Prokofy Neva

No, no what would be funny if Prok showed you a picture of a pod that has literally scudded here for months on end. You can't sit in it and drive it away. You can't push it off the road. The owner is a typical no-show. So there it is, annoying people and making land near it unrentable. I'll find it and post it here soon. I've written to the creator to come get their stupid pod AND the owner any number of times, guess those "messages cap"!

PICNIC is used just as much. I've heard it any number of times. It's more memorable than PEBCAK. Of course it's about hatred of users, and both indeed are about programmers as they give us a window into their horrid culture. The customers are viewed as a "problem" when the coders should be subordinate to them in the "customer is always right" mode of trying to SERVE customers and make their code have CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS instead of their own ideological extremities. We've so often found that the case -- it's our computer that is the problem, it's our ignorance that's a problem in trying to play the very difficult game of Second Life. It's like you have to get a degree in physics to run something you've purchased. At least Sansar is more forthright in implying that purchases there are like high-end developer kits or perhaps hobbyists' kits but it's clear that the average user is going to have a hard time (and does). It's not about "unfamiliar". It's about sheer contempt, scorn, hatred and the belief that "everyone" should conform to machines and their limited way of "thinking" or they are stupid. THEY are the ones who have it quite backward. If anything, there needs to be more regulation of coders because of their horrid culture.

Problem in Chair, Not in Computer, i.e. the computer programmer's hatred of the user as the actual problem arising with software, instead of his own coding.

This is only your take on it, and applies only to certain hubs that certain oldbies developed a fixation on. It did actually happen the way they expected, using Jane Jacobs' theories which were perfectly sound. It's just that the gaggle of techno-communists, sandboxers, freebie account holders, oldbies with 4096 free tier etc couldn't stand that commerce *gasp* was uprooting their notion of a world that should have either a) no commerce, like a giant Burning Man or b) no business but their business. The Lindens *could have* zoned by just putting a label on a sim, and that might have gone quite far on its own. But they didn't want governance and support tickets so they let it go wild. Worse, they refused to develop basic policies about spam and extortion that took four long years to finally be cleared. There were cynical reasons for this: the blight of the Mainland helped sell their more expensive islands. The oldbies who had boutiques on the first sims were furious that later sims that had telehubs on them drew traffic away from their boutiques. That really is all it's about. I ascertained this fairly quickly. The degree of howling on the forums about the telehubs which provided a more democratic way of reaching the buying public, even with high rent costs, was directly proportionate to how far away the oldbie's boutique was. If she or he had 4096 free tier, of course they could have moved and bought telehub land off the auction but their allergy to commerce -- except their own -- was notorious. To break into the market in the earlier days, you had to friend up the oldbies, be part of their social circle, get a corner in their store perhaps, or go in with them in a store or mall -- but on the old sims. That meant the overwhelming majority of people who wanted to sell things, who could create things, who were in other lines of work besides scripting and creation, whether in the sex business, or whatever, had no way to get to market. The telehubs were inevitable because they gave them that way, and that was a good thing -- and hated by oldbies. I studied the telehubs very closely, bought land around them, rented from Anshe, even rented TO Anshe and learned a lot about them. o Philip told me most of the economy's revenue came from them o They sold for dollars on the auction so the Lindens made money from them o The land was highly prized and Anshe Chung and Blue Burke and a very few others were able to monopolize the market. o But one thing they did was have contracts with top merchants who paid them a flat amount for them to put their stores everywhere -- I found this out when some of them were willing to come to me when I charged less. o The telehubs were not the lag heaps or avatar traps always claimed by howling oldbies on the forums. There was exactly one avatar trapping telehub -- with all oldbie businesses in fact, and clubs. The newest hubs were positively bucolic -- fields, waterfalls, etc. The Lindens minimized and finally ditched their squat brown buildings and made very nice builds (like the Moth Temple) o There was actually nothing magic about "a telehub". It was a scripted disc that could be put anywhere. In fact, the function of creating a landing on an island IS a telehub. The same thing. Yet the Lindens kept the telehubs out of their new Moth continent in the crazy Burning Man type of belief that it would make the land less "blighted" and "uglified" by commerce. Instead, all that happened is that those who bought land on Linden auctions and paid tier on it had no way to conveniently get to it! I created a group for people just to set home and log on to that continent when it was new due to this crazy Linden policy -- which again, was driven by forums howling. One of the early lessons I learned about how the Lindens were influenced was THAT. And I and other land owners learned to petition the Lindens with actual people and their actual businesses and tier payments to get them to stop catering to an idealistic few who owned little or no land -- or got free 4096s. o Oldbies needed p2p so that people would come to their stores. They were threatened by search/places that didn't always reward them, even when they used traffic gimmicks. o Basically, the telehubs, which were completely normal and necessary as they are in RL became a totemic symbol of hate by those who were losing in the economy when lots of new people came in and made land rentals and sales a business that challenged their more specialized Ren Faire sort of craftsmenship of content creation and scripting. It was like the Age of Iron coming to the Bronze Age. The way the oldbies and those close to LL who became its employees would try to eliminate the inevitable transition to the Iron Age is by condemning it as crude mass culture whereas they and their creations represented high and select culture. It failed. High culture could appear in a mall, too. o For a time, some of the oldbies made an online marketplace that they thought would circumvent malls in world which were losing them business. But then the Lindens created their own marketplace and closed them down essentially.

