PPRS (I need my resident database for paid locations)

No and I really don't see how you've drawn that conclusion, I'm saying nothing of the sort. I gave you a popular marketing tactic that LL are employing, one that many companies employ inworld and out of world.

How is this related to the question of Pick *Buying* being cheating/gaming?

I have asserted that the Pick *Buying* systems are intended to game search, and that gaming of search is against LL policy.
You have not addressed that point.

I did not assert that the individual Pick *Sellers* were intending to game search.
You have avoided the main point by talking about the free will of the *Sellers*, and by bringing up some sort of Sweepstake that LL are running. Neither of these have any bearing on the topic of Pick *Buying*.

Yes I have addressed this point Sling, many many times, people choose to place a pick. Gaming would be finding a way of getting picks made without giving a person a choice to do so.



The free will of those placing the pick is central to the whole issue. The same as I can choose to enter LL's sweepstake or refer a friend and receive a bonus. I have that choice.

The logic of what you say is that using camping chairs to game traffic would only be gaming if the camping was done without giving the camper a choice to camp.

What are you smoking?

Yes that's pretty close to the truth, however a huge difference with camping being used to inflate traffic scores is that the campers were often AFK. If the campers are sat around talking, they're not really gaming traffic at all.

You illustrated the fallacy of it? But you're full of fallacies, as that very post show. Ciaran didn't choose to justify the gaming of search at all, and yet you said he did. And it's not the only fallacy you've posted in this short thread.

I'm indulging in responding to what you write, and you wrote a fallacy so I pointed it out. There's nothing semantic about it. Someone writes something, you respond as though he'd written something else, etc. If you prefer to stick to a topic, then you should stick to it and not write arguments from fallacy.

Oh, you are so very wrong. I posted a number of times that LL had specifically said that traffic bots are not against the ToS and are ok to use. I even posted a paste of it. And not only me. Someone else asked them too and posted their reply. You cannot have missed them, Sling. One of your hobbies is to get on this soapbox, so I don't believe you could have missed them.

Precisely. Prior to that, LL had sepcifically stated that they are not against the ToS and that it is ok to use them.

Of course you were saying those things. They were/are your opinions. What reasons LL had for banning traffic bots doesn't come into it. Before they were banned, they were not only in keeping with the ToS, but they were also specifically given the ok by LL - more than once.

That's right. They were undesirable to many people, including me, but they were not against the ToS until LL said otherwise.

More fallacy, Sling. You never learn. What I'm saying is what I write - not what you would like me to be saying. Sorry.

Someone did and it might have been you. You are free to think that of me, and I don't mind. But I have to say that I don't think very highly of your morals because of the fallacies you write. To my way of thinking, they are tantamount to lies, because they are intended to deceive..

Of course there is. What you forget is that there are different wrongs. To one person, something is wrong, but to another, it isn't wrong. Just because you think that something is wrong doesn't make it wrong for the whole world. It only makes it wrong in your view.

As a newb, I assumed two possible things about a user's "Picks": They were either places and things that the user personally endorsed because they thought they were really good, or they were a way to store landmarks to places the person visited frequently.

It didn't take me very long to understand that "Picks" could be in a person's profile purely because they were paid to keep them there. But before that point, I was a potential sucker.

There is just something fundamentally dishonest about this. The TOS doesn't enter into it. Illegal <> immoral. Legal <> moral.

This is more along the lines of "viral marketing", or even the case of, say, so-called "scientific studies" of drugs paid for by drug companies--though in our case, the stakes are very much lower.

It doesn't matter a wit that the person has a choice about whether to enter into a contract to be paid to list places in their "Picks". It is simply dishonest to conflate information about stuff people are getting paid to advertise with information about stuff they've genuinely liked and genuinely used.

Suppose the profile got a new page, entitled, "Stuff I've been paid to advertise", and all of the paid "Picks" had to be there, and only there. Would you, as a merchant, feel it would be worth it to pay for that kind of exposure? If not, then you have the beginnings of an understanding of the problem.

ToTaL BS ! ...IMO..., picks was invented for people to share their favorite locations in their profile, Not the Best paying locations, might aswell bring camping back if they are not willing to change this ?!




QFT


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You are making the mistake of thinking that Picks are just for "I like" stuff. Picks are for whatever purpose a person chooses. Sometimes they are used to show people and not places, and sometimes they are used to be very negative about a person or a place. Picks are there for whatever purpose a person wants to use them. There is nothing wrong, negative, immoral, whatever about a person using his/her Picks to advertise a place, whether they like the place or not.

