New Feature: Scripted Agent Estate Access Discussion

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 hour ago, primerib1 said:

So basically, I have only 3 options here:

1. Stop using bots, and make club visitors unhappy, possibly resulting in them stopping to come to my place
2. Move my club somewhere else, and deal with the tediousness of rebuilding the club, resetting things, another marketing campaign etc.
3. Break the rules by operating bots but not marking them as "scripted agents", thus fully putting myself in the risk of being banned if someone who hates me reported me for operating bots but not registering them as "scripted agents"

"I have 3 poisons, which one is tastier for you?"

So, talking with the estate owner/managers and asking is out of the question?

I just don't understand people who deliberately and obtusely limit their options when there are dozens of options if you just put your mind to work.

[Rowan Amore]

2 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

That was always going to be an issue, of course.

As regards LL's ability to act on it -- if the data is being collected within SL, by any means (including, but not exclusively bots), LL can move against that data collecting operation, shutting it down.

 

What I see happening is..bots will now have full profiles.and not be registered as scripted agents.  This will.then make everyone wonder about.that random.person showing up near their home.  A rash of abuse reports will ensue.  But, it's not a bot?  Is it?. No?  Maybe?

All the info is now on a website owned by...who?  

Just playing devil's advocate.  

 

[Love Zhaoying]

4 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

I take great offense to that.

You're welcome!

[Love Zhaoying]

13 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

So, talking with the estate owner/managers and asking is out of the question?

I just don't understand people who deliberately and obtusely limit their options when there are dozens of options if you just put your mind to work.

I suspect @primerib1 didn't understand the option, as you've pointed out! 
ETA: I missed it too until a few minutes ago.

Edited March 31, 2023 by Love Zhaoying

[Silent Mistwalker]

4 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

I take great offense to that.

Too bad. Even I know you're just a softie at heart.

Having a soft heart in a hard world is courage, not weakness.

[Silent Mistwalker]

4 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

What I see happening is..bots will now have full profiles.and not be registered as scripted agents.  This will.then make everyone wonder about.that random.person showing up near their home.  A rash of abuse reports will ensue.  But, it's not a bot?  Is it?. No?  Maybe?

All the info is now on a website owned by...who?  

Just playing devil's advocate.  

 

AS always it will be up to LL to determine if the account reported in the AR is a bot or not. Us plebs don't really need to know if we use the tools provided as intended.

 

Edited March 31, 2023 by Silent Mistwalker

[Love Zhaoying]

It seems pretty significant that scripted agents are now banned from the premier LL offering, Bellisseria!

[Rowan Amore]

2 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

AS always it will be up to LL to determine if the account reported in the AR is a bot or not. Us plebs don't really need to know if we use the tools provided as intended.

 

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.  

[Zalificent Corvinus]

8 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

What I see happening is..bots will now have full profiles.and not be registered as scripted agents.  This will.then make everyone wonder about.that random.person showing up near their home.  A rash of abuse reports will ensue.  But, it's not a bot?  Is it?. No?  Maybe?

All the info is now on a website owned by...who?  

Just playing devil's advocate.  

 

Yup, all very predictable, and the follow up will be a tidal wave of fraudulent Abuse Reports, swamping Governance and choking the whole system, for a range of paranoid delusional non-crimes.

 

Use an out of date LM to a store that's moved, land in a parcel, realise its the wrong place, TP out, and the bot-hater who currently owns iot AR's you for "being a filthy unregistered bot who tp's in and leaves again almost instantly without speaking, who's hiding by having a profile and pretending to be a real person".

TP to a load of stores bargain hunting, and get AR'd for "being a filthy unregistered bot who rapidly tp's to more than 8 places in an hour".

The list of inventive reasons why people will be accused of being "filthy unregistered bots" is almost endless.

 

The Draconian Crackdown has begun, the new data privacy rules for example, fashion blogger posts that they are wearing clothes made by [username] and gets into troble as the new policy makes somebodies username "personal data that you can be banned for posting on external websites".

