How to help newbies financially?

Yep - it's a dilemma with the cone system. Maybe everyone should hide the cones from normal shoppers and leave the system owner to drum up the people

I know nothing about building scripts. But if I can slide items from inventory into the prize tosser.....I should be able to slide LM's into a cone.....that has the right script. Right?

I can understand people being sent to different cones in your place - they are just cone locations, but I can't see a repeated location in your report, except for the Times Square one, which may be the creator's way of boosting traffic for the Places tab

The cones are no mod, so you can't add a script or LMs to them.

I mean with the Perfect Cone.

Where the heck is that creator?

With a perfect cone, yes

You could try IMing him, asking to swap your cones for mod cones, so you can add an LM and an LM giver (script) to each of them.

The "right" script could allow the cone-owner to add a landmark to the cone without the cone being otherwise modifiable.

Unless the scripts are uncommonly robust, allowing the containing object to be modifiable may not be an option. A rogue script in a cone could cause all kinds of mischief.

This could get a little tricky. What if I'm plugging in LM's to locations that I approve of....but no one is returning the favor. You know what I mean? Could prove to be limiting on your pool of visitors.

I had nothing better to do so I did a little trip around the cones, and I discovered a few things.

My 3rd destination was HQ - Times Square, would you believe And while I was there, a guy arrived who was on one of Mickey's cones not long before. I started from Mickey's place. So Times Square gets a fair amount of traffic from it

I found that a cone is not single-user at all - it's multi-user. In fact I found that at Mickey's place, where 2 of us were on the same cone - we arrived a few seconds apart and got paid a few seconds apart. Also, at another place a guy got paid out a few seconds after I arrived at the same cone. It was expecting me, so that was multi-user too.

Another thing I found is that it isn't sim-wide. I checked that at HQ (Times Square), where the cone is in the NW corner of the sim, so I flew southeast but stayed in the sim. It called me back because I'd gone out of range.

When it paid me, one of the cones I visited gave me an LM for the place I was at. So either that's a special from the creator, or you can pop an LM in and it gives it when it pays out. Someone should try that.

The last thing I found was that there is a free version, but it's not good, imo. It pays 5L per payment, which I assume is 2L to the visitor and 3L to the creator - that's a whopping 60% of everything the owner puts in. For me, the 33% might be ok there, but it's still a bit big.

I stopped the tour when I arrived at another of Mickey's cones, but I'm banned from the parcel it's on, so I called it a day

LOL !....oooops....that's an old parcel and was from a while back when we had the little spat. Sorry about that.

I'll fix that for your future Conehead Rendezvous.

hmmm....doing some math here....paying percentage Plus sending traffic from my store to Times Square, several times.....

.....need to test that again, tonight....so Sling doesn't go in off the deep end about it being "skewed".....would hate for that to happen....it won't be pretty.....

I'm saying nuttin'


....... apart from noticing that the system is named "Traffic Cone".

- Multiple visits to the creator's store
- Multiple cones in somebody else's store

This could be very irritating to people using the system to tour places. It might not matter to someone who is simply collecting payments.

I just wanted to pop in one last time and say that I don't like this cone thing. I want to pay for targetted advertising not random people hanging around my store.

Of course, I'm in a slightly different situation than most shops since land isn't really an impulse purchase.

Yeah the whole Cone needs to be slightly re-worked.....there is a way it could work, but depends on volume in both locations and "Coneheads"

Also, wouldn't like the same person going on the same trail everyday....doesn't benefit the shop owner having the same visitors over and over again

It could become a targetted traffic system if enough places use it. But, as it is now, I don't like the cone system either. I do like the idea of it though, and I'd like to use such a system.


@Sling. "Traffic" is the right word for it. A website's traffic means its visitors. Even in SL, a place's traffic means its visitors as well as its traffic number. Also, people use it for the money rather than for touring.


I might do another tour to see how many of the places I went to last night are repeated. It might give an indication of how widespread, or not, it is.

It could be interesting to try and engage other coneheads in conversation during a your tour.

Mickey's experience of watching the cone did seem to indicate that these were live avatars as opposed to afk 'campers'.
Their primary motivation for using the system may well be the payments, but if many of them are also looking around the places where they land, then there is something positive there for landowners - other than traffic minutes.

But.....
The profile of the current coneheads would not necessarily match that of those using this or some roughly similar mobile payments system in a SL in which significant camping was not available.

It has been asserted that camping is a major lubricant for the wheels of the economy. "Don't ban camping or the economy will tank".
So LL respond with "Camping isn't banned. You just can't have camping on a parcel flagged for Search."
How many camping spots will be set on no-search land? How many camping operators will simply junk their camping?
It's way to early to see any pattern. Given that there are still blatant boxes of 50 bots around, it's very probable that large-scale camping operations are still going full blast.

