Bye bye traffic bots

So why is 5 or worse for the search system than 50 or 0 or even 500 or 600 bots if sims were upgraded to allow that?

But those 5 or 6 will be "good" bots by then. And tagging them as bots, so they aren't counted for traffic, will be voluntary according to the blog - and way off in the future. It remains to be seen whether or not untagged "good" bots are warned against. By the time that voluntary tagging happen, if ever, the latest fad at LL will have moved on anyway.

You're "6" key seems to be a bit iffy

I didn't say it would be worse. I said it would be the same problem - the ones with the advanatge will be at the top, and those who don't use bots will be lower down - just they are now.

Personally I think the new announcement is a disappointment.

Of course, it is a good thing that they finally do something. But the result will not help most of the users. It will help people looking for a camping spot though. Since traffic still is important, and bots are not allowed, the only possibility to generate steady high traffic numbers, is camping. Meaning more scripts running, and on the parcels where camping takes place at ground level: much more lag.

Concurrency will drop, and I am quite anxious what that will mean for our user experience. I would not be surprised, if the answer is: nothing. As I stated before, I do not believe that bots put a big load on the system, so 10.000 bots leaving will hardly make my experience better I'm afraid.

Biggest problem in this scenario will be LL. They do not have the resources to enforce the current policies, let alone the anti-bot policy. They will have to monitor all parcels by traffic count, and do manual checks on the 'why'. Some parcels do have a permanent high traffic count, take Bits and Bobs for example, or the Central Park sim.

If they actually enforce this, it will force people to register their alt as bot though. Because if Phil gets in the top 10 (places search) because of 6 models and a few castle guards, he will gt a warning. They are bots, after all. As soon as he registers them as alts, he no longer profits from the traffic, and wont get in the top 10. Time to investigate the next person getting in the top 10. That process needs to be run permanently, to eliminate false traffic from bots. And we all have seen in the past, that is not going to happen.

Exactly. People will find ways to use bots as 'good bots'. Just like your store models and castle guards. Which in the end, gives you the advantage of the traffic they generate. The only difference is that there are only so many 'good bots' that can be justified, when LL actually looks what is happening. So it would become much easier for me to get your traffic numbers: it's not so hard to find a 'good' job for 10 bots at my sim.

That is why I think this announcement is a half one: It will hardly solve anything. Ban traffic as search metric , and the case is closed.

It should change one thing though. People coming here saying that they arrived at a place that was very laggy and when they saw that the place had bots, they immediately knew why it was laggy If the bots go, they'll still arrive at the same places and still find them very laggy. Their user-experience won't change, but their thinking will.

But I'm not at all sure that isn't what's ahead:
So, the way I read it, LL throws a bone to Prok&Co now, and takes a couple of months devising impenetrably obscure search ranking metrics so nobody can tell what if any impact "new traffic" has on anything.

Of course, they'd have killed the trafficbots (and camping) just as effectively by skipping the first step and neutering "traffic" right away, but the crowd wants blood. So, first, a little circus, then the bread.

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Remove of the Bots !
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A dream comes true, but may, isnt it to late? Meanwhile i started to develop for another Online-3D-Game, as anyone did, who didnt used nasty Bots. May the old days will come back with real Gamers and Users, so good luck.


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hehehehe,

this is what Phil said about previous bot counting exercises:

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I don't see any point to these threads, especially as they don't show anything that means anything. It would be interesting to know how many bots there are on the grid, on a daily average over a week or so, but this sort of sweep isn't going to give any such indication.

If the purpose is to plug away at LL to get rid of traffic bots, then this isn't going to do anything.
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Well Phil, I was one of the many who sent all this data from the forums and my own personal experience, also related in the forums, which you scoffed at, in notecards to Jack Linden.

Thank god he listens, and as for your 'then this isn't going to do anything', well, please forgive me for grinning from ear-to-ear, as you have now said in this forum that the Lindens have no deeply held views on bots, and that banning traffic bots is only to appease those who have railed against them.

Slight contradiction eh Phil.

So, which is it?

a) If the purpose is to plug away at LL to get rid of traffic bots, then this isn't going to do anything.

b) ... a measure of appeasement to those who have been persistently calling for the end of traffic bots, just to shut them up for a while.