 

The panic inducing fear mongering bot-haters have ushered in a new age of fraudulent Abuse report spam and mistaken bans . The Cure is WORSE than the disease. I hope the y are happy with the new rules, I wonder if they will still be proud of their "non-victory" over unregistered bots, as the crackdown's  effect on non-bots tightens.

[Rick Nightingale]

@Zalificent Corvinus - would I be right in thinking that you don't like the change?

I really do not believe anyone at LL is daft enough to listen to most of what you say will be reported; don't you think they must deal with stupid abuse reports all the time and filter them out? Nor do I think most event and shop owners are that daft*. There will be no 'Draconian Crackdown'.

Yes, I'm sure it will increase LL's workload somewhat, but that is down to them. Not us. Frankly I would make making an invalid abuse report as serious an issue as the abuse that is being misreported. Again though that's for LL to deal with and us to not know anything about.

Edit: ...and I'm not exactly known for my high opinion of most people.

Edited March 31, 2023 by Rick Nightingale

[Skyler Pancake]

3 hours ago, Patch Linden said:

So instead of giving actual parcel control to the PAYING MEMBERS you give in to a few people crying and take away the ability for EVERYONE to have a bot at their Linden Home.

Guess I'm moving off Belli.

 

I really enjoyed having this quiet little parcel I could retreat to, but if Belli is going to be full HOA without any even discussion with the residents, then I'm not interested in being there.

 

Edited March 31, 2023 by Skyler Pancake
To show abandoned land.

[Sparkle Bunny]

1 minute ago, Skyler Pancake said:

So instead of giving actual parcel control to the PAYING MEMBERS you give in to a few people crying and take away the ability for EVERYONE to have a bot at their Linden Home.

Judging by the number of landowners in Bellisseria (and elsewhere) who haven't mastered basics such as build permissions or autoreturn, LL probably thought giving them more options they don't understand was a waste of time. Bellisserians are already heavily restricted in terms of breedables, and commercial activity is banned altogether, so quite why anyone would ever have thought it was a suitable location for a bot farm is beyond me.

 

3 minutes ago, Skyler Pancake said:

Guess I'm moving off Belli.

Bye!

[WereBeast Alpha]

I don't have the main land I do have a linden home but I rarely use it since I live with a friend on SL while my private full sim is used for an RP I run. I did manage to download second life viewer and add in the estate action for not allowing bots. The visit count is down and only real people can come onto the sim now. Thank you @Linden Lab for doing this. 

[Jennifer Boyle]

34 minutes ago, Skyler Pancake said:

So instead of giving actual parcel control to the PAYING MEMBERS you give in to a few people crying and take away the ability for EVERYONE to have a bot at their Linden Home.

Guess I'm moving off Belli.

 

I really enjoyed having this quiet little parcel I could retreat to, but if Belli is going to be full HOA without any even discussion with the residents, then I'm not interested in being there.

 

 

It's the usual situation in which a few vocal whiners get things done their way, to the detriment of the community at large.

[LittleMe Jewell]

1 hour ago, Skyler Pancake said:

I really enjoyed having this quiet little parcel I could retreat to, but if Belli is going to be full HOA without any even discussion with the residents, then I'm not interested in being there.

Belli has always been full HOA without much discussion with the Residents, though some of the covenant rules do come from comments here in the forums.  Most of us already knew that.

Edited March 31, 2023 by LittleMe Jewell

[Silent Mistwalker]

2 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.  

That's all they can do really. Short of shutting the grid down entirely forever or just banning bots outright. 

As with everything, there will always be those who will be bad actors just because they can.

[Polenth Yue]

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.

On private regions, it's been noticeable that the one where I build has been getting more and more bots. It's like everyone decided they needed to get in on the survey bot action and visiting once a day wasn't enough. The bots wouldn't have been banned in the past, but now the box is checked, and it's suddenly a lot quieter. It was getting silly.

