Question?

[Valhallena]

3 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

If you were clicking links from someone, he was probably capturing far more than your IP.

 

Like what? I never downloaded anything from his website or anything. It was a just click to play thing that was embedded on his site.

[MoiraKathleen]

If the IP is what a web browser uses to suggest a location for shopping sites when your browser doesn't have access to wifi and your location info, then what the IP address shows as "location" is  not always accurate.  When I go to a website for a store with physical locations, the store location 'selected' as the closest to me is always in a town that is about 50 miles away and in a different county than I am, even when there is a physical store in my home town. 

I'm wondering if you use wifi and your browser has been given the OK to access your location info, perhaps more specific location info (than what the IP address would show) is being transmitted by the browser and is retrievable by the site being connected to? 

 

[Valhallena]

7 minutes ago, RowanMinx said:

Also, most home IPs are dynamic today.  So what is logged today, means nothing next week.

Mine sticks, and when I was IP ban, on every account of mine I logged into, it didn't allow me to enter the region until they disabled it.

Edited January 21, 2021 by Valhallena

[Rowan Amore]

5 minutes ago, Valhallena said:

Like what? I never downloaded anything from his website or anything. It was a just click to play thing that was embedded on his site.

Clicking links embedded in someone's website is pretty much the same as opening them from those phishing emails.  You never know what they might be capturing with a seemingly harmless looking link.

[MoiraKathleen]

2 minutes ago, Valhallena said:

Mine sticks

I've never had a reason to investigate this myself, but is there not something in either the router or modem software that would allow one to change it? Or could one request that through one's ISP, if necessary?

[Valhallena]

1 minute ago, MoiraKathleen said:

I've never had a reason to investigate this myself, but is there not something in either the router or modem software that would allow one to change it? Or could one request that through one's ISP, if necessary?

I have no idea, I think I read once that you can just restart your router and it will change your IP, but mine is all the way in the basement and I never tried that suggestion to see.

[Valhallena]

10 minutes ago, RowanMinx said:

Clicking links embedded in someone's website is pretty much the same as opening them from those phishing emails.  You never know what they might be capturing with a seemingly harmless looking link.

It was one of the automatic button that was the play symbol which automatically played music, but I know what you mean. The whole crash course of the IP thing and why you should always avoid that getting into the wrong hands was from when I went down to the police station about the stalker (that's also when I learned that you can't just file a restraining order on someone who's harassing you on the internet with personal information until they actually reach out and attempt to do you harm lol, you can totally be dead by then) but yeah... this was all 8 years ago and I have no idea of what's changed.

[Maryanne Solo]

You can log in to your router and control it remotely.

Just type the IP addie into your browser and bookmark it.
Then you would need username & password of course.

[steeljane42]

58 minutes ago, Valhallena said:

I have no idea, I think I read once that you can just restart your router and it will change your IP, but mine is all the way in the basement and I never tried that suggestion to see.

It depends on the ISP and the configuration they use. Some offer public dynamic IPs, in which case a simple router restart is usually enough to change it. Some put their users behind the NAT, where users (usually 20-30) share one public IP while each user has their own local IP, in which case the restart might or might not help depending how "sticky" the NAT pool is and how long the local IP lease time is. And some ISPs (at least here) still provide their very own public IP to their users, especially on the higher end plans (300mbps to 1gbps), that one will never change no matter how much you restart your hardware. ISP might change it for you, but they most likely won't; that option is reserved for business plan users.

Edited January 22, 2021 by steeljane42

[Karl Herber]

16 hours ago, Valhallena said:

Welp... I updated my profile on here and my second life profile of my blog link, hopefully that gets some attention.

In all my years on here, I have never been so peeved as to pursue a wrongdoer so relentlessly, I take IP logging and flat out stealing very seriously. 

Here's another question, besides reporting in world (which let's face it, that seems to just get ignored often, also do you have to be around the person or their land to report them?), how would you guys go about reporting a "company" on SL that logged your IP sneakily without your consent and now uses it to disrupt your SL experience?

I looked at your blog - and yeah that particular "business" is very well known for shady practises. 

For your other question, as long as you know the name of the person you can AR them from anywhere, you don't have to be on their land if you don't know where it is or you're banned. (go to some Linden owned land somewhere, and put the details in the notes). I don't think you can AR a company as an entity, but you can AR the owner of the company.  AR his bots too - if he was concerned that they would be banned due to being close to your dancers, that's proof that he did not have them registered as bots. You can include the chatlog of that conversation you had with him.

