Anatomy of a Fail

So, I'm working on a refresh and expansion of The Botanical Gardens, on the hunt for some new plants by talent that I don't already have represented at the gardens.

Find a promising sim, traffic is a bit high, but possible if the content is compelling enough.

TP on over. Really nice stuff.

Contemplate IM'ing the creator/owner to offer to showcase at The Botanical Gardens.

Decide to look around a bit more..hmmm...map says there are 28 people on this sim. Not a one in sight.

Fly up. up. up. up.

Sure enough, at 4000 m, there are the 27 other green dots on a platform, only half rezzed in. All bots.

So, Mr. Talented Plant Creator. Nice sim. Nice work. I'd have loved to have your stuff out where hundreds of people were going to pass it by it every day.

Too bad you are a traffic gaming asshole.

I'll be offering that opportunity to someone else.

I hate it when folks do that to game the system

I find, rightly or not, that I've tended to not buy from folks who have bot boxes/platforms. I don't want to feel like I'm encouraging that.

I know this little plant stand in Livingtree, has some nice plants and herbs. Another person on that island has recently done some great season change trees, too... jes sayin...

Dear Ms. Talented Content Creator:

I was all ready to hit the IM button for your stuff as well, then I took a little trip into the sky. Nice job keeping your traffic below the radar and in the believable range. I almost bought it. Your 6 sims are really very interesting, although they take forever to load.

You don't think it's a little hypocritical that you belong to the "Merchant Theft Protection Group" when you are engaging in traffic fraud??

Yours truly,

The Botanical Gardens

Thanks Mari, I'll pop by there.

That little plant stand in Livingtree has some of the best flowers and herbs I've seen anywhere! I use them alot in my little territory!

Halftime show:

Stores Visited: 4
Stores with fraudulent traffic: 3

Traffic numbers:
23000
9900
5700
1400 (the store with no bots)


Anyone who was doubting Anya's bot numbers is sadly mistaken.

/me hopes yer not talking about Vlad Bjornson as I kinda like his stuff.. Nice guy, too. http://www.shiny-life.com/floraprims/



Yep. Me too.

Check out Marcel Flatley's store. Nice scupties. I think it is Samprien (sp?) Designs. But it is in his profile.

I'll check both of those out. Before I get too many tips, I'm not interested in 1 prim sculpty trees or plants. Too many sculpts will kill load time and I want to use those for things that actually need the organic shapes made possible by sculpties.

I'm also partial to things that were not too directly photosourced.

To be honest, most shops around LL, excluding campers, bots, models and other gimmicks will normally be less than 5000.....in fact i would say the average is probably in the range of 500 to 2500.....somewhere there depending on size of shop and land.

I have 28k sqm Mall on Mainland, 120 vendors always full....our traffic is somewhere between 2-3k each day. Never used artificial traffic and it has survived 3.5 years.
How many Malls in SL have lasted 3.5 yrs?.....probably only a handful and i bet they don't use artifical traffic either.

Jack needs to start doing his job .....you know the one he is paid to do.....he needs to do a gridwide cleansweep. To begin with take down all the ones using 10+ bots.....the little fish will follow suit. Thereafter implement the traffic coding and the registration of "Good bots"

Isablan, you just proved the affectiveness of traffic bots. You found a high quality product that you really liked because they were using traffic bots. If they hadn't been using them, you may not have found it at all. The presence of the bots did nothing to reduce the quality of the product. It was your choice to get upset at the affectiveness of the shop owners ability to be found.

I don't use them myself, but I still don't understand the way people get upset for finding what they were looking for.

Isablan, I don't know if you have been there, but the flowers section of "Life is Good" has some nice things that I don't see used too often. Their smaller plants (clover, Clematis, etc) are very nice. I don't work for them or anything, just stumbled on them by inspecting prims.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Life%20is%20good/84/88/26

Sadly, Agricona Garden and Keep it Green aren't around anymore. (Keep it Green's inventory can be found at the Gnubie store though.) They made really unique things.

