Are your human employees registered?

Which then brings up the question, are employees "scripted agents?" DJ's? Hostess? Dancers? Singers at live music events? Since a live resident is not scripted but has to be taged as a scripted agent while on duty, is it now correct procedure to provide false information? There is a paradox of being told to break the TOS in order to comply with the TOS.

As far as I'm concerned, any av that is scripted or merely afk on an ongoing basis should be treated as a bot. Campers whose avs are more often than not afk while they crank up their pittance of lindens are every bit as distasteful and unethical as regular bots.

In the case under discussion the owner's buddy left his av on a stand in her shop and went off to work, in which case he was not in a position to interact with customers when required. He effectively became a bot or at least an unpaid camper, if only on a temporary basis, which is not good.

Quite apart from the issue of gaming traffic figures, the not dissimilar practices of running bots or hosting campers are both very anti-social. I'd rather find myself alone in a sim than in the company of a bunch of zombies. Invisible crowds of little green arrows floating overhead on the Mini-Map are even more creepy and they do nothing for my confidence in the wares on sale.

I'm not taking a swing at you personally, Phil, although it certainly seems that way but I can't help but take a dim view of the quality of the product if I find the creator deems it necessary to pump-up traffic figures to his store with a bunch of fake accounts.

In summary: bots are bad, campers are bad.

To conclude: Kill them! Kill them all!!

It's all there, Peggy:- http://atomicvalley.com/?p=909

Brenda posted the link in the OP.

ETA:
Innula beat me to it

During the comments on the Scripted Agent blog posting, we had:






If "non-Traffic" avatars were visually and programmatically identifiable inworld, then the cheats would be more obvious.

I could see scammers trying to take advantage of this. I see signs in stores warning customers that only X,Y and Z are authorised employees and that no other avatars should be given L$. A scammer could register themself as a non-Traffic and get the coloured name tag. This would help to give an impression that they were employees.

Perhaps this non-Traffic thing could be additionally handled in AND/OR fashion by a list of avatars in About Land. Those avatars would have a special tag colour that identified them as non-Traffic avatars *of that parcel*. Such a thing would also relieve people from the bother of registering/deregistering as they moved around the Grid. The flagging would happen automatically on the relevant parcels.


But then of course, you'd have the smart-arses who would flip their bots to non-Traffic while visitors were in the locality - and then back to Traffic accumulators as soon as things were quiet
It's the sort of thing that LL could detect by profiling activity - if they had a mind to.

Maybe this time around, if they are serious about cleaning things up, they could expend some advance effort in brainstorming the more obvious ways that things can be gamed.

As a point of fact, this is not necessarily true. It depends on who owns the property in question. If it belongs to Amity Slade, and Amity Slade is present on the property but afk, then you're not impermissibly gaming traffic. Your avatar generates no traffic because you own the parcel. If, on the other hand, the parcel belongs to the group Amity's Store, which was created by Amity Slade, and Amity Slade is afk on the property, then your presence is counted in the traffic calculations, as you are not the group called Amity's Store. Then it could be argued that you're gaming traffic, if people really wanted to be jerks about it. It's a technical point, but so is everything Linden Lab is doing in determining who's guilty.

Actually, that's a very good idea - and one that LL won't do because they've already done it another way by implemented scripted agents. It's an excellent idea because employees wouldn't need to register at times when they are working and deregister the rest of the time. That in itself is ludicrous. Poeple wouldn't bother deregistering and their traffic wouldn't count in other places they go. It's ludicrous.

Frontier Linden's replies to the store owner who was penalised because of real people employees means that all real people employees must be registered during times when they are working. It doesn't leave room for variations. And yet, there is no way yet for an employer to check whether or not employees are registered while they are working, which means that LL has made rules that are impossible to knowingly abide by.

Would it have been different if the employees had been standing around, asking customers who pass by if they can help them by demoing stuff, and only getting on a posing stand to demo? According to Frontier Linden, they should still be registered, simply because they are employees and shouldn't count for traffic. I don't disagree with that but, without the means for an employer to know whether or not an employee is registered, it's unworkable.

According to Frontier, all employees on the parcel must be registered so they don't count for traffic. Again, I don't disagree, but LL should not be penalising anyone who is in breach of it until they provide a means for an employer to know.

It's the same thing in this case, the av's are just carrying out different functions but a club with a DJ, dancers, bar staff, greeters whatever are all increasing traffic in the same way these customer service reps do. In fact this place from the OP is apparently a store and mall on a full sim.

Traffic is and always will be, a cack statistic.

Massbotters are probably rescripting their outed bots to TP from sim to sim and AR other avatars suspected of being bots

Example:

I used to stand in a particular spot in my store, in case I could be of any help to customers. While I was/am anywhere in the store, green pillars become visible around the place, with floating text to the effect of, "click me to page the owner". Technically, I should not be counting for traffic so I should register myself whenever I am not just passing through my own store. How ridiculous is that? A store owner cannot be in his/her own store unless s/he is registered at the time? I have no doubt that LL wouldn't do anything about that, but what if the store owner employed someone to do exactly the same thing. Frontier says that the employee must be registered. Where is the difference. Can it get any more stupid?

Sling's idea of adding a panel to the land box for names that shouldn't count for traffic is the only sensible idea I've heard on the subject.

I just thought of another way to highlight the stupidity

In another thread, someone asked about getting a tier-free 512 and putting both a home and a small store on it. Someone replied, saying that she had done exactly that when she started - home on the ground, store in the sky. And there are plenty of people who combine homes and commercial places on the same land.

According to Frontier, everyone who spends any time in the home part must be registered as a scripted agent. So forget about inviting anyone back to your home because they aren't going to register just to visit you.

