How to get into Popular Places

I wonder if this is the sign of the times!

I noticed 2 Skin companies listed in Popular places today. I'd normally expect the Free Money and sex places to dominate these listings.....certainly not Skin companies.

I thought i'd do some investigation. The 1st sim I visited had over 80 people on it....at surface level i could only see 5 people max.....so where were the other 70 or so people.??

Answer : a few hundred metres in the air in some cafe looking joint. If that wasn't misleading enough in falsifying traffic numbers....the fact that none of these Avatars were being paid was even more bemusing! .I have heard about camping and traffic bots, so i presumed these must bots of sorts as they weren't getting any Lindens. How does one login so many bots without crashing your own computer?

Sim 2 has long since been known as a paradise for camping. I thought i would give it a go, as i could not see anyone actually being paid. I sat in one of those chairs to see if it pays out....editing the chair i noticed it only had a sit script and was not a genuine pay out camping chair. Presumeably nearly everyone here were bots too......i recieved no replies from a series of IM's sent to these happy campers.!!

The 2 oversized spacious shops on this SIM had about 4 people milling around. Hell, i can get those type of numbers in my shop by doing relatively little.......why do people go to all this trouble just to attract a few shoppers? I haven't see any of the genuine top Skins brands employing a similar strategy......surely focusing on the quality of one's own product is the only real everlasting way of getting a steady steam of customers in.
Whenever i visit Naughty island, the sim is always half full and that without any major skin releases over the last 6 months. The brand stands on its own...same with Quad sims and others.

More alarming, there seems to be an invasion of these camping/traffic bots all over the grid.... chewing up unnessary resources. When is this all going to stop? I really wonder what the true concurrency login rate is.

I'm not anti-camping by any stretch of the imagination, providing genuine noobs or AV's are the recipients of Lindens. You throw in New Search as well, it's incredible what one has to do get traffic attention for one's business.

LL needs to have a real re-think. This has become a micky mouse economy.!

I took a couple of interesting photos of those 2 sims, unfortunately i can't attach them here.

Try imageshack. Maybe resize your images before you post them.

http://imageshack.us/

I agree. Popular places should be nice places to go where people are actually doing stuff. I suggested that the Lindens manually weed out popular places that use camping and bots. Really now it's just 10 places to moderate.

Popular places is a farce, and serves no useful purpose any more.

I believe if your home is in the region, or there is a plot of land that you can call "home" then your able to access your region even when its full.

Hi Rene,

There was a 384-post thread on camping, traffic, search, and bots a few days ago. Here's where pretty much everyone said everything:

/327/f5/233467/1.html

Happy reading.

I go to popular places all the time because I'm looking to find out how these people got to be on the popular places list..the answer is camping/free money...weather it's real campers or bots, that's how their doing it which I don't really think is fair. What about the rest of us honest merchants who can't get enough business in our shops to even get started, and I'm sure as hell not going to put a dozen or 2 camping chairs on my lot just to get my traffic number up..that's dishonest if you ask me. I have put a couple before, to get started with my club, but never enough to even make a difference.

One of the popular places that really gets me is a clothing skin place, I will not name it but I'm sure you all know which one I'm talking about. I have been there, and looked inside the store, and I didn't even see anything that was all that great. The only reason that place is on popular places is because they own a whole sim and have so many camping chairs, if those are real people, they must be paying a fortune because they offering more for camping than anyone else.

I've learned not to choose the ones at the top of the list when I'm looking for quality items..being able to pay campers does not make you a good creator of whatever it is you create.

Edit:

You know those voting things some people have outside thier shops? That would be the best way to choose which places should be at the top of the list.. put em to a vote. Get people to vote on the shops and the best quality items will be at the top, not the ones owned by the richest people who can afford the most campers. I assure you that the majority of campers is not going to take the time to vote. Or better yet, the more money your place makes (not spends) shoudl be how you get on the popular places list.

Thanks Oryx. I'll give that a read instead.

Just to re-iterate, I'm not against sensible camping as i see thats a good way for genuine players to get some money and I don't begrudge qiving a bit of money away....but the bots are even cheating on the camping concept.

