Question for Lindens.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

My memory of this is really vague; is there somewhere to learn more details about this event? It being on a Tuesday, I'd guess it was an update of the main server channel, but it would be interesting to know how much of the grid rolled to that update before they started a rollback. Also, I'm just generally interested in what a bot-specific failure mode would be, and why it would affect all (and only) bots.

(That said, I'd guess the total population of bots to be lower than "common knowledge" would have it, but that's more hunch than anything.)

As I recall, they did some minor thing that stopped radegast and some bot viewers from logging in for a couple or three days, there was a thread about it here in GD, with the usual suspects claiming '"omagerd half the grid are filthy bots, sl is doooooooommmmmmmeeeedddddddd"

 

[Qie Niangao]

45 minutes ago, Zalificent said:

As I recall, they did some minor thing that stopped radegast and some bot viewers from logging in for a couple or three days, there was a thread about it here in GD, with the usual suspects claiming '"omagerd half the grid are filthy bots, sl is doooooooommmmmmmeeeedddddddd"

Ah, yeah, I halfway follow the jira about this event, enough to see they made a change to one of the login protocols, so it affected some bots, and some non-bot clients. It would have affected the entire (agni) grid at the same time, but only upon login (so existing sessions shouldn't have been affected). It apparently started on a Monday (6 Dec 2021) and lasted into Tuesday, and apparently they did a rolling restart on the main server channel that morning which should have forced lingering bot sessions to relog. The concurrency drop was said to be 3.5K by one source, but later somehow estimated at 20K by another. Because it's both bots and non-bots, and not necessarily all bots, I'm not sure it's meaningful enough to try to track down the actual numbers at this point.

[ETA: I meant to link another post about those rolling restarts being problematic. If so, lower concurrency on that Tuesday could have been partially due to desired regions being down.]

Edited February 17, 2023 by Qie Niangao

[Zalificent Corvinus]

7 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

The concurrency drop was said to be 3.5K by one source, but later somehow estimated at 20K by another. Because it's both bots and non-bots, and not necessarily all bots, I'm not sure it's meaningful enough to try to track down the actual numbers at this point.

The lower figure was based of comparing No-Bot- Tuesday-PM with the same time on the same day the week before and the week after.

The higher figure was "deduct no-bot-tuesday-pm from evening concurrency in california".

Based on the second posters proven track record for talking nonsense, I'd ignore the 20k guestimate.

[Gavin Hird]

9 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:

SL can't retain users on PC, the platform it works best on. How is it going to retain users on hardware that makes it even more of a miserable experience?

As if mobile users lets themselves being stopped by that?

FB, TikTok, Insta, etc, etc are all miserable experiences. 

[Coffee Pancake]

2 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Ah, yeah, I halfway follow the jira about this event, enough to see they made a change to one of the login protocols,.........

If anything this event really did disprove the idea that SL was mostly bots

Not that we needed such an event really, the people who claim SL is entirely bots tend to mean literally everyone other than themselves .. which falls back to the desire / expectation some have to spend their Second Lives spectating on strangers fully fledged conversations / activities.

 

Edited February 17, 2023 by Coffee Pancake

[Silent Mistwalker]

4 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

I think we can agree that there are non-zero bots on the grid, and that they are in-world as much of the time as their bot programs can keep them—basically constantly.

Whatever the distribution of concurrency by non-bots, that bot concurrency will contribute a near constant to the total concurrency distribution.

Because the bots are logged-in all the time, the minimum total concurrency will include a larger share of bots than the maximum concurrency. The variance will be lower, then, at the "bot-rich" lower end of concurrency than in the "human-rich" upper end.

Undoubtedly the Eastern Hemisphere's "prime time" produces a lower concurrency than the Western Hemisphere's, but for the purposes of estimating how many bots may be in-world, I don't see why it matters whence they're logging in.

On the other hand, bots aren't the only possible reason for some more or less constant component of minimal concurrency. It's not that lower variance necessarily corresponds to constantly logged-in sessions (like bots), but that those constant logins will necessarily contribute little variance to the concurrency distribution.

It's worth noting that what Qie says here is the very reason LL requires bots to be registered as scripted agents so that they do NOT contribute to the concurrency distribution, at all. It came about because they realized people would use bots to game traffic.

There are plenty of people who leave their regular accounts logged in 24/7. This has been going on since the day LL stopped forcing logouts and allowed people to stay logged in as long as they want, or their computer/connection is capable of. There used to be debates on the old forums about whether or not one should leave their avatar logged in 24/7, mostly because back then it was a good way to melt your pc while you slept. 

Edited February 17, 2023 by Silent Mistwalker
redundancy

[Coffee Pancake]

3 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

It's worth noting that what Qie says here is the very reason LL requires bots to be registered as scripted agents so that they do NOT contribute to the concurrency distribution, at all. It came about because they realized people would use bots to game traffic.

There are plenty of people who leave their regular accounts logged in 24/7. This has been going on since the day LL stopped forcing logouts and allowed people to stay logged in as long as they want, or their computer/connection is capable of. There used to be debates on the old forums about whether or not one should leave their avatar logged in 24/7 or not, mostly because back then it was a good way to melt your pc while you slept. 

We do know that plenty operating a bot for legit purposes on their land will neglect to tick the box, obviously, a simple mistake they would be happy to rectify should it ever be pointed out to them by LL.

No one should leave their avatar logged in unattended. 

It's really stupid.

[Silent Mistwalker]

3 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

We do know that plenty operating a bot for legit purposes on their land will neglect to tick the box, obviously, a simple mistake they would be happy to rectify should it ever be pointed out to them by LL.

No one should leave their avatar logged in unattended. 

It's really stupid.

I wasn't addressing the flaws in the system, simply pointing out LL does try to keep people from gaming the system.

I have never, in the nearly 20 years I've been in SL, left my account logged in overnight. Not ever. My pc gets shut down every night, unless I happen to be so tired, I somehow forget. That's usually just the monitor though. 🤭