Cloud Python

It's amusing that evaded your comprehension, but not surprising, yet there's always a place for everyone... https://community.secondlife.com/ignore

So to my request the best you could do was "trust me bro, because I say so." Okay. I'll just quote myself:

I'm requesting the research of your methodology that produced the system you use to identify bots with that degree of certainty.

While I'm no fan of bots and find their presence within SL to be detrimental because it artificially inflates user numbers, this claim is highly unfair to the people who have and do still work on this issue. The first problem would be, how to identify a genuine bot? On this thread I've seen people make mention of avatars using lewd animations to interact with other avatars, but that is not a bot. Others still have complained about direct messaging that promotes venues, and while that could be a scripted agent odds are it was actually a person just camping a HUB therefor not a bot. People standing around silent for hours are likely not bots either, I've known several people that enjoy leaving their accounts online even while they sleep, because they find that to be enjoyable for them and ultimately that's their prerogative, these people will make sure they have an automated system that reconnects them in case of a disconnect, but if the disconnect happen because the region they were in restarted, on reconnection that region will be unavailable and the system will place them in an info HUB, there they can stand inactive for a great number of hours, but yet still, they're not a bot. That doesn't even consider all the perfectly valid applications for a bots which if they were to be removed, that'd be akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. More often than not "bot" coupled with "troll" are just umbrella terms people use to describe behavior they personally disapprove of before defaulting to "someone should make sure I am not disturbed and any behavior that displeases me should be banned and actively persecuted, even it if takes an army of moderators watching everything everyone does." That is when they don't have power fantasies as they envision what the grid would be like if they were so fortunate as to have access to a ban hammer... I've meet people that would file an Abuse Report if they as much as got bumped in any busy place they happened to be on, I would find it incredibly entertaining if LL where to anonymize and release some of these Abuse Reports since I'm sure there's an endless string of unreasonable ones that would make for some good humor. All this to say, tone and thought policing other people and using "bot" as a reductive label to justify actions against them is hardly the way forward in an aging platform that has been struggling with new user acquisition for quite some time and is still trying to come to terms with the latest update on its technology that has caused many issues to a significant percentage of the userbase. I'd advise instead people should be more human with each other, since the new standard seems to be seeking out busy places in hopes of being messaged just so they can engage them in bad faith on a battle of wits in an attempt to belittle them which gives them a misplaced sense of achievement.

I see you couldn't be factually correct so instead opted to try to be "morally correct", making using of flaming language and buzzwords. No part of my statement contains any form of misinformation, otherwise you would have been able to point it and correct it, instead the best you could do was this... Meanwhile in the real world... A straw man fallacy is the informal fallacy of refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction. No true Scotsman or appeal to purity is an informal fallacy in which one attempts to protect an a posteriori claim from a falsifying counterexample by covertly modifying the initial claim. Rather than admitting error or providing evidence that would disqualify the falsifying counterexample, the claim is modified into an a priori claim in order to definitionally exclude the undesirable counterexample. The modification is signaled by the use of non-substantive rhetoric such as "true", "pure", "genuine", "authentic", "real", etc.