I think that both of these have been considered.

The Voting stands used to be run by the Lindens at one point, to find the most appreciated places on SL. Unfortunately, all that they actually did was to create a popularity contest. The majority of votes for most places didn't come from genuine visitors but from friends of the owner who voted just to support their friend.

Judging by money making would put the established businesses at the top of every listing for free, thus making it even harder for new folks to break in. The other problem is that it would give an advantage to people selling "specialist" items like vendors and editing tools, which often sell for a lot of money (because they're sold to people who are probably making money on SL anyway) but which the majority probably wouldn't be interested in.

The 2 above mentioned skin companies are probably still making a decent amount of NET profit even if their genuine customer base is likely to be relatively low. They still get a fair amount of attention whilst spending relatively little on marketing costs (i.e a 100k+ classified advert) .. remember their traffic numbers costs next to nothing.

At the other end of the spectrum what i find bemusing, are companies that are prepared to spend 140k to 250k on a weekly classified advert. I have never been able to spend that sort of money on an Advert, neither would I if i had spare cash knocking around.
If i were a betting man, i'd say most of those companies don't achieve sales in any given week to pay for that advert....and if they do, the NET profit is likely to be minimal. Don't forget the market is virtually saturated with skin creators and knocked off BIAB skins.

I believe to be successful in SL, you need to produce quality items to begin with, establish a brand name, become a good Marketeer and most of all you need some sort of Financial sense & Business acumen.
I mean have any of these high spenders ever tried to optimise their rate of return in terms of costs versus potential sales? Say you spent 240k on an advert and achieved 250k sales (Net Profit 10K) and found that by cutting your expenditure to a 50k classified you still generated 150k sales in that week giving you a Net profit of 100k......wouldn't that be the smarter thing to do? Some of the money saved, could be directed in other marketing opportunites giving better visibility....like advertising on say SLEX (banner adverts) or in one the SL newspapers that have large distribution....or radio advertising etc etc. Totally bemused!!!

I mean being proud and gaining recognition for one's work is one aspect, but you need to be rewarded for your efforts by also maximising your profits. Being able to spend 240k on a classified advert, just doesn't quite cut it for me!

That was gotten rid of for the same reason. People gamed the voting system by forming vote circles. People would fly around the grid every day hitting the vote boxes of everyone on their list It was just as corrupt as traffic is now and eventually it was dumped. When we had positive and negative ratings in our profiles, it was the same way. People organized rating parties and everyone gave everyone else a positive. You had people that could barely rez a plywood cube listed higher in the building category than hugely talented builders who got their rates the old fashioned (honest) way. I can't think of any possible system that people won't just game into uselessness.

Spot on, Chip.

The only thing that makes sense is to get rid of the popular places listing and eliminate traffic as the ranking method for old search places in its entirety.

If I were designing the system, here is how I would set it up.

Search
(checkboxes - none checked by default)
1) All
2) Places
3) Shopping
4) People
5) Groups
6) Land
7) Events
Classifieds

Yes. Split up Places and Shopping.

Allow results to be organized by user preference (user can choose low to high)
1) Alphabetical Name
2) Relevance (however they are defining that these days)
3) Traffic
4) Votes (use a one-time vote system like b-places does.)
5) Random

Sounds pretty good, except get rid of sorting by traffic. If traffic is relevant in any degree, the alt farm and campbot problem will never go away.

But Isablan, how do you split up Places and Shopping for parcels like yours, where you can buy plants n stuff, or Apollo, where you can buy the cuddle rugs, the sky bubble thingies, or Greenies, which has a shop above the kitchen build? All are fun places to go, but also have shopping...

Well, in theory (THEORY, mind you) if traffic was removed from the "relevance" equation and was not something that automatically landed you atop the search results, the rationale for gaming it becomes a lot less attractive. The only way it matters is for the users who choose to sort their results by traffic. When you take away default results you remove a lot of the ability to game since it will be next to impossible for a given person to game every single option.

