It's time to regulate bots. The Lindens never met a script they didn't like but they must learn to balance the happiness of sandboxers (those wishing to use Second Life for experimentation with the software itself, including themselves) with settlers (those wishing to live or work in Second Life for other purposes). None other than Pathfinder Linden recently spoke on a radio show of how wonderful the artificial intelligence experiments are on Second Life, and how such bots should be allowed to roam free across the grid. No. Not on my lawn, please. Please don't tell me about "the Internet" as we all now about robot.txt. And we also know that increasingly, social media sites like Facebook are NOT open to endless scrutiny and scraping by widgeteers' and other Googlian bots. Second Life does not have to become an endless playground for the few to monitor and scrape the many; it can strike a balance. Bots should not be banned; but they surely can be regulated. 1. I would like to see all accounts that are used as bots manned by remote control to perform automatic scripted functions to be marked permanently as such with the term "bot" on their profile. 2. I would like to see this type of marking only available as a premium, i.e. paid account. Some consideration could be given to discounts available to some bot users to buy up a fleet of bots, but they must pay for these accounts that are currently free, yet able to suck down a great deal of resources on the grid; estimates of their presence are as high as 10 percent or more of the concurrent log-ons. 3. I would like an option on the land menu to ban such bots from my land that I pay tier for just as I have the option to ban "no payment on file" (a feature I do not use now, even for the sake of bot-control, because it could just as well keep out a potential paying customer, especially from Europe or Latin America, than a bot). While I realize there is a great deal of exaggeration and hysteria over the bot issue, and many people think that if you get rid of traffic, you get rid of bots, bots really are an increasing problem. Over recent weeks, I've attempted to monitor them and I've listened to the reports of many others in the LL Traffic Future group about bots. A. in Infohubs: I sometimes cannot tell who is a bot, and who is a normal person. While bots often appear as Ruth or appear hunched over in the old-fashion birthing position, they can also appear as suave Lotharios gesturing into the air and have cool club titles over their heads. I might try to talk to them, get no answer, and then after a half hour, notice that there are 2 more clones like them right by their side, none of whom are moving, and none of whom object when I push them off to the side like cattle to get them out of the way of the infohub landing area. B. Camping – While loathed, isn't outlawed, and bots are being used to suck down camping dollars from people who chose to use this method – that's robbery, as their intent isn't to line the pockets of engineers using bots, but to help newbies. Those who chose to use camping or money trees or any kind of legal game to distribute free money should not be exploited by programmers using bots. C. Data scraping – Marketing bots are all over the grid, floating around and scraping land titles and other bits from the land menu, pricing in the land market, and all kinds of facts. I don't see why these free accounts should be allowed to draw down resources and also take up scarce avatar slots on my sims and enable all my data to be used for free by the few engineers performing for commercial use by other companies – it puts them at an unfair advantage. In order to prevent commercial exploitation by the few of the many, we should have the ability to ban such scrapers from our land. I don't care that they can't fill up their data bases unless they force "opt-out" and if everybody refuses to opt in to make their field useful "for the public" – the public rarely benefits from the plethora of marketing, shopping, and search sites springing up that largely benefit only the consultants who are luring outworld companies into SL, not the SL public. The public must be allowed to opt in, not opt out of being scraped by marketers. D. Science – the scientific use of bots for experiments on intelligence, human or artificial, is constantly invoked as a justification for all bots, even though it is the least percentage of bot usage in SL. I also don't want to be harnessed into a scientific experiment on my land that I didn't consent to by having to deal with a bot that I may not even be able to tell is a bot. As part of the age-old ethics of obtaining consent for scientific experimentation, bots must be marked, and I must have the ability to prevent their entry.