The ideal sunshine and rainbows thing would be to get all the bot owners together and have them voluntarily follow a basic code of conduct to stop them causing issues for others. That never happened, so here we are.

[Alwin Alcott]

6 hours ago, Cain Maven said:

A good first step, but as others have noted this will not affect non-registered bots, including copybots.

Can we have a discussion on how to try to make a dent in that issue? I'm not downplaying the issue of bots in general, but I do believe copybots have a fairly large economic impact that has gone unaddressed for a very long time.

Perhaps LL could invite a group of creators to listen to concerns and ideas?

not sure if it changed a lot last decade, but in the past copybots were not scripted agents. It were (are?) users on modified viewers.

[Gwin LeShelle]

9 hours ago, Kadah Coba said:

Awesome, gonna enable this on my estate. And maybe the policy change to further increase the requirement to have bot accounts flagged properly actually has some affect.

I hope something like this eventually comes to the parcel level. I have some mainland which has been seeing exponential increase is roaming bots visiting with unknown purposes. It's nearly useless to ban them individually as repeat names rarely are seen. One of our rental parcels has seen over a dozen bots in the past 24 hours, this was typically 1-3 per day max just last week going back over a year. No clue what's with a recent massive uptick in bot traffic. And this is just what's our parcels alone are seeing, the regions themselves might be getting even more bot traffic that we're not checking for. :s

Yep we have a visitor detector that sends me emails we have a massive surge of bots over the last 24h there too.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 hours ago, Jennifer Boyle said:

It's the usual situation in which a few vocal whiners get things done their way, to the detriment of the community at large.

This is such a very odd perspective, Jennifer.

Why do you say "few"?

Look at this thread. Or at the, what, ten or so previous ones on the subject of bots. The number of residents who are concerned and/or mad about bots is much larger than those defending them. On Twitter, the number of those complaining about bots and who are now vocally cheering these changes, outnumbers those who think the status quo was better by a factor of probably 10 to 1.

Being more numerous doesn't make those of us who had objections to the data scraping and bot proliferation "right," but it really does make pretty nonsensical your suggestion that a "few" are ruining it all for the "many." Where are the voices of this apparently mythical "community at large," this "silent majority"? I hear a few of them here, a few on Twitter -- but it's not the volume of those opposed to them that is drowning them out, it's the sheer numbers.

I also don't understand why you need to characterize people's concerns as "whining." You can surely disagree with people without reductively dismissing those concerns as mere "whining," even if you don't think they have any merit.

I don't think it's "whining" to want to have control over who gets to enter your land. In any other context, we -- and I'm sure you -- would take issue with the suggestion that landowners should be compelled to have visitors they don't want. Why are bots special exceptions to the "my land, my rules" approach that is almost axiomatic here?

Nor do I think being concerned about who has access to our data, for manipulation, aggregation, analysis, and publication off-grid, unreasonable.

Your enjoyment of lists of "popular attachments" or "busy regions" doesn't trump literally everyone else's right to restrict access to their land, and to their data.

[Coffee Pancake]

3 hours ago, Skyler Pancake said:

if Belli is going to be full HOA

Belli is full HOA. That's literally the whole point.

4 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

What I see happening is..bots will now have full profiles.and not be registered as scripted agents.

Bots and people use SL in very different ways and not just in terms of what they do, but how they do it and what data they request while they do it.

A little clever subterfuge might make them hard to spot given our limited perspective, but from LL's side, they're trivial to pick out from the crowd (it wouldn't even take an AI .. but that would be a good summer project for someone at LL).

We can only hope they use their massive advantage to keep bot operators honest.

[Gwin LeShelle]

7 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Not the first time that something that many deem as good will have a negative aspect to it.

I deem that as good personally. Finally all the game of home Hardcore players need to rely on luck ...just like everyone else XD no need to surveil vacant Linden homes just use the find a new home page when you need one

[Zalificent Corvinus]

3 hours ago, Rick Nightingale said:

@Zalificent Corvinus - would I be right in thinking that you don't like the change?

