Please help fight camping

It was a red herring. Sorry that my post seemed to imply that it was. However, we *do* know how the system is programmed; it's been described by Lindens explaining what the measurements mean. PM me if you'd like the details, or ask in a new thread.

Often seems that way, but no. I'll be happy to discuss it on another thread, in Scripting Tips, if anyone starts it.

PM sent

It seems that running scripts (listeners etc.), except those that move objects and such, can't slow down other things like av movements because of the way the programme is written. A higher script ips rate means fewer other things that require processor time, so the ips rate in the sim that I'm in can't cause lag. But, after the textures have loaded, there is no noticable lag around the store.

The scripts thing was just an aside, anyway.

Granted - its not going to be very easy to come up with a way to measure popularity in a way that can't be gamed. But I find it hard to accept its not possible - I think the method simply hasn't been concieved of yet.



But doing both (Have Land bots while competing for compelling content) are somewhat mutually exclusive, at least if you consider the 'spirit' behind why Linden created Traffic (formally called Dwell) in the first place.

Traffic/Dwell was intended to highlight those areas that provided the most compelling content. The idea was that the bar would continually be raised - and the market would drive the need to create better & better content. At one time, people were actually paid for their Traffic (Dwell) numbers - in both Lindens and Cash USD as a Linden incentive. As further evidence of their intent, this program was called the "Developer Incentive Program". (Which was later dropped due to rampant gaming).

Traffic bots throw a wrench into that spirit, because it becomes no longer neccesary to create good or popular content in order to acheive a high traffic figure. Thusly, the incentive to innovate and create isn't as much as it *could* be, if competition drove innovation.

I'm not saying that those that create compelling content don't get rewarded at all. But in today's environment, its not possible to succeed on compelling content alone - and that's really a disservice to all of us.

Well said.

Wonder how this will get spun.

Beginning to find the excuses entertaining.

Travis, I'd love for someone to invent a true popularity meter.

In the meantime, we should simply get rid of using traffic (dwell) for ranking in searches.

Or do what Tegg said and just bump everyone's traffic up to some ceiling with a checkbox.

Then everyone gets to be popular without the fuss.

Haha! Hey Collette, you're popular with me without any such feature.

My comment that you quoted was just mild humour, Travis

They are not mutually exclusive at all, but using camping in its various forms is certainly in conflict with the original 'spirit' of using Traffic as the sole ranking factor in the Places search.

Since people do serious business in SL, and business people will usually take advantage of things if they are legal, or they wouldn't be very good in business, the fault really lies in the continuance of the Places tab.

Hypothetical example:
Suppose that a local businesses directory offered a plumber the most prominent and large ad in the Plumbing section for more money than a normal ad, and that if he accepted then no other plumbers would get a prominent ad - they would all be just small lineage ads. If the money is reasonable, any plumber would jump at that huge advantage. None of them would say, "No thank you. My concience dictates that all plumbers should be equally advertised in the directory." It's business, and it matters.

People shouldn't be railing against the various forms of camping, as in the title of this thread - they should be trying to persuade LL to get rid of the Places tab (and the Popular Places tab too, since it serves no useful purpose). All this 'get rid of campingbots and trafficbots' stuff is nonsense. Get rid of bots, and what will it do? The bot people will use camping instead, so nothing is gained.

Dunno, some of those Traditional European Cheeses are pretty chalky textured.






Well thanks

Nice spin

I give it a 8.6.


Nevermind the fact that the Classified Tab already gives "the plumber" the chance for the bigger ad.

Ty, Colette Did you notice that I didn't find fault with the original intent?

That cost you points.

The biggest stumbling block is establishing identity: at least to me, I'd only want to know how many real live human avatar-pilots (you know: the servo-plasm) came to visit, not the number of that person's alts and bots. But it's really, really hard to establish that Avatar X is truly not the same person as Avatar Y with any degree of reliability. If we're willing to live with some noise, we could just say that everything sharing an IP address *or* a MAC address *or* a hardware machine ID was the same person. That's wrong, but maybe it would be good enough. And all these things can be spoofed with varying time constants and degrees of difficulty, but maybe it's good enough. (I really think it's hopeless to try to do this by forcing "Account" to be umbrella to all alts. Can't say only one Account per IP address, etc.)

But then, even if you've established that a session belongs to a unique human identity, you can't know that it's not that human's bot. Thus is born the Traffic Gamer Bot Cooperative: everybody runs a single bot that flits through the circuit of all cooperating traffic gamers, in turn with all the other gamers' bots.

It's just like the "Boost my traffic" checkbox, but with more sim border crossings.

I'll help fight camping in a little while, but first I need to spend some time on this chair that's paying me.

brb afk

Yep

But I've never been against getting rid of the Places tab. I've always said that I don't mind one way or the other. If you think about it, it wasn't a particularly good idea in the first place. Even if nobody lifted a finger to improve their traffic, all it would ever do is produce elite results. For every search topic, there would be some elite, some not so elite and most that could never hope to be elite because they'd hardly ever be found. The rich would get richer and the poor would stay poor. Not a good concept at all.

OHH nice blindside spin 9.6

Ill let this one slide because you weren't around before Camp Chairs.

Other than the obvious Contest-Every-Hour places, the system actually worked fairly well.

lol. You just can't bring yourself to award me a 10.0 can you?

I wasn't around then - you are right about that. But could it have worked fairly well for small businesses that were on the wrong end of the listings? I'm sure that is was fine for the established ones, and those that were bubbling under, but did it allow start-ups to rise up?

Actually it did do those things.

But much of the reasons it did might have been the scale of SL. Even if you were at the bottom of the traffic listing you still often showed up on the first page.

For example I was the third Shape Seller for non-furries to open shop. Thus if you typed "shapes" it was fairly easy to find me even on the day I opened.

I was the first Mod/copy shape seller on the grid for non-furries, so I kinda had that place all to myself. LOL.

Still it continued to work for a while even when camping chairs started. But after the flood gates opened (Open registration) PLUS the associated massive increase in camping happened ---- it totally fell apart.

Fair enough Colette. With the number of businesses in SL now, I don't think that it's now a brilliant idea, for the reason that I stated earlier.

Yep so just get rid of "traffic"

and just list Alphabetically / disallowing AAAA, BBBB , CCC .. etc names.

Or heck list randomly.

Use the Classifieds for advertisements.

Maybe even add a Commercial Ads tab to replace "Popular Places"

I don't think there is a suitable way to list Places, except in the way that they are ranked in the All>Places results. That's there now, and is quite satisfactory. The only sensible reason I see for keeping the Places tab is to maintain the camping source of income for many people.

Theres your 10.

Its absolutely not satisfactory as is.

Did your brain reboot, did you forget this entire discussion?

LOL

No, I haven't changed. I said in the previous thread that I don't mind one way or the other whether Places stays or goes. I've never argued to keep it. My arguments have been that, since it exists, and it's a bumpy playing surface, I see nothing wrong with being a bump myself