That's the otherside of the argument and also valid.

My guess is that even some quality creators got involved in a arms race to be seen or remain on the radar....otherwise their biz would sink. I think deep down they would have preferred doing business without having to log in Bots.

I never visit places with 5-digit traffic unless I've completely failed to find what I'm looking for elsewhere.

Exactly. I completely understand not liking bots. I don't like them either. But when I hear people getting ticked off because they found what they were looking for, the logic part of my brain snaps and I think it may be time to start drinking.

Actually, I didn't find what I was looking for. I was looking for talented creators who deserved a spot on a popular sim that showcases the plant life of SL. I can landscape a sim and garner 12k traffic without resorting to fraud. A talented creator *should* be able to do half the traffic I do without having to fake the numbers. It comes down to ethics. There's a difference between effective marketing & product placement and cheating. Somebody talented should be able to achieve 6k traffic without use of traffic enhancing fraud. When you engage in traffic fraud you are saying point blank that your stuff isn't good enough for people to want to hang around. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for a landscape supply vendor, is it?

What a traffic bot says is "I'm not good enough to achieve this on my own, so I have to cheat."

I'm with you Argos....i'm always interested in finding the product first anf foremost. It really don't worry me about their gimmicks or sideshows, thats down to the shop owner. Life's too short for me to start questioning every shopkeeper's ethics or morals.
Maybe in RL you can pay more attention to that.....but for a pixelated Game on the Internetz.....nah!!

I know my RL friends would tell me to seek psychoriatic help...if i told them i was upset that some shop was using 20 bots to game traffic in order to appear higher in Places Search....and therefore didn't want to buy their pixel image guitar!

Think people need to put things into perspective!

Having said all that...i don't like Bots. Its up to Jack and the G-team to enforce their policy ....hopefully it wasn't just hot air. If they can't clear the grid of bots....i'll just have to carry on and ignore them.

Yay!



Thanks! Glad you like 'em!

I feel worse about seeing bots when its a mall and store owners are paying for them perhaps not realising.

I used to work at a mall in SL which is now mostly filled with alts of the same person, he's dressed them up a bit, positions them around but the place is essentially dead, the avis stay on 24/7 to boost the traffic...real weird.

It aint that hard to run a few events, promote stores, buy advertising, i really dont know why some many opt for the idle alt/bot thing....

Not so sure the G-Team are enforcing the bot thing i mean surely they'd know some sims wont have 80+ avis online all day and night, even their own big linden events don't get that kind of traffic...

While I don't want to 'call out' anyone too harshly, and don't believe bot runners are evil, really, I too have always relied on real traffic.

Regardless of the choices others make, that's what's felt right for me.

And it can be done.

I'd say what my traffic numbers are, but I haven't looked at such things since 2005. That's like looking at a thermometer to figure out if you are hot or cold.

How do you pick a bot?

I've seen that argument used by bot-runners.
It's totally self-serving.

The exact same logic can be used to justify email spamming.
'If someone has a high-quality product, then it's OK to send out spam to a targeted list, or spam comments on websites, because the targets may not find it otherwise.'
It's clear in this thread and others that people regard search-gamers with the same sort of distaste that they regard spammers.

What you see in this thread is the equivalent of the RL Boulder Pledge - never buy from a business that is spamvertised.

Thanks Tania! The actual name is Paradise Found, Sampireun Design is the name of the furniture store I have on the same sim

@Isablan: Whether you use sculpted plants or not is of course entirely up to you, but I think you are mistaken about the load time. To prove that, simply take a look at my store. 3/4 sim filled with sculpted 1 prim plants, flowers and trees. They all do use the same sculptmap so the loading time is not so high at all. What worried me more is the amount of polygons used, but I found that visiting the sim does not give a bit of lag, and I am on a very low end client.

Of course it is entirely your choice what you want displayed or not, but having the right information could help you in your decisions. The many customers why wander around the sim can all vouch for a pretty lag-free experience, even with 1200 sculpted plants out there