Public Landbot Project: Cancelled

I’ve mentioned the Public landbot project previously in this post. I’m not involved in any way in the project however since I run landbots I am kept fairly informed on the progress from parties that do happen to be interested. In this post from the projects blog, the projects only developer has had a change of heart citing “scheming soulless land barons, whose only interests really lie in edifying their own ego, or lining their wallets at the expense of those less fortunate” as one reason, and credits yours truly “for inspiring this change of position“. The simple fact is he was paid in advance for work which was not and apparently will not be completed. Unfortunately this is not the first time this has happened. A close friend informed me shortly after the project began that he himself had previously paid Fword to develop a landbot which has yet to be delivered although in this post Fword claims he has had a working landbot for quite some time. The only reference to any landbot code he has published appears to be some outdated code from back when Linden Lab still had a First Land program.

Apparently my inspiration towards the demise of the project is from publicly made comments where I stated I did not believe he was capable of creating the software (which he claims to already have). Whats surprising is that this came as such a shock to him as I’d previously in his presence made the same statements. Many interested “soulless land barons” involved in the project have often raised the same issue, and after 2 months I can understand why their patience was wearing thin. Their inquiries to him for updates were met with a less than childlike responses. Up until now my guess is he’s written more profanity in relation to this project than lines of code.

A basic functioning landbot is not difficult to create, in fact since the start of their project two new landbots have emerged and continue to improve regularly prompting one of the old time landbot operators to bow his head in shame for being beat by the new guy. The most impressive thing about these new landbots is that their developers didn’t have any experience in developing in c# (the language most landbots are written in due to the libsecondlife API library). So my hats off to the new guys, my condolences to those who have been taken advantage of with promises only to be met with excuses and to fword himself — good luck in your new endeavor.

— Yohan

Landbots make mistakes too

Today I was working on some improvements to the Bots and I messed up. One of the parameters you send to search is the sort order, for those using the viewer this is automatically set. Those of us running landbots have to set this specifically, well I reversed the flag so instead of getting the lowest parcels listed for sale I got the most expensive ones and since the bots calculate their buy rates based initially on the average price of the results returned so as you can imagine if you’ve ever looked at search this set my initial buy rate to about 75L/per sq.m and within about 1/2 second my bot had spent L$356,000 on 5 parcels including a 4096 sq.m parcel for L$300,000. Yes folks thats 73.2L per sq.m for a 4096. I of course immediately kicked myself for forgetting to turn on the debug mode during testing and began contacting the people I purchased the 5 parcels from. All went smoothly until I got in contact with the last and largest mistake. Before I go into the details of that, you should know that because of a few unscrupulous individuals that run landbots we are often all grouped into the ‘evil’ category. I can’t speak for others, but The Super Babenco Brothers have a clean record when it comes to returning mistakes and we even go as far as contacting people when a mistake is obvious instead of waiting for them to contact us. We have never charged for a return or made a single linden on anyone’s mistake.

So I sent an IM and followed it up with a notecard,

The IM:

[2007/12/26 14:17]  Yohan Pintens: Hi Fury, I just made a huge mistake
and bought a parcel of land from you for 300K,
I am wondering if you would be kind enough to undo it.

The Notecard:

Hi Fury,

I was screwing around and purchased your parcel of land in Mantle/231/193
for L$300,000. I totally messed up and did not mean to purchase it.
I am hoping you will be kind enough to assist me in undoing my blunder.
I've marked the parcel back for sale to you for the price I paid. 

Please let me know
Yohan Pintens,
Super Babenco Brothers

About 4 hours later I saw my notecard was accepted, so I sent another IM in hopes of some resolution, the discussion is as follows (unedited)

New Operational Landbot from Vixen Heron

I’ve added this bot to the directory. Although its slow, it is operational. From my past conversations with Vixen mistakes are likely to be returned. Vixen did the development of this bot on his own so it may improve in speed with time.

— Stuck

“Landbot” Merlin is seen again: Selling his landbot on E-Bay?

Marc Bragg (Second Life Avatar: ‘Marc Woebegone’) Posted the following comment in the Landbot Directory, since I find this information somewhat amusing I’ve did a post here where it will be more visible:

“MERLIN SELLS LANDBOT ON e-Bay WOOOOT! GO MERLIN GO!!!