Yes. There's abandoned land instead. So that's a good thing. But the Lindens need to sell it on demand.

1. The Lindens should put an end to spam cars -- driverless cars that blight the roads, waterways and railways of the Mainland to no good purpose. When you actually read this thread, you see MOST of the people DO NOT LIKE and DO NOT WANT these cars. Their voices are never measured or allowed to be heard because just a few fanboyz who like them coupled with just a few Lindens who even follow this issue keep them churning. But most do not want them. That is what you find when you actually research this issue in good faith, without being biased as a) a road builder b) a car maker c) a platformista with big ideas of how you can play Tropica. By that I mean people who like cross-sim meta-play in their virtual world and who either don't own land and spend time in sandboxes, never log in at all and just chat on the forums, or have tiny parcels so they cast their eye about for where they can spread their wings without paying tier. Those of us who have to pay tier, run businesses, trying to make communities, trying to live our lives should not be sustaining those who don't pay tier but blight our lives. So you get this resident talking about how these cars pile up. Indeed! And that's why some of them are gone now, and why those that remain supposedly don't do that, but yet, the can get stuck and keep scudding along like the others. Another resident speaks about TOS violations -- the very fact of hitting avatars and knocking into them which is a violation. Then there's the usual debate about sim crossing problems, always more exaggerated to give some a feeling they are needed. One also sees here this sort of argumentation that is all too common among those who cry "PICNIC": "residents mistakenly accusing owners of excessive rezzing of vehicles and sending abuse reports for "unfair use of region resources". Um, but their vehicles are out of control, piling up, blighting the view, and giving people stress, so that if there is technically "not" an unfair use of region resources, that doesn't matter. It's still a bad thing. If it happens "due to a bug" and STILL uses up resources, why can't that be called out? How ELSE is a resident going to get rid of this blight and lag except by a report? It's not as if a Support Ticket will work, and there the resident will be told to go make an Abuse Report. 2. The Lindens -- if they must -- should only allow such rezzing cars to be placed at infohubs or certain junctures on Linden roads and NOT allowed to endlessly ride through all the highways. This is the most obvious solution to quell the endless invocation of the "tourism" argument because if someone REALLY needs tourism, they don't need it on demand on OTHER people's sims, sims where OTHER people live and own and pay the tier. They can pick up the cars at certain junctions with the rest of the public by looking in search/places and exploring from there. The Lindens could also take applications from private property owners who want to serve as rezzing zones, as they would the community portals 3. The Lindens should make a policy on driverless vehicles on public roads -- this shouldn't be so hard and they need to establish either a prohibition completely (my proposal) or a significant restriction on the vehicles by allowing them only at certain locations, and only with certain features and rules, i.e. not "out of theme," not inducing lag, not for sale, etc. What is sometimes mistakenly viewed as "Linden policy" is merely a wiki written by resident fans and is even labelled now as "not" Linden policy. Why can't we get an actual Linden policy? Furthermore, the "Linden policy" is based on two Lindens who are no longer here, one who promoted the adult continent and the other whose job it was to build roads. So we get this sort of lackadaisical "policy: Blondin Linden: yeah I dont see a problem with that. The roads are meant to be used by vehicles Actually, no. Roads are for avatars WITH vehicles. This isn't a train set where the boy stands outside and watches the trains go round. It's a world with people in it, in the form of their avatars. Actual people who travel tend to get a free vehicle or buy either a low-cost or very customized expensive vehicle and get around find without any spam cars. And the sims are meant to be lived on by people who pay tier for the land and put builds on them, so the roads aren't to be endlessly coddled in the name of load tests, big ideas of running the platform at a meta level, selling vehicles, reputational enhancement. etc. Why does my view from my tiered land on to a public road that I expect to add, not subtract value, and to be like a RL highway, have to include your grandiose spam projects? It shouldn't. Or you get this randomly said at an office hour: Michael Linden: one area the Lab won't act on is the "appropriateness of appearance" if a train looks like a potato with twelve noses and "eat at joes" written on it, that's fine with us But a car on the water or a bus in the air shouldn't be "fine with us"? Why? 4. The Lindens should justify any need to have grid-wide "testing" for load testing or any other kind of testing. There's reference to the "Lindens' need to test." I'm not sure that's the case any more. AND even if it is, don't the Lindens have their own sims to test on? Do they really need to constantly stress the Mainland, which has enough problems, with this constant "load testing"? I mean we "Tier Loading" patrons of SL are tired of being treated as guinea pigs. We should have the enjoyment of Second Life as the Community Standards promise us. What's interesting, too about the theories around the banning of a certain car is that "the Lindens shut it down due to a SL bug." Not for any good reason -- like it was piling up, like the creator was selling it, like the creator refused to mitigate it. But some bug. There was this comment there then in that thread: "I doubt any of this is particularly useful to know in detail now, although I gather that at one point some variant may have aided griefers. What may someday have significance is the fact that objects can acquire state that's hidden to us but known to the sim. It's not something I'd ever considered before this, when trying to isolate bugs." Well, as a victim of this bug, I can only say that if it was "required" to run the cars, then the cars had to go. 5. The driverless cars are NOT used for "tourism" -- this is one of the most widely used arguments for them that has no validity. The notion is hypothetically and groundlessly invoked by those who merely "like" the idea; it is also self-reported by driverless car makers -- and the Lindens should provide us with the actual numbers as they discover them objectively. Perhaps someone can make a script that monitors cars and indicates whether they have drivers or not; these can be deployed around sample sims so that better numbers can be obtained. Anyone who actually logs into SL knows that these cars are EMPTY -- I stand on multiple sims for hours and see nothing but empty spam cars -- and the occasional vehicle with an actual conscious avatar in it it -- and I often see an even worse phenomenon: out-of-theme cars -- buses are in the air, planes are on the road, cars are on the water -- the makers don't care and they think this is "creative". It gets old quick. They often hover in the air above roads and blight the view. The pod car is a science fiction "look" that the overwhelming majority of sims do NOT have. The idea that to have one car available on a whim for someone who wants to explore, we need to have thousands of spam cars deployed on 5,000 sims is absurd. The Lindens don't have that idea about sailing; they make only some areas available for rezzing and sailing. Why are roads different and why do the less appreciated non-Blake Sea owning residents have to endure ugly pod spam and off-topic vehicles in the sky? The one figure we're given by one of the most notorious spam car makers is astounding and gives the lie to all the claims of "wide use of tourism": 5 years with over 110,000 visitors taking over 325,000 rides That's incredible, as it means only 22,000 users a year -- a tiny number compared to the massive numbers of cars rezzed and spamming the world -- which would be in the millions. This figure totally gives the lie to the "tourism" argument and the fact that these 22,000 per year took 65,000 rides -- i.e. users took more than one ride -- is also a total nothing. These figures by one of the most notorious and disliked "scourge cars" let us know that the "tourism" argument simply has to be knocked down. Furthermore, if we had the "scourge car" user lists, we would discover that the overwhelming majority of "tourists" would be gone from SL. They didn't retain. Why should the rest of us suffer from a list of ghost riders? If the Lindens really think this is true, they will take the numbers of any of the car makers, and subject them to ruthless scrutiny. Better yet, they will do their own monitoring.

