🔔 LindenLab 🔔 : The Strong Need For Differentiation Between Actual Residents Versus Bots, Scripted Agents And NPC's In Second Life

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

Short of a single closed source viewer and/or getting rid of free accounts, there's really not much that can be done, which is why threads like this turn so silly.

Two examples: I've suggested before different possibilities including "viewers must identify themselves" (so LL can tell when non-standard viewers are used), etc. Plus, good old Phil discovered that there are hidden flag values where LL "thinks" (and/or possibly "remembers") that a user is a Registered Agent - separate from the "declared" Registered Agent setting.

So, there are plenty of ideas of what "could" be done, and what LL "might already" do that we aren't told about. 

[Count Burks]

14 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

That would upset all the people who leave their regular account logged in at all times, even when they are sleeping. They aren't NPCs or bots, just regular resident accounts. People have been doing this for more than a decade. 

I don't think forcing people to log out when we literally had to fight for the "right" to not be logged out when AFK is going to be successful.

Imagine getting one of those emails daily simply because you prefer to remain logged in. 

I doubt LL would be interested in having to spend even more money just policing avatars for being logged in "too long".

When a normal users is idle for 24 hours in world without any form of navigation this is unusual but possible. The message also clearly indicates "IF your avatar is being used for other purposes than normal resident activity."

I do not see why anyone would be upset about that. Many games just log out players after 30 minutes of inactivity.

[Extrude Ragu]

Interestingly on my exploration I have come across places where bots are marked as scripted correctly, I even found a place where there's a whole group of like 12 of them all marked correctly. Although I suppose it's possible that LL themselves might have manually marked them

[Love Zhaoying]

8 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Just a few examples of the really obvious ones I could find in a few minutes just clicking around on busy looking places on the mainland. There are less obvious ones around too, but you have to live there to distinguish them.

These are the sorts of things that would lead a player to think they are being intentionally misled and the platform is really empty.

Since it's this easy, I don't see why LL can't design systems to detect these types of situations (using algorithms, don't even need AI). Probably like with the recent changes to "Scripted Agent" status, things would have to get "worse" or "noisy with complaints" first to make it a priority.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

3 hours ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Here are some examples of regions with bot parking lots that are unregistered that I can find in 10 minutes teleporting around the grid:-

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Maitreya/53/223/34

1/13 of these are registered as scripted agents standing in a bunch
 

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Goodnight/25/186/163

29 agents in this tiny parcel scattered around in empty skyboxes, most without avatars, the rest default LL avatars, all in empty skyboxes

 

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Nanga/91/81/104

20 agents all with last name veneer in default avatars standing parked in a circle in a skybox, 0 are marked as scripted

 

 

Just a few examples of the really obvious ones I could find in a few minutes just clicking around on busy looking places on the mainland. There are less obvious ones around too, but you have to live there to distinguish them.

These are the sorts of things that would lead a player to think they are being intentionally misled and the platform is really empty.

hmmmm did i say only 10% of logins are actual people, im thinking my estimate is too high, probably more like <5% of logins are real people, the rest are bots or whatever. But as long as those <5% allow Ll to make a profit, its all still good 😁

Edited November 1, 2023 by Dakota Linden
Moderator Edit: Screenshots Removed

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Extrude Ragu said:

Although I suppose it's possible that LL themselves might have manually marked them

This would align with what Phil seemed to report.

[Love Zhaoying]

20 minutes ago, Count Burks said:

When a normal users is idle for 24 hours in world without any form of navigation this is unusual but possible. The message also clearly indicates "IF your avatar is being used for other purposes than normal resident activity."

I do not see why anyone would be upset about that. Many games just log out players after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Bots, being controlled by software, can just log back in.

[Paul Hexem]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Two examples: I've suggested before different possibilities including "viewers must identify themselves" (so LL can tell when non-standard viewers are used), etc. Plus, good old Phil discovered that there are hidden flag values where LL "thinks" (and/or possibly "remembers") that a user is a Registered Agent - separate from the "declared" Registered Agent setting.

