where can I find pick camping places ?

I think we've found in this thread that some will do anything possible to increase their traffic regardless of the overall effect of others enjoyment of SL. Nothing those who love SL itself will ever change the opinions of those who are only here for profit. Just to keep the two sides from descending into further argument I cheerfully offer the following words...Nazi...Hitler....National Socialist Party...Third Reich. Is that enough to invoke Godwin's Law? I'm outta here

It's you who keeps claiming that what you write is just your opinion - that's when you get caught out, that is.

There is a difference between respect someone's opinion and respecting someone.

I wonder how well your repeated attempts to dismiss the anti-bot crowd as a loud but tiny minority and therefore mostly irrelevant .. Fits with your professed self-image.

When did anyone other than the Lindens suddenly get the authority to offer more than just opinion around here?

Your pipe-dream that forum posts are either facts or lies is still as ludicrous as ever.

We haven't found that at all. In fact, I can state categorically that the people in this thread, who do things to increase traffic, do so only because it doesn't have any negative effect on users, and would stop doing it if it did have a negative effect for users.

I can also state that the people in this thread, who do things to increase traffic, take no notice at all of the personal desires of the few people who don't like it. It's all hot air to us because it's just personal desires of theirs and has nothing at all to do with what's best for SL and its users.

There are no animations in the MLP system.

Aren't your trampled over competitors "users"?

Aren't their potential customers who never hear of them because you gamed the search "users"?

Wait, what? You can now read minds and speak categorically on behalf of others, regarding not only their actions but their thoughts and attitudes and what they may or may not do in the future? Sorry to be blunt, but that's just unbelievably arrogant and flat-out stupid.

Not so. The only flat-out stupid part is your post about it.

Yes, I can state it categorically because there are only 2 of us in the thread, and I know us both that well.

Come along now, Phil. You've gone beyond "doesn't have any negative effect on users" elsewhere. You hold that it's actually good for the general population




See?
Gaming Search is good for SL because it helps people to find Phil's store before they find other stores.

He agrees that if other people use it to get inferior products higher in search then it would be a bad thing for the population. But of course he implies that such a situation would be so rare as to be completely insignificant.
This is the "utter crap" (subjective criteria) situation he says. He says nothing about the intermediate (subjective criteria) cases.
Would a higher ranking for the 'just plain ordinary/shoddy or not as good' not waste people's time? There would be lot of that about, so this would be bad for the community also.


Apart from the event of inferior products being ranked artificially higher, what might be a negative effect for users?

There are a few that immediately come to mind.
The major one is dots on the Map. "Where are all the people?" A user looks at Map and sees avatar dots. Due to the activity of search gamers, including "the people in this thread, who do things ((talking about traffic botting)) to increase traffic" the Map has become useless as a way of determining where people are.
Clearly this is bad for the community.

Places Search has also been damaged as the ranking is by the inflated artificial Traffic.
Clearly this is bad for the community.

Picks can no longer be taken as an indication that the avatar considers the products/facilities on a parcel have worth in their eyes.
This damages the social fabric. An element of trust between avatars has been damaged by the activities of pick-buyers.


Search gaming is good for the gamers and bad for the community.
Activities involving the use of zombie avatars to artificially inflate traffic and pick-buying to artificially give an indication of link authoritativeness " have a negative effect for users."

Any reasonable person who looks at the situation objectively can see the clear negative effects.


The question is:
Do search gaming activities such a s traffic inflation and pick-buying have a negative effect on users?

The question is not:
Do other people do it? or "Was traffic borked by others before X joined in the borking with them and helped to ensure that the borkage would continue and grow?



Would any search gamers like to supply a convincing argument as to why search gaming does not have a negative effect on users?

My steps to get higher in the ranking are good for users, because they allow them to find a store full off excellent things, made from very few prims and sold at very low prices. What can I say? It's perfectly true, as so very many people continue to tell me. Sorry if it hurts you, but it's true.

You can dig back even further if you like, and find where my steps knocked the #1 ranked place for 'low prim furniture' off the top. That was good for users too, because the place didn't sell any low prim furniture. In fact it was that place that inspired me to use bots. (He was using campers to get to #1).

You see now? It's very good for users. The fact that it's also good for me just means that everyone's a winner


What can I say? From my experience, the places at and near the top of the rankings have good stuff. Perhaps you should go and find an example of what you're talking about instead of just making things up. Find a store that uses methods you disapprove of to get high ranking, but only sells total crap, and let us know where it is so that we can see for ourselves. Without such evidence, your argument is just your incredibly biased imagination.


