How LL could make bots irrelevant

Well I would have loved to read the list Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against your land bots, at least you are known for a decent behavior if someone sold to one of your bots by accident.
But in the end, I think land bots and traffic bots both simply are ways to influence ones business result, and both allowed tools.


Well you know I do agree with that. It would remove traffic as a search metric without removing traffic as a tool.
Search All replaces places search by choosing Places in the drop down list anyway, so I see no reason to let it stay. In fact, that goes for all tabs, they can all be replaced by choosing the right drop-down value.


Indeed, neither your nor my opinion are of much value. What worries me most though is that LL benefits from the concurrency numbers, so they might take measures to satisfy the complainers a little, but at the same time assure their numbers do not change that much. They still rely on them too much.

Who gets the only 3 camping pads in a sim isn't any kind of edge case.
It's the idea of setting a limit to be shared across all landowners that's silly.



There's 'popular' as in people going there to enjoy the atmosphere of the place or shop for great stuff.
There's the perversion of that when the only thing that attacts avatars is the payment for being there. You're stretching the meaning of 'popular' way too far.






Uh, no they didn't.
The Ad-farm blog/ban to which I was referring was the initial one on February 13th, 2008 .
The next day, ad-farmers had prims down and ban-lines up. Some had their defence already set up in land description. One muppet near one of my parcels claimed that he was securing his parcel purely to protect neighbours. Despite ARs those bans stayed up for months.
There was a flood of complaints and ARs about them, but whereas prims were being removed around the grid, no action was taken on the ban-lined microparcels.
The knitting warning was sensible and very amusing, but it didn't come until *6 months* after a ban that should have been explained to Governance staff as intended to stop a generic type of behaviour.

The failure to brief Governance staff and/or to have a procedure for them to feedback to someone who could alter their brief points to a very por management style. LL musy have known that people would have tried to work around the ban. They should have been waiting for it and ready to slap it down.

Actually, physics seems to rarely be the problem since H4 anyway, so I hesitated to mention it at all, but that argues in favor of bots, not in favor of non-bot Traffic. Traditional camping is okay, too, where the agents plunk themselves down on a pad and go non-physical, but danceballs for events (or camping) leaves them threatening to bump into each other. Not that it matters that much.

I tried to post a response to a certain TypePad blog with which we're familiar, but it seems to have been eaten (presumably by TypePad, which seems b0rked most of the time). Maybe I'll bestir myself to try again, but anyway: I agree with you that the die is cast, and that the most likely Linden course of action will leave Traffic intact as a Search ranking metric. And yes, I do think that will fail, not because they won't go to the effort of trying to enforce it, but rather because despite enforcement it won't have the desired effect and will trigger undesirable side effects.

Yeah, but see, I just don't understand how it's possible to discriminate between a place trying to be a popular spot for folks to hang out, and a place trying to have a lot of people there to boost the Traffic numbers. I just don't see any interesting difference between especially generous Sploders on the one hand, and "fraudulent" camping pads on the other.

Yeah, that too. I've pointed out elsewhere (ahem ) that Traffic by its very nature protects the status quo. (But of course I'm a Communist. Apparently.)

One of us is misremembering history, it could be me. I see the blog entry you refer to and I recall it being made but that was not the ad farm ban that I am referring to in any way. It was certainly not the beginning of the new policy of aggressively chasing down and removing ad networks.

I see you're upset about the failure of the February announcement, on the other hand, I choose to ignore that and see the September announcement, it's aggressive implementation along with the many other large scale projects to improve mainland as being the start of a new era in SL where LL via the G Team are heavily involved in maintaining the quality of mainland. I believe (yet to be proven!) that LL will continue that theme with upcoming parcel cutting and traffic gaming announcements.

Note to Qie: All posts to that blog are being eaten and appearing later, presumably after being approved by the owner.

Hmm, maybe it's because I tend to think in a programmatical way that ignores human behaviour as difficult to model and therefore irrelevant but I do not see the difference between something that people are visiting because they enjoy getting paid and something people are visiting because they enjoy it for other reasons.