So it's a geeky, Reddity thing then, thanks.

The problem I have with that obelisk is that some people use it as a form of griefing itself in fact, by pretending they abide by these rules, then putting in on small little parcels with other things that drive people away. I generally abide by these rules as I don't allow security orbs on the ground, only in the sky, and don't allow ban lines. Re: shrubs/privacy screens, so often people put up photo-real boards that really look god-awful so I don't allow them in a lot of areas. Unchecking "avatars can see me" is the best form of privacy there is.

What is TIL?

Lots of people already drive all over the place on all kinds of vehicles and animals. Real people. Not spam cars. And they aren't bothered by sim seams nearly as much as implied by all these posts. It's not a big deal. No one needs to save us from them. I've built parking lots. All over. And since my groups are open, it doesn't matter what the autoreturn is, and I wouldn't extend that merely to enable griefers and litterers to succeed. There are good reasons why some don't want to take instruction from those who think they have a better idea: they have experience inworld.

No. Klytyna is right about this. Any solution that means subjecting the whole population of SL to a BDSM viewer and its works is by definition wrong and I do hope the Lindens would grasp wh The sim seams aren't the horror imagined or portrayed by animats in his bid to be the saviour who fixes it. Lots of people drive or ride around, including myself, and this doesn't bother them. There are all kinds of vehicles to try with varying degrees of skill and capacity and that's part of the fun of it. The obsession of Philip or the inability of Lindens to "solve it" is kind of a myth, but in fact, they've improved it steadily and it really isn't the most important thing for the Mainland. Blight of land, failure to move abandoned land, curbing of spam cars -- those are all more important problems and enabling this BDSM kludge only distracts from these other issues.

