💡 Positive News Regarding Scripted Agents Function 💡

[Ceka Cianci]

14 minutes ago, M Peccable said:

So this is the end of roaming bots? My bot, which has a profile that states exactly what it is doing, and has had zero complaints in the last 12 years, can no longer teleport into some Linden-owned, completely open, and completely public regions (No access teleport is the message). So products like my Ban Line HUD that depends on a benign bot are just going to have to die? A large number of people are using it. Are they just to be left out in the cold? We need a way for "approved" bots to roam, or a lot of products are going to suffer.

I think it's only for private regions and will only work on the bots that are registered..

I think at the end of the day a lot of things can be broken if a lot of people use it, but if enough of their stuff breaks, they might turn it back off. unless they figure their publicly  data is more important than the thing they wanted to keep using. hehehe

Edited March 30, 2023 by Ceka Cianci

[Sid Nagy]

5 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

I think that's illegal now

 

Cruelty against the fish or the chips or both?

[Ceka Cianci]

16 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

Cruelty against the fish or the chips or both?

I keep getting confused on chips.. Are chips like soft cut potatoes kind of like what we call fries or wedges, or are they like dehydrated potato slices?

Our chips are like dehydrated.

[Phil Deakins]

20 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

Cruelty against the fish or the chips or both?

Neither. Cruelty against people eating the fish and chips. It's the printing ink on the newspapers I believe.

[Phil Deakins]

1 minute ago, Ceka Cianci said:

I keep getting confused on chips.. Are chips like soft cut potatoes kind of like what we call fries or wedges, or are they like dehydrated potato slices?

Our chips are like dehydrated.

Chips are what you call fries. I think our chips tend to be a little bit thicker though.

What you call chips, we call crisps - very thin, brittle slices of potato.

[Sid Nagy]

22 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

Neither. Cruelty against people eating the fish and chips. It's the printing ink on the newspapers I believe.

British tabloids tend to be toxic, so I can understand that.

[Paul Hexem]

1 hour ago, M Peccable said:

So this is the end of roaming bots? My bot, which has a profile that states exactly what it is doing, and has had zero complaints in the last 12 years, can no longer teleport into some Linden-owned, completely open, and completely public regions (No access teleport is the message). So products like my Ban Line HUD that depends on a benign bot are just going to have to die? A large number of people are using it. Are they just to be left out in the cold? We need a way for "approved" bots to roam, or a lot of products are going to suffer.

This is actually a great point. I wonder, especially if the feature gets enabled on mainland, how many products are going to stop working correctly and what the response will be.

[belindacarson]

4 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

This is actually a great point. I wonder, especially if the feature gets enabled on mainland, how many products are going to stop working correctly and what the response will be.

I can imagine a ticker tape parade.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, M Peccable said:

So this is the end of roaming bots? My bot, which has a profile that states exactly what it is doing, and has had zero complaints in the last 12 years, can no longer teleport into some Linden-owned, completely open, and completely public regions (No access teleport is the message). So products like my Ban Line HUD that depends on a benign bot are just going to have to die? A large number of people are using it. Are they just to be left out in the cold? We need a way for "approved" bots to roam, or a lot of products are going to suffer.

This is indeed a problem. "Unapproved" bots, of course, shouldn't merely be subject to estate bans: they should be eliminated because they are in violation of LL's guidelines on scripted agents. I don't know, however, that there is currently (or even potentially) a way to detect unregistered bots, so the tool of course only affects those that are registered. At the moment, however, it should only be impacting private estates: I'm not sure why you'd be having problems accessing Linden-owned regions -- I assume you mean on the mainland. That might be worth asking about.

The issue, as usual, is that an abuse of scripted agents may have made life more difficult for those who are using them responsibly. We've gone from a situation in which one might very occasionally see a bot on one's land, to one where there are sometimes multiple bots popping up in a single 24-hour period. What I'm hearing over and over again, here, on Twitter, and elsewhere, is that they are swarming and proliferating right now. Personally, I don't care much about that because my own land isn't private, but there are others who very clearly do.

And because SL has always worked on the principle of "my land, my rules," it's only logical to give landowners that right.

What I'd like and hope to see is a new bot policy that curtails the really intrusive activities of the bots who are operating across the entire grid 24/7. One prominent bot-based project has claimed that its bots visit "every region on the grid within 24 hours," and that "[s]ome days this may result in multiple visits." That's pretty egregious: get more than one project doing that, and you're not going to be able to swing an animesh ChatGPT-enabled cat without hitting one. So, policy restrictions might reduce the desire or need to ban bots from one's land.

I wonder too if some sort of "white list" function that allows one to except particular bots might not be doable and desirable. That would be good too because it would be, of necessity, opt-in: those who allowed your bots in would be exercising informed consent.

