SecondLife: Captchas Not Good Enough for Land Buying - But For Buying/Selling Linden Dollars, It Is OK?

You know, this is a common practice among certain types of people. I often encounter this when dealing with certain computer programmers, for example.

When confronting someone of this particular type of personality with a problem that would 1) change the status quo of implementation; 2) require relatively higher degree of effort to implement and debug; 3) require skills that said person does not have; and/or 4) not of enough personal interest to said person, the typical response is to conjure up what can only be described as "excuses", often inconsistent and contradictory to what is already implemented. To these people, it is difficult to say something as easy as "that's a reasonable idea, but there is apparently not enough interest or priority to implement it" or "that's an unreasonable idea and it's not implemented anywhere else because it's such an unreasonable idea." Though in the latter case, such is often extremely difficult to say because the proposal is usually implemented elsewhere and saying that would cause an obvious inconsistency. I think the "reasoning" behind the CAPTCHA that is mentioned in this post is a prime example of that.

I can recall other examples where people have proposed features that were rejected on grounds like "it would add too many features and configurations that few people would use", never mind the fact that there are already such described features, and even undocumented features only available by editing XML settings files. Sometimes these types of people can be spotted on JIRA as well.

And of course there are some people who make these sort of "reasoned" (inconsistent/illogical) arguments merely out of self interest, believing that if developers spent their time on that issue, they would spend less time on issues for which they have actual concern.

I myself do not necessarily think landbots need to be thwarted except to the extent that they may cause justified grievances, whether or not intentional, especially for non-technical people (such as taking advantage of a bug or bad implementation that puts land for sale at an unintended price for a fraction of a second).

Interesting delayed listing idea. I wonder if it's on JIRA...

As second life grows and grows, this is something that will need to be addressed.  We don't want to give robots the same status as humans.  I personally would rather keep the mechanically minded out of the world completely in the sense that they approximate human behavious.  I would be more than willing to fill out a captcha whenever and wherever necessary to keep exploitative robots out of the world.