Trivia games and bots question

[Chic Aeon]

Don't want to make a script  (so not a scripts person) but figured this was the best place to ask.  Can Trivia games where you answer questions (some I have seen nave a choice of four possibilities and others you had to type in the answer (didn't always work well - those) be gamed by bots?  Trying to find a way to help the new and or broke folks but want the money to go to ACTUAL avatars, not avatar owners per se. 

 

Thanks for any insights.   Other suggestions welcome too. 

[Wulfie Reanimator]

A bot can do anything a regular user can do, at least in theory.

Second Life is open-source and doesn't have any kind of "anti-cheat" or "anti-bot" systems built into the viewer nor the sim. If the viewer knows how to present you with a menu with buttons (or questions in chat), the bot is able to read those buttons (or chat).

Your best preventative method might be to present the questions/choices as textures. It's unlikely that there exist any bots that come with OCR. I think bots are generally blind in general, they don't need a graphical view of the world to interact with it.

Or if you really want to make things difficult, you could use prim media to display a webpage with the trivia questions/choices on it.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

The simplest way I can think of, and it might also be a least-lag solution, is to have the answer given to a text box, not by listening to local chat. so it goes like this:

The question goes out in local chat as usual.

An avatar wishing to answer touches the object and gets a chat box into which they type their answer.

The answer gets processed in the usual way, and the winner can be announced in local chat, but as no answer was given in local, there's no way a bot can stand logging questions and keeping track of answers.

Assuming a bot can't touch an object and get a text-box to type into, it can't answer.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

4 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

The simplest way I can think of, and it might also be a least-lag solution, is to have the answer given to a text box, not by listening to local chat. so it goes like this:

The question goes out in local chat as usual.

An avatar wishing to answer touches the object and gets a chat box into which they type their answer.

The answer gets processed in the usual way, and the winner can be announced in local chat, but as no answer was given in local, there's no way a bot can stand logging questions and keeping track of answers.

Assuming a bot can't touch an object and get a text-box to type into, it can't answer.

Bots can touch objects (just as your viewer can tell the sim "I have touched this object"), and dialogs are just glorified chat messages.

When you type stuff into a text box and confirm it, your viewer will actually send a regular chat message on that text box channel. This also means that the viewer/bot will know what channel the message is supposed to go into, so they don't have to type anything into the actual text box, they can "bypass" it by just chatting on the correct channel.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

I was assuming that the channel chosen for the toucher would be obtained from part of their UUID plus some random addition so that it couldn't easily be guessed at or grabbed by scanning a known range.

I didn't see how a bot would be able to know what channel the text box was using, but I'll take your word for it that they can tell.