Gratuitous use of bots boost traffic
Coffee Pancake
Why are regions allowed to host dozens upon dozens of bot accounts to fake traffic scores when such behavior is clearly against ToS.
Some sims are almost at the avatar cap before a single real person has arrived with fields of fake accounts on skyplatforms and in hidden locations, all day, all night, day in, day out.
They are obviously not marked as scripted agents as the regions in question have astronomical traffic ratings yet not an actual soul in sight.
Is there some secret rule that regions owners are allowed to do this?
I will not show locations or name names. But this behavior is so endemic, I would be happy to give any Linden a guided tour of the worst offenders.
This phenomenon is actively harming the platform. When the busy places are ghost towns with faked numbers, the only conclusion anyone can come to is that Second Life is dead.
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Otoa Kiyori
I got an idea from this feed back and comments... behavior-based bot detection/activity scoring! 💡
The automated agent flag is only used by bot owners who like to use their bots for legitimate reasons with openness. I believe many bots do not want to follow the automated agent flag rules anyway (even though TOS mandates it and the AR category is in place) So simple avatar count is not a reliable or pragmatic indicator of activities
The behavior patterns of the bots are pretty clear (for now), and practically idle AFKers, IM-only people or look-around-only visitors are pretty much not contributing to the "activity" of the area just like bots anyways (thank you for the idea for a new experiment guys!)
primerib1 Resident
- Reports of "bots not marked as bots" need to be taken care of consistently, as it is against TOS
- There should be a cap to the max number of bots per region. Probably can be related to the size of parcels owned in that region.
- Non-bot avatars should always take priority: If a region is filled up by lots of bots, the next avatar entering should be allowed (temporarily exceeding max region capacity), but one of the bots must be kicked out.
3a. Conversely, if a bot tries to enter an already-full region, said bot must be blocked. If the bot keeps trying, beyond a certain threshold (say, 4 attempts the past 300 seconds) the bot must be forced into "cooldown box" and not allowed to TP at all for a certain time; if the bot keeps violating this, the cooldown time should be extended exponentially (1min, then 2 mins, then 4 mins, then 8 mins, and so on). The penalty gets reduced to a lower tier (e.g. from 32 mins cooldown to 16 mins) once per 24h unless the bot violates the limit again.
Philip Linden
Agree this is a real problem, and that we would be much better off if fixed. Coffee Pancake I’ll take you up on a tour if you want to give me one.
What if there was a very easy way to report “suspected bot” which was handled by initiating a chat conversation / Turing test with the bot? Those not answering (and not marked as scripted agents) could be kicked or traffic removed, etc.
Fish TopHat
Philip Linden A good starting point is the top regions on the destination guide. I know for a fact places like London City have dozens of traffic bots all over the sky.
I just went there at 6:30pm SLT on the 15th and there are 37 traffic bots on the sim
chrixbed Resident
There is a simple setting on an avatar account to declare it as a scripted agent. When you enable this setting, the traffic is not calculated, and people are informed that the avatar is a bot. For me, using bots is a fun way to have NPCs on a sim and add variety and interaction with other avatars. However, if bots are used to artificially boost traffic or deceive people, that is a concern and should be reported to Linden.
RestrainedRaptor Resident
I'm very concerned to hear that people are reporting these bots and nothing's being done. Do we need to write up another exposé article on Medium\.com before they listen?
Zy Butcher
The secret is that people are not reporting it and LL is not taking any action, I saw a RP sim at the top traffic of its tag with about a dozen bots. I reported them, while I was doing it the sim owner asked me what I was doing in their land and banned me when I asked him if they were bots. No action was taken. This happened 2 weeks ago.
What it means to my RP community is that there are new places coming up every month and they go unnoticed because of bots, intensifying the feeling that “the community is dead”.
Darien Caldwell
Scripted agents have to be designated as such in their account settings, which means they don't count against traffic. If they have bots but aren't designating them as bots, that's against the TOS. Simply report them.
Paul Hexem
Darien Caldwell Of course, when enforcement is slow or nonresponsive...
Coffee Pancake
Darien Caldwell Amazing, I'm sure we haven't been doing this for at least a decade now.
Spooky Shadow
Many clubs, like a certain 80's club for example, use multiple bots to pretend they have traffic. It is cheating. They are also on the mainland so they are taking up avatar slots of other parcel owners in the region. Down with traffic bots!
Dana Enyo
Bots could be totally banned from SL and I would be a very happy camper. Once upon a time, in trying to explain SL to an outsider, I could say that--unlike video games--behind every avatar was a real, human person. Bots have totally blown up that idea, and we are poorer for it.
Coffee Pancake
Dana Enyo This was a huge part of the hook that had me in the start.
Every avatar was another user.
Everything was made by another user.
Kuuko Shan
It happens even in newcomers friendly zones. One of the top ones, Japan Hiroba, it's filled with bots just to be in the recommended areas for newcomers. The worst of all is that they don't actually offer a service to help new members. They use a chat relay to spy what you say (which is against the TOS too) and if you mention that there are bots, they treats you with being banned from there. It's crazy and I am not even sure what's the whole point of all that...
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