Land on the Mainland is purchased and while you may call it "renting from the estate manager Governor Linden," in fact an island "owner" is only doing the same, at another level in a different form. And no, dear, I have an island and a homestead and I have had them for more than 10 years. I actually find that this idea that you "need to reboot every day" is for the birds. Long observation and testing of this has proven to me that you do not need to do that at all. If you monitor the collisions and scripts that is not necessary. And I don't experience lag even on these sims that aren't "constantly reset" with multiple tenants and pets and such. It's absolutely insane to have a bot come in and take up an avatar slot and waste script time when the estate manager panel lets you announce over a kind of public address system anything you need to. Of course, we get it that somebody with hundreds of sims might like a bot that goes from sim to sim doing all this unnecessary re-setting but a) it's unnecessary b) it's not proven as a vital function that should therefore enable griefing of other people with spam. Anything you want to the avatars on that sim, like "Save your work I'm going to reset the island" can be said on the estate menu. Are you unfamiliar with this feature? Oh, and there's this: the system ITSELF gives you timed warnings when you click to reset a sim and people realize when that comes they need to save up their work and leave. So this is TOTAL TOTAL overkill, not at all a valid use case, and just a kind of Fisking. The idea that there is some kind of valid use case involving sending notices to everyone on a spim in 4 languages is also completely and totally edge-casing. The sim-wide communicator could easily have a message pasted in with multiple languages all at once without any bots. Since you have to program and click on a bot anyway to get it to do something, pasting and clicking on the estate panel is the same thing, and therefore the bot is not justified. Most people in any language can understand numbers and realize the sim is resetting and they need to save their work or not put out any items -- although of course most people aren't creators or developers so this "save your work" idea is even more arcane. The idea that bots "need" to reboot sims every three days is also completely and entirely misplaced. That has never been proven and is in fact not necessary as anyone else who runs a sim knows. It's just "urban lore" and "habit" and "received wisdom" that perhaps even the Lindens imagine is true but they should test it and find it is not. It is wear and tear on servers to keep resetting them all the time needlessly. As for Easter Egg hunts, you don't need a bot there, either as you yourself could use the public address system. The idea that you would come online, program a bot, then send a bot out like a dog to do the same thing you could do yourself in real time with cut and paste just boggles the mind. These are not valid use cases. If they are precious to you because you like to play with your dog-bots, that's understood but none of them are "necessities" and none of them justify leaving these functions open to be massively used for griefing. The Lindens will likely find a way to throttle this, or hopefully make the entire feature of "conferencing" only an opt-in globally that you can opt never to have ever, from anything. Believe me, most people don't need to leave spamming portals open for over-happy party kids or your Easter egg hunt once a year.

Re: You are currently alpha testing a klunky kludge fix using a customised rlv relay (that you seem to know very little about rlv isn't encouraging, thiose comments about 'open relays'). LL will NEVER endorse or support an rlv/rlva based fix for vehicle crossings, nor will most vehicle makers be willing to rewrite all their scripts to use rlv on a custom channel, and such a channel will leak out and social undesirables will attempt to use it as a backdoor relay channel for nefarious purposes. Yes, this is one of those extremely rare cases when I'd agree with Klytyna Why is BDMS coming out of the bedroom into the public roads? That's really the question to ask here. Many people in SL, including myself, who repudiate BDSM as an ideology will still, in the name of individual freedom and choice, tolerate BDSM as an individual social choice by people for their private lives, including in a virtual world. But they will not tolerate it being imposed on them in any way in the public sphere. And that's what is happening here. Often I see in RL as in SL a certain ideological gambit to normalize BDSM and impose it on the public sphere, where it begins to encroach on the individual rights of others -- by finding some means, such as with "50 Shades of Grey" of making it seem "okay". There's the issue, for example, of doms who parade around women in chains grovelling to them at various merchants' events or public events. That makes people uncomfortable for sure. But there's always that pushing of the envelope by some. And when they push their envelope, it's perfectly fine to push back and say the public sphere has to be free of coercion. There's the other issue of people who view Second Life as a platform sandbox for them to implement their fantasies of platform influence and control, even as other people have a different immersive take on SL and seek to have a private live on a sim without platformistas harassing them -- this is an old debate that one can find on the old forums in 2004-2007. There's also this: the Lindens have been working on sim seams since the dawn of time. I recall Philip once explained to me in copious detail, using napkins at at lunch during the SL meet-up in Chicago, what the problems were in the sim seam challenge. You know child thingie looking into the next sim, a hand off thing, a this, a that, or -- as the Russian fairy tale characters say: go-there-I-know-not-where, fetch-that-I-know-not-what. Remember, Philip had a degree in physics, he wasn't just a computer engineer. In a thread last year, Klytyna describes what hampers these crossings. And here a man named Chaser Zaks gives a very good explanation of what the issue is in the sim crossings -- perfectly comprehendable by the layman. Of course, Klytyna, as I know from repeated personal experience can shoot down somebody's idea or attempt to understand a thing or get action on it and newbies can suffer from this sort of hazing on the forums. But there's hazing in the other direction, too, when somebody thinks they can build a better mouse-trap AND impose it on the public. As animats has made clear, it's not just that he is experimenting with his own personal cars and scripts to explore -- that would be one thing. His aim is to add a fleet of driverless cars to roam around the sims, joining the other spam on the roads, and find problems and then alert residents or Lindens to fix them. And I for one find that as onerous, and I think others would, too. I think these concerns should be addressed in the form of a ticket to the Lindens, on a case-by-case basis, by those directly affected.

