Bots?

[Infinatedepths]

I own a private region.  In the last few weeks I've noticed an influx of "People" who pop onto the sim and then immediately off again.  All are 8 months or under, All have completely blank profiles, All have names in all caps and none of them really rez (just the orange cloud).  What are these? Is there a way to get rid of them?  Thanks for any input.

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

Maybe Tiny Empires alts? If that game is even still going on... 

You could set your security to only allow avatars over a certain age, unless you have some legitimate newer accounts who visit your region. 

[Adamburp Adamczyk]

I have the same issue with this.

 

@Tommy Lindensince I was planning to bring this to your attention at the next Governance meeting, any advice on this? it's becoming a plague and I don't especially want to make my land PIOF entry only.

[Infinatedepths]

 

Silvia, no, I have an age restriction up... 30 days, but one of our functions is to help people new to this type of roleplay learn.  So, I hesitate to go any higher, and, I'm afraid that it will only start over again with older avatars. 

I could I know about the SL bots the came in and turned two circles then popped out.  They seemed to have vanished or are replaced with those bots that just hover in place.

 

[LittleMe Jewell]

Usually the ones that just pop in and out are land survey bots.  The Tiny Empire ones tend to just stand around in places for long periods of time.

[Infinatedepths]

Adamburp, its annoying at best.  We have a policy of greeting everyone that comes to the sim.  Someone just gets typing to welcome them and Poof, they're gone.  Rather disrupting.

[Maitimo]

I've started to see third party providers producing web-based SL maps (since the official one is so useless anymore), so it may be that they are mapping bots taking snapshots of the region.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

13 hours ago, Infinatedepths said:

I own a private region.  In the last few weeks I've noticed an influx of "People" who pop onto the sim and then immediately off again.  All are 8 months or under, All have completely blank profiles, All have names in all caps and none of them really rez (just the orange cloud).  What are these? Is there a way to get rid of them?  Thanks for any input.

I notice a lot more of them lately. And I don't know if they are all related. One of them got into a tree on my rentals -- it seemed to be an object named for an avatar, or an object AND an avatar. Another avatar appeared who claimed to be the owner, and a tenant of mine asked what he was doing, and his answer was "Research." Why does your research involve my land?

The Lindens of course set the stage for this by allowing all those unmanned vehicles to constantly spam sims.

[Gem Oxygen]

 I just changed my sim to only allow those with payment info allowed, this is not permanent but just long enough to let the owner of these bots know my sim is not a ideal landing spot. I have noticed this too and I had tried the age defenders but once the 7 days past, they was back again. I don't want to restrict my sim too much, but the no payment info seems to have sent a passive aggressive message.

[ArgontheDevil Ormega]

Have some fun with it.  Set your land to allow damage and then shoot them.  Organize bot hunts with your legitimate tenants.  Make a contest of it.  Who gets the most kills gets a free rent period.

[Peter Stindberg]

I recently stumbled across that topic, and scripted a tracker for those bots. They ARE getting more. There is some background info here: https://lounetizen.com/botdata/

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

6 hours ago, ArgontheDevil Ormega said:

Have some fun with it.  Set your land to allow damage and then shoot them.  Organize bot hunts with your legitimate tenants.  Make a contest of it.  Who gets the most kills gets a free rent period.

This has potential! You could sell tickets like at a carnival game: five shots for L$50. I'd rather play that than gamble on gachas. 

[Peter Stindberg]

There's definitely enough of them. My tracker counts about 3-7 visits a day. A bit less during the weekend.

[Infinatedepths]

On 4/3/2021 at 4:45 PM, Maitimo said:

I've started to see third party providers producing web-based SL maps (since the official one is so useless anymore), so it may be that they are mapping bots taking snapshots of the region.

 

I don't think they're hear long enough to map anything.  Its less than 10 seconds as a general rule.

[Adamburp Adamczyk]

I knew I'd seen something like this before:

 

https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/442523-problem-with-bots-on-my-parcel/page/4/?tab=comments#comment-1970476

 

read Kristin Linden's comments.

 

@Tommy Lindencan you add this ongoing issue to any agenda for tomorrow's Governance meeting please? kristin's turn to bring the cake.

Edited April 5, 2021 by Adamburp Adamczyk
pinged to supertom for the Governance User Group meeting :)

[Tommy Linden]

Hey @Adamburp Adamczyk

We don't have a Governance meeting tomorrow, as I mentioned in the last meeting, the next one isn't until the 20th.

Also, I will be up front with you, in that I am afraid I do not see what the violation is here that would warrant the Governance team stepping in. There is nothing saying that someone, person or bot (as long as the bot is set to be a self identified scripted agent), can't temporarily visit a land. If all they are doing is visiting and then leaving, aside from it being an annoyance, I am not sure what the actual harm is.

If there is more going on than just a visit, please feel free to file an Abuse Report and it will be looked at.

Otherwise I would encourage land owners to utilize the features that we provide in restricting access to their land if they do not wish to have visitors arrive at it.

-Tommy Linden

[Peter Stindberg]

I am just having a visit from "dgtest14" https://my.secondlife.com/dgtest14 on my parcel. New profile, joined today, simply standing around. Curious, I checkd if there is a dgtest13 - and there is: https://my.secondlife.com/dgtest13 - joined a month ago. Apparently, the dgtest-family goes all the way back to dgtest 1 https://my.secondlife.com/dgtest1 who joined 18 months ago.