THAP

Truly, those 2 bot counting threads were useless, and many of us have sent notecards to Jack about bots. I sent one this time around and it's wasn't the first. I also attended the Future of traffic stuff and shouted for bots to be banned. So there's no need for your high horse this time Those threads were totally useless as witnessed by the people in them not accepting the figures. Also, LL have a reasonable idea of how many bots there are and those threads, or the data from them, would surely have been laughed at by Jack, or ignored. Either way, they wouldn;t have been taken seriously because of their own knowledge.

At this time, nobody got what they wanted. Traffic gaming with bots is going nowhere. It'll change a bit for now, but that's all.

Is this the same thing as filling up regions with masses of 'zombie' alts... ?

There are very few 50- or 60-bot farms. Eliminating them will accomplish little other than reducing concurrency numbers. I've already explained the mathematics behind this. Let me try it another way...

My little shop pays tier on half a sim. That makes it more successful than most, right? On a very good day I still have less than 200 traffic. 200 traffic is one bot online for less than three and a half hours.

People saying their one or two or five modeling bots aren't there for the traffic are full of it. One or two or five bots still put you one up on nearly everyone without bots. You have to dig *very* *very* deep into the bot numbers before you'll see shops topping search that do it selling products.

This problem is much bigger than anyone acknowledges, and this policy will not fix search.

Yeah but the advantage will be like trucking companies competeing against a few cheating the speed limit by 5kph instead of competing against those who cheat by 50kph.

That probably sums it up. What puzzles me is why. Even if that doesn't sum it, I'm still puzzled by why they've done what they've done. If they are going to radically change the Places tab rankings, why not do it now. They did it once in an RC, so it's extremely easy for them to put it back in, at least for now. I can only see one answer - doing it in such a slow way that the concurrency numbers aren't suddenly hit. I strongly suspect that it's the reason why it was removed from the RC ages ago; i.e. somebody put it in as was planned, and someone higher up said, "Oh no! Take it out. We'll lose 20k concurrency if that goes through."

I can only see this new policy clouding the issue. Right now, it's pretty much black and white - a parcel has traffic bots or it doesn't. Soon it will be a case of one parcel has some traffic bots but LL hasn't got round to them yet, another parcel has been made to remove the bots and can't compete with the first parcel, another one will have "good bots" whether they had them before or not, so the second parcel can't compete with it, different Lindens will come to different decisions on the same things, making it hard for one place to compete but easy for another, equal, place to compete, etc. etc. Nobody will know whether or not a parcel's bots have passed the test. People will know that, if they don't have some bots in some form, they can't compete, so nothing will change in that respect. The whole thing is going to get cloudy, with plenty of shades of grey, imo, and competing or not is still going to be down to whether or not a parcel has bots. I hope that I am very much mistaken but we'll see how things work out.

It doesn't matter what the degree of the advanatage is. A win by 1" is the same as if it had been by 1 mile. It's still a win.

who actually takes any notice of these traffic figures ?

If I want to go somewhere I dont go there because some statistic implies it's popular...

anyone who travelled round sl a lot would see that the vaster part of it usually lies empty anyway....

It's not that people take notice of the traffic numbers - it's that places with higher traffic rank higher in the Places tab where more people (potential customers) will see them and TP to them, thereby imcreasing sales.

There obviously must be something seriously wrong with me as I don't think I've ever taken any notice of the (what do you call it) land/sim/parcel ratings.

I'm assuming the only point is, if you want to open a shop you like to know the sim (area) has a lot of traffic and potential customers for you?

Do people really shop like that?

Generally I just search for an item, TP to the location (could just as easily bit 1 tiny hut in the middle of a forest with 8 items for sale, than a GIANT MEGASTORE in the heart of a busy shopping area.

Buy the 1 item I want and TP back home.

Obviously something wrong with me I guess?

funny if I want to buy stuff I look for what I need not how many people go there

When you search, the first stores to come up in search generally have very high traffic, as it's one of the metrics used to determine placement. That's why it's such a big deal--the higher you are in search, the more people are likely to find ya!

like was just said, its not about the actual traffic figure so much as it is about how search ranks based on the traffic figure.
so you search, buy your item, and are none the wiser. i reckon youre pretty typical actually.

But if you need shoes and 500 stores have what you need then which one do you go to first?

Yeah. As much as we may protest that we don't pay any attention to traffic numbers or even try to consciously discount for them, it's obviously the case that those numbers make a huge difference to the people who get them, otherwise they wouldn't bother with bots or spend for campers. (The mechanism is search ranking, as described, but the proof is in the frantic competition to get big traffic numbers, gamed or otherwise.)