In my case, the gardens are already listed as Parks & Nature. The fact that you can buy the plants is just a bonus. Somebody who was actually shopping for plants would have a much easier time heading to a store that was set up as a retail garden center instead of having to wander around an entire sim looking for Pampas Grass.

Apollo would be the same as it is now - there is a dedicated shopping area already set up. You list the store in Shopping and the sim in Places.

While not a all out solution LL should limit login by the same IP address to 3. That I think would put a good dent in a lot of campers IMO.

I've been in the search engine business since before Google came along, and I can tell that, as long as there is search, people will do things to improve their natural rankings, which necessarily moves other people's rankings below where they would naturally be. With all the search engine experience and expertise there is in the world, a search engine that can prevent people from doing things to improve their natural rakings doesn't yet exist. All the good ideas in the world cannot yet produce such a search system. Every one of the ideas in this thread, and in others, won't prevent it. The only system that can do it is a human edited directory system, and I don't see that happening in SL.

Soon after Google launched they stated publically that their engine was spam-proof, and ever since then they've fought a losing battle against spam. If they can't do after all this time, who can? It may make an interesting thread to post in, but the desired result cannot be achieved.

Depends on the desired result. *My* desired result is to find what I am looking for. If I search for houses I want prefab houses for sale, not houses for rent, not land for sale with a house on it, not some BDSM parlor with two houses in boxes on the far wall amongst the 194 bondage products. Allowing people to refine their seaches and how they want to see results matches the person searching with their desired target. The point isn't to design a system that can't be gamed, the point is to get me the results so that I can find what I'm looking for. What *I* want is a way to filter out undesireable results. I want land and rentals in their own category that I can choose to exclude, I want places that are not actual shops in their own category that I can exclude.

Yes but if you got that, what about the person who searches on 'houses', and thinks what crap results they are cos they are all about prefab houses, and they are looking to rent a house? It needs a much more refined searchterm than just 'houses'. It would be a very faulty engine that returned the results you want.

Because the Popular Place/Places results only have parcel land Titles and Descriptions to work with, and is an extemely basic search engine - more of a database query engine - it's very difficult for LL to produce good results sets. Changing the traffic evaluation this or way that won't produce the desired results if the land Titles and Descriptions don't have the exact search phrase in them. The only way to get reasonable results is to search on things that sellers of the item might just have put in their lands' Titles and Descriptions.

To my way of thinking, the Popular Places and Places tabs cannot be made to be satisfactory without a lot of work on the system there, but LL is majoring on the All search now, which includes a Places option. As far as I know, all it does is filter everything else out, and still ranks places according the Google search system. But that's the best way forward, imo. Google's system is a good search engine, whereas the LL one isn't. It will produce much better results WHEN land owners who want to found learn to optimise the lands' Titles and Descriptions for it.

*That* person would be an idiot for failing to search for RENTAL HOUSES, wouldn't they?

I TOTALLY AGREE!! I can't stand it when people put search terms in their ad that have nothing to do with what they are offering..When I'm looking for skins, I don't want to find any place on the list that does not sell skins, but unfortunately, that's not the case..

Any of you go right now into the search and type in skins, and count how many are on the first page that have nothing to do with a skin shop. I think that people should have to choose from a list what items and services are relevant to what they offer. Then when you go to search, you will not get as maney false advertisements. Of course there will always be the people who check every box, but you will know that if they offer EVERYTHING that they are just trying to pull you in.

Actually, there is such a system: sort items randomly every search. It probably wouldn't produce very useful results, but it couldn't be gamed. The question is how to add more useful information to that.

Although I don't have a solution for fixing the search, I think the elimination of traffic is vital. At the moment the new search 'all' takes into acount traffic figures gamed by campbots. So rather than addressing the issue of camping SL has undoubtebly spent thousands on new search engine that contains the same 'gamed' results. They are just presenting them in a different way. You can disguise a turd to look like a cucumber but it's still going to taste like sh*t.

I remember a town hall many months back where they announced that the new search would eliminate camping.

1. Am i making it up?
2. if not, whatever happened to that?

Porky