It's not done for the exposure, though I suppose there'd be a benefot to that even if the real reason went away. Pay-for-picks came about when picks became part of the search placement calculation. I think it is primarily a way to game search.

But you raise an interesting point. There'd be value to traffic botting even if it went away as a search metric. Hot spots on the map might still be useful enough to encourage botting. But it'd certainly be less useful if it wasn't a search metric, so the thinking is that removing it as a metric will reduce cheating.

Likewise, there'd still be value to pay-for-picks if it wasn't a search metric, but it'd be worth less, so the thinking is that there'd be less gaming if it wasn't a metric.

But since both these codes will still exist when picks and traffic are removed from search, we'll find out if they are still used. I think LL will have to both outlaw pay-for-picks *and* remove it from search weighting.

They may well have been invented to share favourite places, by the time LL introduced them into search relevance they were being used for a wide variety of reasons. LL told people to find ways to get people to put their business locations in their picks, Linden Lab gave this as advice. It was patently obvious what was going to happen, indeed it already was happening with store owners and their friends having business parcels in their picks.

Well it does matter about choice when it comes to talking of gaming. I still find it amazing that people find the idea of paid marketing so unethical, as I said earlier Linden lab are offering the chance to win L$100,000 to people who get someone else to signup, it's the same marketing concept as paid picks. Linden Lab also had a referal program, as do many many other places. These are standard practices.



Wouldn't bother me one iota if they were flagged as paid picks, friends should declare their friends picks and store owners should flag their their own store too. Make them a different colour. Swapped picks, paid picks, friend picks, own store picks, they're all in the same area.

You're forgetting something, Salvador. Whatever the reason was behind LL's creation of Picks, it was LL themselves who later decided to use picks as a ranking factor and, in doing so, told everyone about it and suggested that place owners get people to put the places in their picks, so that they can do well in search. If you have a problem with it, you should be pointing the finger at LL, and not at people who do what LL suggested.

i think your both right, this leaves us with the question ...why did LL ban camping ?

i mean if they did it to "clean" the search, shouldnt they also disable the picks rank now ?

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Profile Picks were a valuable indicator of the perceived worth of a location right up until the second the data was included in the Search computation.

Bots became the issue with camping more than genuine campers who sat around chatting, if it had remained genuine people sat around chatting and in some cases it really was, then I doubt camping would have been banned as a means of attracting people to a parcel set to show in search.

This argument that it's LLs fault that people gamed Picks, and the implication that LL encouraged gaming of Picks is bogus.

Nobody forced ad farmers to cut microparcels and extort.
Nobody forced bot runners to run traffic bots.
Nobody forced anyone to game Picks.
Those people decided to do it. They had a choice not to do it.

LL produced systems.
People gamed them.
To argue that LL should be blamed for people's greed and dishonesty is just plain silly.

To be sure, LL should have slapped them down sooner.


All this humbug about whether or not something clearly gaming is against the TOS or not is illustrated in the link in my Forum sig.
For the benefit of those who don't see Form sigs, here it is:



This was an ad-farmer who put up banlines on his 16m extortion parcels after LL took action against griefy builds on such parcels.
A few extracts from the page:
[/url]

I wish there were more Lindens like Maggie, who would tell the semantic TOS-dancers to go sit on something.

They didn't ban camping, or even bots. They banned the gaming of search, with great emphasis on the Places tab search - the traffic rankings that many bots, and camping in general, were created to influence.

Camping is still allowed as long as the parcel it's on isn't set to show in search, and bots are still allowed, even on land that's set to show in search, but not if their purpose is to influence the traffic rakings.

Picks are certainly used by places to improve their All search rankings, but they can also be used as advertising, and there is no way to tell the difference, so it's unlikely that paying for picks will go the way of traffic bots and traffic camping.

Who are "those people", Sling? I've never paid for picks and I'm pretty sure that Ciaran hasn't.

You're back into your fallacies with a vengeance, Sling. LL suggested to people that they get other people to put the places in their Picks. How can you possibly find fault with that?

Fallacy is dishonest and silly, Sling, but it's something you're very good at. Nobody argues that LL should be blamed for anything. I wrote that, "if you find fault with it, it's LL you should be pointing the finger at". See? If *YOU* find fault.

Umm.. who mentioned the ToS?

Umm... who mentioned the ToS?

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SearchAPI

"Picks This counts as an incoming link. Paying/Verified residents have better weight on rankings. Encourage others to add your parcel to their picks tab on the profile. (See picks camping) "

I think peoples who gloat about gaming systems with such methods should be...


...shot.

isnt paying for picks the same ?

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