New Feature: Scripted Agent Estate Access Discussion

[EliseAnne85]

1 hour ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

18 hours ago, M Peccable said:

"Protect yourself from what?" would be my question.

Invasive practices.

@ The Above.  I knew what Silent meant.  I knew she wasn't using that quote above to mean a watch.  

Silent, is no dummie, techno nor otherwise.  

However, the above is what we are trying to establish in how to protect ourselves from invasive practices.

Right now, data scraping may never be 100% free of.  But, at least, in people's homes (parcels), we'd like to not have bots popping in any time they damn want.

[M Peccable]

3 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

@ The Above.  I knew what Silent meant.  I knew she wasn't using that quote above to mean a watch.  

Silent, is no dummie, techno nor otherwise.  

However, the above is what we are trying to establish in how to protect ourselves from invasive practices.

Right now, data scraping may never be 100% free of.  But, at least, in people's homes (parcels), we'd like to not have bots popping in any time they damn want.

It is still VERY confusing and distracting from the thread to respond to a question like ""Protect yourself from what?"" out of context, and answer it in a way that is not applicable to the original context.

No one is accusing anyone of being a dummie.

 

Edited April 6, 2023 by M Peccable

[EliseAnne85]

3 minutes ago, M Peccable said:

It is still VERY confusing and distracting from the thread to respond to a question like ""Protect yourself from what?"" out of context, and answer it in a way that is not applicable to the original context.

No one is accusing anyone of being a dummie.

 

Okay, thank you for saying you weren't trying to dumb someone down.

But, I think it's time to get beyond this now and discuss the issue, if there is anything to discuss.

Generally to the thread, not directed at M Peccable:  My homes under ABOUT LAND show no way for the region owner to turn on deny_bot.  So, I have no protection from deny_bot that I can see.  

Edited April 6, 2023 by EliseAnne85

[bunboxmomo]

3 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Okay, thank you for saying you weren't trying to dumb someone down.

But, I think it's time to get beyond this now and discuss the issue, if there is anything to discuss.

Generally to the thread, not directed at M Peccable:  My homes under ABOUT LAND show no way for the region owner to turn on deny_bot.  So, I have no protection from deny_bot that I can see.  

It's an estate function, not a region function.
(It really should be a region function too honestly, even if not entirely datatight.)

[Ceka Cianci]

2 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Okay, that you for saying you weren't trying to dumb someone down.

But, I think it's time to get beyond this now and discuss the issue, if there is anything to discuss.

Generally to the thread, not directed at M Peccable:  My homes under ABOUT LAND show no way for the region owner to turn on deny_bot.  So, I have no protection from deny_bot that I can see.  

You can ask the region owner about if they have the setting turned on or not.. They may not even know there has been a change in estate privileges.. There might be a lot that don't know about it really if they don't read the blogs..

It's usually that you have to know it's there or stumble on it or someone mention something, because LL doesn't send out that information over the wire in world..

[M Peccable]

Just now, Ceka Cianci said:

You can ask the region owner about if they have the setting turned on or not.. They may not even know there has been a change in estate privileges.. There might be a lot that don't know about it really if they don't read the blogs..

It's usually that you have to know it's there or stumble on it or someone mention something, because LL doesn't send out that information over the wire in world..

There is no region setting, only an estate level setting. At least at this point in time.

[bunboxmomo]

Just now, Ceka Cianci said:

You can ask the region owner about if they have the setting turned on or not.. They may not even know there has been a change in estate privileges.. There might be a lot that don't know about it really if they don't read the blogs..

It's usually that you have to know it's there or stumble on it or someone mention something, because LL doesn't send out that information over the wire in world..

Not really an option for people who own regions, but not the estate.
Take for example WRE, which offers rental *and region ownership* of entire regions.

Even though such a region is not physically connected to other regions in WRE's estate, enabling the option would enable it in over 600 regions, regardless of the views of other region owners. (This would result in problems for communities who use bots as part of their own systems in their region or communities!)

As a result, this really should be a region level function as well.

[Love Zhaoying]

36 minutes ago, bunboxmomo said:

DID I SERIOUSLY JUST END MY POST IN A SEMI-COLON OUT OF HABIT BECAUSE I WROTE PSUEDOCODE AND TRIGGERED THAT HABITUAL ENDING OF LINES WITH ;???

God I need to go out and touch some grass.

I could edit that mistake out of the original post, but it's funny enough that I'm going to leave that in.