What would happen if Traffic were removed as a ranking factor? That would result in the removal of all camping aimed at manufacturing traffic points - even the one or two pad places. It would also spell the end of mobile camping.


Even if Traffic remains as a search ranking factor, and small-scale pad groups continue to operate, what happens?
We have a large number of campers competing for a far smaller number of camping spots. It's a seller's market. Camping rates would probably drop.


With a ban on large-scale camping for search-traffic or a removal of the motivation to provide such camping, this camping money that is said to lubricate the economy will very probably dry up.

LL say that they will monitor the economic stats to see if there is an impact on the economy. A problem there is they are making deliberately slow progress even on the blatant 50/80 - bots-in-a-box.
Shirley! Won't the effects become swamped by other factors affecting the economy over such a long period?



LL seem very reluctant to remove Traffic as a ranking factor.

How about....
Remove Traffic as a ranking factor for up to a month.
Maybe up to two months, or something between? I suspect that it would take a week or longer for all camping operators to realise that they are simply donating L$ to residents and getting no payback other than dots on the Map.
Although ..... I could see the big operators and the device makers coordinating a rapid disbling of all devices in order to demonstrate the effect decisively to LL. "Sorry campers. This pad is offline. Scream at LL!"



Anyone running camping primarily out of generosity and community building would continue to run their camping. There would be no shortage of campers for them. This could be a downside for them in that they could be visited by hordes of silent zombies.

If we started to see economic meltdown, LL could just put traffic back into ranking - even after a week - and continue the slowly, slowly approach. At least we'd know where the slow road was taking us.

There is a sense in LL's option to proceed very, very slowly. It gives people time to adjust.



So back to what caused me to kick off this thread..
If it is true that camping money is an essential grease for the economy, where are these people going to get money after large-scale camping eventually disappears?



Can enough 'real' jobs be created?
Will enough people want to do them?
And then we have Des raising a possible issue for US-based SL 'employers'.


The sort of system that I floated is a pragmatic sort of response. It's a compromise.
I suspect that we'd see a lot of afk people, but they could only be afk for relatively short periods.
With a majority of afk people and Traffic remaining as a factor in Search, the thing would largely be yet another camping system. However, even the afk people would be exposed to new places on a continuing basis.
It would only be the live and interested people who would make it other than another Traffic gaming system. When the stay in not mandatory for payment, these people can move on and weight the traffic for places that they actually prefer to be in.

This sort of system also allows landowners a relatively inexpensive and easy way to get visitors. It's independent of Search. Rather than sit in page 90 of some search, buy a small number of credits and see what happens. Maybe you get live eyeballs. Maybe you get afk, but even they have eyeballs when they arrive.



Whatever.. *if* it's true that the money currently circulated via camping is an essential ingredient in the economy, then we are heading for a SL in which that money has to be injected in some other way.

Hello,

my name is Jan maroon and i am the inventor of the traffic cone network.

I made the network, because i saw many people who made a beautiful place,
and their frustration that noone comes. I wonder how to make the many freebies visit the places. I do not like camping, but i knew that freebies search for money.

Instead of camping - people can move around and watch the place while waiting. The idea was that they see products or services while they are waiting and maybe come back to buy them in future. This is why you can put a landmark into the cone. The landmark is given to the person when he/she gets the money, i thought this would make them accepting the landmark more often.

One can put one cone one one parcel, it is not limited to the sim. The cone checks if the visitor leaves the parcel border or is afk, and it has a antibot protection.

I think it is quite different to ordinary camping - and there are already a few people who had
really success with the cones, at least to find new friends or group members.
It is important for me that the system is fair and good - so if you have any suggestions
please tell me.

Regards
Jan maroon

The cone can give out landmarks, you have to put it into the cone before granting the permissions.

Regards
Jan Maroon

I can think of one way, which is kinda off topic for this thread, but still a little relevant.

A friend of mine has spent their entire existence in this world without using RL cash, they have been here for oh probably a year. Anyway last week they decided they wanted some bits and pieces so they transferred into their account some RL money.

The minimum is $25 US$, because this is the first time they have ever actually used RL money they discovered that LL would only allow them to convert $10 of that into L$, the rest has to sit in their account until next month (I think) when LL will "upgrade" the amount they can spend buying L$.

Needless to say, they aren't impressed, and don't plan to put any more RL money in.

LL are effectively holding the money, gaining interest on it (ok its only $15, but still if 10,000 people have $15 in their account they can't spend...)

My thoughts on it, either the minimum buy should be lowered to $10, OR they should raise the start level to $25 on the Lindex (which IMHO would be better for the economy).

