Please help fight camping

The OP has not put forward any suggestions for how locations should be ranked in place of the traffic score. What order should the search appear in? A moments thought will tell you why simply putting things in alphabetical order is unsatisfactory.

Objecting to something while having no alternative suggestion is unhelpful at best

agree

traffic should become unique vists per day with atleast 5 minutes required to be on the land as it is now
or unique vists over 3 days / 3 to get an average
and integrate that along with the picks criteria of the new search

we`ll still have the bots but only for a couple of minutes as running them 24/7 will be useless
LL will never remove traffic but this is a nice alternative of who ever suggested it when i read it the first time

Campers who are not bots would still be on the grid anyway, taking up resources somewhere. As discussed previously then, it is the bots that are the problem, not the human campers.

There are millions of newspapers that are completely free. They only exist because of advertisement. The same is true for almost all TV and radio stations (besides the state run ones in some countries). Basically all the internet works like that. Noone pays for ICQ messages, yahoo webspace, MSN photo albums and ebay sales. SL is much more than that, it combines all of that together. You can make a decent living inside of SL without paying a cent. Just create some stuff and sell it, then camp here and there. Some people did that very well and became millionaires. The biggest milionaire of SL, who is used for advertisement for SL all the time, was an escort in the beginning, which is not much different from camping, you just dance naked. She probably never spent a dime on SL. So why is it bad to exactly what SL is being advertised for -make money for free?

What you saided

...................and you changed them too...............................



You changed your factors...............

Fact of the matter is spam those that are non paying accounts and let those that do pay alone.

By attracting people to the area, increasing traffic and improving the position in the search results. This increases the visibility of the area. In this traffic obsessed world, camping sells.



However they do do it, hence why there are so many camping locations. Genuine campers actually do it to use money inworld, bot campers however do it to increase their visibility and whilst traffic is such a big factor in how people view the world then this will continue.

I have a shopping mall, traffic isn't great but my sales there the last few days have been better than anywhere else I have a store. I also rent stores there, the first thing many prospective store owners are going to look at is ....traffic! So my low traffic isn't much of a selling point, despite the fact that the people who come there seem to buy. The percentage of people who come there and buy is quite good, but there's no statistic available to prove that.

I think you got me wrong.

Advertisers pay for ads, but the consumers get the newspaper, TV station or radio station for free. This is a valuable business model that also applies to many internet services like ebay. Since SL can be compared to Ebay (according to its creator- I can find the quote if you insist) being a non paying account is apparantly perfectly OK within the business model of SL. Otherwise they wouldn't offer it.

Yes, but as i remeber you pay for newspapers, TV Stations and radio stations ( tho there are payed TV and Radio as well )are free yes, but you can`t mix the issues together. So saying this now say We paying users are Newspapers and TV and Radio are Non paying accounts. I say spam them in search and leave the Paying users alone.

Uh, say *what*? Did you go to the linked jiras and read the whole point of this thread? There's plenty of reading there; my personal favorite (because I wrote it) is https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-633, but that was before LL made public that they were using the Google appliance for search, so it's a little more ambitious than the Google algorithms.

But you can forget all that, too, and just use the existing Google-based search as configured by LL, but with a zero weight assigned to traffic. It's fine to keep collecting the traffic data--I don't think the collection process itself is too much of a tax on the servers; once traffic is no longer used for any search weighting, it could actually be a useful metric for a location's owner and prospective renters.

Like all Jira threads, this one is TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read). Google also applies weight to the traffic count in it's searches though. This still doesn't answer the question; what factor would you use other than popularity to put the results of a given search in order by?

Good for you. I support anyone who's against spreading hate. I don't hate camping per se. I am against the policy that encourages business owners to waste sim resources with bot farm camping. (I don't "hate" the policy, I just want it changed.)

Camping shouldn't be illegal! We just need to get rid of the reason for the abuse of camping to deceptively inflate search rankings, with the side effect that it slows down the sims for actual PEOPLE who want to use the grid.

*Pangea, I agree that camp farms are simply a form of deception. As much as I'd like to blame the owners of camp farms, it's the *policy* that is the root of the problem. If you agree, please vote for the Jira entry!