I suspect the problem is with your tokenizer. You knew it expects a semicolon. Or could be your parser.

[bunboxmomo]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I suspect the problem is with your tokenizer. You knew it expects a semicolon. Or could be your parser.

Clearly I am not a human and am actually a bot being run by GPT-4, and my algorithm incorrectly identified my response as code internally and compelled me to add a ;

Edited April 6, 2023 by bunboxmomo

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, bunboxmomo said:

So I would like to see an internal team at LL established to produce an internal brief on the viability of the idea of bringing into line that disconnect between UX and actuality, and what challenges would be involved, what limitations, what impact and if this is viable or not, and then if so perhaps implement this.

A team dedicated to evaluating modernisation of parts of code that by their nature present challenges to larger operation if changed, that aims to evaluate potential changes and explore the options of that, would be nice to see at LL, as there are many points of SL's structure and codebase that could benefit from this that are generally left alone because of how deep the code is or how much depends on it and how much would potentially break with changes done without proper planning and these parts of the codebase often present additional obstacles to feature implementation, such as in this case parcel level controls

I know coffee protested quite hard about this, but this is a thing that many production standard projects do and old heavily depended on spaghetti code is often reivewed and changed bit by bit over time to effect change, where changing parts of codebase can be potentially project breaking, such as is the case here.

The concept is not that wild and it'd be nice to see a team exist at LL for this like at other developer teams, and if one already exists, it would be nice to see one address this topic.

Not going to happen any time soon, for a very simple reason, creating "Special Taskforces" with numerous members, to investigate the whole damn codebase and rewrite most of it takes a crapton of time and a crapton of money.

 

SL isn't some standard video game from a games dev company, where they have 50-75 coders and lead coders, and 40 3d modelers, and 60 texture artists, and 50 sound effects guys etc., etc., etc.

There's a HANDFUL of people poking about in the code, mostly doing emergency hot-fixes.

Projects that at REAL games dev companies might take 3 months to implement, at LL, take 3 to 5 YEARS, because instead of 5 guys working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week on a new feature, there's ONE guy, working 4 hours a day, one day a week, because the rest of their time is shared between half a dozen different project viewers, and server maintenance, and hosting user group meetings on the beta grid, and attending office meetings where non technical management tell them what half dozen new project viewers will be launched next week!

 

[Ceka Cianci]

Just now, M Peccable said:

There is no region setting, only an estate level setting. At least at this point in time.

Sim setting..

If I call it a sim then I get corrected with it being a region.. If I call it a region I get corrected that way as well..

I should just start calling them Island.. hehehe

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, bunboxmomo said:

Clearly I am not a human and am actually a bot being run by GPT-4, and my algorithm incorrectly identified my response as code internally and compelled me to add a ;

My reply was because I've been working on tokenizers and parsers. 😺

[Ceka Cianci]

3 minutes ago, bunboxmomo said:

Not really an option for people who own regions, but not the estate.
Take for example WRE, which offers rental *and region ownership* of entire regions.

Even though such a region is not physically connected to other regions in WRE's estate, enabling the option would enable it in over 600 regions, regardless of the views of other region owners. (This would result in problems for communities who use bots as part of their own systems in their region or communities!)

As a result, this really should be a region level function as well.

So a private Island doesn't have this function?  Now that doesn't make a lick of sense at all..

[bunboxmomo]

3 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

So a private Island doesn't have this function?  Now that doesn't make a lick of sense at all..

Yep! Estate level function, not region.
So this only works for private islands that are part of their *own* estate as well.

Hence why this should *also* be a region level function too.

Edited April 6, 2023 by bunboxmomo

[M Peccable]

5 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

So a private Island doesn't have this function?  Now that doesn't make a lick of sense at all..

A private island (one region) is an estate also. So no problem there. As the estate grows and adds regions, as it stands now all those regions have to be denying bots or not. No mixture of the two, since it is an estate-level setting only.

 

Edited April 6, 2023 by M Peccable

[bunboxmomo]

1 minute ago, M Peccable said:

A private island (one region) is an estate also. So no problem there. As the estate grows and adds regions, as it stands now all those regions have to be denying bots or not. No mixture off the two, since it is an estate-level setting only.

 

Not actually accurate M.
I myself have owned regions, that are part of larger estates, despite being a private island.

There are rental services that provide full region rental with Region Owner rights.
These sims are affected.

WRE is one example, and is one of the largest providers of land in SL, there are others this affects too.

