New Feature: Scripted Agent Estate Access Discussion

[Scylla Rhiadra]

9 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

And yet, the forum has many threads where vehicle using "Explorers" claim that parking their butts on a wonky vehicle simulator gives them a magic right to enter peoples property without let or hindrance, threads in which you have claimed it's unreasonable for landowners to keep the vehicle users out with zero second orbs and ban lines.

Bot's don't enjoy special status, the exact same parcel access tools that work on privacy-hating vehicle-vagrants work on bots too, no differences.

 🍎 and 🍊

These are two entirely different issues, involving different functionality, and with different solutions required.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

8 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

For those of us that don't keep up with acronyms, can someone tell me what HOA is..

 

"Home Owners Association", it's like a "Residents Association" or "Tenants Association" but without the democracy, and more self appointed committee members of the Kommunity Kommisar Kommando Korps, telling you what colour paint you can use on your bedroom wall (they know you used the wrong colour because they have high powered binoculars with a night vision feature) or that you own the wrong type of housecat, and need to replace it with a more expensive model that better matches the Official Kommunity Theme.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

4 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

 🍎 and 🍊

These are two entirely different issues, involving different functionality, and with different solutions required.

II find banlines and a zero second orb works equally well on both groups

[Ceka Cianci]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Home Owners Association!

You're welcome. 🙂

Now I know why I didn't know what it was.. It's because I don't Role play..

hehehe

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Just now, Ceka Cianci said:

Now I know why I didn't know what it was.. It's because I don't Role play..

hehehe

It's a thing that applies in RL, I think, to "gated communities" or those residential developments that are rather like condos, with restrictions on the colours you can paint your front door, the kinds of flowers you can plant, the sort of knapsack your child takes to school . . . ok, I'm being a little silly, but you get the idea.

[Gwin LeShelle]

21 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

Now I know why I didn't know what it was.. It's because I don't Role play..

hehehe

I didn't knew either but as it seems it's just another example of some people taking SL way too serious XD 

[Ceka Cianci]

Just now, Scylla Rhiadra said:

It's a thing that applies in RL, I think, to "gated communities" or those residential developments that are rather like condos, with restrictions on the colours you can paint your front door, the kinds of flowers you can plant, the sort of knapsack your child takes to school . . . ok, I'm being a little silly, but you get the idea.

Ya, I know what they are in RL.. I've had to deal with them as well as the town halls when I apply for permits  for jobs my family does in them at times..

I don't see any difference from living in their sim as I do any other sim that has it's own rules.

 

 

 

 

[Love Zhaoying]

6 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

They've basically been given us a bandaid for, what is to some, a gunshot wound.  

 

[Love Zhaoying]

These changes are discriminatory to all the Belli residents with Bot boyfriends and children. 

[Love Zhaoying]

Bots: *Exist*
Users: go nuts, threaten to ragequit

LL: *Does something about Bots*
Users: go nuts, threaten to ragequit

 

[nytyny]

This is amazing. Thanks for hearing to all SL community and taking swift action. Appreciate the effort but this is still half job done. Would love to see this at parcel level, or at least allow the parcel level allowed list to override the ban as well.

From a big estate point of view, a lot of our residents do use Bots for their own purposes, so now it becomes a headache for EMs to get the info about all legit Bots from the residents and add them to Estate Allowed List. If they could just add their own bots in parcel allowed list and it should override the ban on scripted agents, it would have been great!

May be in near future we will see this update as well. Thanks!

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, nytyny said:

From a big estate point of view, a lot of our residents do use Bots for their own purposes, so now it becomes a headache for EMs to get the info about all legit Bots from the residents and add them to Estate Allowed List. If they could just add their own bots in parcel allowed list and it should override the ban on scripted agents, it would have been great!

May be in near future we will see this update as well. Thanks!

This is a great idea, don't think I saw it elsewhere yet.

[Qie Niangao]

4 hours ago, Polenth Yue said:

Bellisseria has had bot issues for a long time. Some house parcels would be chosen as bot landing points, instead of the sensible thing and using the road outside. It meant houses were being abandoned by a string of owners, because they couldn't do anything about the bots. Then there were the ones that technically were on public land, but at common skybox height, so they'd appear right by people's skyboxes. Maybe the bot owners thought it'd keep them out of people's way rather than being creepy, but it really didn't work that way. There were also the roleplay bots that sometimes filled regions on the public land for no apparent reason. Being able to remove bots from a house parcel would only solve some of the issues.