It is? I agree that the green dots show bots as well as non-bots, but I did a little survey the other week and found that 76% of the green dots were real people. I even chatted briefly with some of them. I know that a few people moan about the green dots, but I promise you, the large majority of them are real people. Try it yourself and see.


It is? Explain please, because I haven't seen it. It seems to me that you're still trying to make out that any place that influences the traffic must be inferior and, of course, it goes without saying that that's nonsense.


The social fabric is it? LMAO. I'm not going to go through that again - enough people in this thread have already shown you the realities.


How would you know? You haven't made any attempt to look at the situation objectively. If you did, you would argue against your own current arguments. Your attitude seems to be, "It's nothing to do with me, but I just don't like it for no specific reason. Now what can I contrive to fool people into thinking it's bad?"


No.

I think I just did - at least I shot your reasons down.

You know, Sling, it's very unethical of you to keep making things up and trying to fool people into agreeing with your own personal biases. You cheat them with falsehoods, and that's downright immoral.

Brilliant Phil!!

I asked if search gaming had a negative effect for users, and you come back and demonstrate one way in which search gaming has a negative effect for users.......

"He was using campers to get to #1)."



Excellent. Good man!


The rest of your posturings are simple self-serving claptrap.

Yep, I did give an example of how it was bad for users - similar to what I asked you to go and get. But like a knight in shining armour, I rectified that situation by using bots, and thereby improved those results for users

Also, his stuff wasn't crap (which was your point). It just wasn't low prim. Nobody has suggested that it's ok to promote 'wrong' stuff in the results - just the opposite. So that wasn't an example of what I asked you to go and get. I still want you to go and find an example of a place that is ranked highly by using methods you don't approve and sells only crap.

[added]
So we agree, as we always did, that promoting something you haven't got, is bad for users, but this discussion isn't about that.

Roughly interpreted as, "I have no answers to the rest of your post"

This guy was in the #1 slot.
He got to the #1 slot by using traffic gaming, by your account.
You think that it was bad for the community that he was in the #1 slot. You must think that or else you wouldn't say that knocking him off the #1 slot was good for the community.
What if he had one or more items that in *your opinion* were low-prim? Is there a universally accepted definition of low-prim? Would it still have been bad for the community that he was at the #1 slot?


So when you knocked him off the #1 slot, he dropped to the #2 slot. -- or independently of your search gaming, some other parcels knocked him down a little further.
So he's still ranked high due to his search-gaming, and in your opinion, his being ranked high is bad for the community - a negative effect on users
So you have supplied an example of search-gaming being bad for the community.


It matters not whether what he had on sale was not low or lowish enough prim by your opinion or whether the overall quality was good or bad.
What matters is that you considered that it was bad for the community that he was at the #1 slot, and that he had gotten there by search-gaming.

I have a Lucky Chair in my store, which is just as much about traffic as it is about free samples of my products. I'm probably not the only one either. I stand by my previous comment.

I'll formalise an answer to your question (mainly because I'm bored):-

Using methods, such as paying for picks and traffic bots, to improve rankings are bad for SL's users when they are used to promote items that aren't for sale. E.g. when sex beds are promoted but the place only sells shoes, or when low prim funiture is promoted but the place doesn't sell any low prim furniture.

In just the same way, it is bad for SL users when place owners include wrong words in their parcel's name and description, for the purpose of ranking in the results that their places shouldn't even be listed in. The same sexbed/shoes and low prim furniture examples also apply here.

So yes, the search system can be manipulated in ways that are bad for SL users. That aspect has been mentioned a number of times through this thread. But it's not exlcusive to paying for picks or using traffic bots - it's done with any and all forms of optimising such as parcel names and descriptions.

It's also done unintentionally. Someone buys an item that's set to show in search and they get a copy of the item. But the "Show in search" option remains checked on their copy, so when they rez it, the parcel has the item set to show in search. If the parcel is also set to show in search, then the item gets listed in the parcel's page, and the page/place will then be listed in the results for the item (e.g. sexbed) - the wrong results.

Yes it is, but it's not in the same category as paying for picks or using traffic bots. However, if it makes you feel any better, I'll change the statement to, "I can categorically state that all of the people that I know about in this thread who use the methods, would stop using them if they were bad for users." Ok?

I stand by my reply to your comment too.