Landbot legend Merlin has listed is software program for sale on e-Bay… for $523.00 something, if you buy it now…. Now, I found scripters willing to write one for around $100.00 or so, so the price is high, but the concept delicious.

Link here:

http://cgi.ebay.com:80/landbot-second-life_W0QQitemZ120195198197QQcmdZViewItem

Description:

landbot for second life.
A program to automatically log into second life and search the land for sale database and automatically buy land at the size and price you set.

easy to use. simple to set up.

you could buy a entire sim for 1/3rd of a penny!!! It’s the luck of the draw, or luck of the teleport.

This program has been in use for over year, a never ending saga of progress in both engineering and design.

For less then the price of 1/4 SIM you could buy unlimited land for unbelievably low prices!

In order to keep competition down and increase your odd’s of getting those awesome deals i will only sell one copy of this program at this price, after this one sells the price goes up 100USD for each copy that sells after it.

goodluck
IM LandBot Merlin
Inworld with questions.

This is a computer program and will be emailed to you.
Zero delivery fee.”

I’m guessing this sudden release after Merlin not being in the landbot game for over a year is inspired by the public landbot projects goals of creating a free landbot. I’ll be a little bit conspiratorial and say from the information on the e-bay listing that appears to be Second Life Avatar ‘Bob Perry’ trying to hawk his vapor ware landbot which was never actually working or competitive. Also from a gleaning of the screen shot I am pretty certain that the landbot shown would not be competitive as it is missing a few obvious things. You will also notice this auction: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120195048709 has the same screen shot but lacks the ‘legend Landbot Merlin’ rhetoric. Yup.. sure smells like ‘Bob Perry’. I’ll also point out that the auction I listed shows one has already been sold for less than the current ‘landbot merlin’ version.

And Lastly ‘Landbot Merlin’ is not the same as the notorious ‘Landbaron Merlin’, Infact as far as I am aware ‘Landbot Merlin’ has never actually purchased a parcel of land.

— Stuck

Fword Landbot: Public meeting Announced for December 5 at 4PM

Apparently Land Shepherd will be holding a public meeting tomorrow (December 5 2007 4:00PM PST) at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dunnideer/169/93/349 I haven’t been provided any details on what is to be discussed.

Open-sourced landbot coming soon?

I was passed a notecard labeled “Landbot Project Introduction” created by ‘Land Shepherd` which reads:

Fword Utorid is a programmer with experience making “bots” through the use of libsecondlife. She has been contacted about the possibility of making a public landbot that would be open to anyone to use and is confident that she can make one. She says she made a basic one several months ago but never kept up with it. Please contact her if you have questions about the landbot or would like a demonstration of some of the current bots she has created.

The overall purpose of this project is to create a landbot for public use as well as release open sourced landbot code. The goal is to both create a level playing field in the land market as well as to get Linden Lab to address the issue of landbots.
The landbot must be competitive with the models currently being used by other landbot owners. It should be fairly easy to use. Users of the public landbot will have to agree to use it honorably and do things like give back mistakes. The landbot and documentation will be available on a website that Fword will create.

An upfront fee of L$(undisclosed) will be paid to Fword to begin development. Once a landbot is delivered that is proven to be fast enough to compete with the current landbots being used, another fee of L$(undisclosed) will be paid to Fword.

Users of the public landbot would also be encouraged to donate a part of any profits they get through the landbot to Fword as long as she is involved in the project. This would be both to encourage Fword to continue development of the landbot and to offset potential losses of her income from the release of the landbot source code.

What does this mean? Well the proof is in the pudding, so we’ll wait and see. If its another ‘Bob Perry’ Landbot deal or if it actually becomes “Competitive with current landbots and easy to use”

It looks like they now have their own website up so those interested can track progress.

