Traffic Bots Against the TOS of LL?

From the wiki:-

I have to say that I don't know how relogging back into a sim gains traffic points, although I can imagine. Constantly TPing between sims might add a load of traffic points that standing still couldn't generate. Perhaps some people do it that way and, if they do, they'll be hammering the servers a lot.

Anyone know if the Hoppy Pay (or something similar) camping system is still running? They offered a free HUD, and rather than sitting in one spot to camp you were paid to TP to a list of affiliate locations that appearing in the HUD, getting a couple of lindens at each destination. You had to stay long enough for the HUD to register the TP and confirm your location before it loaded a new destination.

I checked on Slex, and the HUD is no longer available, but a similar system could result in clusters of avatars appearing and disappearing.

LMAO I thought this thread was about traffic bots who WERE against the TOS.

/me imagines traffic bots with picket signs....

[QUOTE
As regards shopping habits, most customers really don't give 2 Monkeys about the green dots that are 700m in the air....unless they are lagged out on that SIM because of them. They just want to shop for the product and then move on. In the grand scheme of things...the few people that spend time thinking on what'ts ethical and what's not are really out there in the wilderness.

[/QUOTE]

Rene is totally correct, agree 100%

It seems to me that most of the people who post here are people who are involved in SL business or people who are very technically apt. I am neither and I wonder how many average shoppers are like me. Here for the social aspect, shopping and getting a bit creative with the land I rent. Blissful unaware nor giving a toss about some bots floating way above the clouds

Maybe the anti bots should accept that most people really don't care......of course I am generalizing, I don't know most people!

Wouldn't the "fact" that most people don't care as some claim be a pretty sad statement.

They came to SL with traffic being gamed, they figure its always been gamed. They are apathetic about it because they figure its not going to get fixed ever.

Same goes for the new gaming, just a continuation.

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Others who are old enough to remember life before camp and traffic bots .. may not care either ... but likely for a different reason. They may have just given up on the whole thing.

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Thus ..

To claim that Trafficbots have the support of the public because people "don't care" probably isn't saying what the Trafficbot advocates think it is saying.

Um did I claim that they are supported, I don't think I did, perhaps you were talking to someone else. If they are anything like me, they don't even know they exist, ignorance can indeed be bliss

How can those ignorant on traffic gaming have an opinion on the subject one way or another?

By definition .. they don't know about it.

I didn't say they have opinion either, please stop twisting my words. I said they maybe blissfully unaware of them.

Well I suspect you would care when you found you can't get into your homesim because someone is running 35 bots on their 1024 shop parcel and 5 other neighbours are already in. Or you can't get a camppad, because campbots have them faster than you can get them, or you can't TP because bots are TPing as fast as they can.
Personally the gaming bit doesn't worry me as much as the misuse of avatars for this.
I think people should be able to just type a number in they want for traffic they can type 999,999 in for all I care then people can make up their own minds on searching for stuff rather than be misled somewhere is 35-90 times better than it really is.

It would be easier to filter out traffic gaming than to filter out picks gaming.

I thought it involved forcing an avie to ghost in such a way that the sim keeps on counting it for traffic purposes but where they don't count against the agent limit actually.

Rene is totally correct, agree 100%

It seems to me that most of the people who post here are people who are involved in SL business or people who are very technically apt. I am neither and I wonder how many average shoppers are like me. Here for the social aspect, shopping and getting a bit creative with the land I rent. Blissful unaware nor giving a toss about some bots floating way above the clouds

Maybe the anti bots should accept that most people really don't care......of course I am generalizing, I don't know most people![/QUOTE]



I agree almost 100% but most people who complain about bots also have no clue what a bot is which is the best part of reading the anti bot posts lol.

I suspect a lot of mass botters don't know what a human resident is too, SL residency is logging into the accounts page to transfer cash out isn't it?

The story so far

Search gaming is not a dishonourable activity because:
1. LL have not yet managed to prevent it
2. Only a relative minority know that it goes on
3. Other people do it. You are forced to use it in order to compete. You have absolutely no choice. Ethics and morality are irrelevant.

Search gaming is actually good for SL because
1. Only people selling ultra-high quality products and services use it, therefore it helps to ensure that lower-quality gets a lower search ranking. For this reason, people in search of ultra-high quality goods are very grateful that the merchants use traffic gaming.
2. It helps to make money for those practising it

Did it ever occur to you to use your mouth for talking, Sling?

Reading this thread something felt off. I finally figured out what it was. In several posts Sling equates trafficbots to spamming. I think this is a tenuous comparison.

Spam comes to me directly, as does mass mailings, I didn't ask for information dumped on my doorstep or to be emailed with offers to enlarge a part of my body that doesn't exist.

Trafficbots raise the profile artificially for something you are already searching for. If you don't go looking for "Free Ferrari" in SL then you would see a Ferrari fan sim with 50 bots sitting around doing nothing.

It strikes me as little different than google's "Sponsored Links" that show up at the top of the page. Are the websites on google 'gaming' by paying google to put their site on top?

Now if the sim owner tracked avatars who visited their sim, then sent daily IM's telling the users who visit them to please come back and maybe the will get some free herbal viagra, then there would be a comparison to be made.

