SLUniverse Forums

Sarah Nerd

Although originally I had big issues with bots in general, I've gotten used to them and now I even use one to do group invites for my freebie group and I use the bot from landmachine.com to manage/price/track/set up trees and displays for me. My issue is with the people that misuse them like this piece of shit stealing with them or people who put 20 up on a lot to increase traffic.

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Daman

Scripting has tons of uses, most of them legit.

And I guess I exaggerated in my post. It's just that every single time I hear bots mentioned it's negatively. It's hard to see really legit means.

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Brenda Connolly

The Bot Runner in question is a shit, no way around that. I won't go into whether bots are good or bad, I'm ambivalent mostly, they can be misused just like anything else.

The land sale interface is straightforward enough for me, I read all the boxes before clicking yes, and understand that selling to ANYBODY means just that. I don't know how many additional clickthroughs you can add, some people just won't read them all no matter how much hand holding or nanny stating we do. I don't think the various time delaying tactic are a good idea, they may just make the process bog down.

I will grant that those who don't speak English as a primary language may have difficulty. And that speaks to LL's shameful habit of not making essential knowledge to survive in SL readily available and up to date. They won't get involved and that is fine. Then they have a duty to see that we can access what we need to know when needed. They don't have to spoon feed us, but it should be in an accessible place. Land dealing being the biggest part of the economy dictates that there should be a comprehensive guide on an official LL space, not buried in some wiki or 3rd party site

Gigs

There are probably more people running legit bots than there are people running scammy land bots. It's just airplane syndrome, you only hear about them when they crash, not the millions of uneventful flights.

Daman

Yeah. You're right.

I just looked a bit into bots tonight. And apparently there are bots that do useful things. For example what Sarah described.

So you can consider my comment regarding all bots as retracted. I misjudged with that.

Colette Meiji

I don't know ..

Airplanes are not designed to crash.

Land Bots *are* designed to get land as cheap as possible as fast as possible.

Aodhan McDunnough

True for the good estate managers.

Unfortunately we have another set of horror stories regarding estate managers. Those would be estate managers who evict their tenants in violation of their original agreements. Also is the case of sim transfers and the new owner will not honor the previous rental agreements. The sum involved in a single contract breach can reach hundreds to thousands of US$.

The main problem with renting on private estate is the absence of a binding rental contract. All you have going for you is a trust contract. Whereas LL's land use rules for the mainland are fixed and published and you can only lose your rights if you're in serious violation of the TOS and CS.

Both land types have their problems and their benefits. I'm on the mainland because bots I can deal with but arbitrary and unscrupulous estate managers I cannot.

Re: Captcha
It's been proposed before and I do like it, but I think someone said captcha can be defeated. It still might help on a limited basis.

Re: Bots in general
Bots aren't the problem. It's the user.

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We can't get rid of Landbots but we can stop the damage.
VOTE this proposal on the Jira. Current votes: 71
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2905

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Aodhan McDunnough

Yep guys, 2905's my Jira posting regarding this matter. The features were a collaboration of about 8(?) of us here.

Tess Whitcroft

How about if you built in a restriction that you couldn't sell land below a certain price without selling it TO a specific avatar? The sell process just wouldn't activate for a sale below, for example, L$1 per sq meter (those of you who regularly buy and sell land I am sure could suggest a better price than my wild guess) unless a specific sell to avatar name was entered. No one would ever enter the name of any landbot in any transaction like that so that usefulness of predatory landbots would be pretty much zero.

Tess

Stormy Weeks

And yet Katt Linden is talking about potential permanent in-world bannings for breaches of forum etiquette.

Aodhan McDunnough

I like this. Only issue I see is if someone is really intending to open sell at giveaway prices.

reeneebob Birmingham

That's a tad over the top.

Colette Meiji

Thats been in for years. Since 2005


[/sarcasm on]
Basically it was Robin/Jeska/Pathfinder's brilliant solution to the "Prok Problem"
[/sarcasm off]

It allowed them to ban Prok from the official forums but not in-game and still appear on the surface to be lenient.

Of course that was back in the days when they felt they were also bound by the rules.

There are a lot of people who stopped posting on the official forums because of that issue. Its a pretty big threat to lose your access inworld / your virtual stuff/ your business just because of a Forums argument.

I am not sure how many times it has been enforced since 05 though. Can't be many. No permabans that I can remember anyway.

It is a stupid rule.

Tranquility

These people would be few and far between I imagine. Also, they probably would rather see the land goto someone with an ounce of dignity rather than some dumb predatory landbot. They can advertise on forums and no doubt will have a buyer within the hour.

Beezle Warburton

Hence likely to be arbitrarily enforced.

I think I'll just keep my argumentative self out of the main forums.

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Ordinal Malaprop

Forum bans are arbitrarily enforced as it is (not that this is very easy to get right, I am aware - I do moderate forums myself). Tying it to inworld banning is and always has been madness, and I'm sure results in people not being banned from the forums who really should be, as the added punishment is considered too harsh. Particularly for a permanent ban.

But speaking personally I am just not interested in the official forums until they fix the software. It has been over a year now and there is absolutely no excuse for them not to have done it. Every time I think about the matter it feels as if I have been paid a visit by SlapInTheFace Linden.

caroline ra

I had to stop posting there. I tend to write as if I were speaking. Although I dont have a limited vocabulary I still like to sprinkle my speech with various profanities. This forum is more tolerant of the minority of us who, while not exactly suffering from tourettes, do love to fucking swear.

Cocoanut Koala

One of the things it does is keep people who have something to lose - in other words, thoughtful and contributing and possibly long-term residents - from feeling they can use the forums without having to walk on eggshells.

Because they HAVE so much to lose.

And as Desmond pointed out, everybody is going to have a bad day and say things they regret, "even if it takes years," he says.

Whereas any jerk with nothing to lose can say whatever he wants, and what does he care?

Result: More people talking who have nothing to lose who don't care; fewer thoughtful people talking who have more experience and investment in SL (including those who have built businesses in-world), and might have a lot of worthwhile things to add.

End Result: A gradual but real dumbing down.

coco

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Khamon

Another option is to add a "Sell to Public" box that must be intentionally checked in order for the parcel to appear for sale in Find and on the map.

Or add a "Sell to Me Only" box that people would easily see and check if that's what they were meaning to do. It could even be default checked so that a seller would have to uncheck it to make the sale publicly available.

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Brenda Connolly

Fixed:

To be truthful, I don't see it as much more than the usual Linden legacy of unfufilled promises. Update the software. Now, and maybe that will show me they actually do give a shit. Otherwise, I think that place will either just lumber along until it implodes, or LL will act, and turn the place into the sterile, dry techno forum the elitists over there want,

Beebo Brink

There is at least one valid reason for setting land for sale at below-market rate and that's to unload it quickly before being hit with another tier fee. The tier you pay in waiting days or weeks or longer for a land parcel to sell on the open market may be more than you would lose selling at a bargain price. And sometimes people choose to liquidate quickly and leave SL, or for pressing RL reasons must leave quickly. Dumping to a land bot is one way to recover at least a portion of your land investement instead of abandoning the land to LL at a complete loss.

Given how low the recent land prices have dropped, is it feasible for LL to set some arbitrary limit for a prohibited land price? Guaranteed, if someone tries to list their land at L$1/m for sale to anybody, and the system won't let them do it, they'll just bump it up to L$2 or L$3 without stopping to think why. If they can bypass the "Sell to" option when they know exactly who the buyer is, they'll bypass the price limit too.

I applaud the effort to find solutions to this user error, but this particular solution doesn't thrill me.

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