The Bellisseria Bot Ban was surprising to me because I never really knew about these issues. Now I'm worried about the Mainland more than ever. Even if we somehow manage to get parcel-scope access control applicable to bots, the public land (and abandoned parcels) will be bot haven unless the Governor decides to ban them from the estate.

The problem is, there are useful purposes for bots.* They don't need to be on Belli—sorry @Paul Hexem, but it won't break SL if Belli bots need to find a new home. But if all of Mainland were off-limits, where would they go, really? But if Mainland is not off-limits, isn't it all subject to the same abuse the Belli bots inflicted on residents?

So, seriously: now what?

Before the Belli ban, I thought the parcel-scope ban would be just fine for Mainland. Sure, it wouldn't do anything about data privacy, but I'm fine with Mainland being wide open for that kind of data collection. But if the place is gonna be flooded by Belli bot refugees hovering everywhere they aren't banned, this is gonna get old real fast.

_______________
* Repeating myself, as usual: There shouldn't be data uniquely available to bots, but that's how it is because the Lab has a weird fetish about routing even non-real time data directly to the viewer instead of through a public API. They claim to be incapable of securing such an API. Makes ya feel real confident about the security of that viewer interface, too, don't it? How many after-the-fact throttles have needed kludging onto viewer data access over the years?

[Qie Niangao]

12 minutes ago, nytyny said:

If they could just add their own bots in parcel allowed list and it should override the ban on scripted agents, it would have been great!

This sounds difficult. I have the (naive?) impression that the Estate-scope ban is implemented at teleport into the Estate, so the logic would be that teleport would be okay for a bot allowed on a parcel within that Estate even though the bot isn't listed as an Estate-scope exception. Now when that bot tries to cross outside that parcel, it must be denied access to those locations where it isn't specially allowed. I think the logic is consistent, but seems complicated to implement.

[nytyny]

46 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

I think the logic is consistent, but seems complicated to implement

I agree, it is a complicate feature to implement, but i think it is possible. Without this feature, it becomes another hassle for large estates to keep track of Legit bots, which is painful. 

[Sid Nagy]

 

12 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

YES! THIS!

"After Residents consent to the Second Life Terms of Service and connected Privacy Policy, Second Life presents select information about Residents to each other within the Second Life environment. This presentation is for the sole purpose of facilitating interaction within Second Life. Without a separate agreement in place (for e.g. as a sub-processor or vendor), there is no default right that any third party has to collect, store, process, or transmit a Second Life Resident’s Personal Data outside of Second Life."

 

Edited March 31, 2023 by Sid Nagy

[Sid Nagy]

10 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

Oh, of course.  It just seems they've only increased their workload of abuse reports yet the problem will still exist.  There is no solution, IMO.  Bad actors will always find a way to circumvent the rules.   They've basically been given us a bandaid for, what is to some, a gunshot wound.  

There isn't a law or rule in the world where there aren't people trying to work around it.
Still that shouldn't stop the world to have laws and rules in place and make new better laws and rules if needed.

Edited March 31, 2023 by Sid Nagy

[Paul Hexem]

2 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

They don't need to be on Belli—sorry @Paul Hexem, but it won't break SL if Belli bots need to find a new home.

For the sake of clarity: my point is less that bots need to be allowed and more that LL just banned all my alts from my own parcel without input from me.

Other estate owners will do it to their renters. It's not a question of if, but when and who.

Without parcel level controls, this is a terrible idea.

The truth is, I only ever used my bot to manage some DJ stuff, and I don't DJ much anymore. I've just lost the ability to test or configure it unless I go buy new land. But if I'm affected, we know other people will be too. 

Edited March 31, 2023 by Paul Hexem

[Innula Zenovka]

5 hours ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Now you can say "well, obviously LL will use some common sense about this" but the reality is, when ANY "take action on reported offences from the public" system is overloaded, pressure from on high to reduce backlogs leads to shortcuts in processing, and to mistakes.