Full disclosure: I am a vendor. I do not use trafficbots. I do however have my workshop in a skybox over my main store, but my main store parcel will not show up in a <Places> search. I am not getting rich in SL, but I have made enough that I do not have to spend real money to keep my fake lands and buy my fake clothes in SL.

It would be similar to sponsored links, if and only if gamed/botted sites were marked such in the search. A checkbox that marks your land as using bots (traffic or otherwise ) and/or camping. Combined with an option in search to turn off those parcels from showing. Then you have a way for the majority of actual users to vote with their lindens, combined with a clear post on the blog and at login about the new changes to search.

edit: Add in that it would be an AR bait to use bots/campers and not click the checkbox, if found to be doing it. First time a warning, second time removal of parcel from search entirely.

IMO pay for picks is very much like a sponsored listing.
and also like renting advertising space (in ppls profiles)
the only difference is that the money from this goes to the users and not the host.
which in a way is a good thing.. what goes around .. comes around.

i am going to put my foot waaaaay into my mouth and say that merchants who are opposed to pay for picks and camping should perhaps put a sign up at their store saying that none of their items may be purchased with money gained from camping and pay for picks.

of course that would be cutting their nose off to spite their face.. and silly actually.

in the end a gamed place with not much to offer.. wouldnt really benifit.
when i use places and all search and end up somewhere that either has a load of junk... or not the item i was searching for .. or it is at all hard to even begin to see where what i am looking for is.. i leave.. and dont come back.

eku: consider the number of folks that go through about five or six pages and decide to just buy the first semi-decent item because they get tired of shifting through the junk BiaB stuff due to search manipulation.

And I'll repeat a challenge I saw in another thread: let those using pay for picks, bots, etc post clearly in their store the techniques they are using to optimize their search rating. Actually be transparent about it to the buying public.

Perhaps, but I'm not sure what point you're making about that, especially with reference to my comment about the risk that tinkering with the Traffic statistic in some often-suggested ways would lead to trafficbots that really, really do impact service quality of sims, their neighbors, and central grid services overall. (I suppose, in a way, this would "filter out traffic gaming," by very assuredly killing Traffic, finally.)

But if the idea is that we should keep Traffic and throw out Picks, I guess I don't really see the advantage of that. Gaming Picks might be more insidious (maybe), but it doesn't inherently--without gaming--reinforce behavior that hurts the user experience (increasing the focus of resource demand) as does Traffic. But honestly, I think they're both damned silly things by which to rank Search results, even if they weren't gamed.

It occurs to me that, in some ways, they're less damaging to the Grid *because* they're gamed. If folks are naively lured to a store with a lot of fake Picks or a box of static trafficbots hidden away out of drawing distance, at least they won't be sucked in to contributing further to a combinatorial lagfest of real avatars downloading each others' textures, computing each others' collisions, etc.

thats what i am doing now.. (edit... woops misunderstanding.. not postingabout the alts but stopping them)
I have never used pay for picks and I am giving the SIM an alt free run, starting yesterday...
I am curious to see if it has any impact on sales.

But as long as there is a way to game... ppl will game.
sad to say.

I like to think I make good products and i would love to see them succeed only on quality merit alone.

The word "spam" is used for unsolicited email and such, but that's not it's original use on the web. It was first used by the search engines themselves - I don't know which one was the first. It was in the days when search engines ranked pages on content alone, and pages needed to be submitted to them, rather than leave to them to find the pages themselves. Engines didn't use spiders to follow links in those days. Some people thought it would help their cause if they submitted a page repetitively in a very short space of time, and that was equated with the Monte Python song, "Spam spam spam spam ...". That's how the word came to be used on the web. Since then it has come to be used for other things, including email spam.

Using the word "spam" to describe what traffic bots do is understandable, but wrong. What is search engine spam is decided by each engine for itself, and by nobody else. For instance, one engine may decide that cloaking is against it's guidelines, and another may decide that it isn't. For the first engine, cloaking is spam, but not for the second one. (Cloaking is a grey area in the world of search engines).

Something can be "spammy", meaning it feels/looks like spam, and traffic bots and camping can be thought of as being spammy, but it's only spam when it goes against the search engine's guidelines and statements. Traffic manipulation is not against the search engine's guidelines, statements, ToS, or anything else, so it isn't spam.

Some people think that spamming the search engines is wrong, but it isn't. A search engine is a private company that makes internal rules for itself, and for nobody else. If somebody does something that is against its internal rules, then it can deal with it internally, sometimes by deindexing a website, and that's fair enough. That's the way it works. There is nothing right or wrong about spamming a search engine. If a person doesn't mind the risk of having the site deindexed by the engine, spam away. It's not a moral issue.

I may be mistaken, but I'm sure that there are loads of excellent products in places that are ranked at or near the top. You paint a false picture, Mort.

Why?

So that the customers know why they are at the top? Bear in mind, the customer may well be expecting to find the most genuinely popular store, not the one that SEOs best, and thus it's borderline deception not to tell them...

What's the point of stopping people in their tracks and explaining why the place is at the top? The vast majority aren't interested, so what's the point in wasting their time? Why not just let them get on with what they went there for?