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Wow, this is insane...I must've had a blonde moment (and I am a rl blonde) when looking for "popular" places to visit. I didn't take any offense when I found bots at a location, just realized i needed to look for actual comments as to whether a place was occupied or not. AND I find that if there is no "live" ppl on a sim I just moved on...besides sometimes having a bot around can make a place seems less lonely. Just saying.
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Bots in plain sight are one thing. Maybe the sim owner has arrived from Second Life not long ago and doesn't know that, unlike Second Life, OpenSim supports actual NPCs. Or they don't know how to make NPCs yet. Or they find actual NPCs too inconvenient to handle.
The least a sim owner could do then is put the bots on the exclude list in the OSW beacon. I'll be honest: Not doing so reeks of cheating, especially now. Doing so says, "I'm not cheating, and I do what's necessary for everyone to know."
But it's something else to put AFK avatars clearly made for this purpose (if their profiles are blank save for maybe one group, you can be certain they're purpose-made) somewhere where visitors can't see, much less interact with them. Inside a building on a parcel set to private, for example. Or even more blatantly, on a sky platform 5,000m above the ground with no teleporter to take you there.
If you do manage to teleport there, and you spot a bunch of standard Ruths or whatever starter avatars the grid gives out, the case is clear.
If the sim owner insists that what OSW measures is actual visitor traffic, the case is clear.
If the sim owner attacks you personally and/or blocks you on OSW or even bans you in-world after finding out your UUID just because you've ever spoken out against visitor count cheating, the case is clear.
There are also those who justify un-excluded bots by stating that literally nobody cares for the popularity ranking anyhow. But, believe it or not, there are always those who are like, "Wait, people don't care for it? I always use it to find cool sims where lots of people go!" And if they're newbies, they're also like, "What do you mean it isn't accurate?"
It's mostly seasoned users of many years for whom the list of most popular sims is bogus. Fairly new users of a few weeks or months who don't know about the manipulations take it at face value. And other seasoned users say that this list should either be made as accurate as possible or removed altogether instead of letting it misguide less experienced users.
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The least a sim owner could do then is put the bots on the exclude list in the OSW beacon. I'll be honest: Not doing so reeks of cheating, especially now. Doing so says, "I'm not cheating, and I do what's necessary for everyone to know."
But it's something else to put AFK avatars clearly made for this purpose (if their profiles are blank save for maybe one group, you can be certain they're purpose-made) somewhere where visitors can't see, much less interact with them. Inside a building on a parcel set to private, for example. Or even more blatantly, on a sky platform 5,000m above the ground with no teleporter to take you there.
If you do manage to teleport there, and you spot a bunch of standard Ruths or whatever starter avatars the grid gives out, the case is clear.
If the sim owner insists that what OSW measures is actual visitor traffic, the case is clear.
If the sim owner attacks you personally and/or blocks you on OSW or even bans you in-world after finding out your UUID just because you've ever spoken out against visitor count cheating, the case is clear.
There are also those who justify un-excluded bots by stating that literally nobody cares for the popularity ranking anyhow. But, believe it or not, there are always those who are like, "Wait, people don't care for it? I always use it to find cool sims where lots of people go!" And if they're newbies, they're also like, "What do you mean it isn't accurate?"
It's mostly seasoned users of many years for whom the list of most popular sims is bogus. Fairly new users of a few weeks or months who don't know about the manipulations take it at face value. And other seasoned users say that this list should either be made as accurate as possible or removed altogether instead of letting it misguide less experienced users.