Traffic Bots Against the TOS of LL?

Well no its not

If all those places below you on the places search got as many bots as you ...

and people in other industries did ..

the grid would fill up with bots pretty-damn-quick.

In fact, You BENEFIT from people who wont use bots for ethical considerations. The longer it takes for trafficbot abuse to grow out of control, the longer it will take before LL decides they need to do something about it.

So not only do you feel it's fine to displace people from their rightful search ranking, you'd be okay with displacing them from their land too. You're a real prince, Phil. As to your other point, go count how many businesses and clubs are listed in search, then multiply that by 20 bots each, then come back and claim it's a gross exaggeration.

Firstly I don't use Bots.....so i'm insignifcant when it comes to Places Search.
I don' spend 100's k on classifieds and those classifieds i do have are carfeully crafted so i get more bang per buck! I only include keywords relating to products i sell. I use lots of keyword variants and some in foreign languages too!
My bad!

As for ALL search i have ways of being ranked high and its a combination of events that i perform. I made an investment...I own lots of land, i've set up a number of main shops and satellite shops, i use different permutations of keywords for different locations, different orders, variants, foreign languages....you name it, even Picks, an ever growing large customer group that i send invites to personally to those customers who purchase products and not people simply arriving there and being auto-spammed like other companies. I do it ....because i can!.....LL love my 4 figure monthly tier payments!!!

My bad!

I guess i'll keep focusing on running a viable business then!

did not see that
I usually avoid bot threads but decided to peek in this one

When I got attacked it was because I said I bought something at your store, I was proud of my purchase and my find as it fit my needs perfect, someone (can't remember who now) jumped all over me said I was supporting a known traffic botter, etc

I had no clue you used traffic bots and said so, this person (and I am sure others) did not believe me, but I don't care if they do

I shop WHERE I WANT, bots or no bots, I don't care

I have no problem with camping bots, traffic bots, etc, other than they are in world when I can not get in

If someone wants to game the traffic, I don't care....

still not sure why it bothers others, when someone says that they do not care, that it is not something that upsets them

The feeling I got at that time was... you fight with us or you side with them, and are evil

for some reason they could not comprehend that I am literally middle of the road, don't care either way.

*shrug*

sorry if my comments seem rambling and disconnected, mind is elsewhere today

I don't need to count them. You made a gross exaggeration. That's all there is to it.

As for the first part of your post, it's just your inexperience talking, and doesn't merit a response.

ah yes, the old "lalalalala I can't hear you" argument. Very intellectual of you Phil.

It bothers them for a couple of reasons as far as I can tell. The main one is that they don't understand what SL is. They wrongly imagine that SL is an end in itself and, as such, it should be what they orginally thought it was - what we all probably originally thought it was, and they are loathe to give up on that idea. But SL was never the end in itself that is originally thought. It is only a live development system that we use. Imo, that's the reason why they attack the opposition rather than debate - because they want SL to be what *they* want it to be.

The other reason that I can discern only applies to some of them. They just like to argue for the sake of it.

Both of those produce the attacks, especially the first one.

Good impartial post

There are primarily 2 groups that are against Traffic Bots.....1) To view rankings ethically 2) and those businesses effected by those Places Search rankings.

Not much you can do about the 1st group, and if you look at SL population as whole, its probably numbers to the same percentage as those that believe President Bush should remain in power! Negligible!

The 2nd group i believe should quit whinning and do something to improve their Company's visibility. Traffic & camping Bots are here and part of the SL furniture, you can argue semantics all day long but it ain't going to improve your sales none!
Places Search is just one way of marketing your company, there are many other options internally and externally to increase your company's visibility. If these people would get off their ass instead of camping in RA complaining about it....they might generate more sales! I have chosen totally to ignore Place search, it simply does not exist for me.....i don't like traffic bots, so I won't use them. I moved on.....my businesses still do very well!

hehe. if you made any sense, I'd hear alright

Ill do the math for you Phil

Lets say that 5,000 venues were to have 20 bots each

thats 100,000 Bots.

