Your opinions about visitor tracking

I'm curious about your opinions of visitor radar for your parcel. I am looking for one that I could use just to see who is on my parcel while I'm there -- like a HUD or something, not an object that sits there an uses resources all the time.

I have about four levels of stuff going on in my parcel, the ground gallery, a platform I'm not quite sure what to do with yet, a public changing room, and my private changing cublicle about 1200 meters up where I am most of the time.

When someone is on my parcel I just see the green V somewhere below me. I can't tell if they're in the dressing room or somewhere else. I'd like to know if it's someone I should greet and if they're in the dressing room I'd like to not disturb them.

Does such a thing exist and would you consider this an instrusion of your privacy for the purposes I have explained? Yeah, I know it's my land, but I feel very strongly about not wanting to spy on people and ensuring they have a comfortable visit.

My personal opinion: As long as you are using it as described, and not posting a public record of the comings and goings, I see no problem with that. I've seen a few "3D Radar" systems that make a cube with dots inside it indicating the relative positions and elevations of anyone in scanner range. The idea of only having it active when you're logged in and on the parcel is also very considerate.

The challenge would be having one system that displays all the elevations. You'd need a scanner for each level, reporting to your central display, since most scanners have a limited radius of 96M from the scanner.

I thought most stores tracked visitors anyway.

Would it be possible to say add a prim as a landing point at each location that would record the visitor and send the info back to you?

A sensor only has a limit of 96 meters. In your case, for multiple levels you would have to deploy multiple sensors sending their messages to your hud which can quickly add up to an additional burden on the full sim. Alternatively you can use Grid Proxy to see who is in the full sim all the way up to 2,000,000 meters in height with little impact using PAR. It can chat the keys of who is in the sim on the channel of your choice and will only send an update if someone leaves or enters with a very low impact.

It is free and open source @

http://code.google.com/p/par/

And here is the video tutorial on the chat radar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjILXyD1xVw

with the script included in the plugin pak, it is actually much easier then shown in the video.

I have just now seen scanners that do 512 elevation, but I bet they use some kind of relay prims with scripts on all the time. Not good.

Actually I just thought of a simpler solution. Move my private dressing cube below the public one. That way if I see a ^ instead of a v, they're probably in the public dressing room.

Duh!

How easy it is to look for a high tech solution to a low tech problem.

Thank you, Jesse. I will look into that. It might be nice to see if it's the same person all the time (which I'm perfectly okay with) or if several are enjoying the facilities, such as they are. The traffic number varies wildly.

Weston, I have one in m stores that emails me the names of everyone who has been there and sends an IM in world to let me know there is someone there (if I am on line i see it). When Damien and Hera visited your gardens not long ago, I am sure they would have been happy to have been greeted . If you want a copy let me know and I will drop one on you.

Jesse, please correct if wrong. I think folks may need a little more context before they do this ...

Grid Proxy is a libsl program that installs on your PC and does packet inspection of all SL traffic to your PC. (Actually, it can also do packet insertion). As such, it does not have any impact on server performance, but, if your PC is low performance, may have an impact on your own SL performance.

When you install PAR plugins or other Grid Proxy applets, you are installing a shim of 3rd party software that intercepts traffic between your client and the server and inspects/modifies it. In the case of the software Jesse is recommending, it is Open Source and Lordgreggreg's stuff has been around a while, so is generally trusted, though not widely used outside of the developer community.

http://lib.openmetaverse.org/wiki/GridProxy
.

Fair assessment except for the "generally trusted" part. Enough of us have looked at the source to see that there is nothing nefarious going on. That coupled with the tremendous amount of face that LordGregGreg would loose in the community if any shenanigans were tried.

Full sim radars and how to create them are a frequent request in the scripting forum. Up until this point I have discouraged their use, first due to the fact that it is an "advanced" scripting project and secondly because of the negative impact they can have on all of the sim residents. I personally know that Thomas Conover has put a lot of thought into his design to lessen the impact as much as possible, such as throttling the messages as sim lag increases. But due to their design with multiple probes flying throughout the sim, they still are not very friendly.

I have had a lot of fun though scripting a 3D Radar around PAR though with minimal impact. 3D icons are rezzed for each person in sim that show thier location and rotation and displays their names. Touch the prim to bring up their profile and or pic and if they are close enough, you can cam into their location. This has a curious side effect, if you see two avs that are face to face in a horizontal position for example....................................................................
(This example is not for sale BTW and was just a scripting exercise to see the sim impact)
It takes minimal skill to script around the input for anyone that is interested and I know that there is a package of plugins available for sale on xstreet built around PAR.

