How LL could make bots irrelevant

That same mail surprised me as well. Yet I do not think XstreetSL will never lead to less bots on the grid, as the two will never be entirely integrated I suspect.

And even if so, then we would have Search All, Search SLX, and search places/groups/people/etc. And as long as search places is there, the bots will stay. Phil clearly showed what happens if he removes his bots: he looses way too much revenue because too many people still are using Places Search. Even where Search All is the default search. So adding another search option will not change that, I am affraid.

Furthermore, I would be surprised if anything happens with XStreetSL, except the revenue getting into other pockets.

The trouble is the cost of running 30 bots is negligible, probably even 0. The benefit is non-zero even if very few people use Places search. So traffic bots will never end as long as even one person uses Places to find anything.

That's my feeling too. They'll integrate the account systems and promote it in-world.
Extract from the FAQ
https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417&task=knowledge&questionID=5809
"How will Xstreet listings be connected with inworld search and classifieds?

Linden Lab's efforts to enhance the virtual world commerce experience through use of web-based marketplaces is part of a long road map for providing as many benefits to our Residents as possible. One possible outcome of this development is the eventual integration of product listings and advertisements from the marketplace with Second Life's inworld search and classifieds. However, we are not announcing the specifics of these integration opportunities at this time"


I just hope LL are not hoping that the traffic-gaming issue will just die a natural death.


Meanwhile, we can buy bot systems and info on XStreetSL

Yes - absolutely. Having been in that business for many years (I still have an seo site and forum), I can state categorically that there are no seo methods (things) that cannot be read in public seo forums. There are firms and individuals who claim to have secrets that others don't have, but they lie. SEOs test and test, and discuss/share what they find in the forums. Groups of forum users set about tests, reporting in the forums, and so on.

The reason why some companies pay significant amounts of money to SEOs is because it's cheaper and more reliable than the alternatives. They don't want to employ (on the payroll) an expert to do it because it would cost more. They don't want an employee to spend a lot of time learning it themselves because it would cost a lot and they wouldn't feel confident that the employee has become an expert. It's much easier and cheaper to pay a specialist, who can prove his/her value by showing results, or who has a good reputation for it.

It's just the same with many things - car repairs, plumbing, etc. etc. I've no desire to learn what I'd need to know to fix my car each time something went wrong. I'd much rather pay a garage to do it and get it done very quickly. Seo is worse than that. A car can be tested immediately to see if the repair worked or not, but RL search engine rankings take time and, for long enough, the company wouldn't even know if they were doing the right things, or if they'd done them as well as they could be done, or even too well.

Difficult to guess what this does to the Traffic/-gaming issue. LL is noted for making the best of any possible excuse not to act, or at least it was in the High Objectivist era of King Philip.

Long-term, however... I see no way that they would not completely meld these together. Truth is, XStreetSL is greatly handicapped because it lacks the one valuable thing in Search All: the absolute grid location of actual items for sale, something simply required for items that need to be seen and tested. And in-world search is handicapped by the need to actually TP to the parcel to see even a preview of what's listed. When you think about it, neither one is worth a damn by itself, but we use them because they're all we've got. Combined, they'd be pretty powerful. (Not surprising that OnRez is throwing in the towel now, although they were becoming less and less relevant even before this. Now, a combined in-world and web-populated Search should have an insurmountable advantage over any future competitor.)

Lol- you have zero conception on how to run a business in or out of SL The above quotes kind of highlight that!

I would place you in the category in "Buy a piece of land, build a shop, fill it with content, sit back.....and then they will come! " <shakes head>

We're on the same page as usual!

perhaps LL could make it so that any parcel where they reach high traffic levels, from the same avatars spending all their time there... gets flagged in search as possible bot traffic

Kinda put a big sign so all can see in search that it is being done

Same with many other manipulation techniques

See for sure what the silent majority feels about it.

Probably be like they feel about paid reviewers on rl products

I wonder if there is a way to colour code a logged-in Bot on world & Mini map. Maybe by assigning a colour code based on the type of login client. There must be a way LL can determeine the difference.

after watching a few of the Phillip linden videos last night..
from what i gather..it's pretty much a project of the world and letting the world evolve on it's own..
i really don't see them getting in the way unless it is something they add to the world that messes with the ecco system of it all..

more like if they made a change to improve the world and it affected bots or how people do things in sl..i don't know if they would mess with the human nature of it all..i think they want to see us work it out ourselves..more or less the same approach as not getting involved with resident disputes..

just a guess is all..but after watching those videos i can see why they don't get involved as much as we would like them too..