On the regular SL viewer you do not have to relog for a new group role in which you were already a member on another role. You do on Firestorm. Firestorm goes through glitchy periods sometimes where even two relogs and resaving just doesn't work on groups. I don't do invites. The tenants change their own role. On the SL Viewer they do this right away.On Firestorm and others they have to relog. Re: Viewer statistics First, let me point out how TRULY AWFUL IN EVERY WAY it is that the coding Lindens have office hours where interested parties and fans can come But Governance and Community don't have office hours, ever. They used to years ago. But they stopped. Truly unfair. And once again, I realize you can fetch this number from a special office hour from these special Lindens. I'd like that made available officially for all of us because I do not believe self-reports, and one Linden might be anecdotal or out of date. I'd like the company itself to state unabashedly how many residents are using its viewer and how many are using Firestorm or others. The end.

@Klytyna re: So now you are denying the figures on which viewers are the most popular and most used? Even LL know FS is more popular that the official SL Inferiority Viewer, that's why they are so cooperative and chummy with the FS devs... As for why people don't use a feature in their viewers... For EXACTLY the same reason you don't know how to use 'calling cards'... Bloody minded ignorance and a refusal to make ANY effort to learn how to use their viewer. You're calling 'calling cards' an exploit when they are not. You're demanding their use for making conference calls to everyone on a sim be banned, when in fact they are almost never used at all, and conference calls to everyone on a sim do NOT require the use of calling cards at all, just the use of crtl+leftclick in the people panel, on the list of people nearby, a standard feature of all viewers, no exploits or calling cards or properties edits needed, just a case of... LEARNING HOW YOUR VIEWER WORKS BECAUSE IT'S NOT... NOT... NOT VIEWER ONE ANYMORE. Noobs don't know how to use their viewers properly, because they are, well... Noobs. They have a legitimate excuse, they can and do learn with time. You don't know how to use your viewer because you are PERMANOOB, you've been a NOOB for more than 12 years, and by now it's pretty much incurable. 1. Self-reported figures are never figures that I would trust. Has Linden Lab officially stated that there are more Firestorm users than SL official browser users? That is the received wisdom. Could LL verify that and state it? Oh, they didn't. Oh, they won't. OK, well, see point one then. 2. Oh, dear, this popular viewer, this supposedly E-Z streamlined viewer, has a feature that users that ran toward it and use it in droves "don't understand how to use"? I have tenants that hate Firestorm, as I do, but they'll download it and use it once for the "find things" feature. I give them the free Searchbert to use instead, but Searchbert can only go in a certain diameter in a certain distance so Firestorm is "better" when people really get desperate. I downloaded it once to see if in fact that was easy to use, and also to check the group title change since this is so confounding to so many tenants constantly -- and Firestorm makes them relog to kick in a title change in a group, which the SL viewer doesn't make them do, one of the many reasons why I think it's better. 3. I find it really hard to believe that conference calls, that people hate hate hate -- sometimes confusedly thinking they "come from a group" which makes them get on that group and say "stop that!" is something they find "hard to turn off". From what I gather, they easily turn them off. 4. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that in fact these SELF-REPORTED NUMBERS could be inflated. 5. Or, not that it is hard to turn off, but that you can turn it off only after getting the first spam! There isn't an option to NEVER get conference calls? And one spam is one too many for most people, especially if racist and stupid -- it drives them madly wild and they think one is evidence of a horrid form of abuse. And maybe they aren't wrong. 6. Calling cards not obtained with consent are indeed an exploit. You know, like copies taken outside of permissions "just because you can" are an exploit. Same principle. Some techs love to argue back from the capacities and affordances of machines and code to code morality. Why? We're humans, and we have human morality, and we're not machines. 7. I know how to use the SL viewer. It does not have an option to opt out of conference calls. I thought maybe there would be one of those commands on the advanced or developer sections like the way you fix the view of sculpties, or the way you fix your typing hands, that would just stop that forever, or at least, on each log-in. Too bad there isn't.