Edited March 30, 2023 by Scylla Rhiadra
Repetition

[Silent Mistwalker]

In the nearly 20 years I've been in SL I have never needed a HUD to explore the grid so I'm having a hard time understanding why/how other people might have to depend on such devices. I've boated/sailed, flown, ridden, walked and driven all over the grid and never had the issues so many others seem to have. Worst has always been region crossings. When it happens, I just pick myself up, dust myself off, rez a new COPIABLE vehicle and continue my journey.

It may be that putting all your eggs into one basket by having your business depend so heavily on a bot(s) might not have been a sound business plan.

 

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, M Peccable said:

can no longer teleport into some Linden-owned, completely open, and completely public regions (No access teleport is the message). 

Linden owned? That must be either temporary testing or some bug they should be informed about. I can't imagine they meant to leave Linden regions set that way on agni.

One way this could be a big positive if it ever comes to the Mainland, is if you were to ask the SLCG and GTFO and all the many other Mainland-centric groups (even the lowly VRC, where I could help a little) to promote your helper script, so you wouldn't need to rely on bots for most of your data. They might also be recruited to put the script in their members' builds, vehicles, etc. (maybe some have already?). Really, bots would be my very last resort for collecting data, for a bunch of reasons having nothing to do with why people want to ban bots.

[M Peccable]

29 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

At the moment, however, it should only be impacting private estates: I'm not sure why you'd be having problems accessing Linden-owned regions -- I assume you mean on the mainland.

The open Linden-owned region I mentioned is in Bellisseria. If this is deployed to all of mainland it will mean the end of a good selling product that many people use and enjoy. And my product won't be the only one.

[Silent Mistwalker]

Just now, M Peccable said:

The open Linden-owned region I mentioned is in Bellisseria. If this is deployed to all of mainland it will mean the end of a good selling product that many people use and enjoy. And my product won't be the only one.

It's not the first time this sort of thing has happened in SL in the name of progress, and it won't be the last.

[M Peccable]

4 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Linden owned? That must be either temporary testing or some bug they should be informed about. I can't imagine they meant to leave Linden regions set that way on agni.

One way this could be a big positive if it ever comes to the Mainland, is if you were to ask the SLCG and GTFO and all the many other Mainland-centric groups (even the lowly VRC, where I could help a little) to promote your helper script, so you wouldn't need to rely on bots for most of your data. They might also be recruited to put the script in their members' builds, vehicles, etc. (maybe some have already?). Really, bots would be my very last resort for collecting data, for a bunch of reasons having nothing to do with why people want to ban bots.

The HUD itself does exactly what you mentioned. But that isn't good enough. Without the help of the bot keeping the data more or less current (one visit per sim per week), the only way new ban lines would be detected is when someone hits the affected sim and by then it could be too late. What good is a Ban Line HUD if it can't keep its data current enough to keep you out of trouble?

If it comes to mainland, I'm toast...

[M Peccable]

4 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

It's not the first time this sort of thing has happened in SL in the name of progress, and it won't be the last.

I don't think the consensus that "all bots are bad and should be banned" is progress.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

6 minutes ago, M Peccable said:

The open Linden-owned region I mentioned is in Bellisseria. If this is deployed to all of mainland it will mean the end of a good selling product that many people use and enjoy. And my product won't be the only one.

Interesting, but maybe (given the kinds of restrictions already in force there) unsurprising that this has been applied to Bellisseria. I don't think I knew that.

Belli is kind of a special case in all kinds of ways, and features all sorts of rules that have not been (and likely won't ever be) applied to the other parts of the Mainland. There is, at the moment, no reason to believe that we are going to be given a parcel-level tool, or one that can be used by a full-region owner on the Mainland, although, honestly, I'd like to see one.

Even if this happens, that shouldn't impact public highways, the SLRR, other public lands, or even abandoned land.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

5 minutes ago, M Peccable said:

I don't think the consensus that "all bots are bad and should be banned" is progress.

I totally agree.

But neither is the binary opposite -- all bots should be allowed to go wherever they want and do whatever they want -- a very happy solution.

I think that this is a work in progress: one of the positive things about the fact that LL is taking so long to produce a new policy is that it suggests they are thinking very long and hard about it. What I hope we end up with is a solution that avoids black-and-white approaches, but rather empowers individual landowners without wiping out the responsible use of scripted agents.

[Qie Niangao]

31 minutes ago, M Peccable said:

The HUD itself does exactly what you mentioned. But that isn't good enough. Without the help of the bot keeping the data more or less current (one visit per sim per week), the only way new ban lines would be detected is when someone hits the affected sim and by then it could be too late. What good is a Ban Line HUD if it can't keep its data current enough to keep you out of trouble?

If it comes to mainland, I'm toast...