uhm, sadly no.

there are no secrets to how to market yourself well in sl....no one taught me, i just figured it out and picked up some info here and there. consequently i teach classes in how to do it to anyone who wants to know for free. but the interesting thing i find is that most creators even tho they take my class, cant be bothered to do what it takes to market themselves well even tho it is extremely simple and not at all time consuming to do.

marketing is an element of commerce...period. ive said it before....you MUST let people know what you have or no one will buy it. and there is no way that anyone else can know the right key words etc to use for your product unless they do the same research each of us must do to figure it out. i dont know if your items are wood or steel and what your items are named. the variables are just too great for assigning key words, parcel names, descriptions, etc.

again...no secrets, just good ole hard work. i will say that those i hear whining about no sales, no traffic etc are often the same ones i have spoken to at length about how to do this and they choose not to follow the steps. so in addition to the knowledge which is readily available...you also have to actually DO something.

Purely on the dot colour thing:-

If they had the coding to vary the colour of dots, then they could do something like:

Have a different colour for an avatar that is logged in from the same IP as (say) two other avatars on the same parcel.
Whatever about bots, that might irritate people who run more than one avatar in the same place at the same time. It might also iritate people who don't want others to know of a possible RL connection with the typists of other avatars in the same SL place. It might also freak out someone who suddenly notices that their dot is the same colour as that of another. Dad?
Some drama could be avoided if there was a unique dot colour for each unique IP set within the parcel.


Dot colour could be used to indicate how long the avatar had been on the parcel. However that would be gamed immediately.

Dot colour might not do anything about bots, but it would certainly have potential to shake up the non-bots.

I always tell new SL creators and even old ones, that you need to spend 1/2 your time in researching and creating products.....and the other 1/2 doing Marketing and admin work. Anything less is foolhardy!

I've worked in the Advertising & Marketing sector for over 20+ years in RL and found that methods which are effective in RL are not neccesarily so in SL. Yes i have a bit of an advantage in terms of general Marketing knowledge, but i still need to learn the new ways that are effective inside this new virtual world platform.

It doesn't help that at times it's not a level playing field, where most of my main competitors are stocking up high with traffic bots, which is something i have chosen not to do....so i chose to find alternative ways of making myself visible to compensate for that shortfall in Places Search.
There's no point moaning about the gaming that goes on, if traffic wasn't gamed, something else would. It's called human nature!

May I ask what time is left for sex???

Rofl - the above is SL time. I don't do pixel sex....well not since my Noob days!

It's absolutely true that some will use any and all means to make a buck. If there's a way to game it, they will find and use it.

The traffic and the picks gaming really push my button though.
I think that they have a very direct negative effect on SL society as a whole. They have a corrosive social effect on everyone.

Bots and typist-away campers are just constant disappointments for people who want to socialise. They breed general cynicism with SL.
Systematic Pick buying damages the whole fun and trust chain thing of Profiles.

Other gaming techniques might be more or less effective, but they don't do direct damage to SL as a whole.

in⋅cor⋅ri⋅gi⋅ble   [in-kawr-i-juh-buhl, -kor-] Show IPA Pronunciation
–adjective
1. not corrigible; bad beyond correction or reform: incorrigible behavior; an incorrigible liar.
2. impervious to constraints or punishment; willful; unruly; uncontrollable: an incorrigible child; incorrigible hair.
3. firmly fixed; not easily changed: an incorrigible habit.
4. not easily swayed or influenced: an incorrigible optimist.
–noun
5. a person who is incorrigible.
6. Phil Deakins
Origin:
1300–50; ME < L incorrigibilis. See in- 3 , corrigible

This is the problem with many people. I've said many times here that, if a person has the will to succeed, they can succeed. It's the lack of will/determination that keeps people just ticking over, often at the level of hoping to make the tier for the month. There's nothing wrong with that. We all have different desires/hobbies in SL, and some people's desire/hobby is just to make things and, if someone likes it enough to buy it, it's a very pleasant bonus. So it's not really a problem for them if sales success is not what they are specifically aiming at.

Everyone doesn't log into SL to socialise, and there's no reason in the world to expect logged in people to socialise. If you walk up to an avatar that isn't a camper or a bot, the chances are that the person does not want to socialise with you.

"I see dead people!. They're everywhere!"

And unlike in the movie, they're really dead.

