Open letter to Linden Lab: Enforcing policies?

[Dorientje Woller]

1 minute ago, Rolig Loon said:

Not to argue at all, because I agree with your basic point, but I have a friend who habitually logs in on two accounts because she's creating and testing things.  She's also absent-minded enough to get wrapped up in some RL matter and forget that she's still logged in ... for hours.  Without being too outlandish, I can imagine other people who do the same sort of thing.  All of which brings me back to the problem that I posed before -- and Lindal has expanded on -- "How can LL craft a policy that defines where the red line is?" How many, how long, how "obvious" does behavior have to be before it's over the line?

Wouldn't it be better that Linden Lab provide a timer that determin how long you can be afk. I know that in Star Trek Online, such system exists that when you are abscent for 60 minutes or afk, that you are logged out. 

[Solar Legion]

As for the traffic numbers in legacy search .... It has long been the case that such numbers have incredibly little meaning. if one is paying attention to those ... that is one them.

As to the AFK Timer: One did (possibly does) exist in the Viewer. I know it does on TPVs. it is user settable.

I see no reason to change that.

[Dorientje Woller]

7 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

As to the AFK Timer: One did (possibly does) exist in the Viewer. I know it does on TPVs. it is user settable.

I see no such timer in Alchemy Viewer. Although I see the setting/timer to show others that you are AFK after set timer. I am refering to a timer that logs you off after a period of time of being afk/abscent, set by the user.

Edited January 23, 2023 by Dorientje Woller

[Rowan Amore]

1 minute ago, Dorientje Woller said:

I see no such timer in Alchemy Viewer. Although I see the setting/timer to show others that you are AFK after set timer. I am refering to a timer that logs you off after a period of time, set by the user.

Why?  

[Solar Legion]

6 minutes ago, Dorientje Woller said:

I see no such timer in Alchemy Viewer. Although I see the setting/timer to show others that you are AFK after set timer. I am refering to a timer that logs you off after a period of time of being afk/abscent, set by the user.

FS settings but still ...

These are all one should need - forcing a user to log out should not be an enforced setting.

ETA: Meaning in general a user should be able to choose if/when they are logged out for inactivity. This isn't some MMO ... 

Edited January 23, 2023 by Solar Legion

[Dorientje Woller]

1 minute ago, Rowan Amore said:

Why?  

To prevent situations where real users are considered to be bots when they go afk for a long time, for whatever reason. I regulary forget to log out, when I go outside to go to store and return 1 to 2 hours later. Am I bot? Or a dumb blonde?

[Rowan Amore]

23 minutes ago, Dorientje Woller said:

I simply wonder how many times I will be harrassed now by club owners in search of staff, being poached to come to work for them while my gerne of music doesn't fit theirs, and then being insulted for it that I am no "real" dj because I refuse to play their genre of music. I do other things in SL beside dj'ng, which requiers my full also.

Probably less often from that website than you would if you simply wandered around inworld.  Far more people inworld than people who know about that site.or read the forums.

[Ceka Cianci]

1 minute ago, Solar Legion said:

FS settings but still ...

These are all one should need - forcing a user to log out should not be an enforced setting.

I agree, I don't want fear to end up getting us a worse user experience.. If it's about bots , find a way to restrict them ,not us.. hehehe

[Solar Legion]

Just now, Dorientje Woller said:

To prevent situations where real users are considered to be bots when they go afk for a long time, for whatever reason. I regulary forget to log out, when I go outside to go to store and return 1 to 2 hours later. Am I bot? Or a dumb blonde?

Unless it impacts you directly in some way, why should such matter to you? That is their issue for making sure a mistake concerning your status as a Bot or not.

[Silent Mistwalker]

14 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Not to argue at all, because I agree with your basic point, but I have a friend who habitually logs in on two accounts because she's creating and testing things.  She's also absent-minded enough to get wrapped up in some RL matter and forget that she's still logged in ... for hours.  Without being too outlandish, I can imagine other people who do the same sort of thing.  All of which brings me back to the problem that I posed before -- and Lindal has expanded on -- "How can LL craft a policy that defines where the red line is?" How many, how long, how "obvious" does behavior have to be before it's over the line?