I really do not believe anyone at LL is daft enough to listen to most of what you say will be reported; don't you think they must deal with stupid abuse reports all the time and filter them out? Nor do I think most event and shop owners are that daft*. There will be no 'Draconian Crackdown'.

Yes, I'm sure it will increase LL's workload somewhat, but that is down to them. Not us. Frankly I would make making an invalid abuse report as serious an issue as the abuse that is being misreported. Again though that's for LL to deal with and us to not know anything about.

Edit: ...and I'm not exactly known for my high opinion of most people.

Do I "like" an over the top knee-jerk reaction to a non-urgent un-problem, that won't do much to accomplish it's stated goals, but will result in even more fraudulent AR's that governance already get ?

The first example of a soon to be spammed un-crime report I gave, is not "hypothetical", its basically lifted straight from a recent thread where somebody made that exact complaint, their radar spotted an arrival on the parcel, they went over to talk to the new arrival, but the arrival left almost immediately, not an obvious bot account, but a 'normal avatar", which the parcel owner then admitted to instantly banning because of their "suspicious behavior" in teleporting in, and then straight back out.

 

How many times have any of us used an out of date LM, , and then said "whoa this isnt where i thought i was going", and left, there are already people claiming thats "proof you are a bot" and banning people from their parcels, or adding them to voodoo banlists.

 

There is a lot of whining about "data scraping" and one of the whiners suggested that if LL want to allow data collection, that they should create an official API for that.

They already did... It's called LSL, a quick perusal of the script commands for "scraping" object info, agent info, even what level of premium subscription somebody has are all in LSL..

Some people think it's EASY for LL to infalibly identify bots with some automated thing, if that is in fact the case, why dont we have a script command called llAgentIsABot(avkey), instead we get some heavy handed "shut down registered bots on a whole region" setting that can ONLY be used by Estate Managers, which by and large makes it either completely useless, or heavy handed over the top knee jerking.

Add in that this new "completely crap response to whiny demands" only affects the Registered Bot from the responsible bot users, and does nothing what so ever to the hypothetical "vast hoard of evil unregistered bots", and it becomes even more of a pointless placebo. Add in that the method being officially offered for detecting "evil unregistered bots" is apparently Neighbourhood Snitch Prodnose Vigillantteism generated fraudulent AR spam, and this is a governance disaster waiting to happen.

Add in the new rules about data privacy, that now classifies display name and/or user name as "personal data" that we're forbidden from sharing on off grid sites, and every blogger is now theoretically in breach if they mention a username when blogging that users store products, or people posting transcripts on blogs, of those dev team meetups every week.

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.

And now this nonsense is coming to SL, because "wahhhhh, how dare your evil bot know what mesh body i wear, my friend with the single digit IQ said bots cause the Plague, and spread computer viruses to your microwave oven"

Governance are often accused of dragging their feet over AR's because it seems they don't get processed, or take too long, and heads up, repeatedly filing false AR's is apparently already an offence, the new measures will only make it even more common.

Oh and a final thought on your final comment...

Remember that the Axiom Review Board has ruled that use of "An honest man has nothing to fear from the police" should be discontinued.

 

4 hours ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

Us plebs don't really need to know if we use the tools provided as intended.

And when have "we the people" ever done that?, One of my former SL housemates was threatened with being AR'd for "harassment" because she asked some home invader to leave more than once, nowhere in the ToS does it state you can't ask an unwelcome visitor to leave.

 

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I don't think it's "whining" to want to have control over who gets to enter your land. In any other context, we -- and I'm sure you -- would take issue with the suggestion that landowners should be compelled to have visitors they don't want. Why are bots special exceptions to the "my land, my rules" approach that is almost axiomatic here?

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.

[Ceka Cianci]

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

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

6 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!

You're welcome. 🙂