Just my little rant for today...

Hello , i just talked with people about your points about the cones -

first i want to say that i will try to make this better -

you must know that i needed the commission cause there is a big backend behind the network .

But i will think about how to make it better and fairer.

Regards
Jan maroon

I did chat with any coneheads that I found along the way, Sling, but you don't get to see many. One was afk for a while but we chatted when she got back. The other was the guy who I saw again at HQ. We chatted but he'd just started with the cones so I couldn't learn anything from him.

But the best chat I had was just now - at HQ - the 10th and last destination of my tour today, during which I was not sent to any of the places I was sent to yesterday - except HQ. The creator happened to be there when I arrived and we chatted about the main points that have been raised here. He seems a nice enough guy and is open to suggestions. He said that he'd look into them. We chatted about the level of commission, and about the cone immediately sending people away (I suggested giving users the option of staying here or going elsewhere, and I explained why), and also about it giving an LM...

The point about it giving an LM is that it *does* give an LM if the owner puts one into it - like I found with one cone yesterday. It can't give an LM as the means of TPing a person to the next cone, which would have been ideal, because it's the next cone that gives the person the URL in chat. The current cone doesn't do it. So right now, putting your LM into the cone will cause it to give it to the user when it pays out. And thinking about it some more, the current cone can only give an LM as the means of TPing to the next place if the LM is in its inventory, and that can't happen with any flexible system. There's maybe a way round it but it's a bit convoluted - having all the LMs in a central store/object, for instance, but it's very messy.

Apparently, the back end is a webserver.

At that time, plenty of users will only be doing it for the money and they won't move away from the cones. They'll find something else to do while they are waiting, such as using the web, emails, RL. But that doesn't mean that they will all be like that. Most users won't go on tour for the sake of finding interesting things, but what do people do when they are stuck waiting in a place? They read anything they can find to read. In SL, we look around, even if it's only doing a 360 degree turn to see what's there. Much of the time, what's there will be of no interest, but some of the time, it will be of interest.

Example: I am genuinely not interested in almost everything in SL - I'm a bit unusual in that way - most people are more interested in SL things than I am. Even so, I was sent to a place today (New Brighton) where the 11 minutes wasn't enough, even for me. It's a nice build and I hadn't finished looking round it when my time was up. I hadn't even gone onto the pier.

So I think that a system like this will cause people who are only using it for the money to see things that they find interesting. Many will land, click, and do something else, but many, who only set off for the money, will find things of interest.

That would be my approach. The thing has to able to scale up if it were to attempt to replace the current level of camping cash. If what the devices give out is a payment/LM pair that have been bought by the parcel owners in advance, then a real database on a server is required.
Operated by anyone other than LL, the back end would have to trigger in-world entities to do the giving.

That's why I floated the idea of this type of system. It's the most attractive part of it - for me anyway.

Someone could find them selves in an interesting store, it is true.
They could equally find themselves in a build that is primarily a labour of love, and art installation, something completely zany, or whatever and go "Wow! I never even imagined that a place like this could exist."

They'd never find it in Search, because they would not have been looking for it.

It's very much like what you proposed, Sling - that's how the cones came up

I think maybe the big difference is that the cones-type system doesn't have a central pool of money and doesn't rely on donations. I'll have to go back to your first post and re-read it.


ETA:
I re-read it. I does have some significant differences but the objectives seem to be the same - give some money to people and also give them an LM to a place. The cones-type system has the additional objective of having people actually see the place.


Incidentally, the creator said that he'd just posted in the thread, but I don't see a post from him. I wonder if he got the wrong forum or the wrong thread.

Elanthius - I pay for a ton of targeted advertising. This is just something unique to try. I haven't had one sale off it yet. But what I do like about it:

1) Some new eyes are seeing the store.
1a) these "eyes" all have complete profiles - actual "eyes"

2) It's maintenance free - no effort, but to plug in some lindens

3) The cost is quite minimal, compared to other things

4) The new eyes are moving around, and not sitting

5) It DID increase traffic. Heaven Forbid....but every ad I run increases traffic while trying to make a sale....(why else would you pay to run an ad)....so I don't buy the increasing traffic argument...simply trying to meet a new customer or make a sale

5a) I like seeing dots moving around on the map - if someone is reading a classified ad - pulls up the map to the store - and sees dots at various locations, they might think cool....people are at the store....as opposed to dang, another empty store.

6) If I use it more effectively, with the appropriately priced items and some Ad Boards to look at while waiting.....there are more possible benefits there

7) All indication is that the people using it are enjoying it - heck, I myself have spent two hours the last two nights using it....it's sort of addictive....there's something fun about being tossed about SL, and not knowing where you will end up