Bye Bye Traffic Bots/Camping

there's more to the all new search than meets the eye. it is actually rather complicated, and while i hate to reestablish a camping argument, traffic does make a difference, albeit minute in comparison to picks.

but, when everyone starts padding their picks, ultimately it will be traffic and a few other little things that decide who ranks where.

Nice, only problem was I couldn't get people to pay $5L for 24 to shoot campers, maybe with better marketing it might work, if you did a whole theme sim like that with buildings to hide in etc, remember to turn fly off too. and perhaps have some of the zone as no build so they would have to use melee weapons on each other. maybe have it so you can earn the money the camper has if you kill them, and they lose their money if they get killed? Calll it Killer Camping Cash

At least Pickbots don't need to be logged in.

That. Is. Fantastic.

It costs very little for someone to run a bunch of bots. Did LL say that traffic wasn't being computed at all? (I.E. would no longer be a factor in New Search results?) Because so long as it counts and it's free, people will exploit it.

Good riddance. And now we'll get a better look at real concurrency/signups.

Okay, I'm going to bring this up again, as it seems to have been largely ignored... has there been some announcement about merging the teen & regular grids? I know the rumor has been going around for a while now, but what EXACTLY is this comment supposed to mean?

Gaaa ... I sure hope not. No, in fact, I hope that never happens.

Usagi is a noted doomsayer and one who never has anything good to say about SL or LL. Take anything he says with a grain of salt.

yeah there are several that worry about the influx of 'innocent' children swarming the adult grid during summer vacation

They didn't say that it won't continue to be used in the Google search - I don't expect them to change that. But it's effect is minimal and not worth the trouble of having bots - and *definitely* not worth paying campers for.

Well while ever our verification system remains just a "click if you are 18+ and you really are who you say you are" system it's happening now anyway.

I bet before the new system is out there will be bots ready for it.

Heck if its just using google search that would take all on 10 min to code lol

Traffic won't do that. All traffic is, is a few IBLs. They are not differentiated from IBLs from other sources, such as Picks. In fact, they are not as useful as Picks IBLs and others, because they don't impart the amount of 'juice' that other IBLs impart.

Each page has a 'juice' score, which is used as a ranking factor - it's one of many ranking factors. Links impart that juice, so pages with many IBLs acquire more juice to impart via their OBLs. A page that links to others doesn't lose much of its juice through the links to other pages, but it does impart juice that way. It means that different pages have different juice scores, and the higher the juice score, the slightly better the page does in the rankings.

I've not tried to explain that fully. If you are interested, then do a search on Google for PageRank, and read about it. PageRank is what the juice is called for Google's web engine. Although one of their founders (Larry Page) invented PageRank - it's named after him - Google doesn't own the patent to it - it's owned by Stanford University. The appliance documentation states that they use such a system, which may be PageRank itself, or it may be something similar.

The reason I went through all that is because the 12 traffic pages don't acquire much juice, because, as far as we know, they are only linked to from one page, which itself is only linked to from one page, which isn't linked to from any pages. So the traffic IBLs pass very little juice on when compared to other IBLs. The traffic pages are good for a few Picks with good link text (parcel name), whereas other pages are good for that, plus they pass more juice on.

What use would bots be?

Some folks might user bots to be green dots on the map.

Meaning LLABS is monitoring accounts locking them if they feel something is not right wth the accounts. The mergering of the two games is stil a possiblity, because of how they are trying to mainsream the game into everyone home in ether a buyers market, coffee chatter, or a ad driven system in the for of brand names......... The teen game and adult game will be together the signs are already showing but when is the questen.

It's one thing to monitor accounts for fraud and another to even consider merging the two grids.

So people can take their 100 traffic bots, start a group with each of them (costing just over $36 US), and then use another method to get IBLs for the bots themselves. I'm agreeing with Kitty. Within a month of the RC becoming the main viewer, the search is going to be gamed far worse than anything we've ever seen before. With only 10 results per page and many people unable to scroll through them, the top spots are going to be more valuable than ever. The incentive to game the system has never been higher.

We could always leave the current system keep saturating as it is doing till every store in search runs 10-100 bots. Then the system will be fair with 100k online, but nobody of course will be able to TP, move or buy anything..........
Look at the online numbers rising, who actually believes the number of "real" residents is rising accordingly, if it's not dropping that is?

Its getting to the point here changes are coming if and when is what people want to know.

What is required to do so would include policing the content of the entire adult grid turning even the pg areas into viewer restricted parcels.

There would be no way for anyone of X age to even approach mainland due to the hodgepodge of ratings on the lands otherwise considering a pg rated school for child avatars sometimes has to deal with people buying the lots next door for a strip club with huge signs.

Islands would have to be vetted to prove they are child/family safe.

considering LL's standard hands off on content creation and monitoring the content that is being made... that is a whole direction they will not go due to manpower and manhours needed.

Especially since the result is likely to be the barbie and ken beach party look of the competitors

The only way to make it work is have an adult continent and island groups by location on the map. So they need to make that decission and dump a new continent of all mature /adult rated sims, so people who wish to can know that kids aren't going to get into or even see their homes/businesses/sims easily. Then maybe PG can gradually take over the mainland continets as parcels are sold, might as well do it while land is worth SFA anyway.
If they were really keen just copy the existing continents and give landowners the choice to move to identical parcels on the new adult continent by forfeiting the land on the original continent to become PG. It's as much to protect us from kids as them from us.

Or they can continue to keep them separate and ban the accounts of those that commit fraud in order to get into either of the grids they are not supposed to. Which is the most likely situation.

It's worked fine for this many years, and allows for the freedom that was espoused compared to the other online worlds with user created content ( committee verification before it can be uploaded)

Yeah except luckily kids get into the Adult Grid easier than Adults could get into the Teen Grid.
There's no penalty for kids getting onto the adult grid except an accout ban on their disposable account.