It is hoped that with this now easily available alternative, LL will eventually see the light and make something along the lines of llAgentsInSim(list) someday.

I have one of those 3D scanners (complete with sculpted terrain) and they are indeed very, very cool. Probably not what you want though as they're meant for monitoring whole busy sims and run constantly (i dont use it). Typical visitor trackers do run all the time until you remove them or kill their remote probe, which is a pain if you just want it running short term. My suggestion would be the Secret Agent HUD from Conover's GadgetShop (Thomas Conover). Even though it's capable of some fairly nefarious things if used wrong, the scanner itself is the best I've seen yet, much better than Mystitools. It'll routinely pickup people on the ground from 500m up when set to active. When done just detach it

Thanks, Jesse. I just wanted to mention it because many folks assume that because it's open it's safe. It's a little more subtle than that: If you have the skills and time to read the source and compile/build it yourself, then you don't need to trust the creator at all. If you can read the source but don't intend to build it, then you are trusting that the executable you've downloaded is the same as the source you've read, which is where the reputation of the programmer comes in.

If you neither intend to read the source nor to build it, then you are trusting both the programmer's integrity and his/her abilities to correctly document what they've created. In this case, it's best to read a review or two of the software - like Jesse's above - before downloading, even if you believe the programmer to be trustworthy.Not holding my breath, but that would be great!

I like Nela Lykin's infogiver.

InfoGiver V 2.1 ™ - © 2006-2007 Nela Lykin
** NEW PRODUCT **
1. Key features:
-------------------
- Can send messages and/or IM's to people
- Can send landmarks to people
- Can send notecard to people
- Can send a IM to the owner for every visitor
- Can send IM's to up to 5 operators per visitor
- Can send Email to a defined adress for every visitor
- Range can be limited up to exact user defined borders (Bounding Box)
- Prevents spaming the people
- Can be made invisible
- Mod/Copy permissions (make as much copies as you need)
- Can be used in mall parcels or even in parts of your shop to give people usefull info to your products
- Can be used as a welcome message sender or greater

.

I use the secret agent HUD as a radar atached and in my stores the visitor track.
The radar has the 96 limit scan but touching automatic scan the radar can scan the entire sim if you whant.
The visitor track, has n option to deploy sensor in any prim you whant with an extra script touching the tracker base.
You can find all products from this member here for more info

<Your opinions about visitor tracking >

scanners are usless, all they are are toys that muck up yours and others lands. But feel free! People visit my build around sl and they go wow its so not laggy here, whats your trick?

Leave the bells and whistle for noobs and techno havetohaves. you'll make money reguarless how many people you know come everyday. If your not smart enough to do it on your own, you probably live in mommies basement yet.


I was victim once of this stuff. Getting rid of it all was wonderful and enlightning. I'll Never go back.

Neo-Luddism is alive and well, apparently so is hypocrisy.

Wes, you're just talking about four levels of a parcel here, right? And the parcel would fit comfortably inside a 200m diameter circle, right?

If so, all this talk of full-sim scanning or Grid Proxy or Secret Agent HUDs is massive overkill.

So you have four scanner scripts that just sit in an idle listen for your HUD to announce its presence on some obscure channel, and then start a long-delay scan, cropping results to the parcel boundaries and altitude slices of interest. When your HUD quits acknowledging their reports, they go back to idle.

Even when operating, those four slow scanners will have negligible effect on sim performance (and less lag for you than a packet-watcher on your client machine).

Privacy? It's your parcel. I understand you want visitors to feel welcome and not spied-upon, but really: probably half the grid is wearing a Mysti-Tool to tell them who's approaching long before the avatar is near, even on other people's land. Nobody seems bothered by that. Knowing who's on your parcel while you're on that parcel seems completely natural to me.

That sounds very reasonable. Actually it's three public access levels, the fourth being my little plain cube. I almost solved the problem by just moving the cube. Knowing the names, or at least where people are going, is just icing on the cake at this point.

I have a couple of different options I can use for that now thanks to the kindness of the fourm folk, but knowing which has the least impact on the sim is probably too arcane for my layman's understanding. I'll just have to choose which feels the most environmentally freindly and hope for the best.