Please help fight camping

However that doesn't mean its "satisfactory"

Its lame to say something to the effect of.

"Well I know the Traffic system is gamed, but thats satisfactory"

Its fine to not want it fixed, and even to like it the way it is,

but to claim it isn't broke?

Please.

I don't think I said anything like that, Colette - not the "satisfactory" bit. It's not a good search for users, but it isn't "broken". It's just that it's a poor search these days.

The Places search should be the target - not camping. LL seems to like the camping, but if people kept telling them that Places is useless and misleading, etc., they might even do something about it. Camping, in all of its forms, is the wrong target, imo.

That would be horrible. That would actually make the crappy keyword spamming policy beneficial. Currently, if you're selling houses and put a lot of sex related terms in your place description and ads, you'll get people that tp in, find something they don't want, and leave. With the current traffic system, there is negligible benefit to this. With unique visits, places that did this would have huge traffic numbers.

I retracted it in the same post, Argos.

I want to say something about keyword spamming - or *apparent* keyword spamming...

Many people assume that a list of keywords in the description is keyword spamming - and they are wrong to assume that, even though some of it is. One or two people have even written that they ignore places if they just have a list of keywords in the description, and I find that to be very self-centred, if they actually understand the reason for it, which I will endeavour to explain.

Many places have many diferent items for sale, but all places only have a limited number of characters for the place's Title and Description. All places naturally want to be found in the rankings for everything they sell, but the limited number of characters won't allow them to write nice sentences AND include all the items that they sell. Hence there are many places that just have the necessary keywords in the descriptions. Anyone who turns away from such such places either doesn't understand the limitations, or is so self-centred as to think that places should write nice sentences for them when they are looking for an item, and abandon any thought of rankings for the other things they sell.

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Now I want to add something to my previous post...

If Places is the target, instead of camping (the title of this thread), and if LL were persuaded to remove the Places tab, camping would still be ok, which means that camping could still provided a small income for some people, if other people were willing to help them in that way. That would satisfy all those who object to camping for traffic purposes, which is the most common objection to camping.

Yeah, I think things are settling into rough agreement (after nigh unto 400 posts!). When a business so fills their sim with philanthropic camping chairs that other residents can't get in... well, we can address that problem on the joyous day it arises. I think we also all agree that, at least in any formulation yet devised, "traffic" is a poor proxy for "popularity", "Places" based as it is on traffic doesn't add value to the other available Search features, and that legitimate business purposes wouldn't suffer if traffic and Places were simply to vanish.

I for one would be real interested to see threads (maybe in Feature Suggestions?) proposing truly meaningful sources of IBLs to replace traffic-derived "popular places" links, in an improved New Search.

If we all band together to get rid of traffic and Places, seems we could blithely ignore any little differences we may have about what to do till they go away.

Well, the All>Places search attempts a good shot at it. It uses traffic as links (minimally), and it uses Picks and LMs as links. Ideally, all of those are genuine 'votes' for a place - especially Picks. If the Places tab were removed, I don't think that it would be detrimental to the users' search experience - they'd just learn to use the All>Places search that much sooner. So I don't see any reason to find anything in advance.

I don't think LL will do anything about camping in a hurry. My impression is that they only get involved (policy) when it's really necessary - like gambling and banks. I also think that they approve of camping - or maybe did approve of it before the bots came along. But if they are persuaded that bots are taking most of the income instead of real people, they might be persuaded that the Places tab has outlived its usefulness. So I'll say it again...

The Places tab should be the target if you want to get rid of the camping you don't like. People have pestered LL about camping for a long time, and got precisley nowhere. These times of change in search might be very good for persuading LL about the Places search.

Hypothetical example 1:you can't workout how a really crsppy offensive TV show keeps topping the ratings, and find out the owner of the show has registered a thousand accounts with the survey company and has their monitoring constantly tuned to his show.
Hypothetical example 2: you book in for open heart surgery with a surgeon, he tells you he's well practiced at done this operation, done it 20 times this year, and you find out later it was on animals.
Hypothetical example 3: as a plumber you are offered 12 months free advertising in a magazine you open it up and find there are stangely 50 new plumbers in your suburb, and really it is the same plumber with different phone numbers diverting to his main number using the same free advertising deal.

I say get rid of bots period. I own land on a sim that is also occupied by a store owner that keeps 30-35 bots 650 meters above her store. It is so bad that myself and other neighbors cannot have guests to our homes because the region is full. We have all sent her messages and notecards asking her to stop this but she will not even reply to us.

You need to file an AR about that if it's on mainland, and get all other land owners in the sim to do the same.

we know that

Traffic = time spent x Avatars

I say eliminate the time factor of the Traffic count, so it only counts unique Avatars.
That would give a close guage to a place's popularity...and it would take "Gamers" more time to fly in their bots in an out of location. Despite that, the results would not be so disparaging, instead of comparing 2 venues with 120k traffic versus 3k .......you might get something like 652 versus 312, which isn't so relevant. ....maybe the "Traffic Gamers" will give up after a day or two!


Shame the Traffic counter doesn't show 2 types counts in About Land. Static traffic (likely to be camping) and Dynamic traffic (Av's in motion) and be able to do a search on either criteria. Most searchers would naturally use the Dynamic reading.....so again the camping bots become less meaningful in Places search.

Unfortunately, unique entry counts can be gamed too. They tried a number of different metrics before settling on "dwell", the current metric. But I suspect that you're right that unique entries would make camp chairs not cost-effective, which would make bots less remunerative.

However, I predict that it would lead to a spiral in new avatars to game the system. Property owners who want to game the system would set up a service that pays $L to each unique avatar that arrives (not hard to script, with an external database). Botsters would invent a new bot, which would activate a brand new SL account, visit a list of sites that pay (these lists being compiled by botsters and widely shared for mutual profit), and transfer money to the main account.

Human interaction is required to create an account, but only for one step, to read the funky text and enter it. A well designed system would simply show that graphic to the operator who would then type in the text. Note that this operator could be anyone, even someone in SL who gets paid a few $L for each successful entry.

I admit that it raises the bar a bit. Running a profitable bot operation would take more sophistication, effort, and coordination. So the question is: would spiraling the number of SL "residents" put even more load on the servers than the camp bots do now? Possibly.

you are all making great debate about the searching issues, and i have learned a lot.

and it seems to always come back to camping for obvious reasons. but you have overlooked the quite obvious: LL sustains camping because it keeps their 'new account sign ups' and 'login' statistics at a reasonable high, pleasing their investors.

i don't see camping going away, and altering the search to create a situation where traffic is no longer an issue is not likely.

LL makes money on premium accounts and tier.
vendors own land, paying tier.
to own land, you must be premium.

that is money coming in to the system. campers take money out of the system, at a slower rate, but at at the expense of the end user, not LL. why on earth would LL delete the one thing that forces its users to sustain this ongoing money flow?