Is Paying for Links in Profile Picks Cheating?

You may not blame me for it, but it didn't happen. I shared everything I had at the time with this forum. I refuse to share any more of what I've discovered with this forum. Some people here have successfully ensured that any information I have will never be shared here. Not good for a forum, huh? Incidentally, I don't mean the anti-bots.

Perhaps you would like to replay to Marcel again on that little topic.

Only to someone who can't think rationally, Mort. I said earlier, and I'll say it again, I didn't use any gaming of the All search to get the #1 position in my field.

The exploit you refer to came afterwards, Mort.

My point is that you carefully used the words "you've never paid for a Pick" which ignores the possibility that you used the picks of your trafficbot accounts and technically didn't pay users for them. But you (presumably) did pay LL for the alts, or paid to have the bots hosted.



As mentioned above, since the bots all have accounts with Picks, they could be used for both.



Do you have any proof of that? Who is to say that in 40 years we won't have technology that can simulate the entire human quality evaluation process?



I mean an "arms race" as in the generic term for a situation where there are a group of people or organisations spending effort and resources competing; where the goal is not to achieve anything with impact outside of the contest, but simply to spend more effort and resources than the other people; and where, if eventually everyone spends the maximum amount of effort and resources, there is no eventual actual benefit gained.

If no-one was gaming search, gaming search wouldn't be needed. Gaming search has no benefit unless you do it more than the other gamer. And if everyone games the search to the maximum possible extent, the only result is that the search is back in the same order it would have been in the first place, without gaming... except that a whole lot of time and effort has been spent on the gaming, which could have been spent on making bettter products.

The rational thought from that is if you had no problem using an exploit before you have no problem doing so now.

And the reason you are against sharing is it was that exploit that you shared, and it was reported to LL to fix.

So now it is an an arms race along the lines of Ll playing catch up much the same way Anti-Virus and Spam filters do.

They are having to react, since they can not find all the flaws someone that is willing to exploit the system will use.

Aaaw, Kitty. You sound peeved that highly useful information is being kept from you

If some of the people in this forum didn't behave obnoxiosly (not the anti-bot group specifically - there are some nice people in the anti-bots), then it would all have been shared, but those people screwed it up for everyone who reads the forum. When I shared before, I had people say to me that I'm sharing with my competitors too, and I said I know. Even though I won;t help forum as a whole any more, I have shared with 3 of my direct competitors. You know Marcel, of course, but you don't know the others. We are all competing for the same shoppers, and I shared the information with them. But there is no way in the world that I'm sharing anything useful again in this place.

Nope.

That's *not* what Colette made the accusation about.

Good decision!

Nobody has any proof, but quality being a subjective thing, you would have to rely on human input in the form of quality ranking or criteria..

and there, once again .. is something that can be gamed.

Presumably? You presume too much. Do your research before you make accusations. I ask again, what Premium bot accounts? I'll add another question:- what picks in bots? Now go and do your research before answering

Research, my dear, research

You're not Sling are you? Who cares what will happen in 40 years. As far as I am concerned, no generic search engine will ever be able to rank according to the quality of what's at the other end.

I see. So our objective is the rankings, and not the customers and sales that are generated from the rankings. I've got it now. Thank you for clearing that up for me

Wow! Interesting idea, but doesn't exist anywhere in the world.

No, Mort. You wrote that since I admitted to an exploit (that I did after I reached #1), it's reasonable to assume that I still use exploits. How many times do I have to show you what you said? How old are you? Seriously - how old are you?

Don;t you just wish. Ask Kitty about that. I told her that I'd discovered 2 things, and I shared that exploit with her. That was one of them. I didn't share the more important one with her. Ask her.

I don't see LL trying to catch up. Do you?

The new search was step to get away from the older gamed to hell searches.

They didn't expect it to be gamed so quickly.

And the response is about what google's is to such exploits, slow. It takes time for LL to work with google to adjust the code of the search appliance to weed out exploitation.

You admit you used an exploit, when does not matter Phil. It shows you are willing to use them to benefit yourself rather than report them to LL to fix. After all you don't hand a gambler a pack of cards and expect him to play solitaire only.

Who told you this?
you cant just flout your own presumptions as fact...

The reaction of many of the lindens to the public methods of manipulating it. So based on what I've seen and heard from several lindens it wasn't supposed to come out the gate and be manipulated.

Sidestepping, Mort?

Your opinion, or they said so. I think the former

Your opinion, or they said so. I think the former

Your opinion? Yes it is. They don't work with Google at all - they said so. They just bought a product off the shelf, that's all. <sigh>

There was nothing needed fixing about that one, Mort - not that I was aware of until you told me a few days ago.

