Traffic no longer used in search??

The point you make about the bots buying and selling mainland automatically also shows the problems that occur when land is sold at low cost by mistake, if land is purchased automatically by a bot then automatically repriced to a new cost and placed on sale then there is not time notice the error and respond, this problem has been highlighted in the past due to the number of people who fell foul of such bots.

Sure these cases are the result of an error by the seller, so maybe they need to learn a lesson the hard way, but for new users many would never even contemplate that bots will act so quickly to take advantage of their mistakes.
What do you think is their opinion of Second Life when something like this happens? Sometimes this problem could mean the loss of a significant amount of RL money.

It works for me too, but don't expect not to be corrected by me if you post things that I know not to be true.

Bots obviously didn't help Sarah Nerd's land business operate profitably on the mainland, which is a great shame, she was one of the more trustworthy dealers.

I was going by a sentence in your post that followed that one.

I don't think you'll get any support for the idea of banning bots only on mainland but, that aside, you are right that, if traffic bots are banned it won't reduce bots by very much because 'genuine' tasks will be invented for them and things will be worse - those tasks will be where people are, causing lag and much more use of system resources. I pointed that out in another thread some time ago.

Banning all bots isn't going to happen because LL (Jack) acknowledges that some of them perform useful functions - similar to them acknowledging that there are genuine uses of 16m parcels, so they aren't banned. The only realistic way to deal with traffic manipulation is to get rid of the reason for it. As with many things, if you only deal with the symptoms, but leave the root cause in place, then you won't prevent it at all.

The silly thing is that getting rid of the cause of traffic manipulation has been part of their own "roadmap for search" for a long time now. All they need to do is make the change - they already did it once, so it's quick and easy to do. There is no need for the discussions that Jack says will happen soon (again!). Traffic can be kept for the benefit of landowners, of course.

I've seen Elanthius prove over and over on this forum that when mistakes happen he goes out of his way to get the land back to the person that made the mistake without them taking a loss.
You might want to hang back and read some of the older threads before you start throwing out accusations.

why do you even feel the need to correct me, when all I did was post something that anyone can read (it is right there in the damn KB and history)

Where did I accuse Elanthius of anything?

If it sounded that way then it was not intended to.

Not all land buying bot runners are as obliging as Elanthius though.

To be clear, I don't believe Sarah was buying and selling land with bots. I simply meant that she used them for maintenance tasks such as setting prices, setting auto return, descriptions etc. In fact for a list of other bot using people see this page:

http://www.landmachine.com/

It's basically everyone.

Agreed, I don't expect LL to ban them all on the mainland either, but I can hope.
My point was all bots do cause a problem for many real users especially on the mainland.

If LL change the search to no longer take notice of traffic at all.
Then hopefully the worst issues will go away, but from my limited understanding, traffic now has hardly any effect in all search, so these bots should already have a limited use if that is the case.
Yet they are still being used by most businesses purely to boost traffic levels.

Jack Linden mentioned in his office hour that farming out bots as a business is now becoming more of a problem.

If that is accurate then even if traffic is abandoned completely for searches, Will the message actually filter down to the atificial traffic booosting bot users, they are wasting their time?

However one of the buffy bots would also act to increase traffic if just left on a parcel without being used as intended by the creator, more to the point they are being offered free of charge.

So what you're saying is bots are not bad, but just certain bot users?

I doubt that anyone would use traffic bots to influence the All search, because the effect of it is so minimal, but it is still the sole ranking factor for the Places tab search, which is why they are used.

All bots do not "cause a problem for many real users". For instance, my traffic bots are at over 4000m in the sky - a very long way from the store and from the ground. They do not cause a problem for users at all, unless you mean that they affect the rankings that users use.?

Logging in an alt on a thin client can do the same thing. There is no advantage in using the BuffyBot for that purpose, so it's a small red herring.