Let's be clear on this, I think a policy change and aggressive suspensions and bannings for violations is NOT the best solution. I do, however, think it is an adequate solution and I'm optimistic that it will work.

here is an easy solution.have everyone upgrade to PIOF and PIU
and close the door

as far as i can remembr..this all stems from the door being open and being able to set up as many accounts as you like using different emails

just make it where people need to have some kind of payment information..stick to the 5 alts for premium and only 1 basic and those who don't upgrade or give their information like griefers and others lose the account..

so many problems stem from the fact that someone can truly be totally anonymous..

people complained about how it ran in the 2006 boom when the door was opened..then the camping and now bots..

all because of the open door and making as many accounts as you like..

the search is fine .it's the people that abuse it..you don't have to get rid of bots..just all the extra accounts people are not suppose to be having..

doing without the search and watch what happens..
sl will become a ghost town..i'm sure a lot remember when the search went down for more than a week and how it impacted everyone..

people want LL to fix it while we break it and change the search..i think the search works fine..
i never really cared for the fact that someone could just scam someone outof tons of money then leave that account and just by going to another email be a whole new person to do it all over again..

close the door and you'll make premium a premium again.

Why does the Search function exist? Does it exist primarily to help SL merchants make money, or does it exist to help SL residents find that for which they are looking?

I do not want random Search results, or results that are somehow "fair" to SL merchants. I want Search results that help me find that for which I am searching.

it's suppose to be for everyone but you have some that are abusing their part of it and it's easy to do when you can make 50 accounts and log them all in..

i know without it sl becomes really boring..in fact i think when the search went down we were having tp problems also and resulting to landmarks in the inventory..
take the search out and you won't have to worry about bots or anything anymore..
the problems all started with the open door..it went from something like 600,000 to 5 million like over night it felt like..
and still growing..

the thing is we are the ones that abuse it and it's always the same exact argumet ..too many allts on the grid..too many campers on the grid..too many bots on the grid..

really it's just too many people with extra accounts on the grid..

There is a tradeoff involved, though.

For example, if you are searching for a "black dress", and the Search comes up at the top with a major clothing provider who does offer those, you might find a nice one there. But there might be another that you'd like much more - several entries, or even several pages, down. And if that merchant is trapped down there, and doesn't get any customers, that item - which you'd like - will disappear, or even never be created, because a potential merchant may decide not to become one if the market is too unwelcoming.

The only way to solve that is to make products browseable directly, as Xstreet and OnRez do now, but they can't get noticed when they're not obvious in-world. And there are the usual problems with providing an in-world interface to them (if LL provide an "official" in-world interface to either they are accused of FIC; if they create their own official service they are accused of GOM. It seems they are TLAd either way), plus of course, it isn't in LL's interest to do so, when selling land for shops is a key part of their income.

Moreover, it isn't in anyone's interests for the market in SL to stagnate too much. In the real world we accept the tradeoff of a mostly static business environment in exchange for high quality and good value goods (compared to what we would have otherwise). In SL that's nowhere near as good a tradeoff when creativity and self-expression are what many people come to SL for - and they didn't find them in the real world precisely because of the same tradeoff.

Really the problem is in the conflict between what Search does and the culture it's used within. As I mentioned, Google was designed to search for information sources, as a business directory it is sorely lacking.

I'll take what you say at face value.
People can be pesky. If they are looking a certain service/thing, they do tend to expect that the measure of popularity of a place should be somehow related to the particular service/thing and not to some totally unrelated factor.
What you are saying is that work is 'popular'. Social Welfare offices are as 'popular' as nightclubs, etc.

Add:
Prisons are very popular. True - only some of the people there are paid to be there. But dammit! Look at the numbers/traffic. They're hugely popular.
/Add



It's hard enough to deal with socipathic tendencies in RL. In SL, where people are basically anonymous and distanced/insulated from others, sociopathic tendencies are far less easy / impossible to discourage/cure

I sincerely hope that LL will organise themselves and begin to slap down freeloading greedy muppets on a "know it when we see it" basis rather than on on the text of a blog entry.
I really don't think that anyone sees the function of the G-team as being the curing of sociopaths.

That's the problem. In-world Search is not, nor was it meant to be, a business directory. I do not want to see it turned into a business directory.

Second Life is not a "virtual mall." It is a "virtual world."

For something specialized like a business directory, XStreet.com has the right idea. Let third parties like XStreet and OnRez and whomever else compete to create the best marketplace- for both merchants and consumers- and they will do it. I see no reason why Linden Lab necessarily must be the source of a business directory.