So, there are plenty of ideas of what "could" be done, and what LL "might already" do that we aren't told about. 

Even restricting the viewers won't do a lot. Someone with 64 gigs of RAM can just fire up a dozen instances of the default viewer really really easily. The only thing a closed source viewer would do would be to allow them to implement other features around it (more work they won't ever do). Simply restricting viewers alone won't do the trick.

[Orwar]

15 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

Being serious for a moment, it's not a bad thing to want to see the bot policy enforced.

   No, it isn't.

   But presenting it as the one big evil that ruins user retention and creating this false sense of urgency with deranged alarmism is just silly. I reckon any new user seeing an avatar looking like the OP's is going to have a much larger impact on their first impression of Second Life than seeing a 'curious' bunch of avatars piled up in a corner. Having a 'character designer' where you get this:

   Rather than the expectation of this:

   Is going to have a larger impact on new user retention. 

   There are a lot of stuff in which there is room for improvement, turning the bots pink isn't going to magically make new users go 'ooh, this is the platform for me!'. 

[Paul Hexem]

1 minute ago, Orwar said:

   No, it isn't.

   But presenting it as the one big evil that ruins user retention and creating this false sense of urgency with deranged alarmism is just silly.

Yeah. What little effort LL can muster up should be put into other things.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Paul Hexem said:

Even restricting the viewers won't do a lot. Someone with 64 gigs of RAM can just fire up a dozen instances of the default viewer really really easily. The only thing a closed source viewer would do would be to allow them to implement other features around it (more work they won't ever do). Simply restricting viewers alone won't do the trick.

Not sure I was clear, I meant: "the viewer must report 'which viewer it is', assuming that 'bad viewers' (or older ones at least) wouldn't lie and say they are an approved viewer" (such as Official, FS, etc.). My theory is that the "most popular" Bot software does not use "approved" viewers, wouldn't report a valid approved "viewer program name", and so be detectable..

[Flea Yatsenko]

Would be interesting to see if people running these bots are using a VPS/remote hosting or if they're running them off their own computers. No doubt all the serious ones are using IPs from datacenters.

LL doesn't need to try and stop them, they need to make it a pain in the butt for people to run bots. I.E. every new client has a unique key tied to the version number. Third party devs get a login key from LL for each version. If you don't get a key, you aren't a valid user. LL can block clients from logging in. Bot people could try and spoof the keys or whatever but LL and third parties can keep updating them. It's going to be a lot more resource intensive to run 15 viewers at one time than it would some custom program running in a terminal. And you couldn't use a datacenter or another 24/7 hosting service. You'd need a complete desktop. There is no guarantee all these people are running these bots on their own computers. They could easily afford a VPS and run their bot software on the VPS and it would be very cheap. VPS are very cheap right now.

Having a bad key wouldn't stop you from logging in, it would just limit your account and treat you like a bot. Your AV wouldn't contribute to traffic stats, you'd have a special label on the minimap and in your profile, etc. Bots can be very useful in SL and there are some really cool use cases, like store mannequins. But SL isn't accommodating that and it's letting those valid use cases poison their data for determining traffic.

The problem is if your competition is going to start using bots to boost traffic, you get no reward for playing by the rules and registering as a scripted agent. In fact it hurts you. Using bots for traffic needs to be stopped. If someone has a valid use case for a bot, they won't care if the traffic doesn't get counted for that bot. In fact I think they would be pretty happy because they more than likely have competitors filling their land up with bots for higher traffic numbers. And I don't just mean competitors with stores. I mean two competing social venues. One has 3 real people in it who are willing to chat and make friends. The other has 25 bots. People go to the one with 25 bots and miss out on actual humans.

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

The alleged need to differentiate between "Humans" and "Bots".

 

3 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:

How do you suggest they do that?

Sensible technical question, and the response is what?

