Count the bots

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Traffic bots are a problem in Second Life that many people are talking about but nobody has really done anything about. One problem is it's hard to estimate exactly how big the problem is.

There are two big classes of bots. One, shown above, is a traffic bot. It's designed just to game the traffic statistics. You can put 30 or 40 of these 500m above your shop, and bam! you've got great traffic! Linden Lab now claims that traffic doesn't affect the new search rankings as much as it used to, so tactics like this aren't worth very much. But the traffic rankings still exist in the old search results, and they do have some effect in the new, so many people still resort to tricks like this.

Another bot is the camping bot. These exist to fill camping chairs. One person can run 30 bots on one machine, and camp in 30 locations at once, collecting 30 times as much money as a mere human. Again, camping is related to traffic, and for the same reasons above shouldn't be such a big deal -- but camping chairs still exist, and thus so do the bots.

User concurrency has been hovering around 65k these days, and that seems to be a hard limit. Any more users and the asset server collapses and transactions fail. So the real question is, how many of those users are bots, taking up resources the real people might otherwise have?

I have an idea for an experiment. Let's leave Second Life running, but close logins for an extended time -- say, twelve hours or so. Also, let's make it so that any time you try to teleport, you get logged out. After a while, all the real users will leave the grid, and the only accounts left will be avatars who just sit there, doing nothing at all. In other words, the bots.

Nobody would seriously suggest doing this experiment intentionally, but today it looks like Linden Lab has done it for me. Here's a chart of logins over the past 24 hours, courtesy of Tatuero Nino:

It looks like there's about ten thousand bots on the grid, give or take a few.


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