*Qui and Monalisa, I agree, although I think that the search problems are less important than the side effects of camp farms. Get rid of ranking by traffic, and the camp farms will disappear. No matter what system is used for ranking, there will be ways to game it. Of course, I'm in favor of continuing to find better ways to rank search results!

*Alicia, exactly!

*Godwin, you raise a good point. There are a number of ways to rank, and we should be able to choose among them, but at this time, traffic should not be one of the choices because it's a completely meaninless statistic due to camping.

Use of traffic as a means for ranking (especially, as the *default* means!) causes the abuses of camping that ires us. What are the consequences of this policy?

1) encourages bot camping farms
2) causes use of global resources that slows down SL for all users
3) causes use of local resources that really impacts nearby residents
4) allows us to easily find bot farms by using search
5) allows us to see if a place is rarely visited

It does NOT allow us to see if a place is popular. Of the top ranking places, only a small fraction are ranked high due to popularity. The rest are due to camping. Due to camping it's a meaningless statistic so why keep it?

Alternatives include profile links as mentioned above, or by age, or randomly.

The problem is bot-farm camping. Bot-farm camping is a direct consequence of ranking by traffic. Ranking by traffic is useless thanks to bot-farm camping, so get rid of it, or at least make it not the default.

The thing to remember about measurements with rewards attached: you get what you measure. So, be sure to measure what you *want*. If you can't do that, then don't attach rewards (rankings) to measures.

Traffic attempts to measure popularity. It doesn't. I fear that any measure we may think of to attempt to measure popularity will simply measure some other activity that bots can do, and we'll simply encourage bots to do those things.

===

OK, Here's an idea: for traffic, only count premium members. Then LL is at least getting income for the bots. Frankly, I think that would kill bots because they wouldn't be cost-justifiable. I'm not a premium member, so my visits wouldn't be counted ... too bad for me.

Alphabetical would be fine.

The majority of people are familiar with Telephone books and how the AAAA stuff is gamed already.

It would be superior to traffic in that far more USERS are familiar with the gaming tactic before they come to SL.

It has the additional benefit of making it easy to find a place you already sort of know the name of :

For example if you know it starts with CON and says something like "trees"

you can easily scan through the CO's and find it.

Since the link to vote on this was posted yesturday the number of votes against the use
of traffic bots has doubled from 17 to 34 in the last ten hours. People did'nt know a link existed. There is another one--older one with 98 votes.

There are more than "A Few" that don't like the way traffic is abused.

Here is the link again:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-1052

I don't think many are against helping new people. If someone wants to use camping to do that that is fine---------but I think even the new people that use camping would be offened if the realized a lot of the time the camping chairs are really filled with the store owners own Alts and he is paying no one but himself.

And Traffic Bots where the store owner pays nothing are another thing entirely-------that is nothing but pure greed--and yes it does burn resources and hurts others in the same sim. Sometimes people can't even get on their own land if someone else has the sim crammed with alts.

Anyway--you can express your offical opinion. vote on it.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-1052

Though I don't like how camping is gamed for search, I won't vote for this JIRA entry.

Offer a solution other than just saying to fix the problem. I'm sure LL would love a system that can't be gamed, but they need to know what that is first. I've been trying to think of such a system, and have not come up with anything yet.

People use traffic as it is, as a guide to who IS gamming the system. 120k traffic is gamed. Period. So it does serve a purpose, if counter to what it was designed for.

Removing it from search without a viable alternative is simply adding chaos to the disorder.

~Jessy

Why not base shop popularity on the number of unique avatars that have an item in inventory with the shop owner as creator? All that data is in the asset server already.

Sorry, any bot could do that.

The sad truth is that you can't measure popularity in SL, not directly, and not by counting traffic.

If LL were to require all new avs to identify themselves (i.e., by credit card -- "payment info on file", then all alts of that identity could be counted as only one 'visitor', and that would help discourage bot camping. However, bot campers would just organize and camp for each other and get around it. Not to mention the debatable issues about identification which I REALLY don't want to go into here!

Counting premium members only would be a big step in the right direction. There's a JIRA entry for that, here and in my top post:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-792

Bot camping would be prohibitively expensive for most, and for the others, at least they'd be contributing money to support the infrastructure. Most large scale camp farms would disappear. Low-scale camping to encourage newbies to visit wouldn't be affected.

