How to help newbies financially?

Some could be Bots....but can't get past the captcha or whatever questionaire that is inbuilt. So they arrive, click on prim....and leave. I guess the Bots are programmed to UID of the texture or prim.

Can you explain in very simple non-tech terms....how a bot finds these, please?

I've already got someone standing at Second Cone....still someone standing at First Cone.....different people continuously. I'll add one to the third sim, too. If this continues all day....I'm fine with the Cone. They added traffic. I don't care if someone wants to bash that.

Here's another question. What if you put 2 in the same sim....will that mess it up? Can they function that way?

I not sure how Bots are programmed....but as each texture has unique ID number..that could be written into the Bot's coding.....and somehow these Bots can locate these Cones that way or something like that. I'm just guessing! Someone like Qie would have a better explaination.

OK, thanks.

For those of you who are testing these out with a tour....sorry you got sent to my store three times.

Just spent some time at the cones for a while, and talked to some people.

A few were new to SL and using it as a way to see things. The ones I talked to were actually Newcomers - but the ones on my transaction list, for the most part have not been.

They commented that they wish it would send you to a specific type of place...geared toward a category for example:
1) Social Activities
2) Clubs
3) Shopping
4) Random

One guy wanted to see social activities....one was looking for skins and all the new equipment....one had clothing shopping on her mind.

They liked the idea of it being random....sort of....not necessarily. Some had a specific type of place that they wanted to see.....but they were seeing cool places that they may go back to visit later.....and not complaining about that. They did not complain about waiting the 11 minutes at all. They were having fun.

One started his tour at Times Square - he saw a cone and there was a sign on how to use it.
One started from Easy2net....I'm not sure what that is?
One started from a Club.

Someone just landed near my third cone, that I just set out....and she had been at my first cone, earlier today.

One guy walked across my sim lines...then walked back to cone....and still got pay out.

Most are walking around and looking.....and most are awake

They really seem to be enjoying it....I like it!.....just needs to be tweaked a tad.

ok just catching up on all this since my post last night...i see this as being sooo similar to the mobile camping things. the main difference being the fact that it is networking with other locations which has its advantages and disadvantages. but i still think that an area camping system that is set up to allow someone to wander around your entire area for the required amount of minutes and then pays out is the same concept. this is esp true for a mall where they might start the camping process for their 11min at one store and then wander around an entire sim of other stores until they receive their payouts.

this thing about offering another lm right away i think makes it a no go for me...i dont see that as any different than my freebie ring that i already have set up...they tp in, grab the item in my ring and get a lm to the next stop.

i would have to see some pretty heavy evidence that this would get me more sales than using either a grid wide hunt, a freebie ring or an area camping system in order for me to think this is something i should use. esp when it is giving a cut to a creator AND paying out to my visitors...neither of which i have to do with hunts, freebies, etc.

Yeah i like it too, have had it for a couple of weeks now...i like the way they wander round and actually look at things...even my other shops in the Square.

I said in earlier post, if it really takes off in terms of locations and particaptors......you could have separate trails...either by continents or by category....and the Avie could choose the one they liked. Creator also needs to add a Landmark giver inside the Cone.

I think there is general agreement that the system would be better if it only gave the payment and the location que 11 minutes after the cone was clicked.

A major difference to how I understand your ring to work is that there is no benefit to the person in grabbing and running. They can't get any more L$ anywhere from the system until the time period is up.
In the case of the Cone system, as amended, they have no choice but to wait out the 11 minutes at the location.
In the case of what I was floating, they would have the choice. BUT: where would they go?


It might be interesting to try and find out the feelings of the people currently touring around on the Cone system.
If you didn't have to stay here in order to get payment, where would you go, and why?


It might or might not be difficult to get a straight answer.
"Oh no! I'd stay here anyway. In fact I'm going to stay for longer."
v.
"I'd be outta this dump like a shot. To anywhere, just as long as I can get outta here."

Don't you ever read what people write....or do you live by assumptions only?

Didn't you read Mickey's post where she asked a few that used the Cone?

I person could walk into another sim and back, or even TP out and back, depending on the frequency of the checks; e.g. a 1 minute interval would allow it to be done as long as the person gets back before the check. On the other hand, there may not be any checks. It may not be bothered whether or not the person stayed around. It IMs the person that there are 3 minutes to collect the money. That's another test that needs doing.

It's great that you are happy with it

Yes. I read that.
I understood it to very informal - not systematic or broad enough to convince the doubters.
The question would need to be aired very carefully to avoid being skewed by politeness.


What I was fishing for would be a strong indicator that the fixation on forcing people to hang about might not be reflecting reality.

Look back over the posts. It's very clear.
I float the idea that the mandatory stay might not be necessary.
Others say - No Way! If I pay,they stay!

Allowing people the choice to move on might seem counter-intuitive, but we have at least some indication from Mickey that my idea of people remaining voluntarily isn't the crazed ravings of a dreamer.


