New World Notes

Visits to Controversial Bonnie Bots Website Displaying SL User Data Drops to 26K Per Month -- Likely ~5000 Unique Visitors

Here's an interesting footnote to the story of Bonnie Bots, the web site that collects and displays Second Life user data gleaned from in-world bots -- a practice so controversial and provoking so much outrage, Linden Lab had several internal conversations and debates about it, posted a new policy statement, and even added new tools for landowners to block bots.

Hardly anyone has actually ever visited the site. And even less so since the controversy began.

 

SL Customers Can & Should Convince Merchants to Optimize Their Mesh Content! (Comment of the Week)

If it's true that some SL merchants create poorly optimized mesh items to satisfy customer demand for "more detail", reader Chic Aeon makes the point that the opposite is also true -- that customers can make their preference for better optimized content known to to merchants:

There ARE designers who make outstanding items that are STILL triangle friendly and look just as good as the heavy mesh items.

From what I have seen the problem is twofold, and hence I don't disagree with the idea is sometimes choices made are just about sales. For SOME anyway.

For others? They really don't know or understand and there may be some "lazy" folks along the way because it does take more work to get "the look" and also the low triangle count.

For an instance -- with no names used -- last year on the main furniture posting spot on the SL forums, many of us were complaining about the OH SO HIGH triangle count of some creators -- one very popular creator in particular. I LOVED the items but the vertices numbers were heart stopping.

Chic and others started explaining on the SL Forum why excessive vertices were causing them a coronary:

Second Life Creators Sell Poorly-Optimized Mesh to Satisfy Customer Demand (Comment of the Week)

Pretty amazing reader debate around my interview with professional game artist Penny Patton, who pointed out the problems with poorly optimized mesh items being sold in Second Life, and how to solve them. (That one shirt above, as I noted, has way more triangles than Kratos in God of War on the PlayStation 4.)

Reader "Seph" makes the interesting argument that creators are creating triangle-heavy products to please consumers:

Customers buy products that look great, regardless of what it does to their performance. If they preferred performance, I guarantee creators would be selling performance.

Linden Lab rolling out PBR and some better lighting features will help creators rely on more modern material maps and rendering instead of mesh density. More modernizing of Second Life's graphics engine and content creation pipeline will help more.

In the meantime, no creator is doing this to sell less but make performance floater watchers happy. Penny can keep calling them ignorant and lazy, but making customers happy is anything but.

I don't think Penny said either of those things, but I can see how customers might demand massive amounts of triangles, even though it actually does nothing for graphics quality -- similar to how in the US, there's a market for huge SUVs with impressive grilles, even though they actually do nothing for driving quality. (And in both cases, they harm the environment for the respective world they're in.)

Seph's expanded comments help explain why mesh creators are making the equivalent of  Cadillac Escalades for Second Life's fashion crowd:

Linden Lab Adds Bot-Blocking Tools for SL Landowners, Carefully-Worded Policy Warning SL Data Collectors; Bonnie Bots Replies With Curious Meme

Several months after Bonnie Bots brought enormous Sturm und Drang to the Second Life community, Linden Lab has added tools for landowners to block bots from their property -- and posted a warning to collectors of Second Life user data like, well, Bonnie Bots.

The updated tool is "deny_bots", and as that suggests, when the setting for that is switched to On, "all scripted agents that are not explicitly listed in the estate’s Allowed Access list will be denied access to all of the regions within the Estate."

As for the warning, it's available here in Linden Lab's Scripted Agent Policy.

"Read this before considering collecting data in SL for use outside of SL," as Linden Lab Infosec head Soft Linden put it warningly, "or if you are a resident who wants to understand and assert your rights regarding third-party sites and tools."

Tyche Shepherd (pictured), who uses bots to gather data for her much-read Grid Survey land analytics site, has an ambivalent reaction to this change.