IMHO, the traffic stat currently provides too little valuable information, and getting rid of it would get rid of the problems caused by large scale camping. Search wouldn't be much worse than it already is, but camping would be gone.

And a viable alternative has been proposed: counting premium members only. That would get rid of most camp farms, while providing some statistical value (though not what we'd really like, which is the mythical 'ungamable popularity meter').

But it's perfectly reasonable of you to prefer (albeit distorted) traffic ranking to getting rid of the camping problem. It's a personal choice.

I'm just not understanding what's going on here. There are concrete, specific proposals for how to rank search results without traffic in the linked jiras. (Conan, if I could have reduced the length of the jira I submitted any further and have it still make sense to a developer, it would be shorter.)

To state my particular proposal as simply as possible, I want to remove any popularity metric from the default ranking of search results and replace it with the (formal) information value of the matching and unmatching content of the search text and the descriptions being searched.

The way to "game" that system is to write the most precise descriptions, using words that are only likely to occur when somebody is searching for the described content, specifically.

Some might protest that this would hide the popularity of their venue--and indeed, any little start-up that precisely describes its wares will get hits this way. But as it is, any little start-up can already out-traffic the most popular spots by just parking over their bonus 512 a few dozen libsecondlife trafficbots running on any piece-of-crap linux box--monitor not required. Indeed, the fewer actual visitors, the closer one can afford to crowd the sim limit with continuously present bots. Hence, currently, spots with "real" popularity can be *penalized* by the traffic metric.

But all that said, I'm not here arguing in favor of my specific jira proposal. I'm arguing that popularity has outlived its usefulness for search, and that some more sophisticated measure of content match is the only measure necessary. Now that Google has been selected, let them figure it out.

(Oh, speaking of Google... I can't find a straight answer from those guys about what they're actually doing to combat click fraud, which is kind of analogous to traffic-gaming. They say vaguely reassuring words about how they have the problem "managed" but seem pretty cagey about it, even by Goog standards.)

Turn the search into something for shoppers--not places.

Get rid of places "traffic" and have the new Search emphsize the products--The descriptions fields are already there. If product or service images can be used too that is even better. If there has to be a picture of the thing for sale it would be harder to fake it.

People could make a decision BEFORE they go to the shop. That is why SLX works and is
growing. One of the moderators there said they have 5000 new users since SL came out
with the new search. (It is in one of their forums)

SL' search is upside down. It puts control in the hands of the businesses (incresingily the number of alts generated) not the shoppers.

Any kind of ranking system can be gamed------don't do it at all. let a keyword search find the things that match the query and then let the user browse and take a look. Yeah--he would have to look at more than the top few listings to get a good deal, but so what? The yellow pages has been around for a hundred years and there is a good reason. People still use it.

Have we already discussed whether only counting avatars with payment info on file wouldn't make any of these solutions work as intended?

But search is not just for shopping. Service-oriented places and straight offices would be at a disadvantage. NCI comes to mind - look at the problems Carl had at first getting found.

Also, if you are a custom builder but do not sell prefabs, you're going to be screwed if someone doesn't specifically search for "custom build" or "custom builder" but uses "houses" instead.

You're correct that good listings can be hard to write, and that it shouldn't be just about products. But traffic doesn't address any of the issues you raised, so you're not arguing against getting rid of traffic for ranking searches.

That is a good point but I think a custom builder could put an image of some of his work, and key words such as builder-----houses, offices, lots of things would get him found. Especially about things he has done in the past. There are lots of key words that would get people there.

I sell landcaping packages that way on SLX--I show examples of what I have done and people hire me to it for their places. I am not even advertizing the service! I advertized what products of mine I used to do it as a package. It works too.

Scripters and animators get found here--I know cause I've used them. It really was not hard to find them when I set out to do it.

For services--same thing. For educational services for example, A picture of the classroom full of students. For clubs--and image of people dancing on the floor.

It would take imagination to present the product well--but that is what advertizing is really about is'nt it?

Not being critical--just responding.

I am not arguing against removal of traffic. I was addressing the specific nuance of over-emphasizing objects on the land for search, as it harms places that are not shopping-oriented.