Please help fight camping

Sure Phil. Whatever you say.

LOL. Yeah, just like they report on search engine spam, eh?

Whatever you say Phil. Your aren't trying to justify deception in SL are you?

And since you are advertising how wondeful your furniture business is, wait till one of your like minded unscrupulous---but MORE unscrupulous--- copy all your stuff and triple the number of bots.

poetry in motion.

No I'm not. I thought that was obvious.

Sure Phil. You wouldn't be doing that now would you?

Of course not. I'm not that sort of guy

I wonder how many people who've read this thread that have actually gone to Phil's shop. Pretty good advertising, this!

You obviously don't understand how money transfer works. You can't buy real world rice with lindens. The people you are talking about sell their lindens to other people that do want to buy stuff in SL. There's a lot of people shopping in SL that would not be shopping if people were not selling them lindens. The lindens (minus the 3.5% exchange fee) stay inside the game and get used to buy stuff.

It has been good advertising for him I'm sure, Oryx.

One thing I have to say is I commend Phil. I am shocked that people are calling him deceptive and deceitful, etc. I'm seeing him being a pretty stand up guy being open and honest and telling everyone exactly what his business practices are. You can disagree with him but I would think if he was trying to be deceptive that he'd sit idly on his fingers and just let the money roll in.

LOL, Oryx. I never thought of that

A few have - from this and other threads. All but one, who voiced an opinion, have been complimentary.

Yes, that's out there, but ineffective advertising is it's own punishment. If all they sell is houses and they put their resources towards bringing in people that don't want to buy houses, they won't last long. Competing house sellers will go after customers that are looking for houses. Which do you really think is going to do better?

What we are discussing is fraud and why it shouldn't be allowed in SL.

Fraud definitions courtesy of Google (oh, the irony)

In the broadest sense, a fraud is a deception made for personal gain. The specific legal definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Fraud is a crime, and is also a civil law violation.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud[/url]


Something intended to deceive; deliberate trickery intended to gain an advantage
[http://wordnet.princeton.edu[/url]


An act of misrepresentation in the intent to delude.
[http://www.securitiesfraudfyi.com/securities_fraud_glossary.html[/url]


Someone or something that is not what it claims to be
[http://www.beingheard.org.uk/content/default.asp[/url]

Thank you for that Bradley. It's appreciated.

We've been discussing a number of different things, Isablan. Exactly which of them is fraudulent?

And I'm STILL waiting to see a sim where hidden alts affect other people's use of the sim. Please - I really do want to see it in action.

That's because he naively told people. He thought it was normal to game the system. He fell in with a bad crowd (his mentors) and is now going to have to go through the various stages of denial, till he finds his inner core and see who is looking back at him.

No Phil. We've been discussing ONE thing.

I think Phil will sleep soundly tonight.

Groan... WHY do you resort to fiction and imagination, Rebecca? What's the point of it? You must know that you're going to be corrected and be made to look... well anyway.

1. I didn't tell anyone. Some bright spark checked up on me because of my posts in the thread that spawned this one. Yes, I knew that what I do would be seen when I entered the discussion, but it wasn't me who told people.

2. What mentors? I have no mentors. And what bad crowd? If you knew anything about me at all, you'd know that I don't mix with people in SL - I prefer to do what I do in solitude. I don't go out in SL - very very rarely anyway.

3. I've been in the search engine business for many years, and I haven't started to 'go back into my inner core' lol. But that was just a view of yours, and not a false statement, like the others are.

If we're going to discuss things, let's please leave the fiction for other places.

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

Getting back to the 'resources' objections. Not many weeks ago I was in a box in the sky that contained about 50 hidden alts - that's where I first came across them - I'd never heard of it before. I walked around amongst them without any noticeable lag. If they were going to affect other people's use of the sim at all, then being in amongst them would have been the worst place to be for that effect. But there was none.

That's why I want to see for myself this alleged effect that they have on sim resources, because I'm leaning towards the idea that it doesn't exist, and that it's just a false argument that some people throw in to the show how bad hidden alts are. So please, anyone - show me.

