Captcha-like security for group join to stop begging bots.
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Medea Destiny
Yet another day of begging bots hitting many groups and asking for 100L. It's deeply tedious for group moderators, and users are being scammed. For whatever reason this is a problem that has plagued SL for years without any sign of resolution.
A common solution has been to put a L$1 sign up fee for groups. This is less than ideal because it creates a barrier to users who have no money at that moment. Also it's no longer working, as I've seen a begging bot kicked out of such a group today.
We had a big discussion about solutions in the "Friends of Philip" group, and finding any solution that doesn't create problems of its own seems hard. However I'd like to suggest that when people join a group, they are presented with a challenge-response problem. The issues with Captcha itself are well documented, but some simple challenge that's easy for users and hard for bots (perhaps based on the "honeypot" method?) could dramatically help with this.
Maybe this should be a separate entry, but it would also be immensely helpful to have an alternative to group bans, allowing us to temporarily ban a user. Currently these bots get banned, vanish, and are still clogging up the group ban list. If we had temporary (say 1 month) bans as an option, they'd get cleared out of the group ban list.
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Issue tracked. We have no estimate when it may be implemented. Please see future updates here.
DolCute Resident
Love to get my own sweet person back to here... miss DolCute Resident... help
DarkNess Bloodstone
PLEASE! The begging got old YEARS ago.
Beatrice Voxel
Something that might be useful for a lot of the "product support" groups is making the entry-level group "read only". Case in point: Mama Allpa. You can join the group if you know the URI, but the role given is not given the permissions to say anything. However, if you click the Group option in the HUD menu, it passes you a URI link with an elevated role, one that DOES allow chatting in the group.
I would think that with all of the 'Attach me to unpack' HUDS and texture HUDS packed with nearly everything, a simple "Join Support Group" button could be included, which again would elevate the user to a higher role than "everyone". Since it's unlikely that scammers will go around spending lindens on their bots to purchase items just to join a group (and manually clicking buttons) they'll be relegated to the cheap seats, where they can't post a thing to the group.
Kimberly Lemongrass
This is definitely a good idea.
Journey Bunny
Problem was solved nearly 20 yrs ago in all other communication platforms:
LL needs to realize that successful communities are built on curation. When they make tools for the 3D part of SL, they seem to inherently understand that giving users power over their own experiences at many levels is fundamental. But when it comes to text IMs and Group chat, it's like they've ignored every development in the past 2 decades for how people moderate the communications they want to receive.
TF/IDF scoring, naive classifiers etc are used billions of times daily in all our messaging tools to prevent spam, rate limit possible spam, flag possible harassment, reroute suspect content to a moderation queue, etc. We don't even have group moderation queues or spam inboxes or filtering of any kind.
xaka Chayoo
Maybe create an option within the group roles options for chat moderation, right to comment would have to be requested and for say 48 hours after your request is granted your comments would only be seen by chat moderators and need to be approved to be published. Abuse of this option to enforce censoring for any other reason would be self defeating for the group.
AlettaMondragon Resident
NO. Captcha is simply annoying. More annoying than those bots in groups. Either go with the fee to join the group or have some active moderators in your group to deal with any kind of problem in your group chat, and that's all. No need to push even more troublesome things on real people because of a few bots, like anti-bot devices treating us all as bots. We all had to do a Captcha when we signed up. If that's not enough, as obviously isn't, then you can put a Captcha in SL after every single teleport or sim crossing, at joining any group or sending any IM and it still won't be enough.
Medea Destiny
AlettaMondragon Resident We already tried sign-up fees, as I said in the OP it doesn't work any more. Many old but popular groups were created by someone who left SL, and there may be no way to get moderators. Even when there are plenty of moderators, you cannot catch everything instantly and you can't undo a message that has already been sent.
This isn't just about making the group chat experience very slightly less annoying --the reason those begging bots keep going is because they work. There are real people losing money to these scammers. If the bots could not access group chats en masse, they would be a lot less successful, and fewer people would have their money stolen.
