Unfair

[Prokofy Neva]

If the Lindens can put the anti-bot script on Bellisseria "estates," enabling individual parcel owners to ban bots, there's no reason why this can't be enabled on Governor Linden's estate, i.e. the Mainland.

They were so gung-ho about data-scraping bots but they want the poorest folks on the Mainland to endure the big scrape.

 

[Rowan Amore]

5 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

If the Lindens can put the anti-bot script on Bellisseria "estates," enabling individual parcel owners to ban bots, there's no reason why this can't be enabled on Governor Linden's estate, i.e. the Mainland.

They were so gung-ho about data-scraping bots but they want the poorest folks on the Mainland to endure the big scrape.

 

Bots are.banned in ALL.of Bellisseria not by parcel.

[Prokofy Neva]

12 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Bots are.banned in ALL.of Bellisseria not by parcel.

All the more unfair! 

We're premium on the Mainland as well. Why do we have to be scraped by bots and not Bellisserians? PS I have a number of houses in Bellisseria but much more Mainland of course.

[Rowan Amore]

11 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

All the more unfair! 

We're premium on the Mainland as well. Why do we have to be scraped by bots and not Bellisserians? PS I have a number of houses in Bellisseria but much more Mainland of course.

They sort of addressed that, too with the new bot policy.  I guess we wait and see?

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Residents'_privacy_rights

 

[VenKellie]

SOME people need a bot on their old mainland parcel for group invites. NOT all bots are collecting data.

[Love Zhaoying]

LL puts the "UNfair" in "FUNfair"!

Edited April 1, 2023 by Love Zhaoying
UN not UNF lol

[belindacarson]

On 4/1/2023 at 7:46 PM, VenKellie said:

SOME people need a bot on their old mainland parcel for group invites. NOT all bots are collecting data.

SOME people just use a "click this to join group" board.

[Qie Niangao]

I'm curious what the current bot count is, after all the furor settled down a bit. There were too many roamers all along, but it had gotten just stupid right before the new policy, so I wonder if those new bots died off or they're all now frantically cruising Mainland, all dressed up with nowhere else to go.

I really wish this had finally convinced the Lab to expose a proper library API for scripts to safe, authenticated, and rate-limited operations on groups, starting with simple invitations. Sure, dumping the group URI in viewer chat works for a subset of recipients, but as long as only bots can do the first-class invitations, there will always be demand for those bots. And that's just silly.

The whole bot situation is strange now, and it's not clear (to me) what long-term vision is being served by the current policy. The real, serious problems were always twofold: static traffic bots undeclared as scripted agents inflating the highest traffic data to worse than meaningless, and competing swarm after swarm of roaming spybots all collecting the same worthless data and generally giving everybody the willies. In contrast, static group-inviters don't really hurt anybody, it's just an embarrassment that there's any purpose for them to serve. And for some folks, static NPC bots also serve a purpose although personally I find them creepy and annoying. It's hardly tragic if neither of those uses are possible on Bellisseria, nor if that policy were extended to Mainland. (I mean, If anybody actually wanted it, how much could it possibly cost to rent a bot-OK Estate microparcel on which to park a group-inviter bot?) But on the other hand, that they'd be caught by the same policy as traffic cheaters and roaming spybots sure doesn't recommend that policy.

[diamond Marchant]

42 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

only bots can do the first-class invitations

A group joiner script can use llDialog which, in my opinion, works well. For example,

Quote

key groupKey = "6c620c2b-b995-7bc6-b070-efd85fa17de8"; // LCC
string PLEASECLICK = "Please click on the following link to join ";
string groupName ="the Leeward Cruising Club";
string URLSTART = "secondlife:///app/group/";
string URLEND = "/about";
string DOTDOTDOT = "...";
string NEWLINE = "\n";

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        ;
    }
    touch_start(integer total_number)
    {
        key agent = llDetectedKey(0);

        llDialog(agent,
            NEWLINE + PLEASECLICK + groupName + DOTDOTDOT + NEWLINE +
            URLSTART+(string)groupKey+URLEND,
            [],
            -1);
    }
}

 

[VenKellie]

5 hours ago, belindacarson said:

SOME people just use a "click this to join group" board.

that opens the land to griefing and people parking their vehicles without paying.

[diamond Marchant]

3 minutes ago, VenKellie said:

that opens the land to griefing and people parking their vehicles without paying.

Not getting it... please elaborate.

[Qie Niangao]

1 hour ago, diamond Marchant said:

A group joiner script can use llDialog which, in my opinion, works well. 

Yes, that does seem tidier than just dumping the hypertext to local chat for the intended recipient to find and click on. It's still not quite as seamless as a bot's direct invitation, but it's not bad at all.

In fact, I was idly musing that maybe it would be best for the whole group-joining interaction to be removed from the viewer altogether, saving the trouble of rate-controlling it to deter spam griefers, and instead make it only available from within a script's touch_start or _end() handler specifically to the toucher, and maybe in listen() only to the speaker. I guess the invitation is the part susceptible to spamming, though, and kinda need something like that for invite-only groups so there'd at least need to be group authorization of the scripted object, to be able to process the join response. This would need further thought—as if it had a chance anyway.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, diamond Marchant said:

2 hours ago, VenKellie said:

that opens the land to griefing and people parking their vehicles without paying.

Not getting it... please elaborate.

..perhaps they are assuming group membership grants land access and object entry...?

[Quistess Alpha]

4 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

(I mean, If anybody actually wanted it, how much could it possibly cost to rent a bot-OK Estate microparcel on which to park a group-inviter bot?)

Ooh a simple math problem! A full region costs ~200USD per month and can host 100 simultaneous agents, so, if an estate owner has a 'just for bot parking' region they have to charge each bot a bit more than 2USD/month to break even (taking into account, non-optimal occupancy, the actual price to a user would be a fair amount higher). Interestingly, homesteads and open-space regions would cost more for bot parking,

It's not much, but that's a lot more expensive than it currently is to park a bot (basically free).

Edited April 13, 2023 by Quistess Alpha

[Qie Niangao]

19 minutes ago, Quistess Alpha said:

Ooh a simple math problem! A full region costs ~200USD per month and can host 100 simultaneous agents, so, if an estate owner has a 'just for bot parking' region they have to charge each bot a bit more than 2USD/month to break even (taking into account, non-optimal occupancy, the actual price to a user would be a fair amount higher). Interestingly, homesteads and open-space regions would cost more for bot parking,

It's not much, but that's a lot more expensive than it currently is to park a bot (basically free).

Interesting. I hadn't really taken my own question all that seriously, but now that you've done the math, I'm struck by the externalities of "free" bot-parking. There's not really a big difference between fees for a full-primmed Estate region and tier for a full sim-worth of Mainland. Most Mainland regions still have a standard avatar limit of 40 (and 55 on Linden Homes), so the theoretical "cost" of a Mainland-hosted avatar is roughly twice as great as one on an Estate. Of course, nobody actually pays per-avatar on Mainland, it's just tragedy of the commons all the way until you can't teleport in anymore.

If "deny-bots" becomes the standard setting that tenants expect of Estates, that math really would hold: regions that permit bots would have exclusively bots, so the only relevant constraint for those regions would be the avatar limit. Otherwise, if regular Estate tenants would still be willing to rent on regions with little bot enclaves in exchange for Land Impact the bots won't need, the costs might be distributed to mutual benefit. But not all that much: an estate tenant may expect some share of the avatar access limit, too.

Of course the same logic applies on Mainland: a couple group-invite bots on a region won't usually hurt anything but a few dozen would be disastrous. And that's where Mainland could be victimized: If Mainland continues to accept bots and there's nowhere else for them to go, they may really degrade the experience for Mainland owners and visitors.

[diamond Marchant]

2 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

.perhaps they are assuming group membership grants land access and object entry...?

hopefully, nobody lets randos join their land group :)

[VenKellie]

On 4/13/2023 at 4:25 PM, diamond Marchant said:

hopefully, nobody lets randos join their land group

thats why i use a bot to do invites to the land group. its safer that way.

[Alwin Alcott]

7 hours ago, VenKellie said:

thats why i use a bot to do invites to the land group. its safer that way.

of course not, you invite only to a role in the group, and those abilities you can set as strict as you want.

[Aethelwine]

21 hours ago, Alwin Alcott said:

of course not, you invite only to a role in the group, and those abilities you can set as strict as you want.

You can't set up a group role that is subject to auto-return when you are allowing everyone to rezz. Land Group invites are better managed by bots or scripts like Casperlet if you want people to buy into keeping their prims around for more than your auto-return settings.

[Alwin Alcott]

3 hours ago, Aethelwine said:

You can't set up a group role that is subject to auto-return when you are allowing everyone to rezz. Land Group invites are better managed by bots or scripts like Casperlet if you want people to buy into keeping their prims around for more than your auto-return settings.

people don't get invited to  landgroups at stores and venues , if some do they need some better understanding about what they are doing.

[Aethelwine]

41 minutes ago, Alwin Alcott said:

people don't get invited to  landgroups at stores and venues , if some do they need some better understanding about what they are doing.

Which would seem to be why Ven is using a Bot to sift the applications. It might be he uses it to send DJ role to people that are in a different timezone and it would otherwise be difficult to get both avatars online at the same time.

I don't use a Bot, but a group I am involved with does for sending out group notices prompted by events showing on a Google Calendar. It is on a private estate, but I can imagine others having similar setups on mainland being none too happy if their Bot suddenly became banned from the region they are paying for. 

[Alwin Alcott]

1 hour ago, Aethelwine said:

 Which would seem to be why Ven is using a Bot to sift the applications. It might be he uses it to send DJ role to people that are in a different timezone and it would otherwise be difficult to get both avatars online at the same time.

Who on earth lets a bot add a new DJ.. if right they heared him already at application, and can be added when hired. 
Or trust your managers to add one. Conclusion: no bot needed for that.


Bots sending notices should be banned too  that constant spam flow makes that system limp as it is.

[Aethelwine]

On 4/16/2023 at 10:18 AM, Alwin Alcott said:

Who on earth lets a bot add a new DJ.. if right they heared him already at application, and can be added when hired. 
Or trust your managers to add one. Conclusion: no bot needed for that.


Bots sending notices should be banned too  that constant spam flow makes that system limp as it is.

A US parcel owner supporting an Australian event on their land might. Not everyone with venues on parcels have managers to cover every timezone. I don''t have one but I know it would be useful to me because of difficulties I have had in the past being online at the same time as a DJ wanting to run an event on my land. A bot would have made that much easier.

 

Edited April 17, 2023 by Quartz Mole

[Quartz Mole]

Please let's stick to the original topic, the pros and cons of banning bots from the Mainland.    

If people really want to have yet another debate about banlines and security orbs, they should conduct it in a new thread, not here.

[Love Zhaoying]

I agree it is "unfair".