Because unless LL start actually blocking business parcels from in-world Search, in-world Search will always be the number one source of customers. Unfortunately, it is a business directory whether it likes it or not.

bleh we don't need a new system..
we need a new door to get rid of the abuse factor .a lot don't want to hear it but it's an easier fix than changing the system.
just like a club or shop .they are scared to see what the number loss would be if everyone had to have payment info.

The way to get rid of traffic bots has always been to include a checkbox on the Search to allow the searcher to exclude Traffic as a parameter for sorting results.

This idea is not popularly supported by merchants because it gives the searcher the power to decide what results they receive, taking power away from merchants to force certain types of results on the consumer.

Have you asked merchants about this? I'd imagine plenty of merchants would be happy with the consumer having more choice on how they order search.

The problem is that results would have to be ordered by something else, which would be gamed instead, as with the current Search All.

Also, why would a customer uncheck that box, anyway? A naive user would certainly think that popular stores must be best, and they are a fairly large proportion of the market.

Every time I have suggested this idea previously, many merchants (particularly well-established ones) have criticized the proposal as unfair. They argue that they deserve a higher place in Search based upon their bot-free traffic numbers, because it proves they are the "best" merchants.

But if that attitude has changed, I'd be happy to hear it.

I suppose the way I'd say it is that I do not conflate "popular" and "well liked". Traffic is a measure of traffic, not a measure of awesomeness. If you want to measure niceness you're gonna need a whole different metric altogether.

That's the magic of allowing it. The consumer gets to decide how important traffic is to them, and merchants will have to follow the trends accordingly.

The problem is not that merchants "game" the system. They will "game" the system, and should. However, the Search mechanism should be designed so that the way in which merchants "game" the system coincides with giving searchers the information they seek.

Merchants responding to consumer trends and wishes is a good way for merchants to be gaming the system.

I have seen the argument: "Traffic is not an absolute indicator of quality, so it's ok do to whatever we want with it."

Without artificial methods to inflate it, Traffic is an indication that there is something about the particular activity/business in a place that attracts avatars. Traffic would be an indicator of worth.
In general, avatars do not hang around in places that they do not find enjoyable/useful.

"Come on. Let's go somewhere. Let's look for somewhere better."
"No. I want to stay here. I hate it here."
"I heard about a fantastic place in ....."
"No. This place is useless. Let's stay here."


Once you start paying avatars to hang around or use a bunch of alt accounts to hang around for free, any possible link between traffic and parcel worth is destroyed. Traffic is no longer applicable as a search ranking factor.

Here's how traffic-gamed SL search would work in RL:

Prisons are high-traffic. They have a large number of people in there 24/7.
They have television sets.
Therefore they would be first port of call when looking to buy a television set.

And yet, without knowing any secret information, I am on 4th place for my main business, and on 1st place for a small side business I opened a while ago. Your idea of search manipulation is based on some conspiracy theory it seems. But I DO put effort in getting up in search, where others do not. Literally evenings of analyzing.


Yes but hardly detectable. No camping pad in sight. And just an example, I can come up with a dozen alternatives.


Not all searches are for businesses. And so far, search all seems to work quite well to find whatever you need. You know, I search as well for things. And never fail to find them. But I do see that many parcels simply do not optimize their pages to be found. That cannot be blamed on the engine though.
There are of course only so many places to be given on the first page, and the parcels doing the best in optimizing will get there. And the nice thing is, that in general the ones you find in that first page, are relevant. They are the people that actually put effort in their ranking.


What I think, is that we should accept the fact that not everyone can be on the first page of results. That's life. And as far as I see it, the ones on page 3 or 4, for example, simply either are less relevant or did put less effort in their search ranking.

Wrong example though. Because this is no example of traffic-gamed search, this shows how traffic search would work. Where the people who are in a place indicate the popularity of the place. So basically, you show that traffic would be a bad metric in RL.

You contradict yourself here, people hang around getting paid because it gives them something they like, Linden dollars. Then use said Linden dollars to do something else they like. Yet you discount the former as cheating, even though it leads to the latter.

Popular does not always equal awesome, it never has, it never will. Poundland is a popular store for people to shop at, everything costing a quid and all that, it's far from being awesome.

What can possibly be unfair about giving the consumer more choice? Bring it on.