Calling cards, which result from a "friendship" request and show up *on a list on your browser* under "communications" as FRIENDS (not "calling cards" ) and therefore are legitimately called "Friendship cards" given that they are all in a list called FRIENDS on the viewer, are exploited by being pasted and used for spam or by having someone's name who didn't consent to friendship pasted into them and used for conference calls. This post-fact exoneration of all things coded is always creepy. Consent is important. Friendship and its true meanings is important. The system makes list of Friends. If a griefer copy-pastes and exploits and makes fake friends like a Russian bot, the system will still read "Friends" and that is why it is insidious as they were not made with consent. Consent of humans is important in any coded system. Even the Lindens get that.

Yes, you conceded my point, thank you. And yes, you've told us the troubling news -- stated by others -- that there is nothing to stop this, that the morals of bot wranglers only would stop it (those using bots for rentals, stores, RP sims etc don't also use them to spam stupid messages -- they never write or program their bots to do this out of just plain common sense and self-interest, if not for moral reasons). You say that throttling the number of messages or conference calls seem possible -- well, let's hope the Lindens do that but what would be better is to be able to pre-opt-out of all conference calls, ever. Many people would love that. And if they opt-in, the ability to opt out and block the caller forever, like on a RL phone. As for your claims about ban exports you are describing *your own practice* but you must not be familiar with the history of this issue in SL because people ADD ADD ADD constantly all the time. The fear driving this is astounding.

1) You're also trying to chunk up the issue and try to separate out various functions of bots THAT DO NOT INVOLVE SPAMMING and trying to derail and distract the discussion at hand. DO YOU OR DO YOU NOT SUPPORT BOTS THAT IM EVERYONE ON A SIM AND SPAM THEM WITH A MESSAGE THAT NO ONE HAS CONSENTED TO RECEIVE, YES OR NO It seems to me you botters want to save out this ability of mass spamming because "you never know" if you might need it. Perhaps you imagine your bots valiantly spamming out a message about a RL end of the world? But you know, I think we'll manage without you? What you really seem to be doing with this parsing, edge-casing of singleton issues, etc. is to say "we reserve the right to do WTF we want with our bots". And the answer is, no, comrades, you don't get to do that. And please say yes or no, do you support spamming? So we can understand that in fact you bless spamming or not. BTW many of the things you think are glorious and wonderful about bots are also accomplished by simple prims with old fashioned scripts even of 14 years ago like "visitor log". You don't need to take up an avatar slot on a Mainland sim with these laggers to accomplish this task. There are also other systems beside bots that have multiple message systems to reach staff. As for the bot being able to join a group, I continue to subject that to testing because the issue here isn't somehow being "stupid about what the technical abilities of bots are" which at the end of the say largely don't matter to non-bot wranglers like me. The issue is "is this griefer harassing me really a bot, can bots do that, and since that's annoying, how can we stop it?" I realize these nuances fly right over the heads of some, and they're rather indulge in their raucous ridicule, snarking, "liking" blah blah. But again, a bot does not have the intelligence to look for themed groups. Do tell me how a bot finds rental groups. Not every rental group that is open for membership has the word "rent" or "rental" in it. It could be called "Sunnybrook Meadows". So unless the bot is scanning every group in its entirety and only joining open ones -- a function one can concede it might be able to do, as much as a load on the servers that might be, how can it pick out open, large groups for maximum effect with its racist spam message to have maximum shock and anger value? I suggest that takes human malice, not bot action. The bot might also pick out pro-Trump or anti-Trump or some other political group. How does it do that? Only human intelligence could pick out the *theme* of a group that might not be in its name. As the bot what the name of the airport is in Toronto, and you'll see its problem.

@Ghost Mejou Re: Exporting ban lists is actually part of the cleaning and review process! We automatically parse non-existing accounts(like banned accounts) or ancient ones. Then we generally have an open discussion about the bans on there. Sadly our non-EM moderators can't see the list without it being exported. However, we value the input of our entire team and that's why it's important to check. Once again, I oppose the export of ban lists precisely because they are copy-pasted without thought and without clean-up and without awareness. If you have an "open discussion" that's great, but I don't get to be in it to explain to you that I am a blogger, not a griefer or copybotter. Did you take me off? I don't want or need to be in every open discussion. But that's just why exports are insidious, they can't be corrected for problems like this, and the problems then only mount. Valuing the input of your team is great management-speak, but we can't be all on your team and inputting. Some furry that once took out a gun at the Shelter is banned for life. He comes to my rentals and lives happily ever after, only taking his gun out on war sims zoned for this. Why should he be endlessly put in ban lists? There is no court of arbitration for ban lists. So I oppose them. Each owner should make his own up organically of actual cases of griefing. As for copybotting, one can find lists here and there of which ones to include but there, too, there isn't any due process. The abuse reporting system in SL is mainly used to settle scores with enemies by invoking technicalities to make the Lindens pounce on enemies. Given that reality I'm skeptical of any cutting and pasting.

