Professionalism and campers/bots...

Good Lord...that's exactly what the picks is for me. By people having my club in their picks, other people will see it. And it's not like I make ANY freaking money at all from people visiting my club, so there's no advantage to me "gaming the system".

Hey Mort, what business are you in? Just curious.

Pics or it didn't happen!! show me these fabulous boots..i must see them lol

But are they putting them there because they actually go and enjoy the place, or because they can get rewarded for it and only go to renew their being in the prize pool?



consumer for the most part.

Most of what I build and sell that isn't custom work is now on on-rez. cut back my land so shut down the store I had which did decent enough traffic and sales for barely advertised.

In fact most of what i make is spur of the moment items, seen lots of the donuts I made wandering around in furry mouths

RL done work for various companies both in house and elsewhere looking into optimization and web presence. Saw more than I wanted of the "pay us and we'll boost your search rankings" schemes.

I run a mall, so it's important to me that the traffic numbers I present to my renters are real. The rent I charge is based on how many people shop at the mall and if I inflated those numbers with fake traffic, well, that would be fraud. Not all businesses have to deal with this particular ethical issue.

If I TP into a mall and I detect a traffic bot farm, I either immediately TP away or take pictures of the bots and THEN TP away. If you're an individual business owner just trying to bump your own sales, well, you do what ya gotta do I guess.

Judging by the names that have come up when I've awarded prizes, most of them ARE members of the club. There have been a few names that have come up that I can tell they've just bounced around picking up clubs or whatever. The majority however, are regulars.



OK, and as I see this, it's no more than search ranking optimization, which is an acceptable and desired website design technique (I used to design websites).

Even if I have 500 people in that Picks program (and I can't tell how many I do have, but I'm guessing maybe 50-75), those people are not making a significant impact on my traffic. Further, I've been watching my traffic numbers every day since January, and trust me when I tell you...the past 2-3 weeks, the traffic has been screwy as hell. It's coming down at different times of the day, and runs high and low, with few "middle-ground" numbers. It won't be much longer when traffic is completely irrelevant, and ya'll have to find something else to grouse about

Trying to be as open minded as possible, I'll just say differing methods work for different people. And what a business owner chooses to do to promote their business is up to them, as long as it doesn't run afoul of the TOS. But there are social stigmas associated with some of those choices.

My business is moderately successful. I average around 4k traffic. I don't use campers or bots. I don't pay for picks. I do use many classifieds, ranging from 200L to 45,000L. Why? Because I have found it to be highly effective. Truth be told, some of my 200L ads outperform the 45,000L ad.

As well, I have a lot of word-of-mouth built up from tirelessly serving the needs of my loyal customer base. And I consider that the most prized thing I could possibly have. What works for me may not work for you, your mileage may vary.

Personally I don't like those who stack up 30 bots just to get high traffic numbers. If getting the most traffic is their goal, great. If they feel it's a measure of how good their location is, I have two words: Epic Fail.

Darien, I'm pretty sure that there isn't one person on this forum who supports the use of 30 bots - not even those of us who do use picks/bots/campers. It seems to me that those of us who are using them are doing so judiciously. I'd say we're all united on the excessive use of the campers and bots

Yes, It was just a general statement about those that do, not necessarily talking about anyone on the forums. But considering that anyone can now come to the forums, not just Premiums, I wouldn't be so sure about your statement

Good point - I forgot!

You show yourself to be greatly lacking in knowledge of link-building for search engines, but that's no surprise. Listen to Marcel - he can teach you a thing or two.

When a search engine scans pages for links to follow as reference point. A page full of links = additional hits on the metrics for every link on the page.

It's the simplest method used.

I must admit I am leaning towards agreeing with your viewpoint on this Colette.

You said to Marcel that links companies have thgeir own websites, as your argument against what he said. It's true that some do, but most links companies are link-building companies, that seek links from other sites, so your reply to Marcel was wrong. What Marcel compared his 'pay for picks' with was correct.

Your understanding of search engines and links on pages is very lacking - *very* lacking. I saw a later post of yours, saying that you'd considered optimizing websites, but you'd need to learn a lot before you could begin to do that.

nope it's paying for links period, it's not sharing links with other companies. It's a deliberate flood of links in order to skew the search results. Many times using pages with a flood of keywords in the meta tags and nothing but paid links in the body.

Much like paying for picks, or stuffing a horde of bots in a box.

=p

I missed out. They went to someone starting with a Y. a Y !!! arg! =)

Sorry, but you are wrong. There are some links sellers who have their own sites, but the majority of links companies are link-builders, and they acquire links one by one - mostly by offering exchanges and submitting to directories. Both methods pay for links - they pay the companies to arrange links to the site - you're right about that - but some of it is suggested and recommended by the engines. You talk as though it is all wrong as far as the engines are concerned, but you are wrong.

There is a difference between optimization and google bombing. Which hiring a link farm, paying for mass picks, or using a horde of bots to farm traffic is.

And there are limits to what you can do, just ask the ones removed from the listings at google which as you said gives information on optimizing.

A neighbour of mine in Kang Nae sim has a club plus store. She uses a CampMaster system.
It was set for L$3 per 15minutes, with a daily max of L$50.
The thing was maxed out by campers almost 24/7.
It had anti-bot turned off.

Generally it was set for 30 campers, but sometimes 20. It was lowered to 10 when they ran an event - keeping the sim at about 40 avatars.

Today I noticed a distinct lack dots on the map.
??
Aha! Anti-bot has been turned on.
On login to the system, it pops up a 1 to 9 menu and asks for a random number to be clicked.
It will pop that menu up every 10 minutes, neatly getting the value of a bot/idle camper before logging them out with no pay.

ANYWAY...
Right now, the system is set for 20 campers.
Up to now, that would have meant 20 dots.
Now? Three live ones.

Horribly unscientific metric:
20 campers = 17 bots plus 3 that are capable of responding to a pop-up every 10 minutes.

Poof! Poof! Only 1 left

I wanted to use my 1000th post for something more meaningful than this, but what the hell...

Your horribly unscientific method is exactly that, but I don't mean that as a slam.

17 bots was probably closer to 10 bots, with 7 actual (non-bot) users logging on and then going to bed/work/school/whatever.

Sorry about your 1000th You really shouldn't have!
I'm not in anyway offended by your agreeing with me that the single sample 'metric' was exactly as I described it - "horribly unscientific".

However, the potential 7 non-bots might as well be bots in their effect of filling up the sim with zombie dots. The camping system 'anti-bot' certainly treats avatars with absent typists as bots.
In a way, they are worse than bots. The non-bots would probably have more load of attachments, scripts, flexies than would a dedicated bot avatar.

Whether bots or not, the engaging of the anti-bot feature has decimated them.
Ah the bliss!!
Lag-factors aside. It was intensely irritating to have a cloud of zombies sitting just beyond the boundary. It was a constant visible reminder of the spiritually-impoverished attitudes of some residents.

Maybe they could put up some banlines too.

Hi Chris!
Smoooooooooch!!


Anyhow, that camping system has been set for Anti-Bot = Once now.
People logging in to it only have to respond to the popup just once at the start, and then then can go out for the day/night.
So we're back up to 20 zombies taking up half the spaces in the sim.

It's interesting.
At a zombie camper level of 20 max, they would be paying out about US$600 per month.
There has just GOT to be a way of spending that sort of money differently/imaginatively to pull spenders into the parcel.