She's not intentionally trying to drive her traffic numbers up.

The deal is, LL created this situation with dwell and traffic to begin with. If I am remembering correctly, landowners were paid dwell according to the amount of traffic. The higher your traffic, the higher your dwell (paid by LL) would be. I couldn't afford land at all back then so my memory might be off. Then they nixed dwell, which I was both kind of grateful for and not happy about, and the focus shifted to just traffic with club owners etc. believing that higher traffic numbers would bring in even more people until the occupancy limit crashed the party. That belief has never been squashed.

It's a similar situation to creators who insist no mod prevents copybotting. 

LL already has a policy in place regarding what does and doesn't constitute a violation, just not one where all the details are made available to residents/the public. 

[Dorientje Woller]

3 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

FS settings but still ...

These are all one should need - forcing a user to log out should not be an enforced setting.

No such setting in Alchemy. But, as you said, shouldn't be enforced, it's a precausive measurment to avoid to be considered as a bot.

[Rowan Amore]

1 minute ago, Dorientje Woller said:

To prevent situations where real users are considered to be bots when they go afk for a long time, for whatever reason. I regulary forget to log out, when I go outside to go to store and return 1 to 2 hours later. Am I bot? Or a dumb blonde?

One person standing at home for 24 hours is hardly an issue. Even 2 or 3.  No one cares about that.  LL has a policy about bots (avatars) being used to game traffic.  A policy they do not enforce.  That's what this thread is about.  LL enforcing their own policies and nothing more.

[SpiritSparrow Skydancer]

8 hours ago, Maitimo said:

If traffic was totally removed as a metric altogether, so it has no effect on search results whatsoever, and all references to it removed from the TOS, the problem (and the traffic bots themselves) would disappear overnight.

 

Exactly!!!

[Dorientje Woller]

4 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

One person standing at home for 24 hours is hardly an issue. Even 2 or 3.  No one cares about that.  LL has a policy about bots (avatars) being used to game traffic.  A policy they do not enforce.  That's what this thread is about.  LL enforcing their own policies and nothing more.

So, solutions to the system, that prevent Linden Labs to enforce their policies upon people that aren't game bots and are just afk, if they decide to do so, is no solution at all?

 

[xDancingStarx]

After 4 pages there still wasn't presented a plausible solution, since once you remove traffic from places that, at this moment, seem to be gaming traffic according to "common sense", they're going to evade this. Do you think that they are stupid? What if they fake it like a cinema and place avatars in front of a big screen? What now? This "common sense" argument would be evaded in so many ways. And similar attempts are actually already being made. Of course people are not stupid, especially when there's money involved.

Then some people suggest to remove this search functionality in 3rd party viewers. In which case I'm asking, what is actually the issue here? Is the main issue the sole presence of these bots, or the fact that those places game the traffic ranking? I've heard the argument that newbies would get disillusioned. Do you actually believe that newbies from the scratch go by the Firestorm legacy traffic search? I'll leave you to your believe, but I haven't made that experience. And Linden has made their own solution to this problem, which is the relevance. As much as I use the legacy search (exclusively) and know that some places are gaming traffic, maybe this huge problem just isn't as "huge" overall (while it exists) especially since I haven't seen a viable solution to get rid of it.

[Rowan Amore]

What it boils down to is...LL knows people are not registering as scripted agents.  They don't care.  Why?  I'd imagine our daily numbers would be far less if all those avatars I've shown in this thread were taken out of the equation.  

1 minute ago, Dorientje Woller said:

So, solutions to the system, that prevent Linden Labs to enforce their policies upon people that aren't game bots and are just afk, if they decide to do so, is no solution at all?

 

Seriously?  Have you read the few things I've posted with pictures?  Or the part of the policy on bots where they address gaming traffic?  One LL employee, once a day for an hour could police the top 10 places in search to see of there are actual people or a sky platform full of new accounts WHICH THEY USE TO INFLATE TRAFFIC.  

Again, it's not rocket science.

[Qie Niangao]

3 minutes ago, xDancingStarx said:

This "common sense" argument would be evaded in so many ways.

