Bye bye traffic bots

youre telling this to the person that posted a step-by-step guide to rorting age verification.

God, i married a person of low morals bordering on criminal!

<3

Maybe Arbor Project or some similar group will take it on and make a game of getting people banned for using bots.

Almost certainly some group will.

Just like with everything else that gets banned.

I still think getting rid of the traffic metric would still have been the best solution. A lot less chance for people to get banned for no reason.

As we speak I believe a post-USSR breakup group of nouveau griefing mafioso are planning a widespread "protection" racket to extort money from shopkeepers in the to-be-PG continent by threatening to AR them for offering to sell rude things under the counter, and by threatening to position bots in shops on both continents to look like traffic gaming is occurring.

Pep (is not going to say what is going to happen to the kid avatars; this is a PG forum)

I was definitely with you on this except my solution was just to get rid of Search Places. Although I heard another suggestion which was just to redesign it as a version of Search All that displaces only places.

It was always clear that Jack would come up with a solution based in policy rather than a technical solution though so I'm not too surprised that we arrived here.

The best 'group' that would AR the traffic-botters would be the people who are listed below the botter in Places search.
They have the motivation to do it.
They can point to an injury done to them by the botter.


It might be that a competitor/trouble-maker would inject bots into someone else's parcel in order to get them Ared.
LL should be able to determine the truth from their own information. They see IPs. They see transactions, IMs and chat between people. They can see dots that they can join if they choose to. The outcome of framing another person should be the perma-banning of the culprits and all their bots, alts.

Except the Arbor Project doesn't play games.

I'm listed waaaayyyy below.....and have Zero motivation to do that.

I no longer feel that a botter does injury toward me. At first...yes, very much so. But after settling into the routine, found that a botter has no effect on my business. For a number of reasons....too many to list.....no one reads this crap anyway.

The only way they would have an effect is if I got tangled up in a mission to destroy them, and wasted valuable time that can be spent on more productive things as a store owner.

Will repeat this until I am blue in the face.....but to newcomers opening a store and starting out....it does NOT matter where you rank in the Places traffic search. What matters is how you run your business. Do so effectively.....and it totally cancels out a variety of irritating aspects that will tend to draw you off course when you can spend your time on much more effective actions.

To get hung up and to think that a botter does you injury....you're already way off course in the process....might as well hang it up right now.....because there are going to be 100 other irritating things in SL that are going to pull you off course as well.

Jack doesn't have the ability to dictate technical solutions to problems. He DOES have the ability to dictate policy solutions.

Even still, he probably does have the clout to get technical solutions on the table to be discussed and seriously considered, but that doesn't guarantee they will happen.

Injury doesn't have to be direct and announced for it to exist. The fact that someone else isn't playing by the same rules that you are, and is profiting from it IS injurious in itself. There is no doubt that you have lost sales to other unscrupulous business owners, through no fault of your own.

Everything you said has merit, and yes, it is not something to dwell on, but to be fair, you shouldn't HAVE to dwell on it. It shouldn't have been allowed to happen in the first place.

In the end, the only thing you can do is just be true to yourself, and stipulate to letting karma take care of those who cheat. You'll likely be in business LONG after they are history.

However, I find that if I can hasten karma along without too much effort, I am up for it.

LOL..... ooops...sorry for laughing.

I learned in RL that Karma does NOT take care of the cheaters. That's a very sweet thought....but kicking back and relying on Karma.....won't cut it. I was talking about hard work and effective efforts.....used consistently and honestly.

Well,Phil pulled his bots as an exercise.
eh... by which I mean that he removed them....

His sales dropped by 25%.
He put the bots back, and his sales climbed up again.

People DO use Places search
People DO primarily vist and spend in the high-ranked places. That's why people look for high ranking. Simples!!

SO...
These people who would have made up 25% of Phil's sales ...
Did they just not spend anywhere?

By obtaining 25% of his sales through gaming traffic with bots, he was taking sales from people ranked below his gamed Places rank.

I think that counts as injury towards the people below who who were not gaming.

What about the merchants who say "I don't like bots, but my competition uses them and takes the sales, so I have to use them."
I'd say that anyone gaming is doing an injury to others who fell forced to game as well.

I'd say the blatant gaming that is not slapped down is an injury to SL as a whole. It breeds cynicism. It's entirely negative for everyone bar gamers who don't give a toss for anyone else.

How does any of that effect me and what I'm doing? It doesn't.

My sales and traffic were way down this week because I didn't do anything on my list that I normally do....just goofed off.....I have no one to blame but myself. If I do just 2 or 3 things on the list next week....entirely different story, and Phil had nothing to do with it.