Real hard to imagine. Would you like crayons? Maybe you can try to draw a picture of it.

---------------

Have to LOL at you calling Chip inexperienced though. Phil you are so clueless about how SL has changed in the last few years.

`

lets deal with the here and now....there are not 100,000 bots.
Is this the Doomsday prediction?

If you're going to ban bots completely, then it will have to include all the model and working bots at ground level too. I visited a business recently that had umpteen models that were bots plus a whole bunch that posed as customers. They have the same effect on traffic. You'd be surprise how many of the famous SL brand names actually use bots and a fair number too.....old established businesses from 2005 and back. This is not just a newbie business owner trait. There are old Pfeifdomes out there, trying to protect their market share as we speak.

If it got to the 100k levels of bots...and the grid could not take it, then yes.....LL will be forced into a policy change as that has an impact on everything on the Grid. It then becomes a much larger issue than simply optimising Places Search.

I wish they were.

Dunno .. a year ago there weren't an estimated 10,000 trafficbots either.

Not long before that people used mainly campers.


When I started there were no bots at all. Of any kind. There was also no such thing as camping.

Why would 100,000 trafficbots be such an unrealistic idea?

Heck, why would 500,000 be unrealistic?

How many venues, shops, etc. are there in Second Life anyhow?

Simple answer to that.

To make it beneficial to hike up the Places searchs rankings, these bots are parked nearly 24/7 ...they have to be inorder to preserve their traffic ranking. Even if owners are not online, you can be sure their bots are. Work it out....1 bot parked for 24 hrs is worth just over 1400 traffic units, you have 20 of them, thats 28000 base traffic before you add on the genuine traffic. So anyone and almost everybody that use traffic bots as one of their search strategies is invariably using them 24/7. Those Places search rankings i presume are updated at least 24 hourly. The effect of not logging on your bots for any given day will result in you falling off the ranking lists and could costs 1000's L in potential lost sales.

The only way i see people not logging on their bots, is if they are on say a 2-week holiday away from home. It's too high risk to keep Computers on unattended.

But I can claim that the majority of people I know in SL, don't give a toss who uses bots or for what purpose. Since the last thread, I've had a number of discussions with friends, who were quite fascinated by bots. And as I said before (and got slammed for it, accused of being Phil or at the very least accused of being a relative of Phil) the average shopper just wants to find what they are looking for, we do not care about bots.

Once again I will state before the accusations fly, I am not for, or against bots, I simply do not give a toss about them.

Hey they did the same to me, made all kinds of innuendo’s. Even though I clearly stated I was not for or against the use of bots. I was totally oblivious to bots prior to that thread.

i have been reading all the way through this thread and the one before.. and many times wanted to chip in... but out of a sense of self preservation and not wanting to be jumped on .. i sort of chickened out every time.
Also sorry in advance if i ramble on .. i am not a really a native speaker of english and what i want to say might not come out exactly the way i meant it to.

I use unscripted alts .. but dont use pay for picks.. I have no idea if my key words are effective or not.. but we tend to be on page one of both Places and All.

I would love to see a SL where traffic could be counted in a realistic way.. pipe dream.. maybe ..

There are many other small ways that people game the traffic.. putting the TP point as far away from the goodies as possible.. false keywords to get ppl to wander around and look for something that just isnt there..
hell a lot of so-called real campers are alts and or bots themselves..
the game is everywhere.

And no I wont say that its good. I also hate not being able to log in .. I hate lag, but can control it a little more because i have my own SIM.. and yes it would be wonderful if there was some life behind every avatar on the grid.

So what i am thinking of doing.. just thinking mind you.. is taking down my alts for a set period of time and taking a look at whether it will have much impact on my sales and my place in the ALL search.

