Coffee Pancake

Oh my sweet summer child. Just. Wow.

For in world profiles From https://community.secondlife.com/knowledgebase/english/profiles-r395/ That said .. I don't think that rule has been enforced once. There is a lot of hardcore porn, gore, general nudity and stuff that needs a substantial amount of kitten pictures to unsee. The page is also crazy out of date and implies privacy setting exist and mean something! As for here .. I guess the G rated requirement is more enforced.

They have never done this to my knowledge. Skyboxes full of ghost avatars persist until the person who operates them stops. I used to assume this was just region owner privilege - if you buy a private region you can do what you like, but that's not the case.

WoW bots are a little different, they typically perform tasks .. say collecting special rocks or plants. These materials are used in crafting and blizzard to balance the markets and recipes on the assumption that there will be automated farming. It's also important to note that wow bots are buying the game and playing the monthly sub. Bots that participate in other actives or are socially disruptive are banned, and big ban waves are common. At the very least bot accounts in SL should be required to purchase a premium plus level of subscription and agree to terms and conditions for bot usage. Things like forbidding bottling from VPN connections would also help keep those doing things with them honest.

LL are huge fans of "if there is no perfect solution, we choose inaction", this is why we only just got a quiet mumblings about the intent to move the render engine to vulkan. I would argue that the bulk of the problems can be solved with policy. Force them to buy an expensive "bot membership" (as bots don't make LL money) and then enforce that and rules about bots when bots are reported by users.

This is a very good point. It's not like SL's history isn't littered with absolute disasters that wouldn't have happened if people paid attention the first 3 times it happened.

They can work out a persons social graph based on proximity, especially once they have identified the parcel of land most associated with an avatar (ie .. their home). It will probably be better than your actual friends list which is polluted by dormant accounts and acquaintances.

A fair compromise would be that bots were required to hold some kind of premium membership as a way to counter escalation and excess. Welcome to the forums ! So many brand new people passionate about this one subject !!

The only way to combat the sweeping actions of SL bot hordes is with more bots. It can only end in an arms race that will impact the wider SL. We have seen how this pans out already with the adult scene in SL. There was a time when the adult continent was thriving and occupied by actual people and real community. Then came the AFK bot places, and aside from the big clubs that managed to hold out, it's now mostly all gone.

It would need to be done by a human and it would result in frustration with LL's lack of group management tooling .. and lord knows groups could do with some love at some point this decade. Bots handling it has allowed LL to ignore the shoddy mess that groups are and how they are a poor fit for purpose. SL has proven it can ! There was a week not so long ago when LL broke logins for all none graphical clients.

It might not bring back paid jobs, and maybe one side effect is a resurgence of camping chairs. But having a job for the fun on it in SL is a valid pass time and can be fun. The complaint about bots at locations isn't that they are always the same and always there, it's that they aren't interactive and defeat social goals. A human that was always there is still a human people can talk to. Likewise bots that scour the grid for land .. defeat people wanting to shop for land and mean LL don't have to do anything themselves to make finding land easier. Bots are why half the grid (especially all of Zindra) is owned by a couple of people.

Welcome to the forums!

You can't attribute failure to achieve a goal a mistake when your decision making is based entirely on false data. This is literally a lack of agency. Thank you for explaining how to game the system. I'm sure no one will find ways to creatively automate that attack vector. Perhaps with scripted bots.

Not when 3rd party hacks end up becoming necessary and essential features. We have group invite bots as scripts can't. There is no pressure on LL to add that functionally as we have found a way around the limitation. development in this specific platform feature is dead This can be applied to all uses for bots in SL.

You're looking for somewhere to visit, perhaps an active place with people .. p00f goes your agency as you're forced to place after place populated with fake people. What if you had a bot to check and aggregate the data from those places and discount static unchanging accounts. Your agency is now at the mercy of a bot arms race as one party tries to undermine the data mining with brute force by deploying dozens and dozens of brand new bots, making them even harder to distinguish from real people. oops

Bots circumvent agency of individuals and undermine the development of robust platform features. Everyone loses. Welcome to the forums btw.

Botting in MMOs breaks the economies and forces the developers to scale content and collectables based on exaggerated supply. This is especially bad in Warcraft where crafting quantities depend on bots collecting materials. Bots add nothing of value to a virtual space, ever. papering over the platform and balance problems with automated agents is a mistake.

I know .. and those gaps will need to be filled by people. This brings back getting a job in SL. Sure, 99% of those jobs will be hobby & for the fun of it, but we need that.

Banning bots is a great idea!! It removes the ability to game traffic, apparent popularity, modelling and AFK with dead fake "avatars". Places will have to put real people in those positions , and compensate them. Land surveys will have to be done in person, this levels and resets the playing field. Successful property management will depend on who has the better human resources not who has the bigger bot army / dataset. Stalkers will have to stalk you in person. The old fashioned way. A net saving in virtual shotgun ammo. LL will have to make up for lost functionality with group inviters and land management (etc) by expanding LSL and advancing the platform. NPC characters will need to depend on scripted control and pathfinding, shining a light on parts of the platform sorely needing developer attention. No more automated wholesale content theft (oh yes, this is a thing). Banning the bots will restore purpose to actual people in SL.

See Animesh.

Sloppy human resource management. If you're going to be evil and have henchmen, don't send them on missions with names & address to the secret lair written in their underwear. *sighs* suspension of disbelief ruined.

There is also the question of the stored data they are not publishing by aggregation on the site. They show region stats and avatar traffic. They don't show who those avatars are, and they absolutely do have that data. The data they have by necessity to build the website is far deeper than we see published. Who can see this data? What are they doing with that data? Who can buy this data? We do know BB isn't the effort of a single person (and some other things claimed by an account purporting to be BB that appeared late last night on reddit to "get ahead" of the controversy).

Please stay on topic and refrain from getting drawn into petty squabbles. Getting this thread locked on a technicality does not address any of the issues raised and deprives people of their voice.

Has it occurred to anyone that because they are using bots, they do not need to use script to gather data, nor is their data collection limited to that which a script can see. They are using a bot - that is the same as using a viewer. They have everything. Right down to the texture UUID of your skin.