Just open your Search window and type in Sex, Strippers, Whore, or just about anything related to sex because a majority of the bot farm owners have these key words listed. Soon you should start to see the bot farms by the hundreds. They are truly everywhere people. Look around.

I do not have a financial stake (I wish I did), I am just a person who has seen so many sl bots that it would make your head spin, and I also am annoyed by the problem and wish to contribute to a solution to the problem. I feel that after you spend a certain amount of time in sl, you start to really get a sense of just how many bots are around you at any given time.

I am also not trying to sensationalize anything, I am just the type of person who receives a piece of e-mail spam and immediately contacts the ISP for resolution, as I believe e-mail spam is a very bad problem, and for sl, I believe the bots problem is also a very bad one that needs to be addressed. It’s really no big deal and I can’t understand why you seem so upset by this type of conversation.

I also do not think it is fair for a company to allow overinflated traffic numbers to go unchecked. It is just dishonest in my opinion and so I can completely understand when I meet people who feel that the bot problem needs to be addressed sooner than later.

Please see my earlier comment regarding the number of bot farms required to hold enough bots to comprise 40-50% of the online resident population. With 70,000 residents online, 40-50% would mean 28,000-35,000 bots. That’s 560-700 50-bot farms. So no, showing me 20 or 30 or 40 of those 50-bot farms wouldn’t really impress me much. It might imply that bots are a problem, but it would do nothing to actually demonstrate a 40-50% prevalence.

Are there really 560-700 50-bot farms on the grid? I have yet to see evidence that this is the case. You *really* need to learn more about statistics before you go about any project like this, because otherwise you will just be wasting your time….that is, if you really want to get an accurate count of the prevalence of bots on the grid. If, on the other hand, you simply wish to find some hyperinflated bot count to back up a pre-existing concern….for example, a way to write sensationalistic Herald stories, or a way to try to convince people to switch to an OpenSim-type grid in which you have a financial stake, then by all means, go ahead.

But if you actually want intelligent, rational people to take your 40-50% prevalence seriously, you might want to gather real data. You seem to believe this number, but you don’t seem to understand that many of us value data and evidence over belief.

So any bot information that can be found, does in fact, belong right here, in this forum. Why would you think it would not belong in this forum? It would seem to me, that your antics do not belong in this forum, as you seem rather unprofessional to me. That’s just my opinion of you from your rancid postings.

Your comments lead me to believe that you haven’t really seen a 50+ person bot farm yet. If I were to post say…20 or 30 or 40 high population bot farm links, would that be considered proof for you that bots are a problem or not? Or would you just throw that into your statistics analyzer and say it doesn’t mean anything, and stick by your little measly 10-15% bot pop estimate, which in my opinion, is ridiculously low and uninformed.

Because, I have thought of doing just that, starting a site with worldwide translation for bot hunters with the help of this site:

http://www.slinfo.de/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=16939&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=240

If you can translate, perhaps you may get a better understanding on the issue. We need to have a site like that one with english translation. Once that occurs, then everyone can see the true bot numbers. Until that happens, we can only guess at the numbers.

I asked you nicely not to fill this forum with the taint of “Linden Lab” now please Shut the Fuck up and shovel your Bullshit on the Linden Blog, XStreetLL or at your office hours where I am sure you can find avatars to kiss your ass so hard they can tell us all what you ate for lunch.

Show me the evidence, not your paranoid delusional fantasies.

If you pick a random location on the sl map, regardless of the number of dots you see (many, or even just a couple), and just go to any of the locations, you will start to see the bots in a vast majority of the places. Even if you do not look for the sims with the larger numbers, and just randomly pick any sims from anywhere on the map at any time of the day, you will start to find that a great percentage of those numbers are due to bot traffic.

You see, I spend quite a bit of time in sl (sad I know), and after a while, you can sort of determine a pattern. If every single time you go somewhere in sl, and you walk around and you notice more bots than humans everywhere you go, that has to tell you that the bot concentration is somewhat high. And yes, you could throw in your example of everywhere you go as being an unfair sample because I of course go to different places than others, however, the fact still remains that there are a great number of bots in many different locations.

And they aren’t always limited to the statistic of a sim with many dots, although, as you point out, a sim with many dots, has one of the highest concentrations of bots. This alone is a major, major problem of deception.

