M Peccable

Yes, you're right, and that isn't what I am debating. It's just that I believe LL's hand has not been forced on this. If it were, I think enforcing the estate bot ban on all of the mainland would have already happened. Even you used the word "might". So this leaves open the possibility of exploring various ways to fix the bad bot problem without having to use a sledgehammer to do it. As long as I feel that way I will continue to offer my ideas, which appears to be much to the chagrin of many.

I believe if there were some compelling legal reason that all bots have to be immediately banned that it would have already happened. So I believe they are listening. Otherwise they probably wouldn't tolerate this thread, lol. Also, I hope my posts are not coming off as protesting. I am genuinely trying to offer workable answers and find compromise. But maybe my words sometimes gets in the way of that.

Are you aware that some of the things that would break are things people depend on for RL income? You can say that that income has never been guaranteed, which is true, but breaking them all at once when there are ways to ease into it unnecessarily maximizes the pain, and the loss of some residents. You say bots are never good. I say knee-jerk, heavy-handed reactions are never good.

But we don't have that. Even if LL rushed it out the door it would be weeks. You know that as well as I do. So let's let LL add those functions before we wreck all of those services.

Wow, your attitude has certainly changed. You wrote that to me. Oh well. Don't worry. I am already in the process of tiering down.

A few days? You are advocating the immediate removal of many services, and telling LL to step up to the plate and replace them. A few days? They would not even be able to replace the group invite services in a few days, much less the 100's of others, many of those requiring platform changes on the scale that deny_bots at the parcel level would. Please rejoin us in reality as soon as you can.

Guilty until proven innocent.

Wow. How sensitive you are to denying others of their "useful services". Some of those services are being depended upon a great deal more than you seem to be aware of. And you seem to carry around with you quite a large sledgehammer.

If you want to talk about the long-term, big picture, then you have a valid and debatable point. If you want to wreck a lot of current content in SL, then lets orchestrate a knee-jerk immediate banning of all bots now. There has to be a better solution than that.

There are tens of thousands of Grid Survey users that would disagree with you. That is just one of many examples. In the past I have admired your posts as being from someone that knows SL and understands how things work, including the good things that comes from good bots. I am assuming the reason you can't see that now is that your vision has become blocked by either bots invading your private space or avatar info that was displayed on a web site that you didn't appreciate. So let's throw the baby out with the bathwater and say you're right. Let's ban not only all bots, but anyone who teleports more than X times per hour. Let Coffee determine for us what X should be.

Definitely extra work, so there would probably be a fee involved, and it's why stationary bots won't need such approval. Implementing a parcel-level bot banning tool is much harder than it sounds.

No. They would not be exempt from restrictions, they would just be the only bots allowed to roam. That opens up the possibility of getting things back to the way they were before botphobia, because the roaming bots would be much rarer and pretty much assumed to be benign since they are approved by LL, so that maybe estate-level restrictions could be eased. But any parcel-level or region-level bans on them would of course be enforced just like with any avatar. It's important to note I am referring to avatar bans, not parcel-level bot bans. As others have tried to indicate, and I think most don't understand, is that parcel-level bot bans would be very difficult to implement technically because of SL's structure. And likely quite expensive from a simulator resource point of view. People like Tyche and myself operated roaming bots for over a decade without causing much of a stir, and it worked because we labeled the bots as being ours, responded to residents if they contacted us with concerns, and we didn't overuse the privilege. Of course, if things go the wrong way and the estate-level bot ban is expanded to include all of the mainland then all of this flies out the window and SL takes a step or three backwards towards the dark ages.

Let me guess: you liked math in school.

Yes, but it is two different solutions to two different problems. I think once the good bots can be separated from the bad ones, no matter what it takes to accomplish that, the subsequent elimination of the bad bots will make the personal data collection problem go away on its own. Requiring that roaming bots be pre-approved by LL might be one way to accomplish that separation. Stationary bots, even if they are scarfing up every scrap of info they can, will collect in a day only a tiny fraction of what it could if it was roaming for only an hour. The personal data collection problem is coming 99% from roaming bots, not stationary ones.

That's true, but it isn't the crux of the problem. The website(s) that host the information you refer to appear to be going away now, and my understanding is that the botphobia is being caused primarily by bots suddenly appearing and invading privacy, not so much by the data hosted on websites. The problem then is more so the roaming bots, and requiring stationary bots to be preapproved puts an undue workload on both residents and LL.

Because that way people can create their own bots for their club, store, etc, without having to do anything except what they do now, which is go to the website and specify it is a scripted agent.

I know you don't see it, but it's there. My product is not the only one that requires the use of a roaming bot in order to function reliably. Using LL pre-approval could be one way to distinguish the good ones from the bad ones.

I would have no objection to LL requiring roaming bots to be pre-registered and approved before being allowed to perform their job. Stationary bots would not need such pre-approval.

Oh cool. That's a relief!

You make it sound like the services they provide or objects they create has no value to the resident using it. Most of us who have created elaborate services or products will never recover the monetary value invested in all the time it took to create the service/object in question. In my case it's a labor of love -- not a selfish self-interest. I glean more satisfaction for someone complimenting my product and telling me how useful it has been to them more than I do when I hear the cash register. Watching it become more and more tattered as it's data becomes more and more fractured will be painful.

If you are saying they will have to change the TOS to say no avatar lists can be stored outside of SL, you are being way to nonchalant. If that were to actually occur, SL would change in ways that frankly, we can't even imagine. All of the changes would be very negative.

If I'm on that list I am going to file an AR against you, because I did not explicitly opt-in to your orb! 😠 This is a good example of not knowing what items people may have that are in danger of getting broken. Unless you have some way to know for sure, then we don't know if your orb is storing its list off world or not. Most won't even think about it, until they pull it out of inventory just to find it doesn't work anymore, with the creator not being at fault.

And it increases load on SL's servers, it increases memory usage on SL's servers (drastically), and otherwise slows down just about any operation that can be done off-world. Sounds like a step backwards to me. My security systems from the late 2000's did all that. My newer ones don't. I've been thinking this whole time that was progress. Let's not go back.

No, not third parties. You are giving consent to the objects and activities inside SL that may record your user name and UUID in order to allow SL to offer the best experience possible. Then also make it clear that it is only the name and UUID they are consenting to, not their RL information.

But many others do.