 

[Karl Herber]

20 hours ago, Karly Kiyori said:

I looked at your blog - and yeah that particular "business" is very well known for shady practises. 

For your other question, as long as you know the name of the person you can AR them from anywhere, you don't have to be on their land if you don't know where it is or you're banned. (go to some Linden owned land somewhere, and put the details in the notes). I don't think you can AR a company as an entity, but you can AR the owner of the company.  AR his bots too - if he was concerned that they would be banned due to being close to your dancers, that's proof that he did not have them registered as bots. You can include the chatlog of that conversation you had with him.

Well, well, well. A crazy coincidence happened today.

I was searching for a parcel of mainland to buy and I was in particular looking for a waterfront parcel that had a connection to plenty of protected sailing. So for each parcel I looked at, I walked from there to the protected sea to make sure I wasn't hitting any banlines or security orbs.

Well, at one of them I did hit an orb. A few moments later I got an IM from the man himself asking what I was doing. The parcel where the orb was did not belong to him, but I presume the orb was one he'd made & sold. He knew exactly which parcel I'd just been bounced from.

Nosey bugger.

[Rowan Amore]

2 hours ago, Karly Kiyori said:

Well, well, well. A crazy coincidence happened today.

I was searching for a parcel of mainland to buy and I was in particular looking for a waterfront parcel that had a connection to plenty of protected sailing. So for each parcel I looked at, I walked from there to the protected sea to make sure I wasn't hitting any banlines or security orbs.

Well, at one of them I did hit an orb. A few moments later I got an IM from the man himself asking what I was doing. The parcel where the orb was did not belong to him, but I presume the orb was one he'd made & sold. He knew exactly which parcel I'd just been bounced from.

Nosey bugger.

He could have just been an admin on the orb.  I have a friend as admin on mine and he can get IMs when someone enters my parcel.  It's not the one discussed in her blog either.  It's just a nice feature of some orbs.  It does, however, have the creator on it when I purchased it although I did remove him.

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, RowanMinx said:

He could have just been an admin on the orb.  I have a friend as admin on mine and he can get IMs when someone enters my parcel.  It's not the one discussed in her blog either.  It's just a nice feature of some orbs.  It does, however, have the creator on it when I purchased it although I did remove him.

This thread raises so many questions. It's weird enough that the creator would put themself as admin on orbs they sell, but then to actually respond to intrusion events like some hired security service... I really don't know what to make of that. They need a better hobby?

Also, scouting out the threat of scripted security devices between a prospective land purchase and protected water... I guess I'd wander the neighborhood a bit, too, so maybe it's not that weird, but if it's really the practice for determining whether a parcel has direct access to the Governor's land, I mean, there are easier ways.

About IP address tracking: It's gross and creepy but it doesn't violate TOS as long as they don't reveal the results in a way that makes it possible for anybody to identify alts. It is however stupidly easy to do (to many visitors) with a pretty simple LSL script, so never assume a landowner doesn't know your alts. (Way back in Redzone days, I posted the basic source code needed, buried in a script intended to help people test whether they were leaking their IP addresses to in-world scripts in the most common way. By now that code has surely been scrubbed by the passage of time - especially because I most likely posted in on SLUniverse.)

Point is, I don't think the IP address argument will convince many people not to buy those products. I'm also a little skeptical about the "botting their own sploders" theory, although it would be incredibly damning in the eyes of customers from whom that creator would be stealing if it's true. I don't have a better theory of why one flock of (registered) bots would be offensive to another flock of (possibly unregistered?) bots, but I also don't quite follow why raising a fuss about the first flock would protect the second. It's not even obvious to me why, if the second flock belonged to that creator, they wouldn't be registered and thus AR-proof. I'm probably confused.

All that said, I can confirm the basis of the other argument: the ban list absolutely does include "vendetta" accounts. I've been on that list (may be still for all I know) and I doubt I've ever touched one of their sploders. (Personally I'd rather all sploders were restricted to registered Skill Gaming regions only, and don't really understand why they're not.) Rather, I was among a chorus of folks criticizing this creator's business practices, years ago and "across the street," which I'm pretty confident was what earned my "vendetta ban" all those years ago.

[ETA: I meant to mention that adding the blog URL to the OP's in-world profile is probably a good idea, but I imagine the suggestion was to put that link on the forums signature, too, which is done somewhere in the forum account profile. I don't use it myself, but I do have it set to show other folk's signatures.]