I think this is a much broader topic that a lot of people haven't quite understood yet. It's no secret to anyone that one of the primary complains of the active SL users is "the graphics" with no shortage of people with every chance they get on Q&As asking LL why doesn't SL "improve its graphics like so and so game." The natural conclusion for this push would be the move to PBR, but was it ill informed? To say the thick of the SL community often speaks on subjects they have no real knowledge of would be an understatement, from people asking live on Lab Gab if LL can "slow down the graphics because too many people are using SL during these lockdowns so while I'm in my parcel on an empty sim I'm lagging" to straight up telling you "PC graphics are better because they are round, while console graphics are worse because they are square" these would hardly be the kind of people to take notes from, yet seemingly LL with their move to PBR did, but that isn't going to fix any problems, here's why: Walk around anywhere on SL, mainland in particular, and there's no shortage of "interesting" things to look at to put it mildly, people copying a tree a couple dozen times to the side to make a wall, large houses with barely anything inside them because the parcel owner ran out of prims, people buying water parcels only to place a basic box with a grass texture and build a house on top, the examples are endless and my point here is, there is no amount of rendering technology that can make any of that look good. When people complain about SL being ugly, they fail to understand the primary reason it does is because of the way areas were designed, with most people being clueless to even begin to understand what the problem is, little wonder why most avatars go about with legs that are too long and arms that are too short, with a tiny little head as the cherry on top of a massive torso, most people don't have the knowledge to even understand human proportions, and by extension their poorly thought out builds that never measure up to anything get their shortcomings pinned on rendering, not their design, because it is easier to blame everyone else but themselves. If we're gonna be pragmatic, we're here now, and PBR isn't going away, but it isn't all bad news, LL made sure objects can have applied on them both the old diffuse maps and the new texture stack for PBR, this means you can see them in both viewers. Problem here is most creators have opted to not bother with diffuse maps, even if that is an operation that would only take a few minutes, others still are selling their products in separate versions, PBR and non-PBR, but I wouldn't call this a solution either. It will come down to the community to pressure content creators to include both old and new textures on these objects, the same way community pressure stopped hair makers from putting a script inside each prim of a hair back in the day. With that in place, we can start thinking about a viewer that could be kept up to date while using the old render, because, as it was mentioned on this thread already, SL is a micro community that for many years has been struggling with new user acquisition that cannot afford to lose a significant percentage of its userbase and if anyone thinks PBR will bring more users than it will drive away, you're in for a rude awakening. The tired old "just update your computer" is, to put it mildly, beyond incentive, we're living in a world with massive inflation, where the grocery prices have gone up by a factor of x2 sometimes x3 and this is the reality beyond what propaganda might tell you, same thing with house payments, and overall cost of living, for anyone that would deny this reality you're either beyond privileged to have been isolated from it or are in denial to help push an agenda, in other words, people would buy new hardware if they could, no one drives an old car, uses and old phone or works with an old computer because they like it or better yet, and this is my favorite "maybe they don't know there are better computers today" yes that is a real quote not just a hypothetical patronizing line. For a short term "solution" and I use that term vaguely, there are Android OS emulators, these could probably run the new Mobile Viewer acceptably once Firestorm decides to shelve v6 later this year or earlier next year.

Let's clarify a few things... I didn't state the bot currently in Eichorn Cove is part of a mining operation, neither did I state there are active mining operations in SL. I merely alluded to the real possibility that it could happen and how LL is ill prepared to deal with such influx if it ever came. Think about it this way, YouTube and its parent company are exceedingly wealthy yet a significant number of videos on the platform include comments made by accounts with lewd pictures in an attempt to drive users to their profiles and malicious links within them, others simply try to impersonate the owner of the channel and claim other commenters have won some sort of prize in an attempt to scam them. This has been going on for many years in a massive scale and YouTube has yet to remedy the situation, and considering the YouTube account creation has significantly more hinders to being created vs a Second Life one, we can start to see the damage potential. I've only mentioned the avatar in Eichorn Cove as part of the wider discussion of bots, that account is a bot, 24/7 it is there roaming back and forward, why? I wouldn't know, but to claim it could be just a normal user is disingenuous to say the least. In regards to Tiny Empires... It's a HUD game, conquer/expansion style, the players basically try to stretch out their influence within it, now either by lack of foresight of carelessness the creator made it so players can pledge alliance to other players which makes that player Tiny Empire "more gooder" as they become part of something bigger made bigger still by their pledge, and the microsecond this was made anyone with a vague interest in this game started using all their alts to pledge allegiance to their main avatar so they could work to have the best Tiny Empire of them all. There are currently 35 power players of Tiny Empires, I can't list their names but a slight bit of digging will get your their names, they're known as Thrusted Advisers since they have the biggest and best Tiny Empires, and yes, that means these players will command hundreds if not thousands of avatars each to be able to reach such an influence within the game. In a personal conservation I've had with the creator, he seemed unbothered with the disruption these players cause in the wider grid of SL, claiming the HUD has anti bot features within it (a claim that I personally do not believe) and that these clusters of avatars made to play his game a simply not an issue. So why would anyone care if there are N number of avatars logged in at any given time with the sole purpose of playing Tiny Empires or to do any other sort of scripted activity? This is a question of value, and quite frankly I'm not sure how much I can speak on the topic before I am made to disappear, but, when ever companies like Globespan Capital Partners, or JP Morgan do business with LL the key thing they'll be interested in is the number of users. This is the same reason why some tech companies that never generated a profit and only lose money year after year are still worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars, because they have a large user base and companies are always eager to have access to that. Now if a significant percentage of SL daily log ins are from bots or bot-like accounts people can start quite rightly so questioning their investment. There's also the question of social value in a social platform. For any would be repliers that are yet to see an issue with so many non-social accounts permeating a social platform, no one here can say the moment they teleport into a "busy" club only to find all those green dots are traffic bots parked in a platform they'll quite happily remain in that place. Traffic bots have always been frowned by the community, these other accounts that permeate water sims or abandoned mainland are no different, be it in a grid wide scale rather than a per parcel scale.