Anyone knows something about them?

Update: dgtest1 has the explanation in their profile: It's apparently a bot for the Destination Guide.

Edited April 5, 2021 by Peter Stindberg

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

1 hour ago, Peter Stindberg said:

I am just having a visit from "dgtest14" https://my.secondlife.com/dgtest14 on my parcel. New profile, joined today, simply standing around. Curious, I checkd if there is a dgtest13 - and there is: https://my.secondlife.com/dgtest13 - joined a month ago. Apparently, the dgtest-family goes all the way back to dgtest 1 https://my.secondlife.com/dgtest1 who joined 18 months ago.

Anyone knows something about them?

Update: dgtest1 has the explanation in their profile: It's apparently a bot for the Destination Guide.

Interesting! I wonder if they are legit, since the DG is run by LL. 

[Peter Stindberg]

They seem to be. I chatted with the one, he was there to verify the location and take a screenshot. He sent me the link: The location IS in the Destination Guide now.

[Laylah Yaseotoko]

They are annoying as heck on my land they all pop in in my personal house, subsequently that parcel was set to payment info on file only. I really don't care what these bots do I don't want to be part of what they do and I don't think they have any business in collecting any data from my personal non public land. I pay LL 260 a month not for bots to go wild on my sim. Last night when I finally snapped and locked it all down we counted no less than 5 of them coming by all with names that and in aaa and aaaa

Edited April 6, 2021 by Laylah Yaseotoko

[K9Mark]

I've seen one beginning with 'aaa' and it is happy to stand on abandoned land, with another one who has got a different initial, for days on end. They are both 7 years 4 months old but they don't seem to be doing anything noticeable or reportable.

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

Whenever someone mentions bots here, I think of this old forum thread. Good times!

 

[Prokofy Neva]

On 4/4/2021 at 10:52 AM, Peter Stindberg said:

There's definitely enough of them. My tracker counts about 3-7 visits a day. A bit less during the weekend.

Here's my problem with "Lou Netizen's" thinking.

He says the bots are "doing good" as he defines it -- and some, but not all of what he indicates could be construed as "doing good".

But why does he or any other bot wrangler get to decide that for the entire community? He withholds the names of groups of bots or individual bots so that people can ban them because he feels they "must" have eminent domain "for the good of society" or "science". But why does he get to decide undemocratically? The ability of certain people to grab the entire world as a canvas they don't pay for is something the Lindens have not adequately addressed as a generic problem for the Metaverse they aspire to shape. The reasoning for not stopping is mainly seems to revolve around the subjective feeling that it doesn't bother them personally -- but then most of them aren't on the Mainland regularly.  The spam cars are only the tip of the iceberg.

Bots should be identified on the description of the account, i.e. with a hard-stamped ID put there by LL, when you sign up for one. There's no reason not to do this. Just as you have to have a drone license in RL and be ready to supply it to authorities, so you have to have a bot license with visibility in SL. And people should have an option to ban such accounts so labeled from their land with a function in the viewer. Again, there's no good reason not to do that.

Lou says the bots are only on your land for a minute, and then they go on doing their supposedly beneficial chores of making maps (helpful when the map is broken) or identifying ban lines disrupting driving or boating.

Except...they can accomplish these goals by strictly staying on Linden roads and waterways. They don't need to come on my land "even for a minute" to accomplish this goal. Not at all. Every bit of information they claim to scrape "for the public good" can be done from the road.

To be sure, on waterways, the problem is that long ago, the Lindens sold some of the water on the original auctions, or let them be claimed when abandoned, creating conflict generators for years. It's a shame that to solve the problem of needing to run less servers without tier covering them they have to create this aggravation, when there were other solutions (create less sims in the first place -- arguably the half-finished continent might never have been started).

So perhaps there's value in getting some kind of list of those areas where ban lines or orbs disrupt sailing except...do people REALLY assembly all that information or need all that information in a HUD? They figure it out on the spot. If they are unseated, they get in again, it's not RL. After awhile, people get to know where the trouble spots are especially if people mark them with buoys (as I have done) (less helpful are huge banners saying "WARNING BAN LINES" when a small sign on a buoy would do.

So why do these bots have such range? The Lindens usually generally have never met a script they don't like, and err on the side of "creativity". Plus, it's a handy load test for them. But the idea that bots "have" to go on private land is pretty faulty once you look at the claimed use cases.

Perhaps inland land sales might require bots crossing land to reach that land for sale because there are no roads. The bots for "research" are not Linden run, making the Destination Guide for the good of all the community. They are random people with random and hidden agendas. Maybe they are spying on rivals and seeing their traffic and sales, since search won't yield high traffic spots on the first returns any more. I have no idea what they are. But THAT we should be able to ban them seems a given. I think the Lindens will come around to this position as they proliferate.

 

Edited April 9, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[WereBeast Alpha]

I have seen this go on the parcel I rent, a couple months ago a random person came onto my parcel never said a word, I walked over there to greet them at the landing spot and once I arrived the person just teleported out and kept on coming back for many days not saying a word. I used my casper visitor tracker to help see how many times he person visited in a week it was 12 times I had to block the account from coming into my parcel. Some people who come in and don't respond usually leave suddenly its really weird I never had that problem on SL.

[Peter Stindberg]

Quite the harvest...