Edited January 23, 2021 by Qie Niangao

[Rowan Amore]

12 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

This thread raises so many questions. It's weird enough that the creator would put themself as admin on orbs they sell, but then to actually respond to intrusion events like some hired security service... I really don't know what to make of that. They need a better hobby?

Also, scouting out the threat of scripted security devices between a prospective land purchase and protected water... I guess I'd wander the neighborhood a bit, too, so maybe it's not that weird, but if it's really the practice for determining whether a parcel has direct access to the Governor's land, I mean, there are easier ways.

About IP address tracking: It's gross and creepy but it doesn't violate TOS as long as they don't reveal the results in a way that makes it possible for anybody to identify alts. It is however stupidly easy to do (to many visitors) with a pretty simple LSL script, so never assume a landowner doesn't know your alts. (Way back in Redzone days, I posted the basic source code needed, buried in a script intended to help people test whether they were leaking their IP addresses to in-world scripts in the most common way. By now that code has surely been scrubbed by the passage of time - especially because I most likely posted in on SLUniverse.)

Point is, I don't think the IP address argument will convince many people not to buy those products. I'm also a little skeptical about the "botting their own sploders" theory, although it would be incredibly damning in the eyes of customers from whom that creator would be stealing if it's true. I don't have a better theory of why one flock of (registered) bots would be offensive to another flock of (possibly unregistered?) bots, but I also don't quite follow why raising a fuss about the first flock would protect the second. It's not even obvious to me why, if the second flock belonged to that creator, they wouldn't be registered and thus AR-proof. I'm probably confused.

All that said, I can confirm the basis of the other argument: the ban list absolutely does include "vendetta" accounts. I've been on that list (may be still for all I know) and I doubt I've ever touched one of their sploders. (Personally I'd rather all sploders were restricted to registered Skill Gaming regions only, and don't really understand why they're not.) Rather, I was among a chorus of folks criticizing this creator's business practices, years ago and "across the street," which I'm pretty confident was what earned my "vendetta ban" all those years ago.

[ETA: I meant to mention that adding the blog URL to the OP's in-world profile is probably a good idea, but I imagine the suggestion was to put that link on the forums signature, too, which is done somewhere in the forum account profile. I don't use it myself, but I do have it set to show other folk's signatures.]

He did it so you could learn how to add or delete a person as admin.  He suggests it in the instructions.  

[Valhallena]

5 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

This thread raises so many questions. It's weird enough that the creator would put themself as admin on orbs they sell, but then to actually respond to intrusion events like some hired security service... I really don't know what to make of that. They need a better hobby?

Also, scouting out the threat of scripted security devices between a prospective land purchase and protected water... I guess I'd wander the neighborhood a bit, too, so maybe it's not that weird, but if it's really the practice for determining whether a parcel has direct access to the Governor's land, I mean, there are easier ways.

About IP address tracking: It's gross and creepy but it doesn't violate TOS as long as they don't reveal the results in a way that makes it possible for anybody to identify alts. It is however stupidly easy to do (to many visitors) with a pretty simple LSL script, so never assume a landowner doesn't know your alts. (Way back in Redzone days, I posted the basic source code needed, buried in a script intended to help people test whether they were leaking their IP addresses to in-world scripts in the most common way. By now that code has surely been scrubbed by the passage of time - especially because I most likely posted in on SLUniverse.)

Point is, I don't think the IP address argument will convince many people not to buy those products. I'm also a little skeptical about the "botting their own sploders" theory, although it would be incredibly damning in the eyes of customers from whom that creator would be stealing if it's true. I don't have a better theory of why one flock of (registered) bots would be offensive to another flock of (possibly unregistered?) bots, but I also don't quite follow why raising a fuss about the first flock would protect the second. It's not even obvious to me why, if the second flock belonged to that creator, they wouldn't be registered and thus AR-proof. I'm probably confused.

All that said, I can confirm the basis of the other argument: the ban list absolutely does include "vendetta" accounts. I've been on that list (may be still for all I know) and I doubt I've ever touched one of their sploders. (Personally I'd rather all sploders were restricted to registered Skill Gaming regions only, and don't really understand why they're not.) Rather, I was among a chorus of folks criticizing this creator's business practices, years ago and "across the street," which I'm pretty confident was what earned my "vendetta ban" all those years ago.

[ETA: I meant to mention that adding the blog URL to the OP's in-world profile is probably a good idea, but I imagine the suggestion was to put that link on the forums signature, too, which is done somewhere in the forum account profile. I don't use it myself, but I do have it set to show other folk's signatures.]

