Professionalism and campers/bots...

Ciaran stated he arrived today and was given money from the raffle ball. Which indicates either an error on their part or an outright falsehood.



I've been to hair stores, clothing stores, jewelry stores and many more with up to 6 lucky chairs in them. Most offering the same products on the 'shelves' many times in the hundreds of lindens worth of product. None had swarms of bots or campers waiting to snatch up the items.

The bot campers are more interested in the lindens they can send to the central account than goods.



I have, and seen many places where the chairs with the wild cards and random amounts of lindens offered don't get anywhere the traffic generated by camp pads or bots in a box.

The B@RE Rose doesn't need anything like a money ball to attract people..
the volume they do there and as many that know about that place it doesn't use it for traffic generating..

they have quality items at a very fair price and lots of them..thats the game in B@re Rose..word of mouth
i've been going there since i've been in sl and heard about them which has been a long time..
never have i gotten money from ball..i've gotten outfits from them but never a dime in lindens..
when i go there sometimes i could be there for more than two hours at a time..
last time i went there was about a week ago to see if they had more sculpite clothes added and got another outfit for free from the ball..and the free things from the balls are not too bad of items really..

i don't think she lacks faith in her products to need any kind of camping or bots..
where people that would need camping to get noticed do lack faith or patience..the tactics people use are what sets the tone for later..i don't think that anyone that has a good product and faith in it would want anything to do their talking but the great thing they have made that they think sl will love..

i do think that people that come here only for money and nothing else will do what they have to if they come in empty handed just looking for ways to make money.. so they end up copying tactics they see.and one of the most popular is camping and botting for traffic ..no brainer there..

this is not people that come here to sell their items they create or people that want to make it in sl i am talking about here..
but people that come here for a way to only use sl and drop trow and leave type of business that they only have to check in once a week to see how much they have made..

people that use bots for certain jobs i can see..because there is a good use for them in some things and some do like to setup some camping for people to make money..
that is not being cheap when you use these things for what they are for..

but if you want to run a cheap business that uses cheap tactics and let that do the talking thats their choice..
but you can't compare them with someone that brings in a good product and knows they have one and lets word get around..and word will travel..you can have good or bad word...
whatever helps you sleep at night ...

there are two ways to do business..your way or their way..
you can follow the lemmings for a quick easy ride or you can stand out in the crowd and show yourself to them by doing it your way..
Business would be no challenge for me if it was too easy and i didn't have to think..

You couldn't be more wrong. SL is alot like RL, about 25 percent content creators to 75 percent 'buyers'. It's just about like RL.


http://www.secondscripter.com/

diversity in products:

I've seen far more stores selling the same biab stuff than there are people willing to buy the items.

So many buy the freebie kits and try reselling them.

So there is far more selling some items then there is a market for them.

Cute, another ethics thread

This time even more funny, because now the amount of traffic generated decides whether it is ethical. To be honest, that does give me a good laugh.

Furthermore, a couple of lucky chairs are using less sim resources then a couple of bots. Well, I cannot wait to see the research that led to that conclusion. Together with the numbers of course.

Well, I do not run my 2 bots anymore. Logging them on each time SL had problems was no longer worth it. They were placed for showing poses, but not that important. They did generate about 3000 to traffic, so I guess that makes me unethical.
What I do run, is the following:

- 2 money chairs
- 4 lucky chairs
- Picks reward system

So, Unethical Flatley is my name. Nice to meet you all.

Yep.

Make any excuse.

Reword any action.

LOL.

I'd have a lot more respect for the trafficbot runners if they would just admit they are cheating.

The absolute hypocracy of it all bothers me more than the gaming.

Why exactly does being called "unethical" bother some people so much.

In my opinion it is unethical to run trafficbots.

Why isn't the response from the trafficbot runners just ..

"So?"

Instead they try to defend the ethics of gaming the traffic system and we get into these debates.

How can exploiting/gaming a system be ethical?

From my perspective - it simply cant be.

Its almost as if the trafficbot runners think that if they cave and admit its unethical that it will somehow be banned.




Thats my point - minus the sarcasm.

Being called unethical doesn't bother me. In fact I could not care less. But still I will not only say "So?". Because it is good that people reading these fora, see both sides of the story.
It is quite simple: you have your perspective, I have mine. So we can both clarify ours. That is what makes a discussion.

Your solution would be: Someone saying something, the other saying "so what?". For me, it would make any discussion a lot less useful or fun.

And I do not know about you, but I find it quite funny that someone is deciding what is ethical and what isn't. Someone deciding that it is unetical to run a few camping bots, but it IS ethical to run a money orb.


Well you can't have it all

how would running two bots be anything close to using them for traffic? i mean you had to have a use for them..i don't think that would put you in the category of gaming a system..
3000 in traffic is not going to move you anywhere upward compared to a place running 30 bots.
i don't think anyone has a problem with bots used for a good purpose..

myself i just think it would be nice to not have to click page after page after page on the search to get to places that are using them for a good reason..sometimes the search lags so bad that i end up just going to the new search..the only thing with that is you can't see how many people are there from the new search option because there is no map option..so we get stuck doing page scrolling because major bot and camping users own the front pages..
i hope they add a show map option soon in the new search then i won't even use the places anymore..
the pop list is just a joke anymore..there was a time i knew it by heart but couldn't even tell you who is on there now..
i think the top spot is held at 140,000 in traffic though hahahahahaha thats just crazy traffic..

