said:

With so many unrelated avatars all showing up at the same spot, I can only assume they have to get the coordinates from somewhere. 

Just curious: What makes you think they're unrelated? Without other information, I think I would have assumed they were all owned by the same RL person, the bot software just cycling through a list of accounts to login at whatever home location the person set for them.

If I understand the post, their rendezvous point is on some nearby abandoned parcel, not your own land, so you can't really do much to deter them from returning.

Count your blessings that it's a steady stream of them coming and going, not a big clump that all arrives at the same time and hangs out for hours. It took nearly a year for Governance to rid us of a bot-flock that filled a water homestead and kept us from being able to navigate out of our waterfront parcels in the neighboring region.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 8/16/2019 at 2:17 PM, Israel Schnute said:

It used to be that I had to put up with dozens and dozens of squatters on neighboring abandoned parcels.  With so many unrelated avatars all showing up at the same spot, I can only assume they have to get the coordinates from somewhere.  Then the land went to auction and problem solved.  Until the new owners finally abandon of course.

Now I'm getting a steady stream of bots teleporting into my sim at 3524 yards in the air multiple times per day.  Each one staying around for only 45 seconds of course.

Does second life have some type of darkweb forum for people who don't really do anything constructive to pass along landmarks?

Years ago it was somethingawful.com and then 4chan.com and then various reddits, but I don't know now.

What you're describing does sound more like Tiny Empires though. I see infestations of there around and I no longer allow them in my rentals because they fill up the sim and annoy people just with their presence. I see bunches of them in the Linden Homes, BTW.

[Israel Schnute]

On 8/17/2019 at 6:09 AM, Qie Niangao said:

Just curious: What makes you think they're unrelated? Without other information, I think I would have assumed they were all owned by the same RL person, the bot software just cycling through a list of accounts to login at whatever home location the person set for them.

If I understand the post, their rendezvous point is on some nearby abandoned parcel, not your own land, so you can't really do much to deter them from returning.

Count your blessings that it's a steady stream of them coming and going, not a big clump that all arrives at the same time and hangs out for hours. It took nearly a year for Governance to rid us of a bot-flock that filled a water homestead and kept us from being able to navigate out of our waterfront parcels in the neighboring region.

I figured out they were unrelated because the person with their 12 alts all had the same naming convention, and all logged in and out at the exact same time.  Then I started getting other folks with different names, and TP times, so it was more obvious.  Also, behaviors, different RP styles and groups, etc.

I'd love to know how you got rid of the problem in a year.  I had to put up with the sim instability for much longer.  All that happened was the powers to be flattened the land.  I think some still come around, but I don't get to log in at those times anymore.  Evidently, 12 alts and bots all squatting isn't an issue though.

For these interstellar pop-ins, I've considered an orb, but then I have to spend money.  Although, I suppose the problem will only get worse.  Why would you need a forum for that though?!

It's actually kinda nice that I got some answers to this age-old question finally.  For the last two years when I ask this question, all I got was vile and hate.  Now I won't be so snippy when I mention that Metric is against my sim rules.

***

Edit: I'm not sure if the mile-high club folks are unrelated or not.  They all have bot sounding names, and similar aged profiles.  Blank profiles.  So on.  At first I thought they are related, but not much to go on.

Edited August 19, 2019 by Israel Schnute

[Fritigern Gothly]

4 hours ago, Israel Schnute said:

For these interstellar pop-ins, I've considered an orb, but then I have to spend money. 

Not necessarily, the MP is full of free and low-cost security systems. The one that I used to use (before moving to Bellisseria) is called " 'Sly' the Security System ", costs only a single L$ and did exactly what I wanted, which is to keep interlopers out of a range of 64 meters around my skybox. A Larger range is possible, but I did not need that.
 

[Qie Niangao]

4 hours ago, Israel Schnute said:

I'd love to know how you got rid of the problem in a year. 

Well, the affected sim was a Linden Homestead water sim. Because this one swarm of bots were present more of the time than not, they filled that little Homestead to capacity which made it pretty much useless as a water sim for navigation. I would not be surprised if those bots were intended to mess with the Lindens more than anything else, and maybe Governance just had enough of it after a while. But who knows, really? Maybe the bot-runner died in RL, and with him expired his grandiose dreams of bot domination of one small part of Heterocera's east coast.

Re your current problem with the "pop-ins" over your own land: yeah, it's expensive for a sim to have to load an avatar's worth of scripted attachments, depending how many these bots are carrying around. I'd be a little cautious about using a script to send them home, though, because whatever they're doing they could do more of it, more often, and with more scripts attached, as retribution. (Also, it takes some resources just to detect the intruders, and the faster they need to be detected, the more resources needed. On the plus side, though, as Fritigern posted above, there are free security scripts for something this simple; they only get complicated when they need to keep elaborate records, be managed on the web, offer multiple levels of access, all that jazz.)

[Israel Schnute]

Thanks for the suggestion, after years you'll never know when an object will come in handy.

I banned a couple leading up to the post, and I think they must've reported it as a bad LM wherever they get the coordinates from, so traffic is dropping off.  I didn't want to play the security game orb game, but it looked like traffic was going to increase perpetually.  Maybe not now.

On the one hand, yeah they're coming in a zillion miles up.  But it still bogs down the servers even worse IMO.  And they act and ignore you like bots.   But it's only a matter of time before the next thing shows up.  Either the usual folks who like to strip naked and change their closes on the protected right of way (you'd think with all the prostitution groups in their profiles they could afford a closet to do it in), the next bot farm, or the next game...

Edited August 20, 2019 by Israel Schnute

[Israel Schnute]

I tried a few things short of the orb.  Sometimes I have Teleporting routing on.  I moved everyone to the surface; I had thought about putting them in a place that might be full of lag too.  But then I discovered a botnet.  Someone was nice enough to gather all of their alts and names.  I banned them all, and now they're doing it to my other zoned parcels.  So I gotta go through this list like a dozen times now.

And what gets me the most, the bot profile is all snippy about how it's there just to do its automated land duties.  Land duties on land everyone else pays for!  Even though the lindens don't care about squatters, what about this sort of thing instead?