"I’m surprised it's taken this long," she tells me. "Scripted agent settings were introduced in 2009. In some ways its a shame but I fully understand why the Lab has introduced the ability to block access, though it may have been more flexible to allow or block at the region level rather than estate. Personally it doesn’t impact my Grid Survey weekly online region surveys, as these don’t require physical visits." However, she adds, it does prevent her from doing sampling surveys she once conducted.

The wording of the Scripted Agent Policy is curious. It represents Linden Lab's "policy" on bots and data collection, but is also somewhat toothless. It states that using bots to artificially boost traffic is against the company's TOS:

Second Life Still Struggling With a Crisis of Poorly-Optimized User-Made Mesh Items -- But a Pro Game Artist Has Some Solutions

Above: A single Second Life fashion item with nearly 50,000 triangles (Courtesy Penny Patton)

Longtime SLer and professional game artist Penny Patton recently bought a Second Life shirt and then saw something that shocked her. That one mesh item (see above) had nearly 50,000 triangles.

As a point of comparison, characters in AAA console games with high end graphics rarely have this many triangle. The ultrarealistic lead character in God of War, for instance, has on the PlayStation 4 version only has 32,000 total triangles. For the entire character and their clothing items, while looking even more detailed than that one Second Life shirt. (Click Kratos at right to see.) 

But when Penny contacted the creator of this shirt in Second Life, she got an interesting response: 

"They informed me that they could not reduce this because it results in a 'decrease in quality'.

"The [shirt has] 11 faces. Each face has three maps. Diffuse, Specular, and Normal. It's even worse because the specular actually only uses one map, a black 1024x1024 texture that was uploaded 11 times instead of reusing the one.

"It's absurd. It's also, sadly, common in SL these days.

"This is why SL needs hard caps on avatar resource use."

It's not only common, it's an ongoing problem, and hasn't really been sufficiently addressed. As a former Linden Lab staffer told me about poorly optimized mesh, "These items are effectively DDOS attacks on everyone around them." 

Five years ago, we pointed out that most of the top-selling mesh bodies in SL are poorly optimized, and have even more triangles -- 200,000 or more. (Penny has also been writing about the issue on her own blog for years,)

Fortunately there are ways Linden Lab can address the issue head-on. 

"I really want to stress there is not one thing Linden Lab should do to fix a problem like this," Penny tells me. "There's no 'silver bullet' solution that will fix the problem and make everyone happy."

That said, here's the solutions she recommends:

Linden Lab Continues Shifting Second Life Economy Base With New Tier Discounts/Transaction Fee Increase

Linden Lab just announced a new pricing deal that's great if you're a landowner, but something of a hard pill if you transact in Linden Dollars quite a bit:

In recognition of our upcoming 20th anniversary, we are making additional changes to land ownership to enable Second Life communities - great and small: Dropping the monthly price of Full Regions by $20 for our 20th anniversary – effective immediately, Full Regions are now $209/mo.

[We're also a]ccepting Linden Dollars for land payments - a convenient new option for Premium Plus members. If you are a creator earning L$ inworld, you now won’t have to sell on the LindeX to pay for your region!

... We decided to absorb many of the costs and distribute some by making a change to Linden Dollar buy and sell fees. Effective today, we are changing LindeX fees as follows: Increasing the buy fee to 10% with a minimum fee of $1.49 and a maximum fee of $14.99USD per transaction Increasing the sell fee to 5%.

Emphasis mine on the key point: This is yet another nudge to get SL users to sign up for a Premium Plus, as the company slowly moves the Second Life economy away from virtual land as the company's key revenue source, toward monthly subscriptions and transaction fees.

Unsurprisingly (as this Reddit thread attests), some people who don't own SL land are pretty pissed:

 

Bonnie Bots Update: Avatar Search Function Removed from Website After Discussion With Linden Lab; Expect More Updates Soon

Here's the latest update to Bonnie Bots, the data-hoovering bots which collect publicly available Second Life user information and publish it to the web:

The website no longer has the Avatar Search function, a feature which caused the most controversy and contention among the SL community.