 

51 minutes ago, Count Burks said:

I have been thinking about this earlier today. A good start to filter between actual users and NPC's with a goal to increase user retention with new residents would be to add the following requirement to get your sim or location listed in the Second Life destination guide.

-. In order to get your parcel listed in the Second Life destination guide any Non Player Character you have in your region or parcel must be marked as scripted agent or NPC where appropriate.

Brilliant! Tell people running "illegal bots" that they must run "legal bots", except, there is NO reliabkle test for "illegal bots" so the requirement is basically UNENFORCEABLE without a MASSIVE investment in on-site policing by LL employees, whcich costs MONEY, and forces up fees.

Which lowers retention. Epic Fail 0/10 for effort.

 

55 minutes ago, Count Burks said:

This measure alone can help filter the search results for any Destination in world by excluding every single bot and NPC. This alone will cause new people who join the platform and wish to explore Second Life after they leave the "new user experience" location, to find actual people to interact with instead of landing at desolated locations populated by greeter bots

And there's the next Epic Faiil, now we're extending the "irrational bot hate" to having a search filter, so you can "filter out places that have a store greeter bot" or a "VIP group inviter bot" or an "anti-known-griefer security bot". Outstanding, so people should only visit unhelpful, griefer infested parcels in their overentiiled search  for "compulsory social activity".

0/10 for effort.

 

1 hour ago, Count Burks said:

According to the Destination Guide one of the popular places shoved into my face is Dullahan Manor with and I will find 7 people there. I am supposed to find 7 actual people there.

Well, quite apart from the fact that the Dump-stination Guide, is, was, and always will be a dumpster fire of useless drek, it NEVER promised 7 "people" just 7 "avatars".

Additionally, part of the reason it's worthless drek is that it only shows avatars per REGION, the store you are complaining about is a separate parcel, on the same region. a 7104 m^2 parcel.

 

1 hour ago, Count Burks said:

This is the user experience Linden Lab provided me with using their Destination guide. I was supposed to find a location with 7 people, one of the more busy destinations.

Again, they never promised "people" just give you a count of "avatars" and 7 is NOT "one of the more busy destinations" in SL, as I said, the Dump-stination guide is useless, always has been.

The  guide being useless, is NOTHING to do with your crusade against bots, feel free to start a new rant thread complaining about how useless the guide is.

 

@Paul Hexem asked you a DIRECT question, and you did NOT even attempt to answer. Nothing but evasion and whining.

Here's his question again, in case you missed it.

"How is Linden Lab supposed to filter between people and non-people? How do they detect who's following the rules? What's the method they should use? Captcha popups every 5 minutes?"

 

57 minutes ago, Count Burks said:

A good start would be to send automated e-mails to users who are parked at the same location for 24 hours in a row. Send e-mail to the avatar containing a message like: ......

Hello Second Life user, 

We noticed that your avatar Avatar Name has been idle in world for more than a period of 24 hours. At Linden Lab we want to keep Second Life a vibrant place for our users. Therefor if your avatar Avatar Name is being used for other purposes or activities than being an active Second Life resident we would like to ask you to register your avatar as an NPC Non Player Character at https://www........

Yeah, I know a number of PEOPLE who have their avatars logged in 24/7, they park their avatars in their beds in their hoomes, when they are  at work or in their RL beds asleep.

So, you are suggesting fraudulently accusing REAL PEOPLE of being "filthy bots" with gratuitous email spam, and you think this will "increase retention".

0/10 for effort.

 

1 hour ago, Count Burks said:

This alone will  cause a large majority of people who deploy NPC's in world to just register their NPC

Still fraudulently mis-using the term NPC to lump actual people who don't meet your standards of activity, or who SIMPLY REFUSE TO TALK TO YOU, in with bots.

 

1 hour ago, Count Burks said:

Most people who have their NPC, greeter bot, roleplay bots, store models etc.... will just register them. Just through simple automation you can already achieve results.