I have total control over whether or not I have sales or not....and total control over how far I want to go. Phil and his bots do not have one tid bit of control over that.

I didn't just wake up and decide that one day. Just kept records and statistics and tweaked and experimented over about 6 months. It's Fact.

Do you have a store, Sling?

If so....I can go down my list with you. If you never tried doing any of the chores on the list.....and you just wait for people to show up.....well, yes.....then you can blame Phil and his bots for lost sales. In that case, a bot runner most likely did take some traffic from you....possibly a sale or two.....but in that case, many type of people are going to take sales away from you....even ones that you would deem as having ethical practices.

And if you don't have a store.....how can you make all of the above judgments and speak for the store owners?

I'll admit that my line of thinking was right where yours is, the month I opened the store. But it didn't take long to figure out what I described above.

Oh for heaven's sake; sales are not a zero-sum game, but they are not infinitely extensible by any means either. People distorting traffic statistics are and always have been guilty of false advertising, everybody has always known it, it's been known forever.

Read what storeowners say in the Forums.
1. Phil says that his bots accounted for 25% of his sales when he did an experiment.
2. Storeowners complain that people use traffic-gaming to get higher ranking.
3. There is general agreement that higher rankings in Places result is higher sales
4. Storeowners complain that they feel forced to game search in order to try and get a level playing field with their competitors who game traffic.

These are not simply some opinions that I have dreamed up.
These are things that have been posted many times here by others.

*Of course* people have to more than just sit on their butts and wait for sales. That's blindingly obvious to anybody bar idiots who never ran a business in their lives.

However, it remains an observable fact that simply gaming traffic will increase sales - and at the expense of others.
You may say that you don't care about unethical behaviour of others. Fair enough. That's you. Other people do care.
This isn't about you, or me, or Phil. It's a general issue for SL at large.

Land market will crash and only few old residends will survive.

Few quality no chance to be competitive no more noobs allowed in the content creations...

A white and grey boring second life

Yes, I'm sure.

Well, then you're making your argument for me to do something about it.

It's cool. I know where you're coming from.

Just found that for me...it's much more effective to concentrate on my own behaviors and practices than to get strung out on the others'. Learned from many years in a RL profession where what some consider false advertising and what some consider unethical behaviors are "somewhat allowed" within the rules.

The years where I got strung out...show in my income negatively....the years where I put the nose to the grindstone and counteracted it with my own practices....shows too, in the opposite direction. If I were inclined to apply the efforts to counteract it....then I just took income from those using behaviors I disapprove of, which could make them non-effective. Works the same here, don't you know.

I've always appreciated the efforts of the crusaders. But believe that offering the alternative....and forcing what some consider unethical behaviors to become non-effective in the long run, is a crusade in itself, and just as important.

There will be a different tool or device for them to use tomorrow. You're simply taking away one tool. You're not taking away the type of behavior you disapprove of. That won't ever go away.

I'm not concerned about that 25% you mentioned. It will meander out among a ton of related businesses, to the point that the effect will be insignificant to me or anyone else.....if you consider the numbers.

Implementing just one tool on a long list of effective tools will more than make up for whatever small percentage of that 25% were to hit anyone's business.....and could possibly make the behaviors you disapprove of entirely non-effective and not worth using. Unfortunately, the masses won't make that work....as it is easier to wring their hands and give up....and not put forth the effort.

Stressing that point is my crusade, rather than trying to change behavior that will continue to exist, regardless of the tools available.

falsly advertising traffic. because everybody tps in looking for the traffic hey.

Don't concern yourself with it, Nina. The same old opinions are trotted out every time. They are valid opinions because that's the way they see things. In this case, some people do believe that we are advertising popularity when we are not. They are entitled to believe it though, just as we are entitled to believe otherwise. What's surprising is that these opinions are being trotted out again, when pure traffic bots are about to be banned.

It's a pity that the decision wasn't delayed a while because I'd just put the finishing touches to my new traffic bot system that allowed me to have more bots 24/7 and yet, apart from remotely exceptional circumstances, guaranteed that there was always plenty of av spaces in the sim for people to come in. It was a beautiful thing to watch in operation I got 2 days out of it, and increased my daily traffic by about 10k. I've now retired the traffic bots, and I'll concentrate more on the All search.

Ahhhhhhh! Now it's been clarified.

So when LL blogged that traffic-botting was "unfair" and that their use "to manipulate traffic" was to be a TOS offence, they didn't really mean
t that there was anything wrong with manipulating traffic per se. They simply meant that use of traffic bots to deny spaces in sims was "unfair" and would be a TOS offence. They just didn't 'splain it properly.

Yeah I mean they did not come out and say manipulating traffic and by extension search was wrong...

oh wait :