Yes, you seem confused. You have to re-read that bit again, but I will try to explain it a bit here.

I said: After realizing I no longer had service, I sent him an email asking him why, and he said because he didn't like where I placed my bots (they were by the sploder; it was a small dancing club so everything was practically near the sploder), and I became offended and concerned why it would matter to him. That's when the light switch went off, and I explain how and why. I also explain how unbeknownst to him, my bots were registered and just there as a way to galvanize the crowd, not for traffic inflation.

Back when I started, IP gathering from a third party was illegal. If that has changed, that sucks because it is entrusting a bunch of people who do not necessarily have good intentions of with your location, and in-world identity of you and your alts which we all know can be used as a way to harass one's "game" play.

 

[Valhallena]

9 hours ago, Karly Kiyori said:

Well, well, well. A crazy coincidence happened today.

I was searching for a parcel of mainland to buy and I was in particular looking for a waterfront parcel that had a connection to plenty of protected sailing. So for each parcel I looked at, I walked from there to the protected sea to make sure I wasn't hitting any banlines or security orbs.

Well, at one of them I did hit an orb. A few moments later I got an IM from the man himself asking what I was doing. The parcel where the orb was did not belong to him, but I presume the orb was one he'd made & sold. He knew exactly which parcel I'd just been bounced from.

Nosey bugger.

Wow... that is one hell of a coincidence and creepy. Like, what does it matter to him who was on another person's land that does not belong to him? What a effing weirdo!

So gross.🤮

[Adamburp Adamczyk]

I've used Voodoo products for over 6 years and never had an issue,  their security device has *never* triggered my media filter, at ANY place that uses it.  So no, it doesn't use the "media exploit".  If you want to see for yourselves visit my sim Mystery Caye with your filter set to on, you'll only see my 80's stream.

 

In terms of "IP logging" for a sploder it's determined by each individual sploder owner whether to use this setting or not, in order to stop a person using a billion alts to "game the system".  And the Sploder owner does NOT see any personal info.

 

One thing that Is important to know about the sploders: when a person clicks the sploder to enter, and the "verify" function is in use, then they get a CLEAR warning message that "clicking verify WILL log your IP address", in various languages.  This puts the choice whether to enter or not FIRMLY in the hands of the user.  So hardly "IP farming" when the user is prompted to make a CLEAR and INFORMED decision.

 

So yes GDPR compliant too - as the user has to give CLEAR consent to enter.

Edited January 23, 2021 by Adamburp Adamczyk
added GDPR comment.

[Valhallena]

14 hours ago, Adamburp Adamczyk said:

I've used Voodoo products for over 6 years and never had an issue,  their security device has *never* triggered my media filter, at ANY place that uses it.  So no, it doesn't use the "media exploit".  If you want to see for yourselves visit my sim Mystery Caye with your filter set to on, you'll only see my 80's stream.

 

In terms of "IP logging" for a sploder it's determined by each individual sploder owner whether to use this setting or not, in order to stop a person using a billion alts to "game the system".  And the Sploder owner does NOT see any personal info.

 

One thing that Is important to know about the sploders: when a person clicks the sploder to enter, and the "verify" function is in use, then they get a CLEAR warning message that "clicking verify WILL log your IP address", in various languages.  This puts the choice whether to enter or not FIRMLY in the hands of the user.  So hardly "IP farming" when the user is prompted to make a CLEAR and INFORMED decision.

 

So yes GDPR compliant too - as the user has to give CLEAR consent to enter.

No one here said he media exploits, I said he exploits his created sploder, so what you are saying is irrelevant.

No one said the sploder owner (the non creator/buyer) sees personal info, so again irrelevant.

Lastly, if a person purchases his sploder product to use for their company, your IP is automatically logged by him when you have to register your product, and that is NOT by consent.

Edited January 24, 2021 by Valhallena

[Silent Mistwalker]

On 1/20/2021 at 12:23 PM, Orwar said:

   There's Virtual Secrets, of course ...

More like Virtual Insanity. 🤭

[Valhallena]

I have filed the report in world on a linden lab land as suggestion, thanks to those who suggested that. I will try tomorrow to speak to a LIVE CHAT representative also to see what else they can so, or suggest I do to help end this man's fraud. 

Edited January 24, 2021 by Valhallena

[Qie Niangao]

15 hours ago, Valhallena said:

Yes, you seem confused. You have to re-read that bit again, but I will try to explain it a bit here.

