Do you want Mayonnaise with your “Can’t login”, Madam?
A friend of mine, Nuschi Martynov, Author of the book “Mit dem Bus durch Second Life” (and some other, more RL centric guidebook^^) recently started a highly interesting campain for getting a better number of how many bots there are in SL, how this affects the statistics of SL users, and how it distorts the traffic data, one of the main factors of the SL search ranking.
The idea is simple, but the outcome will be zuper interesting: Just draw some random, imaginary, horizontal row over the whole grid. Slowly move your mouse along that line: You’ll see the number of Avies currently on the particular sims, and you see the green dots of their approximate positions. Whenever you see a uncommon heap of green dots, teleport there, and try to find out, if it’s a colony of traffic bots, a camper community, or a way cool partay. (The latter could be the most time consuming part of this task^^) Divide the found number of actual colony bots by the sum of avies, found in-a-row, and multiply by 100.
Voila, you have a fair estimate of the percentage of bots that are used for unfair traffic manipulations.
Please note, that this method doesn’t take into account all the people playing with bots. It just counts the mass bot herds, that are usually used to push the traffic of a sim or parcel. (I’m not against bots, they are a proper tool for content creation in Second Life. In fact, in fall 2007, I put up an art installation, using 4 bots, depicting the leaders of the german ZKM, Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe, who are fighting in a boxing ring, while answering philosophic questions!^^)
But: Mass Traffic Bot herds are a scum, nothing more. They spoil the search, lie to parcel buyers, and use up valuable simulator time on our grid. Google (RL) has taken complicated measures to get rid of the click farm scum, that was trying to fake their Ranking Algorithm, and I’d be happy to see a similar action in Second Life, the sooner, the better.
Oh, that brings me back to my subject line: There was a recent incident, that Linden Lab limited the users that still could log in in times of asset trouble to the “premium” account owners. Just for some minutes, hey, but that was enough to be recognized by many people. And then, there was this stuff today, “too many concurrent logins, please try later” (or so, read the sign).
Why not, I beg to ask, reserve the logins for the users that have payment info activated? Not the premium users, that is really not enough to fill 17000 sims, *haha*, and please not the proposed “business users“, M Linden was talking about in the latest Focus interview. But there are lots of freebie accounts that still actively participate in the building, scripting, shopping prosumer scene of SL. Lots of the active users, premium or not, have “payment info used” in their profile. Having the payment info activated doesn’t mean you ever pay any money to LL, it just means, that you have authenticated with some piece of your RL identity (Credit card or Paypal). And what’s more: None of the traffic fraud bots have that feature.
Why? The answer is simple. LL allow you to have one free alt per user, in case you are a premium. So if you want to run a bot farm, just pay $9,95 per additional alt, no problem. That’s USD 388.05 for your 40 bots traffic shaper, thank you, Ma’m.
Do you really think, all these puddles of green are paid 400 bucks cash legal alt accounts? No? I don’t think so either. Just set up another yahu/gmill/hotmill/wob/shootme.com-Mailaccount, and get through the newbies procedure on faithful http://secondlife.com/join, to get another free basic account, no questions asked. Hey, 400 bucks saved, and your “traffic” up the metal in one afternoon, cool. Ach so? That’s against the rules? And it’s disturbing the sim ressources, while real people are anxiously waiting to login? Yes, that’s the point, exactly.
So. Next time, the grid is having troubles, would you want to disable logins for the Newbie users, that haven’t yet decided to stay in SL, the Anonymouses, that defer any unnessecary personal data to Linden Lab™, and the millions of bots, clogging our sims?
Hmmm… Nuschi wouldn’t be online then. And thousands of asian and south american users, where it’s not standard to have a fancy bank account. Hmmm… Oh, next item: What happened to age verification??