AlettaMondragon Resident
Medea Destiny So how do you want to apply the Captcha or anything in a group that has no active owner or officer present to apply the restriction? Let's just force it upon everyone joining every group because of some abandoned groups? Because if you say let's create an option that the owner or an officer with the appropriate group right can set which would put a Captcha or something when you want to join that group in particular, okay, why not, at least people who hate captchas won't join the group and there's no problem. Suggesting to force this on everyone and every group universally is simply unreasonable. Why are you even in a group whose owner is inactive and has no active moderation either? If it's a store group then the store must be pretty dead, if it's a community group then how do you deal with other problems in the group chat? If a group has no active management it is as good as dead. You can't save it.
As for people falling for some of these scams, the best you can do is raise awareness. Some people might be simply naive, although one must be extremely naive to fall for the "Can you please give me 100 lindens" stuff, if they won't be the victim of that scam because they never see it in a group chat, they will be the victim of some other scam elsewhere. The more you know the more careful you can be - or know when you need to be careful - you can't protect people with fancy technical solutions that don't even work, I would put that effort into sharing knowledge with them. Which might be as simple as telling them repeatedly that if some random 0-1 day old avatar is asking for money it is a scam and if they see a "free Lelutka head on marketplace" thing in a chat and a url with a russian domain that is not exactly marketplace.secondlife.com it is fake. LL should raise awareness to these things more, for example on their blog and do that again and again sometimes not just the fancy promotions to buy more stuff all the time, that would help people avoid scams.
Medea Destiny
AlettaMondragon Resident There are some popular and useful groups that were made by someone who has left SL. There's a separate canny somewhere requesting ways for current users of a group to be able to take a group with an inactive owner over, that's really not this issue.
"...people who hate Captchas" -- you're still focusing on Captcha itself. As I said in the OP and several times since, it
shouldn't
be Captcha itself, which is fundamentally bad. There are many alternatives. They might just involve clicking a tick box, or be totally transparent to the user, based on a proof-of-work solution.Feliks Blackwood
I like the idea of creating some way to slow down the bots. Captcha/Captcha like may not be the way- but how about "same message to multiple groups in X time" causing the account to get blocked from sending group messages anywhere? That would slow down all kinds of spammers. Not only these begging bots- but the people who spam every group they are in with flickr links or links to their "magazine" or whatever garbage they are sending to 5 and 6 groups in a row.
How about another right for groups: "Can send URLs" that could be assigned to trusted titles within groups? Automatically prevent sending URLs for 30 days to new subscribers?
There are ways to slow them down, if LL only cared to.
This problem is further exacerbated by Linden Labs refusing to close or turn over groups to other members when they have been abandoned. There's no way to actually ban these bots from many of the groups they spam. If Linden Lab has banned the owners or the accounts are gone, they should be closed or turned over to others to operate. Platforms all over the internet do this. Linden Labs should look at how to implement this as part of an overall process to curtail these quality of life issues in SL.
Too bad that, it seems, support/quality of life isn't a priority for LL at the moment.
Zada Bury
About Beg-Bots and griefers, I made my groups "invite only". As there is no way to invite a resident trough a script-function (you can only send the link to make them self joining ... and there we are back at the start), I use (ironically) a Bot to doing the invites (and settings roles, too).
Solution/Option 1: A script-function to invite people and set different roles. so there would be a physical presence be needed to join a group. Disadvance: You need a physical presence inworld, too - it would not work for "land less" groups.
Solution 2: Faster banning by the support-team. If there comes a flood of messages with "Beg Bot" about "Resident X", it should with a quick-check be possible even by "the janitor" to hit a "on hold until the regular staff comes"-button to log the Spam-/Beg-Bot out and avoid further problems for "12 hours". (Would be also great for Phishing Links ...)
Captchas and so on are no a safe way. It might take just some months, the spammers solve that.
A setting like "resident must be 30 days to join this group" sounds tempting, but then the spammers will create an account and just let it wait for 30 days.
But "Ban for x days" from the group sounds like a good feature, beside of the base-issue.
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