Bots and Land and Violence Oh My

Bots and the adult continent will be the feature of this blog. I may for the sake of brevity not make total sense, we can thrash that out in the comments if you feel the need.

There's almost a discussion going on over on the new blog about the issue of bots. They're trying out a new feature over there that doesn't quite seem to have worked but give them time, new toys often have teething problems.

Part of this discussion is covering camping bots, now I'm not a big fan of traffic, I see nothing better to replace so I don't want it scrapped but there are so many variables as to what generates traffic. I'd support Linden Lab saying they'll outlaw the use of traffic bots, but I'm not so sure that outlawing genuine camping is a good idea.

The same as I don't see the issue with some models in a store, some are model bots, but others are genuine and act as store staff. However traffic bots, genuine campers, model bots or genuine models all have the same result, they inflate traffic. Personally I think we should just accept there will be some inflation in these situations and go after the bots. Bots don't add a whole lot to the world as a whole whereas the model or camper being paid are likely to recycle the money. That's the distinction that should be made.

The problem however is how do you draw that distinction? Sure a bot farm in the sky is easy to spot now, but if you ban those surely bots will just become more intelligent. There's no easy fix here but I think if LL simply say that the use of traffic bots is outlawed then those using the funkier practices run the risk of having their accounts banned.

This of course isn't a perfect solution but no traffic solution will be, it's not as if searching based on relevancy doesn't have its own problems so the balance between the two searches should be kept, that gives us choice and we can each use the search mechanism we prefer. Long term I'd like to see more options for the person performing the search but for now I don't think anything too radical will help.

Last night I attended Blondin Linden's office hour, there was something very odd about this. Blondin has a touch of the Jumpman Lane's about him, last night Jumpman Lane actually arrived: 

They even complimented each other on their T-Shirts even if they didn't agree on policy!

Not much progress was made here. Linden Lab are trying too hard to define things that can't be defined. They need to listen to their residents on this, setup the adult continent, allow people to voluntarily swap land, setup a PG continent, allow people to voluntarily swap land and take it from there.

You simply cannot define this adult content, for example last night the view from some was that stripping was adult content, but then nude beaches aren't. Stripping is not extreme adult content, it never will be, some even see it as a performance art. Right there we have a problem.

What on earth is the point? The forced migration is not a good policy and Linden Lab seriously need to nip this nonsense in the bud and allow the continent to grow organically.

One piece of better news was that it would appear that on estates it will be a region level flag. This is a much better solution than an estate level flag but is still going to lead to problems.

A sim that has 80% PG content and 20% adult content won't want to flag as adult, however where do the 20% go then? How about the hit on earnings on the estate owner? Linden Lab are creating a huge mess here which can be easily avoided with a common sense policy, in the case of a region flagging the 20% as mature content would be a good start and then give us the tools to block access to those parcels for non verifieds.

The better solutions, the solutions that suit the community and inworld business are staring Linden Lab in the face but they don't want to engage with us on these policies. A PR exercise like this could badly backfire. Linden Lab talk to us, not at us, and listen to us, we want to help you to make this work.