Edited April 6, 2023 by bunboxmomo

[Silent Mistwalker]

5 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

So a private Island doesn't have this function?  Now that doesn't make a lick of sense at all..

Homesteads and private full region islands should have the function. Homesteads are full regions with limited LI/prim count.

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, bunboxmomo said:

So I would like to see an internal team at LL established to produce an internal brief on the viability of the idea of bringing into line that disconnect between UX and actuality, and what challenges would be involved, what limitations, what impact and if this is viable or not, and then if so perhaps implement this.

.......

Reality check time ... LL have limited developer resources and a bucket list a mile long. Developers do nothing without management finding a clear business case. All development projects must have the potential to show platform growth. This is why they are working on new starter avatars, performance, puppeteering, new rendering features, vulkan and so on.

Ripping the code base apart to deliver per parcel bot permissions does nothing for platform growth, if it's even possible or practical.

Just in case it's not clear how unwilling LL are to send developers down rabbit holes ripping the code base apart. Consider variable region sizes, something opensim has had forever and does have a clear business case for LL. A Linden did experiment, and while getting a region to be any size was fairly easy, the assumption of a fixed region size was so ingrained into the platform, it would take months of work to address all the cases where things broke as a result. 

There is zero possibility that LL will go down a rabbit hole to enable per parcel bot options that actually function as well as an estate ban.

BTW .. it's an estate ban rather than a per region ban for good reason.

2 minutes ago, bunboxmomo said:

Yep! Estate level function, not region.
So this only works for private islands that are part of their *own* estate as well.

That would be all regions.

All regions are part of an estate, even if that estate only contains one region.

[bunboxmomo]

1 minute ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Reality check time ... LL have limited developer resources and a bucket list a mile long. Developers do nothing without management finding a clear business case. All development projects must have the potential to show platform growth. This is why they are working on new starter avatars, performance, puppeteering, new rendering features, vulkan and so on.

Mam with all due respect, this is standard practice in many places, so it is reality.
You're welcome to say you feel LL would be unable as a company to do that and I would do disagree and we can leave it at that.

[EliseAnne85]

4 minutes ago, bunboxmomo said:

Yep! Estate level function, not region

So, as it stands now, region owners and land owners can check PIOF required for now to keep out bots, or attempt to block certain bots by name which sounds like a hassle.  

[belindacarson]

1 hour ago, bunboxmomo said:

Lol I remember this.
In the MLP community we had to outright ban bloodlines, because we had vampires coming to our sims to prey on users who had signed up for SL *exclusively* for our community who didn't know better and would go "Hey do you want some cool free vampire teeth? :D"

I remember scripting a "Surface to Vampire Missile System" that would scan for bloodlines HUD attachments and then fire a novelty missile at the user, executing a ban from estate command after the calculated time to impact had elapsed to make something more comical and fun out of the situation for our sim visitors.

you can't actually scan for HUD attachments.  I smell animal fertilizer.

[bunboxmomo]

1 minute ago, EliseAnne85 said:

So, as it stands now, region owners and land owners can check PIOF required for now to keep out bots, or attempt to block certain bots by name which sounds like a hassle.  

Yep and as mentioned, this should be changed. As it stands, it leaves ROs who don't also own the Estate itself but want to block all scripted agents, unable to use the option due to the massive widespread impact it would have on other regions within that estate, some of which would be communities that make use of scripted agents for their own functions on their own private islands.

Estate level is good, but there should also be a region level.

Edited April 6, 2023 by bunboxmomo

[Coffee Pancake]

13 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

So a private Island doesn't have this function?  Now that doesn't make a lick of sense at all..

Yes they do .. but the option is all your regions or none of your regions.

1 minute ago, belindacarson said:

you can't actually scan for HUD attachments.  I smell animal fertilizer.

Bronies .. what can you do .. 

[Ceka Cianci]

1 minute ago, bunboxmomo said:

Yep! Estate level function, not region.
So this only works for private islands that are part of their *own* estate as well.

Hence why this should *also* be a region level function too.

I don't know why I thought they were the same.. That would chap my hide if I owned a sim and they only gave this option to the top dogs.. Especially if it was something that was a concern of mine..

So basically it was only an update for the big time land owners.. Well aren't they special again.

Jeeezus.

 

[bunboxmomo]

2 minutes ago, belindacarson said:

you can't actually scan for HUD attachments.  I smell animal fertilizer.

It's been over a decade, cut me some slack, we scanned for something. Probably teeth or something.