To clarify for some users, mining can be done with a smart phone, even the vacant space of a hard drive, GPU mining is the most notorious and prolific, but far from the only way. How does this relate to Second Life? Mining in which what ever form it takes always comes down to performing arithmetic, to do that with an electronic device, electricity is used, and electric power has a cost. A successful mining operation is one that recoups the hardware costs and generates more revenue than the expense of an electric bill. Because LSL is capable of executing arithmetic, and can communicate with outside servers, all the pieces are in the board to make this happen, and while it's true regions in SL by design have strict script limits, it's also true there are currently around 28,000 regions online, distributing a bot net around these regions to perform these tasks would offload most of the electricity cost from the individual to LL, and that being one of the primary hinders to on-location operations one can quickly see the allure. How profitable could this be? While it's hard to estimate I'll say this, we live in a world with no shortage of people that would end someone on the spot just so they could steal their shoes, so as little (or as much) profit as there is to be made, someone will always go after it given the chance and if people start trying in any significant numbers the normal SL users, the ones that keep the platform profitable, would be highly affected, hence why more attention should be given to these avatars that stand around populating most of the main grid for no good apparent reason. More on the topic of researching bots... While I can't post avatar names, in a region known as Eichorn Cove one can find an avatar roaming the grounds 24/7 for reasons seemingly only known to the owner.

Those are definitely not normal users "just standing around" and anyone that would claim so would at best be talking from a place of ignorance. So what are they? The three most common ones, in no particular order, are Tiny Empire player, data collection agents, and miners... yes, really. Long story short, with some clever coding and a bot net of SL avatars, people can set up a mining operation that would run on SL servers, couple that with the amazingly easy process of making a new avatar, and LL laxed attitude towards bots, and we could be on the verge of some serious hard times if knowledge of this ability gets more visibility. This is quite frankly something LL isn't prepared to deal with if the day ever comes. Also to answer a previous inquire, "do they block waterways?" often they do, specially during race or flotilla events these avatars can be in large enough numbers that they'll prevent an event to run by as the region with the addition of one or two participants reaches its cap and won't let anyone else in until those participants already in it exit the region, the open water sims were created and are maintained for mariners and aviators, people that enjoy SL and contribute to its economy, not for people to park hundreds of avatars to "at best" play a silly HUD game with their ridiculous amount of accounts, and at worse collect information up to and including IP addresses or the worse case scenario, do some crypto mining, activity which would affect the performance of not only the region they are standing on, but any other region running on that same CPU. To the OP, do not get discouraged in this endeavor.