An example of what Jojo talked about:-

Back when the only business I had was renting out skyboxes, I had a system that informed me when someone arrived in the show box, and I used to go over to offer assistance and answer questions. One day I went over and the girl was there, not to rent one, but to enquire about the business because she was looking into doing the same thing. Not many days later she went into the business and bought 20 skyboxes from me (mine were very good by comparison to others in those days ). A few days later (literally) she had them all rented out and wanted more. It took her only 1 or 2 days to rent them all out after setting them up.

I'd been in the business for maybe 6 months and I had about 50 skyboxes rented out at the time, but she'd rented 20 out in a couple of days. The difference was that I had a permanent classifieds ad at a low cost, but she put in a lot more determination than that, and it worked brilliantly. If I'm not mistaken, she paid a lot more for classifieds - that's all. She had the will to succeed whereas I defended the money by placing one low cost classified. She went on to buy more and more skyboxes from me, and it was a great success for her.

She had the will to make it a success, and she did it very quickly. All I did by being negative about my spending commitment was improve slowly over a long period of time. She went on to create a social community and land based dwellings too. She was a shining example of the will to succeed being the cause of success.

You have no idea what they're aiming at if they don't specifically say so. And in an arms race, ultimately there's no winner.

Moreover, we're talking about building a world here, and the world has the power to determine people's will/determination - encourage it, discourage it, or to make it irrelevant.

Again, all you are showing is that your definition of "secret" is wrong. Any information that people keep from other people is a secret. How the information is discovered at source is irrelevant. Back in Ancient Greece, Archimedes discovered several scientific principles considered basic today - and he did it by "analyzing available data", the same as any scientist does. Nonetheless he kept them secret, because the Greeks used them for building weapons and they didn't want the enemy to be able to build the same weapons. Any of the enemy could technically have discovered them too, but they couldn't really, because they didn't have Archimedes - nor, in most cases, a society or economy that could support people becoming Archimedes. This has been the case for every scientific discovery with a military application right up to the nuclear bomb. All science is "analyzing available data"; but it doesn't mean that anyone can do it or that it can't be secret.



Read your government's laws on child pornography. Most governments - and most regular people - just want their citizens to stay away from anything that might even vaguely resemble child porn. If they wrote a precise definition, paedophiles would rejoice in everything that was juuuuust outside the definition being effectively confirmed legal. So they write a vague law on child porn, saying that the "details will be decided in court" - knowing that by the time a suspect gets to court, they have already lost their job, family, and all their friends. Effect: people stay away from anything that might be child porn. Which is exactly what people want to happen.

LL could do the same. If "any attempt at search gaming" (with no more precise definition) was punished by instant, permanent, cosmic banning with no appeal, then everyone would stay away from anything that might even vaguely be interpreted that way.



Insert it into the database entry before it's submitted to the search heuristic, of course. Which keyword? Hmm. How about the keyword currently being searched for? That'd make sure everyone was optimized for every search.



The basis of capitalism is that the market buys the products they want most, and tries to buy the cheapest product which has the properties they want. As a result, the companies or people making the products most people want at the lowest cost get more money, and can use them to buy more resources. As a result, the planet's stock of resources is used up as efficiently as possible.

If the market becomes too unintellgent or too lazy to play its role in that process, then capitalism is not working properly. And that is no insult to the market - unfortunately, it will inevitably happen eventually because it is to the benefit of producers to make the problem of "finding the best deal" as hard as possible. Scott Adams was only half joking when he talked about confusopolies!

Having a system where the company that _wastes_ the most resources (since most marketing resources are just lost, the ads are torn down and thrown in the landfill) gets more resources is exactly the opposite of anything intended by the basics of capitalism.

Oh, and the way you're supposed to know that a new product exists is when you see a new shop in your village high street.



Exactly. So it's an arms race, and at the end of the day everyone loses. Eventually, somebody will find the perfect unbeatable way to optimise for the search engine, and stay at #1 forever.

But even that is missing the point. Diversity of content is a key selling point of SL. You can't have diversity of content if you can only have 10 businesses per keyword, no matter how those businesses get there.

As much as I hate to agree with Phil, ... I have to say that I agree with Phil.

It's not that I dislike Phil; I'd just like to see the bot issue go away (as would he).

It would be nice to be able to measure the impact bots have, but it's not. Clearly, they have a big impact when they're used extensively on a region shared with others. Whether they have much of an impact in a wholly-owned region, suck away in the mists somewhere, is questionable.

And I agree that it's very useful to be able to repeat a search and get the same results.

Regardless, if they do get rid of the Places search, I do hope that they continue keeping traffic records and making them available somehow, so parcel owners can see what their traffic is (even if it's group-owned). For my purposes, it would be fine to show the results in an About Land tab -- doesn't matter to me whether everyone can see it.