This removal comes after the Bonnie Bots team had yet another conversation with Linden Lab. However, this reportedly wasn't done due to any policy violation:

"Linden Lab has never required us to make any changes to the website," as spokesperson Skyler Pancake tells me. "Suggestions have been made by Linden Lab which have provided additional insight, but any changes made have been decided by our team internally."

This is hardly the last word in this saga, however. In response to the user protest, Linden Lab just posted (a few hours ago) an update on the official blog:

Why Bonnie Bots Attract Backlash Across Second Life, While Grid Survey Bots Do Not: Tyche's Take

Pictured: Tyche with one of her data-collecting bots

As we watch the controversy over Bonnie Bots roil in angry comments across the Second Life media ecosystem, I've been curious about a mysterious discrepancy:

Grid Survey has been using bots to collect and display Second Life sim and user data for well over 10 years. Run by Tyche Shepherd, it's attracted very little controversy among the community; indeed, many SLers eagerly await her regularly summation of the latest data on community forums.

Why so much appreciation for Grid Survey, and so much outrage over Bonnie Bots?

"I think its a matter of perceptions," Tyche tells me. "From very early on when I started the project, I realized there was a lot more data I could collect including avatar information, but I really didn't want to collect things which were not required for the main task, which in my case, was measuring and monitoring the size of the grid."

Another reason might be that the Bonnie Bots don't look like "bots", and from a distance, look like a standard fashionista avatar. That's led some to fear that Bonnie is an alt "spying" on them.

"Ah an Uncanny Valley hypothesis," Tyche says, when I suggest this idea. "It's probably more the frequency of visiting -- I'm sure a lot of observations are just records in Visitor Lists."

That's another big difference -- Bonnie Bot visits are seriously incessant, compared to Tyche's bots:

 

Bonnie Bots, Explained: Team Behind Controversial Second Life Data Tracker Respond to Feedback, Also Notes: We're Hardly the Only Ones Collecting Public Avatar Data

Last night I teleported to a cozy patio with a firepit on a tiny asteroid to talk with the team of Bonnie Bots, the little Second Life user data website causing enormous controversy across the Second Life community. Since the imbroglio flared up, they have updated the site's homepage with this disclosure:

 

Information about Second Life should be freely accessible by all. We intend to make previously obscured information available to all residents, enable open use of the information, and expand available toolsets to further content creation.  All information collected and made available is publicly accessible and is not, and never will be, utilized for any monetary gain. We support individual privacy and will never attempt to obtain information not contained within or relevant to Second Life.

 

"We understand there are people upset about us releasing our data publicly," as team spokesperson Skyler Pancake explains. "However, people need to understand there are individuals and groups collecting this data secretly. Anyone with a little effort can easily collect this information and include it in seemingly harmless objects. The concern shouldn't be over us releasing this information publicly but who else is privately maintaining such databases and not informing anyone."

 

As the team and I chatted on the asteroid, one of the Bonnie Bots itself primly sat in silence. They warned me to take a picture of her quickly, because she was programmed to go back on her rounds across the Second Life grid soon.

 

While the Bonnie Bots team has bore the brunt of this controversy, they wanted to make it clear that they are hardly the only people collecting data on Second Life users -- and how much is already publicly accessible for people to collect off them:

 

 

BREAKING: Bonnie Bots Team Meets With Linden Lab, Promises Opt-Out & Masking Features for Second Life Users

Above: Patch Linden (speaking) with some of the Bonnie Bots dev team (photo courtesy Bonnie Belle)

 

Most everyone involved with Second Life has been avidly talking for days about BonnieBots, a new website tracking genuine Second Life activity, with many SLers enthusing over the depth and value of this data, and others alleging rampant privacy intrusions. (Examples in comments here, and also here.)

 

This morning, it was Linden Lab's turn to talk: Patch Linden, VP of Product Operations, summoned Bonnie and her team* into Second Life itself for a fireside meeting.  After a reportedly pleasant chat, Bonnie tells me the site will be making some crucial changes: