How landcutters are still hurting the mainland

That would break too many legitimate uses, and they've already told us it's off the table for that reason.

No he definitely said there would be a blog posting sometime after Jan 13th about the traffic issue but was a little cagey about the contents. Sounded to me like the plan is just to make traffic bots some kind of TOS violation and to rely on the community to AR it like we do with ad farms.

We can but pray that LL have fiinally got into their thick heads that using anything avatar-related for search ranking is insanity. It just gets gamed into meaninglessness by the selfish.
If they do remove traffic from search ranking, hopefully they will also demonstrate joined up thinking by removing profile picks as a ranking factor.

"..just to make traffic bots some kind of TOS violation.."
If that sort of partial-assed thinking is going on, then we can look forward to the traffic bots being converted into models and campers.
Nothing will fundamentally change.

Technically against the forum rules but hopefully Jack won't ban me for posting his comments at the Office Hours

[2009/01/08 11:26] Jack Linden: once we have land cutting out of the way, we'll look at deliberate driving up of traffic numbers, perhaps as a tos violation in and of itself.
[2009/01/08 11:27] Jack Linden: and the access issues around locking down a region with camping will also need to be addressed
[2009/01/08 11:29] Jack Linden: Ciaran, to a point yes and we have sometimes taken action if landowners can't reach their own land for long periods. but we need to look at it again
[2009/01/08 11:30] Jack Linden: We're now seeing people selling 'traffic raising' services, and that needs to be dealt with
[2009/01/08 11:31] Jack Linden: I know Ciaran, but we've seen a sharp increase recently
[2009/01/08 11:32] Jack Linden: Traffic is tricky, because some residents like it as a measure of footflow. Where it gets problematic is in using it for search ranking
[2009/01/08 11:33] Jack Linden: As purely info for the parcel, it still has value, though in time i'd prefer to give more detailed info such as number of unique visitors, number that TPed via the classified, L$ spent by parcel and so on
[2009/01/08 11:35] Jack Linden: Chaley, I think that when you're sharing a finite resource, simply allowing one person to use all of that resource while only owning a fraction of the region, isn't really scaleable

Exactly. Hopefully, they will choose to remove traffic rankings altogether, but I'm sceptical about that, even though it is part of their roadmap for search. I'm sceptical because it would remove most camping and bots, and would seriously impact LL's login numbers. It would be stupid to consider login numbers but I am not confident that LL doesn't have that sort of stupid thinking. I hope my lack of confidence is unfounded.

Another aspect:
Banning traffic bots and leaving the traffic rankings in place would also result in other places being ranked highly that should ranked very low. I'm thinking of active clubs that have a tiny shop nearby on the same parcel - shops that rarely get a vistor. They would rank highly for, say, female clothes, because of the club's traffic - they don't need anyone to visit the shop to be ranked highly for what the shop sells.

From all the discussions we've had here, I still see only one solution to the manipulated or skewed traffic rankings, and that is to get rid of the reason for it. Banning traffic bots and keeping traffic rankings would be like cutting a tree down to get rid of it. The tree will continue growing, with its branches taking new directions. The way to get rid of the tree is to kill the root, which is the cause of it growing.

Maybe, but I think you're wrong. The ad farm policy was very succesful and everyone said that would fail. I think this could work too if LL create the right guidelines for ARs to be filed. Of course, ad farms had a massive coordinated group in the Arbor Project that made a concerted push to file ARs. Might be harder getting people to report traffic bots since less people care.

It doesn't sound like they are thinking with live brains. That sounds like they are considering making traffic bots a ToS voilation but continuing to allow camping (the locking down a region thing is already a ToS violation on mainland, and private regions are not their concern). All it will mean is many of the bots are replaced by lag-causing camping. Perhaps not owner-camping, but still camping. It wonlt have any effect on the manipulation of traffic rankings, and it will add to server load. They can't be that blind, can they? I think they can.

JAYSUS WEPT!!

They have *SOMETIMES* taken action if landowners can't reach their own land for *LONG* periods.

It's absolutely moronic.

When the ad farm policy came in, some ad farmers tried to get around the letter of it.
Hax claimed his new towers were works of art.
Many of them but ban lines up in place of the prims.
Some still use terrafroming as a weapon.
Most of that sort of nonsense was *eventually* stamped on.
Any success of the ad farm policy is down to the fact that the ad farmers had few alternatives.

If LL want to move on traffic gaming, they have to move on every aspect of it or they will be wasting everyones time and creating a lot of frustration.
Traffic bots are just one example of people artificially inflating bums on seatsd purely to rank higher in search

THere won't be a problem with getting people to AR bot farms. Once a few of them get whacked and lose traffic ranking while they organises their bots into store models and campers, they'll make it their business to track down the high-traffic competition and AR them.

The policy is a camping/bot policy and I really think we're getting into be careful what you wish for territory here, love it or loathe it camping money often gets circulated around the economy.

Jack said that the locking down a region was already a TOS violation but that they have recently seen an increase in traffic increasing services, a sharp increase. Therefore they're looking at it again. Personally I just think they need to enforce their existing policy, there's no need for a shiny new policy on hogging region resources.

Funny, while the towers in the sim next to me are gone, the land is still chopped up, terraformed to hell, and there's still advertising there despite the big invisiprim walls hiding it. I've had a couple of the landowners in that sim asking if we want to expand in that direction (um, no thanks).

When we start seeing new residents moving in where they were driven out, I'll accept that it's been "very successful". Right now... it's working, slowly, but it still allows abusive behavior while at the same time banning things (like discreet for-sale signs in large parcels) that it shouldn't even be concerned about.

I guess I just mean it was very successful at solving the problem it intended to solve.

