Bye bye traffic bots

Modeling clothes is fine.

Having someone wash your windows and scrub your floors is fine, too....after all, you do need to have the store sparkling.

Sitting on your butt to keep a comfy chair warm and having it ready for the next customer who is about to faint from overexerting themselves during a frantic shopping spree.....should be fine, too.

So yes....it's pretty clear.

I don't see any problem with that. I've had 6 functional model bots in my store for a long time, and they are staying. People make use of them for seeing the animations before deciding whether or not to buy. It's the same with clothes models. people use them to see what the clothes look like when worn - very functional and good.

That was one of my arguments in this forum against a simple ban on traffic bots. If the bots disappeared overnight, those models would give me a very good start on probably everybody else in my field.

Yep, all those things are fine.

I think it's pretty clear they'll just pick on people who are in the top few hundred of the Places search. Half a dozen bots isn't going to do crap for you and won't be enough for anyone to care about. Once you get up to silly numbers, 20, 30, 40 then you'll start to stick out and get hammered down. Well anyway, that's my guess.

Thinking about the ban on camping bots...

How on earth is a Linden who is checking a place going to decide whether or not the person on the camp chair/pad is a bot? It could be someone who is afk - I think most people are when they are camping. But people camping is fine. I can't see that as being truly enforceable, unless LL insist that all camping must be done on seperate parcels, or that only camp systems that protect against bots are used. In practise, it's going to be very very grey, imo.

Sometimes I have 30 to 40 people show up at my furniture store to relax on the couches and chairs. I usually make them some lemonade. Will that count?

No. Lemonade isn't included in the ban.

Only if the lemonade is for personal use and you aren't gong to advertise it.

camping chairs+your own bots+paying yourself = having to move that money back to your main account so you don't lose the money = trackable in accounting!! ;0

Can't they check the IP address of the avi and compare it to the land owner?

I was being sarcastic.

So....the people who are using 40 bots.....will simply cut down to a dozen legitimate "real people" washing windows and scrubbing floors and keeping the chairs warm.......

And the traffic ranking order will stay exactly the same....no difference in placement or order on the list.....just a difference in the actual number count off to the side.

So yes....popularity defined as real traffic from "real people" will still be crystal clear.

That's good to hear, Phil, because they're usually your bots sneaking out to take a break. They say ypu're very harsh.

They could possibly do that but, as i understand it, most camping bots are not the landowners.

I am I hate to think what they'll do when i tell them they are sacked

Yes.
They were illustrating the fact that they were morally bankrupt.

The announcement did not simply say that the practice is now against the TOS.
The announcement referred to the practice as being "unfair", and that most people thought it unfair.

People whose moral outlook is informed purely by the TOS-of-the-day are the bottom-feeding dregs of society.

Just tell them you are taking them out for lemonade, take them to Ursula and leave them there.

lol. But I haven't fully taught them about the birds and the bees. They'd be out of their depth there. Maybe if I tell them I'm taking them out for lemonade, drop them off at Bradley's place, and then remove their home before they get back. That might get me out of watching all the tears and tantrums.

campers are not bots.

campers are being paid for a job. the fact that traffic is raised just says that their place has better employment.

Or, you could wait until the mainland gets Dizzkneed, find a nice family friendly sim and let them wander about in BDSM wear.....and signs advertising a competitor.

Yes Sling, business the world over doesn't push the boundaries of what they can get away with do they. They all play happy families.

If the mainland really does get Dizzkneed, they'll be on their own anyway. I won't have anywhere to put a home for them. LL should have provided a Bots Retirement Home to let them live out the rest of their days in pleasant and peaceful surroundings, instead of wandering the grid seekking out anyone who will lend an ear to their woes or give them a place to sit a while.

Your bots are Jewish?

Oh dear, the owner of Platinum Skins won't like this. I guess that's a few of her gaming tactics scuppered. She still has plenty left though.

Ain't that a pain? Whenever it happens to me I have to either close Firefox without saving a session and restart, or open some different breed of browser.
I dunno. Depends on viewpoint, I guess. I welcome it, actually, as an advance in integrating 3D and 2D access to the data that is the SL world. I just don't see any architectural virtue in a bot script pulling land-for-sale search packets, nor pushing teleports around the grid to buy land, when the transactions just have no 3D context at all. It just seems artificial not to expose same land search, purchase, and sale APIs to the viewer, a web page, and a web service. (And willful denial to not expose them to in-world scripts--but that's a whole different argument.)

Overall the new policy looks "soft" to me... a half-measure. I might have said less than half because non-bot camping for fake traffic is still allowed, but on the other hand there's mention of making the traffic component of search ranking too obscure and variable to game effectively. If they really do that, it will be pretty hard to put any L$/hr value on camping (or trafficbots, for that matter), and the results will be interesting.

I particularly like the phrase " scrubbing the search" Ka-Klick - See Ya - no explanation needed.

Seriously the top 10 results of the places search do not even sell the product for which the search word is for in most cases while their traffic numbers are about half the number of all people on Sl during peak time.

It takes no skill to enforce this. It would take me 1/2 day to eliminate all the major culprits.