@Ghost Menjou thanks for that information, but you are proving my point -- your "good use" involves scanning, which some people may disagree with but let's leave that aside, and involve sending messages *only* to those who are "no bueno". Sending only SOME messages isn't spamming everyone on the sim. Not everyone will have that undesirable/illegal weapons system. So it's not a case. I'm asking for a good use case of spamming everyone on the sim and I don't see one. So you're diverging from the point here by trying to validate "the sending of messages by bots to some people". But that's not the issue. It's "the sending of messages by bots to everyone on a sim or in a group" that is the exploit of friendship cards which are indeed friendship cards, even if termed "calling cards" in inventory as their original intended appearance and application in SL was through consent from a friendship offer, and their casual copying and exploitation in various advertising or griefing exploits are a problem, a bug, not a feature. You're also having trouble condemning spam, by going off on the tangent "but email isn't bad because it is used to spam" . Naturally as a bot user you want to exonerate bots and say "but bots are good." Once again, the topic under discussion here is "bots sending messages to everyone on a sim or in a group". Do you or do you not condemn that behavior and if so, what is your solution to stop it? I could note as an aside, given your invocation of an exigency for bots to have certain messages, that there is one super-annoying RP group out there that forces you to join it if you want to enter all the parcels on that particular interesting RP sim. Understood, that's normal. You pay a fee, and so then you're reluctant to leave that group -- what if you want to go back and enjoy that exploration again on that sim? But eventually you are forced to leave it because the owners use it for their bots to constantly communicate the types of things you mention. So strange automatic voices constantly pipe up every hour, and are echoed by other strange automatic voices saying things back, that I think amount to "I'm here and I'm running" or "yes, the sim is up and running" -- but naturally none of us "norms" feel the need to know this and it's a constant spam. So...why is it there? I think it's there because the owners of the sim have it set to a group and *that land group* has to be the group these bots communicate in. Why they need to communicate there, and can't on some scripted hidden channel that doesn't show up in chat is beyond me. PS why they need to keep spouting these things at all is a mystery. Maybe machines need to tell each other these things; why have humans bothered by them? Nerds who wrangle bots don't think of this, but I think there should be a certain botiquette, and believe me, it will be enforced some day on the wider Internet as it is even now on Twitter regarding Russian troll bots because no one is required to become a machine, think like a machine, be driven into machine behavior or become victims of vicious machines just because "the Internet runs on them" or some other exigency. Any more than they are required to answer phones endlessly ringing with spam calls -- they can be put on a national do-not-call registry; any more than they can expect cars to drive into their living rooms; there are traffic rules. Why bots shouldn't be regulated like phones or cars is beyond me. Of course they should. All machines have historically been regulated because they can be harmful to humans. Why are bots special? They're not. The Internet is not a magical unicorn place. It's just a big phone hooked up to a lot of trucks. Did you get your Amazon today? Did you tip your poor doorman who had to lift all those packages? I also have to chuckle to myself about all these status messages in that RP group when so many bots fall on infohubs and clutter up sims where I have tutorials and such. Why do they do that? Why can't they go home? Why can't they be *set* home? Why, if their "set home sim" is down can they just stay offline instead of being dumped at an infohub FOR DAYS ON END -- it's not like they have the autonomous power to pick themselves up and say "Oh, I should go back to my home sim" -- if they did, they wouldn't be slumped at infohubs for days on end. Again, this is a botiquette issue. The owners of them shouldn't leave them like stray dogs all over.

And with all that, once again you didn't create the valid and good use case of when your bot would need to come on a sim, slurp up all the names of the people there, and send them messages that most of them won't want, and will be viewed as spam. The end. Exporting ban lists is in my view, for the birds. Inevitably these lists are polluted with people who don't belong on them, which were put there for mistaken and especially political reasons. For example, one major creator of a ban system that I believe is no longer allowed in SL put me in that ban list just because he didn't like my blog criticizing his overwhelming powers and abuses in collecting IP addresses. Then it replicates with everybody's "private stash ban list". Another major creator with a monopolist status put me in his product's ban list as an "example" that most purchasers then didn't remove. The potential for massive abuse of such exported list is big. That's why I won't accept them on Twitter, either, or export them.