Most people with legal bots have already registered, so your accusatory email spam achieves NOTHING, in addition non-scripted agents like, oh say people who are AFK, are NOT required to register as scripted agents, nor are people who just don't feel like socialising with you. All you've done is annoy people who are not breaking the rules, and LOWER retention. Well done.

0/10 for effort.

 

1 hour ago, Count Burks said:

as they contribute nothing and are not logged in users.

Yeah, if you are going to launch a whiny crusade against "filthy bots" maybe you should actually LEARN what a "fiithy bot" actually IS.

They ARE "logged in user accounts" remotely operated by an application on the users end. As for what they contribute, store owners do NOT pay for a greeter bot, or a group inviter bot, because it does nothing. Further, accounts registered  as "scripted agents" already DO NOT contribute to traffic figures. so you demanding that they do not contribute to traffic figures is a moot point, as they don't.

0/10 for effort.

 

59 minutes ago, Count Burks said:

Linden Lab is doing just fine managing their policy of bots entering private regions when not allowed. Works like a charm so why would identification of NPC's not work?

No it doesn't, the "ban registered scripted agents" estate power, only works at an estate level, and it only bans "registered scripted agents".

It has ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT ON :unregistered bots, AFK people, people who don't want to talk, people who don't feel social, people who mute and derender you on sight, people who tp'd to the wrong LM and tp straight back out without talking, etc., etc., etc.

 

1 hour ago, Count Burks said:

Linden Lab staff could also just tag avatars as NPC's if they receive an abuse report about them or a complaint.

Horray! Witchhunts!

Refuse to talk to an overentiitled arse, go AFK to make some food, find you've been banned from half the gid because said overentitled arse filed a fraudulent Abuse Report against you for not being social enough, obviously a filthy bot!

1 hour ago, Count Burks said:

Should a user feel this is incorrect they could always appeal.

And we know how long winded, and questionable the appeal process is right?

So you want to give every overentitled arse on the grid, the power to fraudulently accuse anyone they like of the crime of "bot-hood", with no trial, or tests, and think that will "improve retention", and ignore the fact that Governance can't keep up with the EXISTING fraudulent AR spam from overentitled arses, let alone the title wave of arse sourced nonsense you propose.

0/10 for effort

 

So, your whole reply to "How do we differentiate between people and bots?" is to create some sort of fascist state, where self important Neighbourhood Snitches, can falsely accuse anyone they like of a "crime" and have them instantly declared guilty, and punished, in a regime that "is not very strict at the beginning but gets stricter over time".

Hmm...

Sure sounds like a totalitarian fascist state to me, with "The Ministry of Social Activity" punishing people for refusing to socialise with overentitled arses.

[Flea Yatsenko]

Just needs a secret key given to real world users, which gets sent to the servers on login. If it's a valid key and client, you are flagged as a trusted agent or something and you count towards traffic stats and all that. If you don't have a valid key, you are flagged as a scripted agent or unofficial client or whatever and you get restricted in specific ways like having your presence not count towards traffic. You still have to deal with people who want to run 10 instances of a viewer, but most people can barely run a single instance of SL. How many have a computer good enough to run 10 SLs at the same time?

You aren't ever going to completely stop people from gaming traffic numbers and stuff. Just like no one can stop spam emails. You can only minimize them and their bad effects.

There are coding libraries you can use to write your own bot software for SL. It's not like all these people with group inviters and stuff are using the official SL clients.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, Extrude Ragu said:

If a user keeps going to places that the game tells them there are people to talk to, and then finding that there are not people to talk to - The user is exponentially more likely to give up on the game with each failed attempt to find people to socialize with. If this happens, this is the loss of a lifetime of revenue for Linden Lab - A disaster.

So, you're saying that if I refuse to talk to some overentitled arse, with a bloody awful avatar and a bloody awful attitude, who is insane enough, to think that they can DEMAND I entertain them, then that makes me a "SL criminal" who deserves to be punished for not loyally serving the Company by pretending to be a sodding AI Chat Bot, and engaging in social activity with some arse I'd rather avoid?