The whole 'real people' thing is utterly ridiculous.

I'd imagine there was something about this place that made it look like a bot place. I haven't been to the place but I was in a store a while back where there were a few models in glass booths and suddenly one of them started talking to me, asking me if I needed help.

This looked like a place with model bots, but evidently there weren't. I think these are the places that will fall foul of the policy, whereas places that have people walking around and clubs with dancers don't look like bot places, so they'll be fine.

Technically there's no difference between a place that has av's walking around and one that has static av's in terms of traffic scores, but the perception is going to be the rule of thumb.

I agree - and it's stupidity unleashed, isn't it.

To be fair to LL....
I think it is clear what they want to do about Traffic in principle. They just suck bigtime at implementation and clear explanation.
In the case in question here, it appears that the trigger for LL action was the number of avatars generating traffic. I very seriously wonder if they would be at all bothered by the purely technical situation of a single store/club owner being AFK at intervals -- or even for extended AFKs.

As I remember, Jack Linden said that the people they were after were those who were "seriously taking the piss".

See my point about the work platforms my business partner and I use (which are on land belonging to the land group). We're there working for hours on end. We also employ a couple of people to help with adjusting poses, texturing, doing pictures and photoshopping and the like, and we also sometimes do our advertising pictures up there, too.

Plus friends sometimes drop in to talk to us, as do people who want to discuss custom orders.

None of this is to "game traffic" -- it's a obvious way to work. I don't see why on earth we shouldn't both make our products at the same place we sell them, on land we own, or discuss these products with our customers there. Nor do I see the objection to "living above the shop".

Seems to me that root of the problem is the whole idea of counting traffic, which is, as I understand it, a left-over from the early days of SL when you got paid for having people visit your land.

We don't have official customer counting systems in RL to help us decide where to shop for furniture or clothes, or where to go for an evening out, and I don't see why we need them in SL -- particularly when they lead to nonsenses like telling people they mustn't behave in a natural and common-sense manner because it messes up the counting system.

Taking the mick Sling, I suggested it should be a don't take the mick policy and he agreed, I was being PG!

Then we need to club together and buy a huge mirror for LL

We don't actually know how many real people avs there were in that store. It could have come under the "taking the piss" umbrella - like if I put a pair of animations demo bots for every animated seat style I do. That would certainly be taking the piss, even if they were all real people instead of bots.

Fell into the trap of reading the blog - which leaves out some key comments - rather than the actual source.


I really don't see anything that contradicts itself: a bot and a camper serve the exact same purpose. The fact that one avie is controlled by a program and the other by a human who's miles away from their puter really shouldn't make any bit of difference.

Someone claims that they're staff but there's really absolutely no evidence that every single one was indeed "live" the entire time they were "modelling". Across the street mentions 30 staff members so that just sounds like a camperfarm as opposed to a botfarm to me.

I totally agree, Innula. Whenever I'm logged in (me or my alt), which is quite a lot time in each day, I rarely leave the parcel that my store is on. Whatever I do, I do it there. And I've no intention of registering either myself of my alt as scripted agents. Sling's idea would accommodate all that - we could put our own names in the About Land's "no traffic" box, and the 'no traffic' would only apply to our parcels. It's an incredibly good idea - much too good for the likes of LL to implement.

That's fair enough, but the store in question insisted that the models were not afk - not "miles away" - so that they can help customers. However...

30 of them? That does sound a bit like "taking the piss", doesn't it.

We don't know whether that's true though, we don't even know the name of the store to have a peek at what it's like.

If it's a store that usually has 2-5 people there all the time and there's 1 live person there then you have a good case.

If it's a store that sees 2-5 customers per hour and there's 10 live "models" there then it's completely disproportional and clearly intented to game traffic.

And since it seems that their main objection is residents getting *paid to stay on someone's land that rules out most of the other silly things too. You're not getting paid to be at your own store, nor are your friends you invite over to a house that happens to be on the same parcel as the store, etc.

They can't really make a specific outline here either: if they focus on bots then people bring back campers. If they focus on paid campers then they'll reward campers with free goodies if they just hang around the store long enough.

Someone's always going to be pushing and trying to come up with ways that inflate their traffic that doesn't *technically* violate whatever LL has said on the matter and this case feels like one of those.

"Paid to be there" - pretty much sums up an employee, Kitty. So people are not allowed to have employees any more?

Who has time or energy to be on their SL land 24 hours a day?

Yes.
If it's true that there were 30 or even 20 of these employees, then that is extracting the urine/Michael on a scale that well deserved to get whacked.
But then we have people who misrepesent that situation into the likes of 'Oh, so we're not even allowed to have paid staff now!!"

The principle is that Traffic is an indication of bona fide visitor activity. An employee, or a store bot is not a visitor in that sense.

But is that users' fault, if that is how traffic is added up? Certain types of places need employees. I personally love that Bax boots for example has live customer help that will even resize your boots for you if you wish them to.

I also like models that double as greeters, although I'd have to think it's a boring job...just because they can't really look away from the screen very long while there, or they miss being able to greet someone coming in.

Campers are not employees.

Without the name of the store and someone other than the store owner speaking up and going "yes I've been there a lot of times and there was only ever 1 'sales rep' at the most - who was not on a modelling stand - and who never gave any indication of being AFK for large amount of time" there's no way to claim that those "models" were employees in the true sense of the word.

If they are modeling the stores' wares, how is that camping? Sounds like work to me. Models are paid - I got a notice recently that people could apply to work in one store I'd been to in the past. It paid $25L an hour. Other places pay in clothing. Not bots, but actual residents.

Pay + valuable service = employee, in my book.