M Peccable

See what I mean?

I could not have said it better myself. Plus, this action has created a mob mentality towards making everyone believe that all roaming bots are bad, no matter how hard they try to avoid people, no matter how honest the owner is, and no matter what the purpose of the bot is. This impacts me probably harder than most other responsible bot owners. If I chose to be dishonest I could unregister my bot, but that would be just a ticking time bomb anyway. No thanks, I would rather see my flagship product die a slow death.

In my case, that's ok because "off the beaten path" to me is not Belli or any of the Linden homes areas. But that doesn't mean other product developers won't be affected by that.

Being no access by default is the problem. Most will not check the box on their parcel that says "allow bots". I believe that means the majority of mainland regions will have no access, which in turn means that the data will be fresh on so few regions as to render the HUD unreliable. All it would take is to lift a finger to check the box "no bots", or lift a finger and use the land's ban list. Doing so would mean the continuation of a product that 1000's find quite useful. But the hardcore types here say that isn't good enough. They want complete privacy, they want it guaranteed, and they don't want to have to lift a finger in order to accomplish it. Anything short of that is unacceptable. That is my understanding of what you want, please correct me if I am wrong. My problem is with no compromise about having to lift a finger. It has to be opt-in only according to Rick, and from your wording, you also. With no compromise on that, I don't see how myself and many others are going to be able to continue to offer their product(s) if this is deployed as opt-in only to all of mainland.

Opt-in would mean only a fraction of mainland sims would be visited. That is just a fact. If there's a compromise there, I don't see it.

I understand, and banning them isn't acceptable to you. So, if the HUD has to die, the HUD has to die. Loss of functionality, but that doesn't matter. No compromises. Ok, I get it. I will go find a corner somewhere to slowly fade away and let the HUDs and bots fall where they may...

Yes. That most people have knee-jerk reactions as soon as the hear the word bot. Also that most people are clueless to the fact there is a such thing as a beneficial one.

Yes, and with bot access blocked by default, it will be the rare exception where even one of the parcel owners changes their choice to "opt-in to bots". In the case where the entire region is owned by one person then it's their choice. I like Ceka's solution. Implement a place where bots PRE-APPROVED BY LL can visit that is not intrusive to any owners. In fact, make that place inaccessible to anyone except pre-approved bots, so that the bad bots can't use it too.

Except that a great many mainland regions contain no Linden owned land.

What else can I say?

Yes, you are exactly correct. But Rick insists that all parcels be BLOCKED to bots by default. Only owners who specifically opt-in to allowing bots (which very few would do anyway) is the only thing acceptable to Rick. As his last post indicates, he doesn't care if functionality in SL is lost, because adding names to the parcel's ban list is an unacceptable compromise between privacy and functionality. If the HUD has to die, the HUD has to die. Since he never needed a HUD, I guess that means the 1000's who have benefitted from it are delusional and don't need it either.

The HUD is meant for Explorers, not just sailors and aviators. Exploring mainland means getting off the beaten path, which is why I created the HUD to begin with -- I like to explore off the beaten path. So do many others who use the HUD. Getting a script or a prim into the 1000's of mainland sims off the beaten path in order to keep the HUD fed with data that explorers can rely on is impossible, unless you know something I don't.

Of course that's OK, as I already said to Rick. But that isn't acceptable to him. We're trying to find something that is acceptable to both. As it stands now, Rick DOES want all bots banned from mainland, with only those whitelisted parcel by parcel allowed. No way would that work for a product like mine. Actually, I shouldn't say Rick wants ALL bots banned, but he wants all ROAMING bots banned unless specifically whitelisted.

I was just thinking that. Your whitelist idea won't work for me on a sim-by-sim basis, but if bots pre-approved by LL could still access mainland that would work great.

I was going to also add that bringing it to mainland is really the biggest question. However, all of Second Norway, a sailing community, is already off-limits to the bot. It's only a matter of time before all of the sailing communities will discover this option and implement it.

It is quite possible that it is not an unreasonable expectation to your neighbor, who might have found the HUD so useful in their SL experience that they WELCOME the bot. It has happened more than once. Once in the last week, in fact. That particular user has a much bigger problem with security orbs than ban lines, and actually asked if there were a way for the bot to report instantly booting orbs! The point is not all people share your viewpoint on bots. You do indeed have the choice to decide, you can add the bot to the land's ban list. When you do that, it forces the bot to a different parcel, that all. That solution has worked well for many years now, it is only recently that the problem bots have become so numerous that people have become tired trying to keep up with them all. I would like to add that my bot tries to the best of his ability to choose public or abandoned land. So encounters with other avatars do not happen very often to begin with. But, ALL bots be damned!

The main reason is that after years of offering the Helper prim, it made it to about 400 of the over 3000 mainland regions. That was low enough that I have stopped distributing the prims, and working on a new version that does even more than curing headaches, hangovers, leg cramps, and infertility, all without the Helper prim. Now that new version is in jeopardy of being abandoned.

I don't think the consensus that "all bots are bad and should be banned" is progress.

The HUD itself does exactly what you mentioned. But that isn't good enough. Without the help of the bot keeping the data more or less current (one visit per sim per week), the only way new ban lines would be detected is when someone hits the affected sim and by then it could be too late. What good is a Ban Line HUD if it can't keep its data current enough to keep you out of trouble? If it comes to mainland, I'm toast...

The open Linden-owned region I mentioned is in Bellisseria. If this is deployed to all of mainland it will mean the end of a good selling product that many people use and enjoy. And my product won't be the only one.

So this is the end of roaming bots? My bot, which has a profile that states exactly what it is doing, and has had zero complaints in the last 12 years, can no longer teleport into some Linden-owned, completely open, and completely public regions (No access teleport is the message). So products like my Ban Line HUD that depends on a benign bot are just going to have to die? A large number of people are using it. Are they just to be left out in the cold? We need a way for "approved" bots to roam, or a lot of products are going to suffer.

My Ban Line HUD does not operate under this new server version 577942. It is hard to describe all the symptoms and the things it is doing wrong. When editing the HUD and doing a reset of the scripts, nothing happens. It is like the reset request is being completely ignored, because the touch menu still responds after the reset. Teleporting back to a region running 577734 restores normal operation. Anyone else? I guess I will go look for a JIRA.

Those always return "Second Life Server", and something like "2021-10-25.565008". Unless there is a way to glean Main vs RC from that version number, I can't tell anything from that.

So am I correct in assuming there is still no way for a script to parse the environment variables in order to determine whether the region is running on the Main Channel vs a RC Channel? I don't even care which RC channel, I'm just looking for a way to distinguish between Main vs RC.