This problem alone causes many, many people to become frustrated with sl. Many, many complaints of sl are related to persons who just want to open up the sl map, dive right into a large group of real people and just start talking.

Well, unfortunately, almost every large group of people on the sl map, is more than likely going to be nothing more than a bot farm.

And we really aren’t even talking about the number of simowners who leave their avatars online 24/7. And those are the sims that might just have 1 dot on them, but many, many sim owners do this. Those are the sim owners who don’t take the time to create bots, but nevertheless, enjoy leaving their own avatar on their own land all the time.

And then, you have campers.

Campers, should truly be listed as bots, as campers are a form of a temporary bot.

When you leave your avatar behind on the sl grid, it shows up on the map and it inflates the traffic numbers.

This should not be tolerated, but at present, it is. You should not be able to inflate the traffic numbers in this manner. Camping should not be allowed, and between campers, and bot farms, and sim owners who leave their avatars behind on their own sims 24/7, you start to see that this extra traffic inflation really starts to make people wonder about the numbers on the grid at any given time.

You start to ask yourself, why is this deception tolerated?

You already know the lab is just a company making money and you know they are leaving the numbers inflated in these many different manners to make more money.

Unfortunately, the consumer in this case, is being spammed. If you could eliminate the extra traffic above that doesn’t belong in the game, you would see that the numbers are overly inflated. Until these problems are addressed, you will never get a fair number for traffic results, but honestly, what does your gut tell you on this one?

If your gut instinct tells you that the number of bots is insignificant, than so be it, that is your choice to make.

I choose to believe from my personal experiences on the grid that the number of bots is massive because it affects my gameplay every single minute I spend inworld. I can not go anywhere without coming across bots, or campers, or simowner left behind avatars. I see them far more than I see real people no matter where I go. This can NOT be a coincidence. It simply can not be.

The reason is bots, campers, and sim-owner left behind avatars.

All three of these items need to be removed from sl before we can get ANY sort of real traffic numbers in the game.

Until this happens, we will always have people doubting the very high numbers of inactive green dots on the maps, and we will always have users getting spammed by bots, campers, and sim-owner left behind avatars. (apologies for not remembering the term for sim-owner left behind avatars).

Lindens, please, please, fix the bot and camper problems with sl. We are tired of being lied to and we are sick of spam. thank you

Obviously any location with lots of bots will have lots of green dots. So if you teleport to a location with lots of green dots, there is clearly a higher chance of finding a bot farm than if you teleport to a location with only a few dots. Nobody is disagreeing with you over the actual question of whether teleporting to a high-traffic location is likely to result in finding bots (although it is important to note that there are many high-traffic locations that don’t use bots as well).

However, this doesn’t give you any real sort of statistical sampling, because you are getting a sample of only one specific situation: a region with a high number of avatars.

If you look at the map, these regions are not very common. Thus if you base your statistical sampling mainly on those regions with many avatars, you are badly skewing your data.

The regions with only a few avatars greatly outnumber the number of regions with many avatars. If you are looking to model statistically the spread of avatars on the grid, you would want to be careful to make sure that the sampling of regions that you visit is representative of the grid as a whole. A statistical sampling strategy that seeks out places where the variable that you are testing is most likely to be found is a poor sampling strategy for reasons so obvious that anyone should be able to grasp.

Here’s a better little experiment: Let’s work backwards from your assumption that the grid is 40-50% bots. Let’s say that most of these bots are found on these bot farms with large numbers of bots crammed together. There are currently 70,000 residents logged on. If 40-50% are bots, then this means that there are 28,000-35,000 bots online at the moment. That’s a lot of bots. Even with 100-av bot farms, you would still need 280-350 of these 100-person regions. Pull up the map, do you see 280-350 100-av regions?

Or let’s be more conservative, let’s say that these bot farmers use 50-person bot farms on their regions. Then we’re looking at 560-700 50-person regions. Again, this is far more than you see on the map. The green dots on the map are spread out in a pattern that does not suggest 28,000-35,000 bots on the grid.

Please, when you do finally graduate high school and go off to college, sign up for one of the basic stats courses.

Many of those dots are bots. And in my travels, I would argue that 50% of the dots I see on the map, always turn out to be bots.

You however, will not notice the same thing until you actually attempt to locate the bots in the sims. Which, you either have not done, or for some reason, you like to be blinded by what the Lindens tell you about bot traffic.