I saw this every day at work, people call up with a problem, it takes 10-15 mins to identify and deal wityh said problem, forwarding it for resolution to the correct parties, but, there's a lot of calls, and we're ordered to keep AHT, Average Handling Time, down to under 8 mins. and penalised if we don't.

The result, people having to call back a dozen times until they get somebody willing to risk being shouted at by a line manager to do the job right.

Is that comparable, though?    In SL, if people want to complain about something, rather than phone a call centre to harass front-line staff, they have to submit either Support Tickets or Abuse Reports, as appropriate.  The reports are then passed to the appropriate team, who can triage and investigate them without keeping increasingly irate customers on hold.

When someone from Governance investigates a complaint about an unregistered bot, it's going to take only a very cursory inspection of their account history to establish they're not a bot.   Determining that someone is a bot would probably take longer but I think a quick inspection of their recent movements, Chat/IMs, and transaction history should soon satisfy an investigator if they're not a bot.

[Love Zhaoying]

I think, based on some of the Bot / Scripted Agent use-cases that came up in this thread from @Paul Hexem and others, there may be a couple "classes" of bots:

Class "1" - Roaming bots that enter other people's Regions / Parcels - presumably to collect data.  These seem to be the "Bots" that are annoying everyone.

Class "2" - Stationary "helper-bots" that either assist in sales, DJ'ing, cleaning your house, etc. In Paul's examples these could even be considered as "alts".  

Possibly, there is not a good / clear reason to "Ban" Class "2" bots as I describe them above.  So, if I were LL, I would "look the other way" should what I call Class "2" bots be unregistered.

Agree? Disagree? #FightMe ok, don't. It's just an honest suggestion.

 

[Bomba Zanzibar]

at last!!!!!! I m not estate, only renting half a sim, and we have those "bots" at least 6 or 7 times a day, I have a list of 60 names, and could find the website site of this ! pffffff its really annoying, landing, staying 5 seconds, then poof! how can I know they are considered as "bots or scripted agents" or only alts?  is there a way to know it? even my hosts dont greet them anymore lol

I will ask my estate to forbid them, i think she will agrre!

 

Edited March 31, 2023 by Bomba Zanzibar

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, Sid Nagy said:

There isn't a law or rule in the world where there aren't people trying to work around it.
Still that shouldn't stop the world to have laws and rules in place and make new better laws and rules if needed.

I totally agree with you.  Laws and rules are generally always put it place because people disregard social norms.

Just to clarify my position...I do like the new controls to keep bots off your land.  I do wish it extended to parcels on mainland.  I just think people (those not on private estates) are being given a false sense of security in regards to the new Bot Policy and Privacy.   Unless one spends all their time on a bot-banned private estate, unregistered bots can still collect information about you.  Although, those same unregistered bot still have access to private estates unless you use the controls that were already there to limit access.

Example...let's say I have a few unregistered bots.  I put one at shopping events listed on seraphim.  I stand there for several hours, which I swear some actual people do.  I collect data from everyone who enters.  I could even switch out bot A for bot B so no one gets suspicious.  I can then take all.that info and put it onto a website.  A website that LL themselves have said they have no control over.  Each person who stumbles onto that website and finds info about themselves has to figure out how to get that info off the site if they so choose.  

TL;DR...Ban bots good.  Bot policy/privacy...placebo.

Edited March 31, 2023 by Rowan Amore
Added a thought

[Love Zhaoying]

I assume there is some highly technical, don't-want-to-tell-people ways that LL can tell if an avatar appears to be controlled by a "Viewer" or by "Bot software".  Using that method (whatever it is), is probably how LL will determine if "Reported Bots" really are "Unregistered Scripted Agents" or not.

[xDancingStarx]

There already existed a ban on bots. The ban to be excluded from traffic counting. According to most people in this thread there shouldn't be a problem with bots and traffic anymore. Why is there still?

[belindacarson]

31 minutes ago, xDancingStarx said:

There already existed a ban on bots. The ban to be excluded from traffic counting. According to most people in this thread there shouldn't be a problem with bots and traffic anymore. Why is there still?

Because the bots are mostly anonymous so you have no idea of their actions.

At least that site we can't name, identified it's purpose and published what they were up to