Waking up today has been a bizarre pastiche of instant messages from Second Life. At least two of them are identifiably from the beginning of November. The rest? Well, that’s a good question.
Reports are quite widespread about the old IMs suddenly arriving for lots of people, but I’ve ended up with a novel problem.
I’m looking at a lot of these and can’t tell if they’re actually fresh messages from today, or among the bundle of mysteriously delayed messages from five weeks ago. There’s nothing much to give me context. Heck, half of them could be from six months or four years ago. There’s not really anything to go on.
I’ve replied to a couple – if they’re genuinely old ones, I’m not even sure that will even work properly through the IM/email gateway. We’ll see.
Odds are that if my replies get through, the recipient will be just as confused by my reply as I am by the message.
Oh… I got an odd IM this morning that referenced a conversation I had two months ago, and I just assumed (having long forgotten the conversation) that the sender had just signed in after an extended absence and was catching up. I had thought we had already resolved the issue, and thought it odd that I misremembered, but I never considered how odd it was that they could respond to a months-old conversation when they should have had capped messages long ago.
Very strange.
So THAT was it? I got two myself and wondered whether the recipients really did not log in for that long…
Actually, I somewhat agree with Erick. Unfortunately, if everyone else would have looked at that map that was posted, and realized that half of the map is bots and campers, then the map, does not seem very impressive at all.
Anyone who has done any research at all into bots\campers, knows that there are just as many of them now as there has ever been, and they continue to grow.
And, you can not report them. And the Lindens only selectively stop a few of the worse offenders from time to time, but that is it. The problem is still massive.
Anytime you logon and you see 75,000 online, you can be assured it really only means 40,000 real people online with the rest being bots and campers. This is a fact but most people seem to ignore it.
Erick, if you want a story, I mean a real SL story with real fraud tied into it, you should do yourself a favor and research SL Bots and Campers. Then, you will have a real story.
This has been ongoing for so long now it is pathetic. Lindens know we have an issue with bots and campers and they will admit to having a problem, but they will never, ever, admit to how incredibly large the problem really is.
I have been doing research on it and the Lindens are still just ignoring it because they know it will bring down the daily logon numbers tremendously. I’ve tried reporting bots and campers but what happens is they will just tell you they are scanning search results, which, they are only doing a small amount of. There is no way on earth they could be missing the bots and campers that I am finding every single day if they were doing even a halfway decent job of locating them.
And, yes, there was a story a while back about how the Lindens admitted the numbers in the past quarter had taken a drop due to the bots and campers that THEY had discovered.
This amount, which affected there numbers in a major why, is truly, only a tiny amount of bots and campers that were stopped.
If they would have stopped ALL or near all of the bots and campers, the drop in current users online would have split almost in half. This will never be admitted, and this is where the story is, if you take the time to do the research. Just thought you might like to know in case you wanted to do a followup story to your original story.