 

Outstanding display of anti-logic there, guaranteed to "improve retention" of paying customers.

"Thanks for paying money to be here, now get to work greeting noobs or we ban you"

[Zalificent Corvinus]

52 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I've suggested before different possibilities including "viewers must identify themselves" (so LL can tell when non-standard viewers are used), etc.

!. Viewers ALREADY identify themselves. Have done for years, they even used to get sent the reported viewer type by the region servers so they could display that over the heads of other peoples avatars.

You are OLD enough to remember this.

 

2. You are supposed to be a "programmer", but it never occured to you that the coders making "Evil Bot Viewer Mk.27" could, oh, just for the sake of argument, set the string variable "g_viewertype" to say "a perfectly legal non bot viewer, would I lie to you?".

Another "suggesting a thing we already have, that simply doesn't and cannot work, ever" idea from you,

Try again.

[UnilWay SpiritWeaver]

I barely notice this.

Since I have a home in Bellisseria they can't come near where I usually am.

So...

If these are a big issue elsewhere like the screenshots imply I suggest two changes:

1. Move the tool that blocks scripted agents from estate controls into the 'About Land' tools so anyone can block them from their land anywhere. But still over-ridden by estate so that can't be used to allow them. Allow estate controls to force blocking them, but "maybe" not to force unblocking them.

2. Add the restriction against them to all abandoned, linden, and mole owned land everywhere. This will at least force them "out of the public way".

 

Neither of these ideas helps anyone if their neighbor puts 40 of them in a skybox. But that can be handled with existing AR tools if those 40 bots are causing an undue burden on the region.

 

Caveat: I'm not fully convinced these even are an issue on mainland and estates. Do they hog up resources, create undue lag, or prevent actual residents from entering a 'filled up' region? If not... then the solution is just to ignore them.

My experience over the past few years has been to see less and less of them everywhere - even when on estates and mainland. But maybe I'm just lucky?

 

Edited November 1, 2023 by UnilWay SpiritWeaver

[Paul Hexem]

20 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Not sure I was clear, I meant: "the viewer must report 'which viewer it is', assuming that 'bad viewers' (or older ones at least) wouldn't lie and say they are an approved viewer" (such as Official, FS, etc.). My theory is that the "most popular" Bot software does not use "approved" viewers, wouldn't report a valid approved "viewer program name", and so be detectable..

20 minutes ago, Flea Yatsenko said:

Would be interesting to see if people running these bots are using a VPS/remote hosting or if they're running them off their own computers. No doubt all the serious ones are using IPs from datacenters.

LL doesn't need to try and stop them, they need to make it a pain in the butt for people to run bots. I.E. every new client has a unique key tied to the version number. Third party devs get a login key from LL for each version. If you don't get a key, you aren't a valid user. LL can block clients from logging in. Bot people could try and spoof the keys or whatever but LL and third parties can keep updating them. It's going to be a lot more resource intensive to run 15 viewers at one time than it would some custom program running in a terminal. And you couldn't use a datacenter or another 24/7 hosting service. You'd need a complete desktop. There is no guarantee all these people are running these bots on their own computers. They could easily afford a VPS and run their bot software on the VPS and it would be very cheap. VPS are very cheap right now.

Having a bad key wouldn't stop you from logging in, it would just limit your account and treat you like a bot. Your AV wouldn't contribute to traffic stats, you'd have a special label on the minimap and in your profile, etc. Bots can be very useful in SL and there are some really cool use cases, like store mannequins. But SL isn't accommodating that and it's letting those valid use cases poison their data for determining traffic.

The problem is if your competition is going to start using bots to boost traffic, you get no reward for playing by the rules and registering as a scripted agent. In fact it hurts you. Using bots for traffic needs to be stopped. If someone has a valid use case for a bot, they won't care if the traffic doesn't get counted for that bot. In fact I think they would be pretty happy because they more than likely have competitors filling their land up with bots for higher traffic numbers. And I don't just mean competitors with stores. I mean two competing social venues. One has 3 real people in it who are willing to chat and make friends. The other has 25 bots. People go to the one with 25 bots and miss out on actual humans.