Seriously, Mort - how old are you?

Your post says more of a negative thing about about you than about me.

You are making judgments about me based on a couple of threads in a forums.

At least in Phil's cases its been dozens. Although his conclusions are still wrong.

no you cant just say youve seen and heard...
its kind of like ... how would you call it... an urban myth.. aligators in the sewer

a fact is a fact .. needs backing up.. you cant just think its a fact.

a reaction by Linden Labs would be an announcement .. like something similar to the ad farming problem.

hearsay doesnt count.

I didn't mean you literally "Advertised" it.

I mean that you interject your business into these threads.

I meant that it functions as advertising to bring it up like you do.


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As far as THIS thread goes you first mention your business and how successful your search rank is in your SECOND post, #145.

But in your FIRST Post#134 you also mention "Low prim furniture" which is cute since you have a big "Low Prim Furniture" in your Signature line.

You do not brag about your business in the same way Phil does, I don't want you to think I am accusing you of that.

But these threads become functional product placement for you.

There are other posts I want to reply to but since I'm sneaking off to bed I just wanted to address this one.

Phil found something and saw potential in it to manipulate search indexing in his favour, in and by itself the way he's using it for could just be categorized as an undisclosed feature. You can label his specific use of it "exploiting search" but it's on the same level as gaming picks was more or less.

I saw the potential for an XSS exploit in it since there doesn't seem to be any input validation and the forum and site authentication cookies are sent to all secondlife.com subdomains, which includes world.secondlife.com where search listed places live, and they're what you'd need to attempt session hijacking.

My problem with Phil was primarily that given his stated experience he should have known that anything that lets you insert unfiltered HTML onto any portion of a company's website is more than likely a serious bug when it's not specifically listed as a feature but he never reported it.

In other words: Phil found a bug/undisclosed feature that had exploit potential. I'm too tired to make the distinction very clear I think, but there's a rather big one. What he did was simply irresponsible/unethical in my opinion rather than the outright malicious that "using an exploit" generally implies.

Seems to be all Phil and the rest need?

So why is it not all I need?

Marcel doesn't hold a candle to you though Phil,

You BRAG about your business in the threads and how much it makes, usually in an attempt to belittle others.

Marcel never does anything like that.

Exactly

Phil claims that he has stuff in writing which he wont present.

Zaphod did present a quote from Robin Linden supporting YOUR claim , I just wish I knew where it was now.

Zaphod!! repost it!

All exploits start out as bugs, not features. An undisclosed feature is a company's CYOA on a bug that isn't a threat to the system.

If someone looks at a bug as away to gain an advantage, then it becomes an exploit of a bug in the code. A proper response is to ask the maker is this supposed to work this way, to use it is to disregard anything but personal gain.

Edit: and the exploit allowed a bit more than you'd think to run (all I tested was parsed, but didn't try actual server side code to run functions other than insert text through one language). It could easily allowed keyword spamming of epic proportions at best, since it could all have been hidden in comment text that was never visible (without certain clients that allow view source on the search pages)

What Colette wrote has no bearing on my reposnse to Marcel's post. My response was only to Marcel's post.

If someone mentions their low prim furniture business with no other information available then Marcel's assertion that it would not necessarily be advertising would be correct.

However if someone mentions their low prim furniture business and it says quite clearly the name said business right next to that post and every post they make then they are advertising it. So Marcel's assertion is incorrect, you and him do advertise here a lot because everytime you mention you make low prim furniture it is possible to know exactly what that business is without further investigation or a huge leap of deduction.

When Colette says she makes shapes, it is really not possible without at least going in world to look at her classifieds, picks (don't even know if she uses these at all) or worse case goes through search shape vendor at a time to find a business, tp over and see if any of the prims belong to Colette. Hell I don't even know the name of her business and I lurk far more than I post even now. However if Colette was to put her business name underneath her forum name that simple little connection makes it a completely different proposition (but I suspect you and Marcel are very aware of this - I would not insult your intelligence by assuming you are oblivious to this fact ).

So even though I was at first only responding to Marcel, now that you have responded as well I will give my opinion that Colette's observation about you both advertising here a lot is absolutely correct.

To be fair everytime anybody else mentions your low prim furniture business they are advertising for you - including me in this post. However that would not be the case if the words under your forum name were not the name iof your businesses.

More than a few other people also advertise deliberately here. I am not making a judgement about it or anything (at least at this time) - just saying that is the case and that Colette has a point.

It is surprising I had to spell it out like this though.

sorry i have no idea what you are trying to say....

ok i read as far as Colettes post.. and i understand now.

But if what he is saying is .. not true then AR would have brought him down, no?