Some of you buggers are simply unsatisfiable I think eventually LL will realise this and stop wasting their time trying. Doesn't it get mentally tiring to keep finding some convoluted reason why every single thing LL does is a failure?

We're now seeing people selling traffic raisers... um, hasn't camping been around since 2004? Where the hell have you been?

Yeah I made that point to him but he said there has been a sharp increase recently. I'd imagine he means traffic bots for hire.

If people want to bump-start the economy, then they can simply give L$ to random avatars.
I think the 'camping money helping the economy' is just a cloud of humbug encouraged by those who use camping to inflate their traffic/search ranking.


LL need to achieve attitude adjustment on the part of their employees.
A while back, I raised a few AR on a neighbour who was constantly fill the parcel with 30 camping spots, maybe 5 waiting for a sopt, herself, her partner and 3 live customers.
When they had an event, they reduced the camping spots as required to let live customers in.
I eventually had a live chat with Concierge - while standing in the Linden sim next to my yet again inaccessible 4096. She could see exactly what was going on but said that there was nothing she could do about it. She simply wasn't empowered/motivated to take on the hassle of whacking the perps and justifying her action after the event if screams of complaint arose. The best she could do was to try find an excuse to reboot the sim. I said it wasn't worth doing that unless she was going to do it repeatedly.

I have a theory that while there may be individual Lindens who actually have a clue, they have to run any decisive action past a higher management who totally lack an understanding of what it is to 'live' in SL. They just don't get it, and dismiss anything that smells like effort.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Not past tense. Not by a damned sight. Unfortunately, ads go up constantly, probing the edge of the policy. Sometimes G-Team takes them down, but unless G-Team changes its internal "ad" criteria, you can be sure that the still very active adscammers will find the maximally offensive combination of loopholes and the Mainland will be a cesspool again in a few months, despite Arbor's best efforts to save some value here.

As much as I think Jack himself understands that Traffic is worse than useless as a Search ranking criterion, he's not the only one formulating this policy, so yeah, it's difficult to guess what they'll end up doing. I'm still hopeful that they'll do the right thing, but the last time they "studied" it, they were overwhelmed by the "Traffic for hire" camp, and the sad fools who think their paltry manually-generated traffic scores would actually drive anybody to their venues "if not for the bots"--as if bot-builders can't outsmart the G-Team.

Hell, the G-Team can't recognize static advertisements, even when the same scammer has hundreds of them all over the Mainland. What hope have they to track down thousands of hired trafficbots, flitting from one paying parcel to another at random intervals?

S/he Who Must Not Be Named in these Forums is already rallying the troops in favor of a jira preserving Traffic and banning trafficbots. Bizarrely, some folks are lining right up who should be smart enough to see through that. Not a good sign at all.

When I got started, I camped for money and ran money trees, other games, filled out a few surveys. I got paid enough to buy a few things here and there and pay rent for a house with 2 friends. It was satisfying in a way to know that I wasn't "cheating" at the game - I earned my little living and I made some nice friends, most of whom are still around. We've all moved past camping, of course, but it was a good experience. I have no problem with camping so long as it's helping out people who put money back into the economy. I would camp and shop. Yeah, I might leave overnight, but I often looked around to see if there was anything I liked. I wasn't the only one.

With the massive decrease in camping pay, and the proliferation of camping bot runners, that level of wealth injection into the economy as a whole has gone down, although people will still camp overnight to buy a pair of shoes, or what not. Camping in and of itself isnt' teh evol, but anything that is abused that much can certainly appear that way.

Well this humbug from my perspective is based on talking to my tenants who go camping. Now if they give up their land they're going to be giving up pretty much all their home comforts, home, poseballs, animations, clothes, so as a landlord I'm pretty far down the chain of what they're going to give up first, but I know that without camping they wouldn't be buying some of the stuff they do.

As for just giving out money, that isn't as productive. If eliminating camping leads to a more prosperous job market within Second Life then that would be good for everybody, I somehow don't see that happening and I do employ and pay people right now.

Not quite that would be comparable to security systems being sold due to griefing.

In fact I agree that camping has a side-effect that is a positive good for SL (and the SL economy) by redistributing wealth into the hands of those who have no better way of generating L$s but who just can't (yet?) bring themselves to buy L$s. Bots are steadily eroding that, as camping payouts dwindle: the bots compete directly with the campers but for negligible cost, and at the same time reduce the value of the Places search and the Traffic score itself.

The negative side-effects of camping are pretty well known; this is all far afield from the thread topic, so it's not a great place to rehash them, nor the arguments against even ungamed Traffic.

Nonetheless, those of us who really want to see Traffic removed from Search have some unfinished work here: what alternate do we have to effect the same wealth redistribution? There's still "Picks camping," I suppose, and without Traffic, it will be much, much more important to Search ranking (for better or worse). But besides that, what can be an incentive for the "haves" to eagerly recruit "have nots"?

"As for just giving out money, that isn't as productive...."
How is camping any more productive than just giving out money?
Campers don't produce anything other than artificially inflated traffic numbers for the camping place. Campers are just part of a scam to game Search.

If there is no camping, then people who don't want to buy L$ with the loose change from their RL pocket can get L$ in other ways.
They can just accept gifts of L$ from people who want to boost the economy. They can engage in scams, con jobs, scripted objects that take money and the like. They can take those L$ and go and buy stuff in SL. This would be as great for the economy as is the spending of camping L$.



"If eliminating camping leads to a more prosperous job market within Second Life.."
You might as well write 'If eliminating camping leads to a cure for cancer'.
There is no connection between eliminating camping and job creation.

Yup! Griefers are good for the economy.

You're right. We should be ashamed of ourselves for drifting.


So, back on topic :

Landcutters are good for the economy if some of the profits are spent in SL.
Even if landcutters cash out most of their profit, they buy land off non-cutters, who then can spend that money in SL.