If the system did not make presence for 11 minutes mandatory, and if it's the case that in general people stay on for whatever reason, then there's a system that
- brings eyeballs
- promotes a feelgood factor for the place
- gets LMs into inventories
- gets people out and about and seeing new places
- generates traffic scores - while traffic remains a factor - as seems LL's intent.
- is in not tainted by an indication of unfairly buying traffic

I must not be understanding the question. Can't the bot just start out at any known cone location and just follow the links given by the cones, like everybody else?

It doesn't seem like it should be difficult for a bot to defeat the anti-bot test, unless there are other tests besides the hovertext one that I encountered. It's always the same prim of the cone object--and besides, there seem to be only two hovertext prims in that object (or anyway just two that are visibly opaque). The text changes periodically--not sure whether it's on an interval, or whenever somebody touches it.

Maybe the folks who hung out and didn't get paid got screwed by a system snafu. Yesterday, one destination I visited just went silent after counting down and telling me to touch within 3 minutes for payout; the sim was perfectly healthy, so either there was a comms glitch or there's a simple bug there somewhere.

I'm interested in the fact that there are enough paid-for destinations to keep the cone-goers supplied. I'm wondering what would happen if the cones gave out all L$3 each 11 minutes: would there be so many people looking for those L$s that there couldn't be enough contributors? It's not obvious to me that there's a supply/demand equilibrium for any particular payout amount.

I tested going out of range - by TPing back to my sim.

The first time it kept telling me that I'm too far away, but still counted down the minutes until it had told me 6 times, after which it reset the timer and it was finished with me. It would have been good to get a message to the effect that this is the final message before cutting off, but it didn't send one like that.

The second time I did it, I TPed away again and got the same messages again each minute, but I went back when the minutes remaining got down to 6. Then instead of the next message telling me that there are 5 minutes to go, the time away was added and I had 9 minutes to go.

So a person can go away for a while without losing any minutes so far, but the minutes away don't count. 11 minutes are required near the cone. Or to be more precise, the person has to be near the cone for 11 checks. Quick TP excursions can be done without losing time as long as the person gets back for the next check.

Not bad at all

I only know that once the credits run out, the Cone becomes offline to the Network....and you won't get anymore visitors.

Yes, it would be interesting to know how many Cones are in circulation.

I would say the whole thing is in it's infancy at the moment

I'm interested in both the number of cones in use and the ballpark number of people making use of them, but mostly the latter. I don't know how long the cones have been on sale, but, with camping getting shot at, there's a very good chance that this, or something like it, will take off. It's the sort of thing that will have inflationary expansion once it gets a good foothold. Now is a good time to create a *good* one - without the shortcomings

Yes. That's the interesting one.

I floated an idea on the premise that camping overall would take a big hit and that a replacement system to pay the impecunious - and draw eyeballs would be necessary.
We have people forcefully saying that they need the camping money to survive and that the camping money is a significant enabler of the economy.

If it is so that most campers are live avatars with humans at the keyboards, then a system that requires them to move about does two things for them
1. It gives them equivalent payment
2. It takes them to a variety of new places that then might not otherwise have visited.

On the other hand, if most of these campers are actually afk for long periods, then this system would be a pain the ass for them. They would actually have to work for their L$, even if that meant having to spend 30 seconds at the keyboard every 11 minutes or so.

If all these campers are actually live, then there could be a large pool of live eyeballs that merchants would pay to attract.
The argument goes that campers spend money.

It would take a shift in focus to get a critical mass of merchants to buy into the system. See people as potential customers rather than as a means to increase search ranking.
Obviously a lot of merchants see ot that way already, but there still seems to be a fixation on 'traffic'.

You're the only one that still has the fixation over "traffic"

This sort of childish sniping, together with your "outing" me on the Blog, indicates that you've totally lost the plot.

No doubt there are some dyed-in-the-wool AFK campers who are going to leave SL when they can't make L$s that way any more. In fact, one posts regularly to that very effect, in this very forum. I have nothing against that poster, but I just can't get too worked up about the loss of a resident if being able to make a few L$s for nothing is truly make-or-break for them. I mean, how important can SL be to them? and how important can they be to SL?*
This worries me a bit. It's why my earlier formulation would have paid-out from the system operator rather than the cone owners: concern that the cones could be spoofed such that the network would send folks off to unpaying destinations without being able to tell that the intended recipients never got their L$s. (That approach, however, has different "trust" problems.)
That's very interesting and a perfectly practical way for contributors to "get their money's worth" from the cone-hoppers. A couple of aggravating alternatives to avoid any hint of traffic-injection: Just pay 11 minutes after the cone is touched regardless of how long the avatar was in the sim, either requiring them to come back to get paid and receive the next destination, or not even that.

It's fundamentally broken that rewarding visitors who hang around and maybe shop is not clearly distinguishable from gaming traffic. It's not the "gamer's" fault, either; the fault is with the stupid traffic metric itself.