You keep posting this. It reminds me of magical thinking about the real life legal system, as if laws were written with complete specificity.

Interpretation is a feature, not a bug.

Everything works this way. The adfarming policy is a prime example, where the terms of the policy appeal directly to making common sense judgments about whether something (landcutting, for example) is an offence or not. Now, enforcement of that policy is a frustrating mess, but not because it's subject to common sense judgments but because Governance rarely bestirs itself to enforce the policy at all.

But at least it does so, on those rare occasions. There's no existence proof that the Lab has ever enforced its existing bot policy at all.

 

[Rowan Amore]

12 minutes ago, xDancingStarx said:

After 4 pages there still wasn't presented a plausible solution, since once you remove traffic from places that, at this moment, seem to be gaming traffic according to "common sense", they're going to evade this. Do you think that they are stupid? What if they fake it like a cinema and place avatars in front of a big screen? What now? This "common sense" argument would be evaded in so many ways. And similar attempts are actually already being made. Of course people are not stupid, especially when there's money involved.

Then some people suggest to remove this search functionality in 3rd party viewers. In which case I'm asking, what is actually the issue here? Is the main issue the sole presence of these bots, or the fact that those places game the traffic ranking? I've heard the argument that newbies would get disillusioned. Do you actually believe that newbies from the scratch go by the Firestorm legacy traffic search? I'll leave you to your believe, but I haven't made that experience. And Linden has made their own solution to this problem, which is the relevance. As much as I use the legacy search (exclusively) and know that some places are gaming traffic, maybe this huge problem just isn't as "huge" overall (while it exists) especially since I haven't seen a viable solution to get rid of it.

Yes, they get around it by NOT using a bot program and just logging in numerous avatars and parking them on a platform as I've shown.  This thread is about LL enforcing their own policy on bots.  To me, they should amend the policy to include these types of avatars.  People will always find ways to circumvent rules and not using a bot program is how this policy is avoided.  "But they aren't bots" means very little when anyone with eyes can see what they are being used for.  I assume most LL employees have eyes and a degree of common sense.  

Honestly don't care about traffic numbers.  I do care that LL doesn't enforce the.policy and if not, why have it at all?  But god forbid we wander off topic just a bit and they sure do enforce that policy in a heartbeat.

 

 

Edited January 23, 2023 by Rowan Amore

[Sid Nagy]

20 minutes ago, xDancingStarx said:

After 4 pages there still wasn't presented a plausible solution,

I did not start this thread to find solutions.
Solutions are up to Linden Lab. That is their part of the job.

I'm asking them to do what they promise in their policies, just like they do it here on the forums nowadays: strict. It doesn't have to be perfect, but it should be at least a best effort IMHO.

And not only when it suits them but also for the well being of SL itself and the residents that use it to live their Second life privately, quietly, without being tricked, gamed or spied upon and publicly displayed even outside the SL and LL environment, with no other argument than "because it can be done".

Edited January 23, 2023 by Sid Nagy

[Scylla Rhiadra]

6 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

There's no existence proof that the Lab has ever enforced its existing bot policy at all.

 

6 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

I do care that LL doesn't enforce the.policy and if not, why have it at all?  But god forbid we wander off topic just a bit and they sure do enforce that policy in a heartbeat.

The crux.

I haven't seen here any evidence whatsoever that they do enforce this. Nor have I heard an answer to Rowan's question.

Everything else is, in a sense, irrelevant and off-topic. (And yes, that will be used to justify shutting this thread down.)

[Qie Niangao]

1 minute ago, Dorientje Woller said:

So, solutions to the system, that prevent Linden Labs to enforce their policies upon people that aren't game bots and are just afk, if they decide to do so, is no solution at all?

This is hard to follow. It seems the problem for which this would be a solution is the Lab mistaking habitually AFK accounts for bots and punishing them in a hypothetical enforcement action. This seems like looking for trouble in an unlikely place. At least if I were devising a "bot detection" process, idling in place might be one factor (assuming it's super cheap to collect the data), but it's hardly definitive. For one thing, if that were gating to bot detection, it would miss a once common trick of moving bots from site to site. (Nobody does that anymore because there's no need.)

