Ughhh, 10, 20, 50 bots!?!?

That's just plain stupid

I've got WAY better use for my bandwidth, opensim for instance

What really bothers me about this, bottom line, is that because I have a bot (just one as i mentioned before, and NOT to inflate traffic metrics either), you and many others would blacklist my sim as being a bad place, and it's not, sure I use a bot to make my rental boxes easier for the users experience for group invitation upon rental, I have also used other services for this, but they cost too much, I guess I have to agree to a point that trying to use them for traffic metric inflation is shady at best, and to be honest it would take hundreds of them to even make a real difference as far as that goes so it's really not as big of an issue as it would seem as far as ranking. I'm just sick and tired of being targeted for using such a simple thing.

Bent

First off, if your trusting an IP address to match to a user name, that's really kinda lame for a couple of reasons,

1. They aren't always static, however in my case it is.

2. More than one person can access the internet from the same address, you know, there's these cool things called routers and switches and hubs, which is also my case as with most people.

So therefore, stop calling me Abella Beck, if you wanted my inworld name you could have just asked, it's Bent Melody, I'm partnered with Abella Beck, we spend time in RL together (yes I have a RL too). Soooo, an apology to her is in order, she may not share my opinion on the subject. And i am not trying to insult YOU, just the whiners that continually cry about the use of bots in Second Life that insist on trying to insult the people that use them for ANY reason.

I personally use one to automate group invitations and to scan my sims for copy bots, which it does very well. They are also useful in other security modes. Bots are NOT against the TOS, excerpt from the official TOS:

"There are many amazing and useful ways to use Bots and the fact that in some circumstances they can be misused should not impact the more constructive users of Bots. We wouldn't remove Scripting because it can sometimes be used in bad ways, and Bots are no different in that respect."

The whining really begins with creators and shop owners claiming that the bots drive traffic to their competition, once again here I must point out that the same tools are available to marketing a produt on the internet, search engine optimization, push the rankings up, show higher traffic numbers, sell more product. This is the way business is done, not my choice, but simply the way it's done. Same goes for television advertising as i've said, buy the better time slot, reach more people, make it look like you're the busy company, equals more sales.

And lastly, the only real lag a bot causes is if it has loads of attachments, after all it's nothing more than an avatar, most are much less loaded down than what a real user has attached. No sorry, scripts are the real lag generators as you can plainly see even in the simple tools the viewer has built in, an avatar only causes momentary lag upon entering the sim, a script on the other hand (especially one that listens a lot or is noisy) causes a lot of lag and almost at a constant rate. Particles also give the illusion of lag at the client side, as the viewer has to draw and update all the particle positions, again its really an illusion as the script itself is not the real culprit. So maybe we should test a bot against a script and post the true result?

Again, my apologies if you thought I was insulting you, that is not the case, and your input is appreciated.