Even though I worry that jumping in and taking the alts away might have a negative impact on my sales.. deep down .. i think that perhaps it might not. I enjoy creating .. and i would prefer that people were buying my stuff purely because they liked it, not because they found it before something else that they might have wanted more.

and also if i think about the electricity saved on one desktop, then yes maybe what might be lost on the swings can be gained on the roundabouts.

So when i bite the bullet and take the plunge sometime this week .. i will report back here. more fodder for the canons maybe .. but at least it will be something non theoretic to stick in the aforementioned canon.

Hi Bella

It's like preaching to the blind. I run shops, i run a mall, I have a clue on customers and their shopping habits.....but some die-hards with a 5th agenda plainly won't have it....no matter how you present the facts.
I don't use Bots, I don't like Bots, but one can't be ignorant and stupid of the general enviroment we choose to do business in.......and that includes how people shop.

Just my thought, but in the end it makes little difference how I find your store. If your product is shit, I'm not going to buy it. I don't look at the traffic numbers after a search, I alphabetize the list and go from there. I found Phil's store that way, before this debate reached critical mass.

In my opinion, he should do away with his bots, he doesn't need them. He sells great products at great prices and his service is excellent.

The traffic system has been debated heatedly for quite some time, it needs to be done away with, but as usual, it gets the standard deaf ear from The Providers.

Hi Eku

Firstly, i want to say your English is very clear and easy to understand

If you remove you ALTS from your sim, it will have very little impact on your ranking in ALL search as traffic has a very low weighting....and so it should, as it already has Places Search which is traffic centric. Having said that, obviously removing your ALTS will effect your Places Search listing.

I'm actually the opposite to you. I wish someone would park a group of Bots over one of my Mainstores for 48-72 hrs. I'd really like to see what impact it has on daily sales....I've never been totally convinced of it adding much to the total sales as i believe most users and especially new players use ALL Search more than any other Search function.

I had my Models in my shop start a questionaire on how people arrived at one of my Main shops. The list had about 14 options of how the shop was found and I wanted to take a sample of around a 1000 people to make it more valid. Based on that info i could then adjust my marketing strategies. Anyway i totally misjudged how long it would take to poll a 1000 people (if you take into account language difficulties too).....i think we reached around 250 samples and then i lost interest. From those 250 replies, All Search was top (i thought it would be).....but surprisingly to me was that "Referrals" also figured very high.!! I had very few come through Places Search....which i knew would happen as i'm about 15th on most important keyword listings.

It's highly unlikely that your All rankings will change by removing the bots. It's your Places tab rankings that will change.

I took mine down for a couple of days to see what impact it would have on sales, and while it isn't possible to be accurate because there are too many variables, I estimated that my sales dropped by approximately 20%.

Interesting.. Maybe I should park my zombies at Rene`s for a few days

I think that two or three days isnt really enough to calculate a loss in sales. I find there is huge fluctuation depending on many things.. like how SL is performing.. the weather outside... and of course the Olympics or any other attention getter in RL.

Personally I saw a jump in sales during August.. which surprised me because i always thought it was supposed to be the bleh month. But then again we branched out a lot and began making our own animations as well as some unusual pieces... also add in the fact that we tend to get a good slice of the japanese market (no long vacations for us here really once youre out of school) sales are fickle due to more reasons than traffic.

Also ..I can see where Phil is coming from because now i have decided to take them down for a fixed period of time (after i run it by my partner who is sleeping lol) i am getting these OH NOES feelings..

when you have a formula that works.. its hard to let go of pieces of it.. even though you have this deep seated feeling that some parts dont contribute much to the success at all..
like a gambler who feels the compulsion to wear his winning socks.. we hang on tight

mind you .. if 100 places dropped their bots tomorrow... 100 more places would move up on Places and get bitten by the traffic bug.. and start gaming the numbers themselves...

But of course thats not what they say ---

Marcel and Phil , who both use the term.

always say

"The Vast Majority"

the don't say "The Vast Majority of the people I know"

Which is considerably less of a claim.