Well, I didn't mean the HUD, but rather I was referring to what's described on Marketplace thusly:

Quote

There is a free "Explorer's HUD Helper Prim" available. If you own or rent land, you can rez it anywhere on your land. As long as it remains rezzed in the sim, it will dramatically raise the performance of every HUD wearer entering that sim. At the same time, it relieves all those entering HUDs from having to do their own scan, making things easier on the sim. It is a win-win scenario for every sim that has a Helper Prim rezzed somewhere.

Why wouldn't a script rezzed on a region be able to do everything a bot could do on that same region? Maybe there's some external database comms that are marginally easier from the bot host than from the sim, but I'm not even sure how this is architected: if the rezzed prim speeds up HUDs on that region, mustn't it collect and transmit to those HUDs the pre-scanned parcel access data about the region? If so, it could be much more current than the bot-fed data. (And if that's not what it's doing, I'm unclear what that helper script is doing.)

Granted, there'd be a bit more maintenance for those regions that still need a bot visit when some of them have parcels with bot bans, but if a whole region is bot-banned, it seems prudent to suspect regular explorer access might be unwelcome there, too.

[Love Zhaoying]

14 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Well, I didn't mean the HUD, but rather I was referring to what's described on Marketplace thusly:

Quote

There is a free "Explorer's HUD Helper Prim" available. If you own or rent land, you can rez it anywhere on your land. As long as it remains rezzed in the sim, it will dramatically raise the performance of every HUD wearer entering that sim. At the same time, it relieves all those entering HUDs from having to do their own scan, making things easier on the sim. It is a win-win scenario for every sim that has a Helper Prim rezzed somewhere.

My goodness! Does it also cure headaches, hangovers, and infertility? 

@Qie Niangao, I think the answer is that snake oil is used to power the magic hud.

Edited March 30, 2023 by Love Zhaoying

[Rolig Loon]

4 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

My goodness! Does it also cure headaches, hangovers, and infertility? 

If it takes care of leg cramps at 3 a.m., I'll buy one.

[M Peccable]

16 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Well, I didn't mean the HUD, but rather I was referring to what's described on Marketplace thusly:

Why wouldn't a script rezzed on a region be able to do everything a bot could do on that same region?

The main reason is that after years of offering the Helper prim, it made it to about 400 of the over 3000 mainland regions.  That was low enough that I have stopped distributing the prims, and working on a new version that does even more than curing headaches, hangovers, leg cramps, and infertility, all without the Helper prim. Now that new version is in jeopardy of being abandoned.

Edited March 30, 2023 by M Peccable

[Rick Nightingale]

@M Peccable I can see your point, but I do not think it should be a reason to not implement the deny-bot measures.

Really, I'm not bothered by privacy issues in SL. What's the point? I am bothered about having bots landing on my land uninvited. It's disruptive and rude (of the operators). Real people I don't mind because I can interact with the visitor, making the disruption at least worthwhile. Even if the bot rezzes at 1000m and is invisible, I see it on the radar and find it disruptive.

That would include your bots unless I have a reason to want them. I might - I used to own waterfront mainland and arranged it to facilitate passing boars (edit: I meant boats but passing boars were also welcome), so some system to aid sailors might be welcome even by me. I would probably still not allow a bot but be very willing to rez a prim to achieve the purpose.

I don't see bots as an acceptable way to do anything like this for the reasons I gave at the start. It's my land and should be my choice; not being told I should accept it just because someone else wants to pop bots around for some purpose of theirs however useful and benign that might be. Just saying the bot will avoid my parcel but land in my neighbours is just moving the problem (and unreasonable expectation) to them. It's not the answer.

I'm not sure what the answer is... but that's no reason to not implement systems to give us paying land owners the choice to decide what is welcome on our land.

Edited March 30, 2023 by Rick Nightingale

[Rowan Amore]

Seems they finally blogged about it this week...

 

[Istelathis]

1 hour ago, M Peccable said:

The main reason is that after years of offering the Helper prim, it made it to about 400 of the over 3000 mainland regions.  That was low enough that I have stopped distributing the prims, and working on a new version that does even more than curing headaches, hangovers, leg cramps, and infertility, all without the Helper prim. Now that new version is in jeopardy of being abandoned.

At this moment, does landing in a no bot area register as the such for you?  If so, then would it be possible to design your bots to enter another area of the region to do the scan and leave the no bot parcels (or entire regions) a different color to indicate it as unknown?  I happen to enjoy your product, and hope to see it still viable in the future.

Edit:
This is assuming the feature is brought to the mainland, and implemented for parcel owners.

Edited March 30, 2023 by Istelathis

[Love Zhaoying]

Still haven't seen any quotes on why this is only initially released for "Estates" (I believe Private Regions, specifically), and whether there is any plan - or not - to give it to Mainland parcel owners.  I think that is a little bit shameful. Either they have some reason to not mention it, or we missed it, or "oops" they forgot to tell us.