Professionalism and campers/bots...

Bare Rose is the first that comes to mind.
The Ark is another, a nice mature club mainly for furs.
Then there are several malls, though some of the vendors do use the ads (but rarely over 1k in price)

Every keyword is used appropriately, no campers, no adds over 50l, no bots.

And there are many more, if I bothered to go through my landmarks.

Not "everyone" that offer camping at their business are trying to game the system. In fact, traffic numbers play a far less role in the new Search function that it did in the old system of the past.

I have a few camping spots in my store, mainly around my meditation garden in the center of the store. I love to look out of my office and see someone "meditating". I offer these to the few people that find my store that want to hang around and make a few Lindens. It's my way of giving back to those less fortunate without just handing out Lindens to every newbie screaming.. "Give me Lindens". This way they are "working" for it.

I do not advertise my camping... I dont list it in Parcel Description... so they have to actually come there intentionally or wander into the store from the SIM. At the most I have maybe 2 campers there at a time... most of the time they go unused. I do not rely on Traffic, or Search for that matter, to maintain my business. I rely mostly on word of mouth and producing high quality products that makes the customer.. and their friends.. want to come back again.

The most amazing part in all of this..... I've sold products to my campers. They camp for the better part of the day for $50L.... then purchase a bedroom or a living room set for $500L =D And yes, High Quality for $500L... I strive to make my products affordable for most anyone.. and I manage to make Tier on my 1/4 SIM plus cash out a good amount to $US every month.

I've been to a lot of stores that do this. I think it's a great idea and yes it makes a lot of sense. Just put something in the profile stating that this avatar is just a mannequin, or put a title over the name, or attach a sign to it's head. That way, it will be obvious to anyone what you are doing.

Just landed there, there's a raffle orb that gives away money just for people being there.

Do you see camp chairs, or bots? After all that is what this topic is about.

A lone raffle ball and magic chair don't increase traffic to the point campers and bots do.

Most of the items in said raffle and chair are not sold, so they are bonuses for buying at the store.

That's a completely different point, the point is people use devices to attract and retain visitors. Be it camping, money trees, paid picks, raffle orbs, lucky chairs yadda yadda yadda, people see these items as advertising. Saying one is ethical and one isn't, is hypocritical. Saying one is a source of encouraging lag and wasting resources is a whole different point.

there is advertising, then there is gaming a system.

Utilization of camping pads and bots for the sole purpose of gaming the system for higher ratings is unethical.

Having a few things that bring people there and reward shoppers (without advertising them in the store description) is far different.

If that is not clear in your mind, take a step back and consider the impacts of the gamed system now being dropped and a new one with different checks and balances being worked on to replace it.

Those prize and money balls are definitely camping devices and they do attract that kind of traffic. A few of the sims that were in the popular places list for most of last year got all their traffic that way, they even had rows and rows of seats just for drones to sit there and collect.

I'd make an exception for lucky chairs. We have two of them, and see them more of a 'thank you for visiting, here's a prize' gesture. People don't come flocking from all over the grid for our lucky chairs. Now, the places that fill whole rooms with lucky chairs, I could see that being an attraction.

Would you put stores that give out freebies in the same category? Same concept. If that's the case, you would have a hard time finding any store that doesn't employ one of these devices to attract and/or retain visitors.

hmm, I have yet to see places with a prize raffle ball and/or a couple lucky chairs maintain anywhere the traffic a camping spot or bot farm does.

I've seen empty malls full of lucky chairs, because the campers don't want a non-transferable prize they want the lindens.

You hardly fall into the category the OP is referring to.

I would indeed put freebies in the same bracket but I'm not someone who is complaining about marketing tactics.

This whole "Nobody should use marketing tactics" attitude, quite frankly bemuses me.

There is marketing and then there is abusing a system to invalidate the rankings.

Big difference

And you'll be the judge huh MortVent Charron?

Just for curiosities sake....how do you know an AV in sky box above a store is there to create false traffic. My Family and I frequently sit together and do nothing but IM chat with each other above a store.

I usually cam up at times, and see what is up there.

Seeing the original default avatars is usually a big clue

tsk tsk, if it wasn't a problem would LL be reworking things to get the gaming with bots and campers rendered useless?

I'd expect better insults with logic behind them next time.

I wonder out of 60,000 online right now, how many are bots/drones/campers

Some of the folks running spiders should check for avatars being found in the same location on two sequential sweeps.

Given the time between sweeps is usually anywhere from a few hours to a few days, that's usually suggestive of a bot. This wouldn't catch other spiders, but I suspect those are in the minority.

Good to see you back Jeffrey you were sorely missed.

um....whats a "spider" ?

A term originally derived from "web crawler" to refer to automated bots that crawl through systems to collect information.

In this case, bots driven by libSL/modified viewer source that collect information from active regions.

Yeah, but that's really kind of a strawman. I mean, sure, everybody uses marketing tactics, but you don't see Barneys running Blue Light Specials.

I'm not all that moralistic about it. I mean, if what one has to sell is going to appeal to the crowd that's sensitive to traffic, one would have little choice. Considering that 90% of sign-ups quit in the first hour, there's a big market out there for the new and unsophisticated customer. There's probably very good business to be had with camping-intense retail spots near Welcome Areas that just sell stuff straight out of the Library folder.

But if the question is, as I understood it to be, what our reaction is when we discover a bunch of trafficbots or campers at a store, well, I think "newbie paradise" before any product has time to rez. It just says "Blue Light Special" to me.

The ones like at B@R that hand out L$ do. Look up a skin place call platinum and follow the map dots. I believe they are still set up that way. Before it became popular last year for parcel owners to put in their own bots, places like that were where you would mostly find them.

Lucky chairs do get the avatars to linger for hours if the contents would otherwise be worth paying for, the letters change quickly enough to hold interest but not so long that people's letters "never" come up, and there isn't an oX box installed (Ox is a central database used by some places with chairs, hud-assisted human operators and bots alike do use them).

Most chairs out there, especially the huge banks of them, are stuffed with BIAB junk and don't get much notice.

Since when has bare rose given out money with their raffle ball? It gives out items from a list that is also displayed up by the stage. The items change over time as they add more and pull seasonal items. Unless you got a screenshot of it giving out lindens now, since the couple hours I spent looking for an outfit to give someone I never saw the ball give anything but items.

A lucky chair doesn't draw half a sim's resources in bots or campers.

It may add a little traffic but nothing in the same ballpark as those gaming the soon ot be dropped traffic system.

Did you see Ciaran's post? I'm sure that was being done there, at least in the past. They do seem to have scaled back on that, i see this weekend that it's nothing like the lagfest it was months ago.

Perhaps if you pretend that there is ever only one chair in a store, or that the kind that don't fit your arguments don't exist. They do exist, of course.

Pleases have got into the 5-digit traffic just on those chairs, you might want to look around a little more.