_______
*This all may have been discussed to death on the blog, for all I know. I haven't peeked over there, lest I get sucked into another challenge from S/he Who Must Not Be Named, as in the earlier Traffic thread.

LOL

Yes...it was informal. No, it wasn't broad.

It was skewed a tad by politeness (how else would you ask someone standing in your store to give you valuable information?).....and it was skewed by a very low cut and tight sweater.....which explains very lengthy and detailed responses from the male visitors....one wanted to talk more a couple of hours later.

Or maybe it was the 200L I gave him. What can I say...it was Newcomer Day at the store.

I think of a bot as something mechanical, without a person behind it....I never understood how they worked....so yes, the question may not sound right.



I'm not sure - I didn't get any irate messages from anyone. If I get those when a gift bag doesn't toss out something free in one second - I would imagine I would get one over 2L and 11 minutes.



I watched them a good portion of the day - they were pretty active - it seems that Cone #1 is the most active - not sure if there is a reason for that. I wouldn't mind doing 3L to keep them hopping.

Very interesting. The central payment method does have advantages but is likely to be disliked by some people as it requires trust, as you said. The way that I can see the "cone owner pays" method going wrong is the owner not having the funds to pay what s/he has credited to the cone. I could see that as being a *real* problem as there is no way for a script to know that its owner had insufficient funds to make the payment - the pay function silently fails and the script has to assume that the payment went through ok - which means that the cone owner could add an amount of money (credit) to the cones without any money being in the owner's account, and the network would cheerfully send people along. Very interesting. That must be doable with the cones right now.

With a small network it's probably not too big a deal, but I see it as a major problem for a large network.

It's no different to camping, of course, but if a camp pad doesn't pay, you just don't use that one any more - you go somewhere else instead. With a network like this it becomes more awkward not to use a particluar place's cones and people would be put off from using the whole system if a few bad apples were seen.

------------------------------------------

A reason occured to me why people are immediately sent to another place. The cone handles only one person at a time and it may already be handling someone when a new person clicks it. The simplest way of dealing with that is to always send the new person somewhere else. Some alternatives are (a) handle multiple people, or (b) not accept new clicks while it's handling someone, or (c) offer the choice of "stay here or go somewhere else?" only when it's not already handling someone, but the creator probably chose the simple way.

b (not accept new clicks while it's handling someone) is a bad idea as it stops people from getting started.

c (offer the choice of "stay here or go somewhere else?" only when it's not already handling someone) isn't good because it would still send shoppers elsewhere some of the time - much of the time if the system is popular.

a (handle multiple people) is the best way, imo.

If you had multiple people land at same spot....it would become traffic gaming of sorts. You had 8 people at your location for 11 mins =88 units.....not very big admittedly but enough for some "idealists" to throw up their arms. and shout "foul"

This is why I suggested that the device act like a vendor. The parcel owner actually buys the credit/LM pairs from the central resource. The money has to be paid into the system before there is any question of payment or LM being handed out to anyone.
This also cuts of any spoofing on the credit generation side of things. They are driven by real transactions. That can't be faked if the central service is being fed from the transaction to the account used to control the money.




If what happens is that the person has been given a payment and a LM to your place then one of:
1. They get to your place via the LM. Your device is showing as online - because you still have unused credit/LM pairs floating in the central system. Provided they are not on a timer since the last time the got a payment from the system, they can click the device, and a new Credt/LM pair is assigned to them.
2. They get to your place via the LM. Your device is shown as offline because all the credit/LM pairs that you bought have been handed out. OR, by the time their interval since the last payment is up, your device has gone offline. The trail is cold. They have to request a pointer to an online device. Doing this via a hud would seem the easiest way.
*However*, a pair of eyeballs have been delivered to your place. That's your opportunity to get and retain their interest.

It's in the interest of landowners to keep their credits in the system topped up.






It's probably something like that.
And.... the problem gets worse as the system mushrooms. There could many people on the parcel at the same time trying to use the system. Dealing with the transactions via a back-end web database might help, and there would be security issues to be considered.
THere are a number of reasons why I suggest LL control the system (despite the Ha! Snowball's chance in Hell!" is that if this were a very heavily used system, the transaction loads would be heavy. It's not your average scripted prim undertaking.
Having a bot handle things would be open to interruptions in Net connections, crashes inworld or on a computer not in a data-centre, sim crashes and restarts, etc. - and we would be talking in terms of heavy transaction loads.

But...
If the thing were to work by handing out payment and LM on arrival - or as soon as a running time interval for the person has elapsed - allowing the person the choice to stay or move on while waiting for the time interval to elapse, then the transaction handling is much simpler.

Some will argue that if you hand someone a LM then they will head off immediately.
If that were mostly what happened, than that's actually not a problem. When they get to that place, they can't get a new payment/LM pair until the time interval has elapsed.
Work that in reverse.
Someone in another place clicks for the first time, and gets your LM and credit. They immediately come to your place. Now what? They may as well stay in your place if it's at all interesting. They can't get a new payment until the time is up. It's swings and roundabouts.