Picks not registering, how do they work anyway?

Ive all but given up with picks, 4 days and still not registered. I even added a second one for the same parcel 2 days ago, so i had both but still today they arent registered for me.

Im gonna leave it and try again, clearing cache yawn, but has anyone had a similiar problem lately? I have a friend also who said hers for a different place hadnt worked for 2 days - is there a problem with picks right now?


And also, what is this picks system, why cant I find information on it?

o Who runs it? How?
o How does some scripted item like a picks board validate with the database?
o why does it (normally, when its not broke) take 12-48 hours??!!!! This is 2009, what happened to the electronic age?
o Why if you have a pick for say, 2 months and forget to go to the board, does it forget that you registered with that board and make you reregister like a new picker? Does the database only have a floppy disk for space or something?


Not expecting too many replies here but any info would be appriciated

You're talking about a payment system, wherein you get paid for putting some place in your Profile's Picks? I've never done this, but I think that if the place is actually in your Picks, you may need to IM the owner of the registration board to tell her/him that her/his script is not working properly.

hi thanks, its not the devices, ive checked with friends and passers by, its working for everyone else.

I had a similar problem... My pick was not registering until I set the location at bottom of pick screen next to teleport button...

Some of the 'payment for adding to picks' schemes don't work with AV's less than 30 days old.

Rita, look at this thread, you're not alone:

/327/d5/317183/1.html

It's not a problem with the systems, the search they are based on is borked. All you can do currently is wait until LL fixes it.

"Picks" was originally very simple.
If you liked a place, you could put it in the Picks sections of your Profile.
Your profile is the information that you want to present to others when they read it. The places that a person Piucks can say a lot about a person, particularly if the amend the default text taken from the parcel description and say why the like it.

Then LL began to use Picks as a weighting factor in ranking results in ALl Search.
This made perfect sense on the face of it. If people liked a place enough to list in their Picks, then this was an indication of worth/popularity.

And then....
Search gamers abused the system by setting up schemes to reward people for listing them in their Picks.
Now when you lok at someone's Profile, you don't know if their picks are actually an approval for the worth of a place, or simply a Pick sold to the highest bidder, regardless of what they might think of the place.
Logically, this destroys the basis for LL to use Picks as a Search ranking factor.

Picks isn't broken. If you look at someone's Profile, you will see their Picks. That works perfectly.

What's broken is the abuse mechanism.
I hope it continues to be broken until such time as LL outlaw search gaming systems.

Wrong. What's broken is a basic function of SL - namely the websearch - that a lot of other things rely on, not just picks.

interesting angle you have there Sling, there is always alternative ways of looking at things

ok im starting to get the picture now, thank you all, pick checking is based on a core part of SL that is actually broken now, from the other thread it seems a web database somewhere has old results in it and is not updating right now.

oh well, thats the laws of heaven and earth, nothing we can do, but im learning a lot about how the picks actually work at least

Indeed, nothing more or less. Though of course it is the perfect occasion to stir up a discussion about ethics of picks paying

With picks, it is even weirder at the moment. One of the most important things an avatar with a pick needs, is a html page. Using search all, you can see if an avatar has only a link to their profile, or to their html page as well.
So far so good... not. There are many many people that do not show up with a link to their html page, yet they have one. And it can be found too, based on their uuid. But not with search all.

No clue what the almighty Lindens are doing at the moment, but a lot is changing in the background, when we talk about search. And this is just one of the symptoms of that

One more thing: Older picks systems only checked for Payment Info On File (or used). Probably newer ones do the check for a web page.

Now I haven't tried scripting this kind of devices, but it makes sense that they check against search.secondlife.com. That one is always updated slower then in-world search, hence the 24-48 hours.

Furthermore: This indeed is 2009, and it is the electronic age. Try registering a page with google and see how long it takes for it to be crawled. There is so much information to crawl, that is simply takes time for a search system to update.

Well, yes. That does not explain though why last week it took 5 hours to update and now four days...

Google crawls a massive number of websites on a daily basis, but that aside...

I haven't noticed a delay in either updating profile pages (picks) or in adding new pages (new parcels) to the system. That's the in-word search. I've no idea if the website search is updating at all. All I know about that is that it hasn't had a fix applied to it like the in-world search had.

One thing to note is that the page that can be seen by clicking the link to it from the search results is not necessarily the page that has caused the ranking in the results. As soon as a page has been updated by LL's own system, the updated page is the one that will be shown in search, even though the GSA system hasn't yet crawled the updated page. Its rankings are due to its non-updated version. So don't assume that the rankings you see soon after a page has been changed are due to the changes. There is always a gap between when a changed page is returned in the search system and it actually having been crawled and indexed.

Rita, the two places I mentioned to LL as an example do work now. Would be interesting to see if they did just those or if they really fixed things. Can you report anything new?