Reply to comment

I remember when Alta Vista happened to the Web. I remember being somewhat shocked to see how easy it was to find my web pages, when the practice of the time was to send those URLs by email, word-of-mouth, and by listing them on the portals that had started popping up just the the year before. I remember having felt somewhat uncomfortable with the idea, at first. OMG!!! People could find me just by searching for my name! That was a total loss of control over disclosure of my Web content. The advantages soon proved to outweigh the disadvantages by several orders of magnitude, so I got over it pretty fast, and so did everyone else.

By that time, a group of people had devised the robots.txt protocol, which may or may not be honored by web crawlers, but at least it's a nice thing to have. No such thing in SL yet. I hope our work with SLBrowser will prompt the creation of a similar protocol for SL sims. If any techno-weenies out there would like to start talking about it, let's do it like the robottxt group did -- voluntarily, by consensus, and without any standards body. It would be nice if this was made at the server level, but it really doesn't have to be there, it can be at the applications level -- for example, an object in the parcel called "NoBots Please." Our crawlers will get the message; hopefully other bots also will.

(In case you're wondering, the way the servers work, it's not enough to place our bots in the "ban" list of the parcels. The bots can stand outside the parcels and "see" some of the objects inside. So we really need a protocol here that means "even if you see the objects in this parcel, please ignore them.")