Right off the bat I can tell you I've got six computers/laptops in my home. I can run probably 20 instances of LL's regular viewer across them very easily. With virtual machines I could double or triple that number.

You guys are making suggestions that would be a ton of work for LL (so they won't do it anyway) and do literally nothing to stop me from running 15 bots on my parcel. Someone serious about botting could easily beat my numbers, too.

[Orwar]

9 minutes ago, UnilWay SpiritWeaver said:

If these are a big issue elsewhere like the screenshots imply

   Is it, though?

   Is there any practical difference between 'I didn't find friends here because all those dots on the map turned out to be bots' versus 'I didn't find friends here because they were in a private parcel with banlines and they didn't let me crash their party' versus 'I didn't find any friends here because all those dots only speak Russian' or 'I didn't find friends here because it was a shopping event/store and people were annoyed by me trying to chat them up'? Hunting dots on the world map sounds like an extremely desperate and not very well thought-through process.

   Going by the places on the Destination Guide's popular places list, guess what I found all over the place - people! 

   .. Ew, people. Now I'm going to need a bath. 

[Love Zhaoying]

24 minutes ago, UnilWay SpiritWeaver said:

I barely notice this.

Since I have a home in Bellisseria they can't come near where I usually am.

I have a Mainland home and never see bots..(bit I don't usually go anywhere else, either).

[Fionalein]

1 hour ago, Paul Hexem said:

Short of a single closed source viewer and/or getting rid of free accounts, there's really not much that can be done, which is why threads like this turn so silly.

Whoever said bots are restricted to basic accounts? I bet there are Premium bots.

[UnilWay SpiritWeaver]

1 minute ago, Orwar said:

   Going by the places on the Destination Guide's popular places list, guess what I found all over the place - people! 

Yeah. That's why I'm not too convinced we have an actual issue here.

Above were my ideas for how to deal with it IF the issue is real. But... I'm not yet sold on the issue just yet.

I spent almost a year with a plot on the same region as one of those "AFK spicey fun" venues - and my own parcel was just fine. I did get the odd rando visitor who thought maybe I was just "the bot in the backroom with the funner poses" or something. But those were less than a handful of people over the course of a year.

The region performance was just fine. I did get mentally "triggered" by all those green dots a few times. But I got over myself because frankly - it's a great place to pick if you want privacy on mainland. Everyone thinks your place has cooties and mostly you get left alone.

Wouldn't put a shop or social venue there though because... well... everyone things you've got cooties when you're on one of those regions.

 

[Rowan Amore]

2 minutes ago, Orwar said:

   Is it, though?

   Is there any practical difference between 'I didn't find friends here because all those dots on the map turned out to be bots' versus 'I didn't find friends here because they were in a private parcel with banlines and they didn't let me crash their party' versus 'I didn't find any friends here because all those dots only speak Russian' or 'I didn't find friends here because it was a shopping event/store and people were annoyed by me trying to chat them up'? Hunting dots on the world map sounds like an extremely desperate and not very well thought-through process.

   Going by the places on the Destination Guide's popular places list, guess what I found all over the place - people! 

   .. Ew, people. Now I'm going to need a bath. 

I use the Destination guide daily.  I don't use it to find people, though.  Since they began putting the avatar count there, I'll try to avoid places with too many people since I'm taking pictures.

The way I've often found people,.if I were looking for them, is from other's profile Picks.

[Lewis Nerd]

57 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I have a Mainland home and never see bots..(bit I don't usually go anywhere else, either).

Yesterday, I installed a visitor counter on my land.  Today, I was surprised that I had 9 visitors that had been to my land ... one an alt that I was using to test something, and 8 called Bonnie something which apparently we aren't supposed to talk about.

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Lewis Nerd said:

Bonnie something which apparently we aren't supposed to talk about.

I wonder why? </sarcasm> IYKYK