It wasn't my point.
My point is the negative effects of search-gaming.
"Crap" is in the eye of the beholder. So is "low-prim".

If I chose not to invest time in responding to every sentence in your posts, it is in no way an indication that I accept what you say. It simply indicates that I'd rather avoid a massively long Monthy Python argument.
Your debating technique is to throw up a blizzard of misdirection and twisted meanings. I'm not going to humour you.

You're grasping at straws, Sling. The guy didn't sell low prim furniture. He sold furniture, and that's all. He used camping to get to #1 for something that he didn't sell. His only possible excuse could be that his prims were low - near the floor. And of course, I did my usual knight in shining armour stuff, and used bots to knock him down from #1


He went to #2 and then stopped using as many campers, so he dropped further. Yes, his use of camping was bad for the SL population - I already said that - because his use of camping was to promote something that he didn't sell. It's just as bad for the users if someone deos the same thing by just adding things that are not sold to the parcel name and deascription.


Oh, it matters a great deal, Sling. Example: would you consider a 50 prim bed low, medium or high prim? According to what you just said, he would be right to promote 50 prim beds as low prim, and it would be good for users, but you are wrong.

You added this part, making it a completely different statement - one of your personal knowledge and opinion, something I have no problem with even if I had cause to disagree.

The original version looked pretty stupid in the overreaching assumption implied, don't you agree now? Perhaps just an oversight, something else I have no problem with.

Sorry Sling, but you used the word "crap". I've told you before to write exactly you mean, and I assume you do, so it *was* your point.

It indicates that you don't have answers for everything, Sling. You are certainly quick to answer things when you think you have a good answer. Sorry, Sling, but you're just squirming.

If you didn't post so much stuff that is so easily refuted, you wouldn't get so many responses. It might feel like a blizzard to you, but it's just someone responding to what you write (if you don't want responses, don't write it ). You've done it all through this thread - picked out a small part of someone's post to reply to, because you don't have any refutations of the rest, and they were replying to *your* posts.

In the current case, you thought you saw something that supported your assertion that manipulating the rankings is bad for users, so you jumped on it. It turned out that you'd jumped on something that we all agree with - that it's bad for users when people promote things they don't have. Having discovered your error, you now try to say that "low prim" is subjective. It's a beautiful piece of squirming, Sling, but it doesn't get you anyhere

You know how you are, Sling - "I'll ignore that and that and that ... because I can't refute them. I'll pretend they were never written. The chances are that nobody will notice." I'm still waiting for you to tell us why you think you're just the messenger, and who sent you

This whole thread is about paying for picks, and Sling keeps throwing in traffic bots. Those practises were what I was referring to, which should have been obvious, imo.

I stand by my response to the first of your posts.

QFT.

OK. I'll bite.

Let's take this example of why I wouldn't bother to respond:

This is just you being wilfully obtuse as usual.
You take words and twist them into a straw man argument. You indulge in the fantasy that you've won an argument when all you've done is to misrepresent a case into something that can easily be countered.
You ask me to prove something that I never asserted, and then claim victory when I ignore it.

You might have time available to spend on an interminable ding-dong during which you resist clarification. I don't.




It all comes back to whether or not the activities of search gamers have a negative effect on SL.

If traffic bots and campers are not a problem then why do we see people complaining that they can't get into a sim or that sim performance is impacted by a group of campers?
Counters such as "it's not against the TOS unless the use is excessive' ignore the fact that there is a problem even before the resource usage gets to a trigger point that might get LL to reboot the sim or take some other action.

If zombies are not a problem why do we see continuing complaints of how people are confused by being attracted to areas that appear to be populated but in fact have bots?

We continue to see a lot of "I've learnt to ignore high-ranked traffic in Places". Before people learn that high-ranked Traffic is completely misleading and is intended to be so, those people are fooled into assuming that those are the hot places for whatever it is they search for.

I understand that you scoff at the concept of Profile Pinks having any social function. Your motivation is simply person gain, and such things have no place in your world view. To you, Picks are simply IBLs - just cogs in a machine.
If something does not serve your personal interests, it might as well not exist.


People who game search impede the creation of indexing algorithms that can be helpful to the users of search. Along the way, they damage the meaning of the factors that they game.

why would they even bother?
you won't listen anyway, and if you do actually read what they have to say, you will say they are wrong, regardless of how convincing their argument is and how many may agree with it

then you will insult them, call them cheats and gamers.... and other nasty stuff...

so why would anyone want to subject themselves to that?