Might well have been a falsehood, maybe it was an item worth L$99 and I wasn't paying attention,l I didn't win it!

In fact they are doing you a favour - if you try to tp to a place and are banned then you will remember that they have bots and not have to wait there rezzing.

I don't think Money Trees are quite in the same category unless solely used for luring in new people for the traffic.

I had a money tree on my land (don't anymore because the damn thing would not work correctly all the time - grrrr) and I didn't have anything to sell, is just a hangout I wanted people to use and helped them by providing a few L$.

Plus the people using Money Trees do not sit using up resources whilst their typists are away for extended periods because that is the only way to make a reasonable amount.

Of course like most things it is the use you put them to that determines if they constitute an abuse.

No that is like saying all tools are useful and therefore equivalent - not true. Some tools have a higher usefuleness/potential for abuse ratio than others.

Most bots are fairly distinctive. Mostly they are not in anything but a plain box or on a platform of some sort. They stand motionless all the time, no chat etc. Often they are untextured and the biggest giveaway ones are the ones that all face the same direction and have almost identical rez dates.
Of course some are harder to tell than others but if you just ask the group who would like L$100 and nobody answers then generally you probably have found bots

Actually Marcel, if your primary reason was to show off product such as poses or clothing then I do not see that as unethical. If the primary reason was for the traffic then that is unethical in my opinion. Only you really know your reasons.

QFT!

On the subject of this being another ethics thread...most business people will agree that business in SL is important. It gets discussed to death too and yet nobody who is serious about business really seems to mind that. Should we really be discussing business without discussing the ethics surrounding the practices too? If you beleive the answer is yes then perhaps you are not as ethical as you might like to think and ask yourself why are ethics not also important to you.

shh... don't tell anyone but business ethics are the hardest ones to get people to understand... just ask the professors

Too many think it all is fair in making a buck.

Sadly true. For the few I am preaching to the converted and to the masses I would be a heretic. I hope a few borderlines are converted though

As a hobby I jump around trying to find they skyboxes full of alts. One guy got pissed and banned me from his land for trying to get into his. I have a whole bunch of pics of me with alot of motionless zombies. I usually just mix myself in the group for the shot. It's humorous to me. Doesn't take much!

What I think, is that ethics is not a known fact. Let me take my "unethical" system as an example.

As soon as it got known that Picks are an important part of results in Search All, a few people developped different systems to reward people for Picks. So far I saw 3 different ones:

- Pay once per period an amount to all participants
- Have once per period a lottery between all participants (cash)
- Have once per period a lottery between all participants (prizes)

Which one is ethical and which one is not? And more important, who decides? The platform owner seems not to mind (they even helped me finding out some important stuff for this system), and the users of Search All can find what they want. Apparantly the only people who mind, are a few on this forum. My members are pleased with the money they get, my customers are glad they found me (or not, then they just go elsewhere).

Business ethics are not just hard to get people to understand, business ethics are just not defined within very clear boundaries. The fact that I think paying for picks is not against any business ethics, does not make it right. The fact you think it is against ethics, does not make it wrong either.

Which brings me to the reason I react to topics like this: The fact someone thinks that another person is doing something wrong, does not make him/her right. Just as in real life, business people are moving in a grey area at times to get their results, but we are doing things that are right in our eyes. I am open to discussion about my actions, but what I am not open to, is people who think their opinion is the only right one.

i just think everyone outta mind their own business. if you don't like something, stay away. no need to gossip. if something is illegal, then yeah - get involved. but if it's just your opinion against mine, shut yer hole and move along!

And when LL drops picks from the search criteria due to similar abuse to what is done by bots and excessive camper pads...

Any gaming of a system is unethical, doubt it then try it in the real world. Look at how fast google punts many businesses from search listings. Most don't make the news or lawsuits over it... they know they lost due to the BS they pulled.

Nice compare though. Google has documented quite well how you can rank good in Search. Following their documentation, you can optimize your ranking.
Lindens also documented their Search, though less well then Google. Combining the two gives a pretty good idea on how to optimize for Search in SL though.

One of the important things in Google are inbound links. So exactly how many businesses were punted for optimizing for that? Same goes in SL, where Picks are to be compared to inbound links.

Just to get it straight: I am not in favour of cheating. But what I see as cheating, is different from you. Cheating in my opinion is using wrong keywords, trying to lure people towards your parcel while you sell entirely different stuff. Cheating is selling stuff that doesn't do what you promise. Cheating is seeling freebies. That is my opinion. The only difference I see, is that I do not throw statements around that I cannot backup.

There are companies that offer to google bomb to 'optimize' rankings. They generate sites that link to the client's sites for no other reason than to increase rankings in the search engines.

When caught they and their clients are terminated from the google databases.

this is in effect them paying for picks.