I don't think we need to be deciding how Governance would enforce the policy; they're not idiots. The problem as I see it is that they've never enforced this policy at all.

[Lucia Nightfire]

2 hours ago, Dorientje Woller said:

Oh, that script function should be removed, coz it's painting a target on the back of premium users for posible scams.

The means was made official because there were already other ways of determining someone's account level.

I, myself, was using one of at least six other known means before LL added OBJECT_ACCOUNT_LEVEL to llGetObjectDetails().

What do I use the data for? Offering discounts/points/perks to those with Premium accounts that use my in-world services.

Also, PIOF and/or PIU is all one would need to be considered a target for scams, but really, the ones who commonly fall for them are the newest to SL, MMOs or the internet in general.

[CaithLynnSayes]

26 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

What it boils down to is...LL knows people are not registering as scripted agents.  They don't care.  Why?  I'd imagine our daily numbers would be far less if all those avatars I've shown in this thread were taken out of the equation. 

Finally someone says it. I've been watching 3 threads on this and here it is. This is why LL has closed the previous threads and most likely will close this one too in the next 10 minutes. (before deleting my post, obviously, lol)

 

I see some people talk about "data". What data? Nobody knows who you are here unless you specifically say who you are or are using the same username on other platforms and compromise your privacy there. You can not pin that on LL. I also don't agree with the argument raised on account status and that it should be a secret. It never has been. It's on your profile, and most people brag about it even. It is there because some people don't want newbies in certain places for example.

 

As for the actual bot-thing, i don't visit many places, i have my fixed places i go in SL so I've never really ran into too many of them. I am aware of bots standing there like the ones sleeping in 'I Am Legend' (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CnS8r8qUMAALlxL.jpg) But most of them are on empty land in my experience. I don't know what they are up to but it is obvious they are up to something. If they would be over a club or whatever and people soon enough find out that there is nobody actually talking, how long do those clubs exist or stay relative? Not long i would guess.

I also wanted to comment on the bank key logger thing; It used to be that you could only get viruses by actually downloading them bundled with software. However it's 2023 now and things moved on. Google "Exploit Kits" in case you want to learn more. Having said that, they are rare and should not discourage you from surfing the web.

 

To LL, please don't shut down yet another thread on this issue. Clearly people have their feathers ruffled on this. I think you should communicate instead of repeatedly shutting this down, and no, pointing to a vague answer a linden employee made on one of the closed threads clearly isn't cutting it. You are a company that encourages people to come together and communicate, so try it yourself maybe?  

The Bot policy page Sid linked to was last updated on 30 January 2014. I thought that was something you may want to know.

Edited January 23, 2023 by CaithLynnSayes

[LittleMe Jewell]

1 hour ago, Rolig Loon said:

Not to argue at all, because I agree with your basic point, but I have a friend who habitually logs in on two accounts because she's creating and testing things.  She's also absent-minded enough to get wrapped up in some RL matter and forget that she's still logged in ... for hours. 

I do this all the time.

I intentionally log Lil in every evening right after work and first thing in the morning on weekends.  Most of the days, I don't log her off until bedtime.  Some days RL is busy enough that Lil is AFK more than not.

There are also many days that I have a second account logged in for testing or inventory transfers or who knows what.  And I will easily forget about that one and leave it there until bedtime, even if she stopped actually being used for anything hours before.

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

11 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

I don't think we need to be deciding how Governance would enforce the policy; they're not idiots. The problem as I see it is that they've never enforced this policy at all.

This, frankly, could be said about a great many things occurring within SL, including (or maybe especially) de facto evasions of the community standards guidelines and the ToS.

LL seems to have many of these rules in place largely so that they can say they've "taken action": they seldom enforce them. (And I could certainly provide instances.)

And, as you say, enforcement for many or most of these things wouldn't require scholastic disputation about angels on the heads of pins: it's mostly pretty damned obvious. A few hours a week by a Linden governance person would go a long way to actually fixing such issues, and discouraging repetition.

But . . . nope. It's about plausible deniability, I guess?