I said: After realizing I no longer had service, I sent him an email asking him why, and he said because he didn't like where I placed my bots (they were by the sploder; it was a small dancing club so everything was practically near the sploder), and I became offended and concerned why it would matter to him. That's when the light switch went off, and I explain how and why. I also explain how unbeknownst to him, my bots were registered and just there as a way to galvanize the crowd, not for traffic inflation.

Back when I started, IP gathering from a third party was illegal. If that has changed, that sucks because it is entrusting a bunch of people who do not necessarily have good intentions of with your location, and in-world identity of you and your alts which we all know can be used as a way to harass one's "game" play.

Let's get to my confusion next, but first, I'm pretty confident that collection and sharing of IP addresses per se was never against the SL Terms of Service. In fact it used to be the "wild west" until a huge, messy, protracted scandal over the "Redzone" product and its creator, a literal RL criminal. Anybody for whom this is new territory may want to brush up with the help of Inara Pey's contemporaneous blog posts. I don't know if the relevant SL Universe threads are preserved anywhere, but that's where a lot of the action took place. Besides addressing Redzone specifically, the Lab modified the Community Standards, with the relevant language still intact and highlighted below:

Quote

Disclosure

Sharing personal information about other users, either directly or indirectly, without their consent—including, but not limited to, gender, religion, age, marital status, race, sexual orientation, alternate account names (including account statuses, such as whether it is on hold, suspended, or active), and real-world location beyond what is provided by them in their user profile—is not allowed. Except for the purpose of reporting abuse or any violation of policies to Linden Lab, the remote monitoring, posting or sharing of conversations without a participant’s consent are prohibited.

This was supposed to prevent any devices from detecting and revealing alt identities by any means. Third party viewers also introduced media filters to defeat the easiest way(s) to use IP addresses to detect likely alts. And for better or worse, there are still commercial devices available in SL that exchange IP addresses detected by these and other means to ban likely alts without revealing identity (although it's like pulling teeth to get them to admit that's what they're doing, so it's probably considered a TOS grey area).

The Marketplace description of the product under discussion in this thread claims:

Quote

Can I see peoples IP address and their alt avatars?
A: No, Voodoo doesn't disclose any information other than informing in local chat when an avatar is ejected.

Note the emphasis on disclosure.

Now I don't know what it really does, but if it collects IP addresses of region visitors, the subject of "media filters" arises naturally because media (especially a particular form of parcel media) is the easiest way to collect that data.

All that said, it seems you're only claiming that the product owner's IP address is collected during registration. That seems unusual, but I think we all agree this is an "unusual" product.

Okay, so now on to my confusion. Just to make it easier, this is the blog article we're discussing (I don't see any reason not to link it), and the relevant passage:

Quote

And, the reason why he cared that my bots were placed near the sploder, was because he was in fear that my bots would get banned by linden labs (bots created solely to inflate traffic of one’s business on SL is prohibited by Linden Labs), and so if his bots were around my bots when that happened, he too would get banned. 

I completely agree that it's weird of him to care about your bots and their placement. I could make up some bogus just-so story about their proximity to the sploder somehow affecting performance of his scripts... or maybe he thought visitors would think your bots were collecting sploder winnings and he didn't want that to diminish how effective his device appears to be in defeating bots. Or something. 

What I couldn't follow is, if the other bots were his, why would he think he'd risk a ban, even if he thought your bots were unregistered? I mean, if these other bots were his, why wouldn't he have registered them as scripted agents, same as yours? Is it somehow to his advantage to boost traffic everywhere his bots roam? Or... maybe some club owners track their own traffic statistics closely enough to recognize that these visitors don't generate traffic so must be bots, therefore why pay for this supposed bot-defeating product?

So... maybe? I'm just not getting this epiphany, open-and-shut case that these visitors are his bots. I'm thinking "the same people coming in over and over again" might just be the usual bunch of sploder-hunters equipped with one of this creator's other products (which incidentally insures that these sploders aren't intended to draw actual participants, only traffic).

[Rowan Amore]

6 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

So... maybe? I'm just not getting this epiphany, open-and-shut case that these visitors are his bots. I'm thinking "the same people coming in over and over again" might just be the usual bunch of sploder-hunters equipped with one of this creator's other products (which incidentally insures that these sploders aren't intended to draw actual participants, only traffic).

I mentioned a product I saw on the MP made especially to find the largest pots on these sploders.  That would definitely explain the same people showing up all the time.  Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the purpose of having the ability to log IPs the reason people use a product like this?  So one person doesn't log in 20 alts to come grab the money from these?  Otherwise, I don't see the purpose.