*Edit: Removed dollar amounts at the request of ‘FWord Utorid’

The most common mistakes made during land transfer

Landbots are so fast you barely have time to click OK before one of them is able to purchase your parcel. For the most part people set a price they feel is fair for the parcel of land. Unfortunately those of us that do return mistakes spend a fair amount of time returning parcels of land that were sold by accident for a number of reasons. The most common reasons are:

• Trying to sell group land to self or trying to deed land to a group, set land for sale to Anyone
• Attempting to sell land to a friend, but setting to Anyone
• Forgot to add a Zero to the price
• Have wrong parcel selected

These are the four most common reasons people inadvertently end up with a landbot owning their parcel of land. When this happens if instructions are followed within a few hours they usually have the land marked back for sale to the original owner. What people do not realize is that when they mark a parcel for sale to Anyone, even if nobody besides them is in the sim their parcel is listed in the public for sale directory usually within seconds, once this occurs landbots and others that watch the land directory for deals can see this parcel come up! The landbots of course being much more efficient with the data can show up and purchase the land often before the seller even realizes what has happened.

There are a few things you can do to prevent this from happening to you:

1. If you want to put land into a group you do not need to sell the parcel at all!
2. If you are selling a parcel to a friend, or to yourself in the case of group land, never set the parcel for sale to “Anyone”!
3. double, triple, quadruple check the numbers! I realize the interface is often cumbersome (it requires 8 clicks just to sell a parcel), but you might be dealing with a large parcel often hundreds of US dollars in value! Take your time, a few extra seconds verifying the information is really what you want will save you time.

Skye Whitcroft has written a very thorough How-to for almost every scenario for dealing with the sale of a parcel of land, we have a copy here for your convenience. This document includes putting your land into group land as well as taking it out.

Most times if you make a mistake, you’re land will be returned to you, however all mistakes can be prevented with a little effort on your part to double check your entry!

New Rogue Landbot discovered

I was alerted to the possibility of a new landbot spotted recently by ‘Orlando Gloucester’ and ‘Sergio Sobocinski’, Aparently a new bot ‘Auto Oh’ (Unknown Operator) purchases land at below market value and then immediately marks the price up and resets the parcel to for sale. Being curious I decided to sacrifice a 512 square meter parcel for L$3500 (6.83L$/sq.m.) when the current bottom was 7.3L$/sq.m.. I knew the current buy rate for most other landbots would be lower than that, so besides the risk of another land dealer showing up and purchasing the parcel I would be able to test the information that had been given to me. Setting the parcel directly for sale to ‘Auto Oh’ resulted in no action after a few minutes which showed me that he uses axillary searchers, but he himself did not search. I then remarked the parcel for sale for anyone at L$3500, Shortly thereafter ‘Sergio Sobicinski’ showed up, I asked him not to purchase as I was testing something, he complied and a few seconds later ‘Auto Oh’ showed up, purchased the parcel, remarked the parcel for sale at L$3728 and disappeared. Instant messages have gone unanswered and the parcel still remains for sale as I write this post.

The parcel information remained the same other than ‘:)’ being inserted at the beginning of the parcel Name field, and of course the parcel being repriced and set immediately back for sale. The sacrificial parcel can be visited at secondlife://Saint Clair/208/183/59.

I will add this bot to the directory and if you have any experiences good or bad with this bot please post a comment.

*Edit: removed operators name as could not get confirmation, and previously named person has me reasonably convinced he’s not the operator, so to prevent rotten tomatoes from being thrown I’ve removed his name.

Landbot Directory

I’ve created a Landbot Directory to hopefully assist people in knowing who to contact for assistance if their land was purchased by a landbot. If you have experience (good or bad) dealing with any operator, please let others know by posting a comment with any details you feel important.

Can’t fix Stupid

This is a repost of a comment I left on another blog in response to
Petition To Linden Lab Regarding Losses Incurred Related to Landbots, I’ve republished it here for your reading pleasure:

To list a parcel of land for sale for the public (including lanbots) to see in the public search directory takes a minimum of 8 mouse clicks and for you to type in an actual number (price) to sell your land for. Throughout this process the screen is very concise about the process. The defaults are set in such a way that you have to specifically input information to sell a parcel of land at an incorrect price. In addition to the words (which in most cases) are translated to the native language of the person, there are visual cues, calculations which show the price/per sq.m of land, and lastly, the final ‘prompt’ has all of this information together giving you one last chance to cancel the sale before it is listed. The land sales interface borders on cumbersome for anyone selling more than a few parcels. So to make a mistake you really have to be acting quite careless with your assets and I am not sure how Linden Labs could have made it more difficult to make a mistake.