Let me explain how it works. In Moscow, there's this opposition leader named Alexei Navalny who published a video expose of some oligarchs and a prostitute that tied a figure in the Mueller indictments to a Putin aide, showing the connections. So this video went viral and millions saw it all over the world. Soon, Navalny's enemies, actual intelligence agents, pro-Kremlin types, etc. began abuse-reporting his video to Google, the owner of YouTube. So YouTube, like all social media platforms tends to first ban, and then asks questions later, and often never asking questions. They've banned this opposition channel before, and unbanned it after enough people complained to them that they were merely banning a legitimate video that was true, but just under draconian Russian laws could be banned. So the Russian Internet censor banned the video, it contained evidence that they were involved in influencing the US elections. Google then did one of their ban-in-country moves where they blocked that video only for viewers in Russia. Naturally some of the users use circumvention and there's the Streisand Effect and so on, but for extra measure, the Russian censor banned any news media or blog that even just covered the incident, let alone took any deeper look or favourable view. Actually, all the elements of the video were true, there was geolocation, corroboration of other witnesses, the prostitute's testimony, etc. But oligarchs especially if they take big paydays on the London stock exchange are more powerful than the truth, and frankly in the West as in the East. A number of publications that have tried to cover earlier revelations on this story around the Steele memo also found themselves targeted with libel lawsuits and then their lawyers advise them to shut up. The oligarchs may lose those suits down the line as they already have in such cases, because in the US, you would have to show the content was not truthful; that you had maliciously and deliberately printed it; and that it caused material damages. Few libel suits meet all three tests, and in this case, you had the truth, you had the good intentions of the opposition guy wishing to tell it, and you had the oligarch hardly suffering any dent from this claim that he could just bat away. But he's got UK law and can venue-shop and maybe get a libel suit to stick there. Meanwhile, that Navalny video with English subtitles is still viewable in the US but knowing how this works, it may disappear if some bad actor finds some "copyright angle" to question it, or some other angle that will spook Google, which has removed literally thousands of YouTube videos by amateurs showing the proof of the Russian troop presence in Ukraine when they get a "copyright complaint" which of course doesn't apply if some guy is shakily holding a phone outside his car or copying his dashcam video to show Russian tanks. So... In Russia, your enemies, who may be illegitimate or have some hidden agenda, can take literal laws and use literalism to abuse report you; the state or authority may automatically respond as it is forced to do; you may get some sort of human intelligence on the situation -- but you may not. The state authorities also doesn't question what may be wrong more deeply about themselves such as to cause people to have to make videos like this. The state may be selective in enforcement, rewarding friends, hunting down enemies. And so on. The Nuremberg defense was, "I was just following orders." But it wasn't accepted. A crippling of Nuremberg occurred when the Soviets intervened to remove "class" and "political views" from the definition of "genocide" because then Nuremberg could be applied to *them*. These Soviet and Russian analogies are seldom appreciated because the scale and magnitude of real life is big and serious, and the scale and magnitude of Second Life is small and often frivolous. The analogies pertain, however.

The reality is, most people either stay with you long term if they put in tier OR they give you notice if they want to move on and withdraw your tier. Obviously a landowner will keep a "buffer" of unused tier in the group for these events -- or perhaps another kind of event, suddenly some prim land comes up for sale on a sim where he has land. It is hardly a trouble to add another 512 to an alt's account if suddenly several pull out. So it's not the problem you imagine. And I find that most people do not produce the hysterical hypotheticals so often invoked in SL and in RL about tech.

No, because Friendship cards DO require consent, you have to say "yes" when the order comes in to you. That someone can maliciously copy your name into a copyable template doesn't suddenly make something called "calling cards" that are "not" an exploit. They are an exploit. Because there is no normal function through a simple command to "send a calling card" as an order through the viewer. There is ONLY the exploit to copy it and put it on a notecard or put it in a script or some other misuse of it. Once again NO ONE throughout this ENTIRE thread has ever explain the GOOD USE CASE for spamming everyone on a sim with your message because you can snag their name and use it or make calling cards out of them without their permission. Opt-in matters. Imagine a JIRA or a feature on the old lamentably killed Features Voter which says "have the ability to collect all names on a sim and send them an ad for your business". Many people would vote it down as they don't want spam. Spam is against the TOS. The use of this by griefers of me commit spam and get banned. There isn't a mass use that anyone can explain that is legitimate.

Like I said: friendship cards require consent. Exploit of the code to make non-friend cards to harass people, to make spamming conference calls, is an EXPLOIT. It's the creation of MALWARE. What you just demonstrated is AN EXPLOIT and the creation of MALWARE. You didn't demonstrate "justice" or "normalcy" just because some cut and paste action can be made. Ultimately, you can cut and paste the action for an atomic bomb, Callum, are you up for doing that and dropping it on people you don't like? Would you ever recognize ANY constraint to "doing it because I can" ever? To keep claiming it's "ok" and "they get to do this because they get to do this" is to live under vicious code-as-law that need not live under if we are not robots ourselves. The Lindens seem to be leagues ahead of you all in recognizing that their code is EXPLOITED IN UNINTENDED WAYS sometimes and they see "what can we do to fix this or change this" They are pretty culty sometimes but they do tend to have the more realistic attitude toward code called CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS that an IBM or Apple has and have less of the awful Cosmic Engineer humanist/crypto anarchist stuff you find on the forums. Really, the Lindens are our only hope, as bad as they can be.