[Qie Niangao]

3 minutes ago, RowanMinx said:

I mentioned a product I saw on the MP made especially to find the largest pots on these sploders.  That would definitely explain the same people showing up all the time.  Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the purpose of having the ability to log IPs the reason people use a product like this?  So one person doesn't log in 20 alts to come grab the money from these?  Otherwise, I don't see the purpose.

Right, I too believe that's the stated purpose of these sploder's no-alt feature, but that product which locates all these sploders ordered by pot size ensures that visitors will be drawn who are only interested in this immediate sploder pay-out, not participate in anything else related to the club. And that makes the sploder little more than a traffic-gaming device.

It's not rocket science to scrape the "highest payout sploders" webpage to inform a bot where to go, so I guess the sploders must somehow detect obvious alts lest every big-pot sploder be surrounded by bots until the sim is full or the sploder pays out, whichever comes first.

[Silent Mistwalker]

There shouldn't be any need for resident IPs to be used by anyone other than Linden Lab.  If you need someone's IP for something, you probably shouldn't be doing it. 

[Valhallena]

5 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Let's get to my confusion next, but first, I'm pretty confident that collection and sharing of IP addresses per se was never against the SL Terms of Service. In fact it used to be the "wild west" until a huge, messy, protracted scandal over the "Redzone" product and its creator, a literal RL criminal. Anybody for whom this is new territory may want to brush up with the help of Inara Pey's contemporaneous blog posts. I don't know if the relevant SL Universe threads are preserved anywhere, but that's where a lot of the action took place. Besides addressing Redzone specifically, the Lab modified the Community Standards, with the relevant language still intact and highlighted below:

This was supposed to prevent any devices from detecting and revealing alt identities by any means. Third party viewers also introduced media filters to defeat the easiest way(s) to use IP addresses to detect likely alts. And for better or worse, there are still commercial devices available in SL that exchange IP addresses detected by these and other means to ban likely alts without revealing identity (although it's like pulling teeth to get them to admit that's what they're doing, so it's probably considered a TOS grey area).

The Marketplace description of the product under discussion in this thread claims:

Note the emphasis on disclosure.

Now I don't know what it really does, but if it collects IP addresses of region visitors, the subject of "media filters" arises naturally because media (especially a particular form of parcel media) is the easiest way to collect that data.

All that said, it seems you're only claiming that the product owner's IP address is collected during registration. That seems unusual, but I think we all agree this is an "unusual" product.

Okay, so now on to my confusion. Just to make it easier, this is the blog article we're discussing (I don't see any reason not to link it), and the relevant passage:

I completely agree that it's weird of him to care about your bots and their placement. I could make up some bogus just-so story about their proximity to the sploder somehow affecting performance of his scripts... or maybe he thought visitors would think your bots were collecting sploder winnings and he didn't want that to diminish how effective his device appears to be in defeating bots. Or something. 

What I couldn't follow is, if the other bots were his, why would he think he'd risk a ban, even if he thought your bots were unregistered? I mean, if these other bots were his, why wouldn't he have registered them as scripted agents, same as yours? Is it somehow to his advantage to boost traffic everywhere his bots roam? Or... maybe some club owners track their own traffic statistics closely enough to recognize that these visitors don't generate traffic so must be bots, therefore why pay for this supposed bot-defeating product?

So... maybe? I'm just not getting this epiphany, open-and-shut case that these visitors are his bots. I'm thinking "the same people coming in over and over again" might just be the usual bunch of sploder-hunters equipped with one of this creator's other products (which incidentally insures that these sploders aren't intended to draw actual participants, only traffic).

He wouldn't register his bots as scripted agents because there would be no traffic to be made off of them, rendering his product inferior to other sploders out there. Think of it as killing two birds with one stone, the customer gets the traffic they want and he collects the lindens. 

Also, yes- he may have a site (as do other competing sploders companies) that tell customers where the largest pots are, however there tends to be a diversity in the people with the other sploder companies, but the reason they are not as big as what the voodoo sploder is is because the other ones collect an upfront 10-20% fee when you pay the sploder to feed the crowd, whereas voodoo's gave the illusion that they collected nothing . I kept getting the same limited-english speakers or ones that didn't speak at all. I sometimes had other events that required people to wear a certain color to win more lindens or do something else as simple as dance, but because their English was limited and/or bots, they never even participated, they all just focused on the sploder and would teleport to the same spots always (a real indication of a macro).

Edited January 24, 2021 by Valhallena