We've been discussing camping, campbots, and hidden alts. Are you saying that they are all fraudulent in your opinion? If so, please explain why they are fraudulent.

Because he is still in the early stages of denial. We'll see if he continues scamming when someone comes along who games him. I hear the New York Mob is going into the Furnisha' business.

lol. Night Phil.

Rebecca.

I don't know if you've started to write a reply to my request that you explain why you think they are fraudulent, but I know why you think it, so I'll write about that.

You say it is fraudulent because it artifically inflates a place's traffic numbers and moves the place up in the Places rankings.

You have a point - I'll grant you that. But I see it in different way. I see the Places search as a search engine for listing places. I have a place, so it should be listed there. I see that the ranking factor that it uses is traffic numbers, so I do things to suit that ranking factor. The engine doesn't say that these are the most popular places, so I'm not trying to have my place seen as a most popular place. I'm simply making my place more suited to the ranking factor that the engine uses, so that it ranks higher in the results.

I don't call that fraud, but you can call it fraud if you like. If you do call it fraud, then you call every owner of every website that lifts a single finger to make the site more suited to the search engines' ranking factors fraudulent. Everyone who gets IBLs for ranking purposes (as the search engines suggest that they do) is fraudulent. Everyone who writes page Titles to suit search engines, as the engines suggest they do, is fraudulent. That includes just about every significant business on the planet - the biggest ones down to the small ones.

If that's what you want to think, ok, but I don't agree with you.

Nite Rebecca

I think we actually have the same concerns about the new Search, and I'm pretty certain we share the same feelings about traffic.

As for the new Search, you may be right: I'm apt to underestimate the sheer ineptitude of LL, and maybe they had no help from unscrupulous sellers in coming up with the mess they made of it. And to be honest, as far as I can tell so far, for all the artifice required to get it to function at all, most of new Search doesn't appear to give any specific advantage to being deceitful, as traffic does.

And I think we're saying in different ways the same thing about the old, traffic-encumbered Search features: Search needs to satisfy the interests of both those who seek and those who have on offer that which is sought. If instead it favors those who would deceive the searcher, it hurts legitimate businesses who aren't found, who then don't have the revenue from the searchers, and then don't pay LL. It's in the financial interest of LL and all legitimate businesses that Search works well and transparently for the searcher. As you rightly point out, it's also in everyone's interest that not just businesses but also not-for-profit services such as education are also readily found.

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

On resources and lag and stuff: It is certainly true that a "box of bots" well out of the way should consume considerably less sim resources than the same number of avatars within view of everybody. I suspect that they'd consume even less if they sat on a prim, but getting them out of sight helps a lot (e.g., their textures and animations and motions, etc, don't have to be queued for download to anybody else), and making sure they don't come and go more than absolutely necessary is also pretty important. Mainland concerns are a little different from those of isolated islands because neighboring sims can also affect and be affected by the avatars in a sim--but again, having the bots up high in the middle of the sim should keep them from having much "child agent" effect on the neighboring sims. Still, there are only so many avatar slots available, so it's a finite resource that couldn't be shared equitably by all parcel owners, if any one of them kept a bunch of bots in-world continuously.

The script ips numbers reported, though, really should have nothing to do with bots at all. Something is going very wrong with scripts in that sim, and I'd expect things like network vendors to be throwing errors some of the time, but this will *not* lag the "feel" of a sim. Indeed, with numbers this high, the scripts almost can't be doing the kind of things that would make it feel laggy. (Although open listens aren't good, it would take a hell of a lot of them to consume a fraction of that number of instructions--unless there was a lot of cross-chatter on some shared non-zero channel, maybe.)

Did you look up Rationalization?




Because this is a textbook example.


Of course the traffic numbers represent popularity. The number is a score based on the time people spend on the parcel. The highest traffic places make it onto the popular places list.

A 10 year old, if they were allowed on SL, could figure that out.