Ezbeharra

Exactly! I'm aware of plenty of such places, too. And all they would have to do, though, if anyone said anything, is throw some sex beds and tip jars up on that platform and say it's an AFK brothel. I genuinely don't think enforcement is possible, but I would love to be proven wrong because that would mean such a huge improvement.

Exactly, 100% this. Full disclosure of my extremely bad gaming choices, I did pay Eve Online for a while and it was truly astonishing just how resourceful botters were there, how much money they made from it all, and how hard it was for CCP (then the owner of the game) to even take out some of them. What we're seeing in SL is only the barest sliver of what botters are very easily capable of, if they want to evade detection. LL can't even find traffic bots, which are already technically not allowed. I see them all the time. I could name and shame certain locations but I won't. This time. But suppose LL aggressively went after traffic bots. How hard would it be to put them on sex furniture and say they were AFK sex workers? Now what?

All of these things require the ability to detect bots, which is extremely hard to do. MMO companies hate bots, even if they pay subscriptions, and they still have a hard time removing them, even when they have total control of the game client itself (not like SL where you can use Firestorm or some text viewer or anything at all). They cause a lot of income loss in other ways through supporting RMT (real money transactions) for in-world items that make the game less appealing to regular players. So they actively go after botters and it's very hard for them to find them all. LL would face the same thing, under worse circumstances. You cannot identify a bot that does not want to be identified unless you are willing to put a lot of effort into it, which, ehhh, we're talking about LL here.

This is my position as well, and while I understand Paul's objection that it's off topic for the thread, I think it makes more sense to ban the bot behavior that we don't want to see, rather than banning bots entirely. I also want to be clear I'm not talking about any actual service or website or anything out there that exists, but hypothetical cases of data gathering that seem technically very feasible and concerning from a privacy and safety standpoint. I've looked through the ToS and I will be the first to tell you I am terrible at reading legal documents and understanding them, but from what I can see there's nothing banning data export aside from cases where intellectual property and DMCA concerns crop up. If I am wrong, I will be very glad (sincerely) for someone to point out where it says in the ToS that you may not, for example, compile lists of all the avatars present in a region and put that in a searchable database on an external website. But as for bot bans, I absolutely agree with you here, and I very briefly played MMOs (not much of a gamer, really) where botting was such a huge problem that companies had significant resources dedicated to the problem and the botters always seemed to be a step ahead.

This is basically an argument against having any sort of rules about anything, anywhere, so uh good luck with that.

You agreed to Linden Lab having that data. You did not agree to your stalker who is using alts to harass you having that data. At least, I did not agree to it. And yes, this sort of thing happens in SL.

Great I'm gonna have to identify traffic lights everywhere I go now

Do you care if they provide updated in-world location data for your avatar to anyone who looks at their website? Oh wait, you're probably a man so you probably don't know why that might be a problem for some people.

Why the long face? Feeling a little square?

Well I keep saying it so I guess I'll stop after this but it really doesn't matter whether bots are good or bad or a bit of both, there is no way for LL to be able to detect them easily so banning them from the grid or imposing special rules on them isn't going to happen.

You're describing a fair number of avatars that have human players. Anyway it doesn't matter. Restrictions on bots require ways to easily distinguish bots from human players (lol good luck!), otherwise you're just restricting the bots whose owners willingly identify them, who probably aren't doing anything annoying or bad anyway.

Rebirth also has a free head you may want to try, though I don't know if there's an age restriction there. It's a bit harder to get a nice shape with it than the Genus head but it does have an EvoX compatibility mode that works pretty well. I wore it for a few months and was mostly pleased with it. https://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/REBIRTH Forever/47/79/21

Well you don't have to worry because if you look at any MMO that has active bot policing (probably most of them), it's way more effort than LL is likely to ever put into anything. And that's not even counting the use of third party clients in SL, which throws quite a wrench into the works.

Bot banning is a major undertaking, it's not just a matter of posting a NO BOTS sign. Look at any MMO that has had to deal with resource farming bots, which actually do cause harm to their in-game economies and are frequently involved in banned real-world currency transactions. Such cases require that resources be put into bot detection (resources that could otherwise go into features, fixes, and improvements) and are never completely successful. Personally, I would prefer to see something in the TOS addressing data export and aggregation, or at least some clarification that would make it clear harvesting data (whether by bots or humans) and placing it in an external location is not permissible.

I wouldn't write Belleza off just yet. Blueberry seems pretty steadfast in providing sizes for both Gen X bodies in new releases and sale items as far as I can tell and I'm seeing other creators rigging for them, too. A body becomes more attractive if you already have things for it, so I could see a comeback in the future, and apparently the latest update ticked a few of boxes (mod, PG option). Definitely not a very good launch, though, there's no denying that, but I'm keeping an eye on it in case I finally get too annoyed with my Legacy's issues and glitches. If any body maker is on deathwatch I'd say it's Prima (nee Tonic). As a Tonic owner I had the option of getting it cheap, and... I just didn't, even though I definitely wanted to replace my Tonic body. Jumped ship to Legacy in the Halloween sale and let the Prima deal expire. It's a shame, too, it is a nice body, but there's almost nothing for it. I did see that Arti's rigged a recent release for it, so maybe it will pick up but I seriously doubt it.

From what's being collected? Fairly up to date in-world location tracking, from the looks of it. Maybe not quite on the level of "allow anyone to find me on the map" but certainly on the level of "let everyone see where I was an hour or so ago".

Do you seriously believe that stalking does not happen in Second Life?

Now imagine there's a website that keeps track of the recent regions that URI was spotted in by some bot. Imagine you have a stalker.

Okay, I am asking sincerely here because I think it is relevant: Can someone explain what rationale this site could possibly have for collecting profile data and making it searchable, when its purpose, according to the New World Notes article, is to track region activity in order to determine which high traffic regions are filled with actual users at their keyboards? Has anyone noticed that it doesn't even really do that very well, and certainly doesn't use user identification in its tracking? It just gets the raw number of users in a region and compares it to the previous visit. For example, I was in a region with heavy traffic, lots of coming and going, for several hours, but it's very low ranked on their list because the overall number hadn't changed much. So clearly they aren't actually identifying individual users as part of this, to track whether the same people are just sitting in a region for a long time. You don't even need a traveling bot do to that, the information is available anywhere.

Okay just read your own post back to yourself and pretend I said it.

Personally I'm not really taking a position on the privacy issue, but I have to say that if the site really is supposed to do what it purports to do, then it does it so badly that if they are not lying about its actual purpose then they are profoundly stupid.

Wrong.

The forum is a proper communication channel for people to organize around the issues they want to take to LL, so they can act collectively instead of individually. And you are not a moderator.

Well, privacy concerns aside, their methodology for determining active regions is terrible. I can't figure out why they're even scraping profile data, since their metric for region activity is the change in raw avatar count.

That is a really good point. I'll stick with the way things are.