Dwell and Listings STILL>>BROKEN

Our dwell at Village of Cotessa in Ukanipo, on our property information window, seems to now be working proper........ However.... on the "listings" in find places, category Stores..... still is not showing proper.... or should I say..not showing at all on the listings of Stores!!!
I have sent numerous bug reports in... and received an auto reply, to consider it "solved", and I would not receive another message concerning this issue. It is NOT solved! We have had this issue since the orginal 1.6 update... and yes.......still paying weekly fee for this benifit.
I know, we are not the only parcel feeling this issue, and would like to stress....... we are a retailer haven..... and this effects all the residents at Village of Cotessa...... along with any other property owners that pay for their listings!

Thank you,
Residents of Village of Cotessa

Any search entry that includes over 100 results will return 100 results. The 100 you see are selected by a metric that's effectively random. The same 100 will come up for you and everyone else, but they're more or less chosen at random.

We know people often want to see the top-traffic results. We've tested doing that, and the result caused a bad performance hit in the database. We can look into it in the future, but the way things are right now, we can't return results by traffic.

In case you haven't seen, there are (Next-> and (<-Previous) buttons in the Find dialog that can be used to pull up the other results. Of course, you can always enter more specific search terms (or any search term at all, if you're leaving it blank...)

More info on this one:

Prior to 1.6, entering NO search term returned every result (often thousands of results) at once. As a result, you could sort the thousands of results by traffic. Unfortunately, that's a really big query to be returning every time someone asks. So, it was changed to return subsets of 100 results at one time.

Note that this change only affected BLANK searches.

Lee,

If it is randomly selected, then does the 1st hundred on the list with a blank search change periodically? Or does it just select the same ones for the *front page* all the time? Thanks! Mash

Every time I've checked since I've noticed the change, my shop has failed to appear on the first page regardless of traffic, so I believe it doesn't change. If I had to guess, I'd say it's "sorted" based on which order these parcels were entered in some database, probably favoring older entries, but I could be completely wrong. Only LL knows for sure.

With all respect, there has to be a better way to do this. My shop had 2175 traffic one day that I recall, and was unlisted (on the first page, yes, but I don't think many people are aware of the Next button) in favor of other stores with much lower traffic, including many with 0 traffic. I can imagine this frustrates many landowners no end.

I doubt I'm suggesting anything you didn't try, but just in case... How was this tested? I can well imagine it's impractical to sort every blank search... but what if the "blank search" results were generated daily, along with the traffic update, and sorted? Then such a search would simply return that stored list.

Unfortunately, unless I'm misunderstanding, this is not the case. Searching for the first letter of my shop's name returns >100 results and also fails to list it in the proper place. Searching for the first two letters, though, will narrow results to 40 and it is then displayed. I submitted this in a bug report a while back too, assuming it was unintentional. If you want more info, just ask.

In the meantime, perhaps places which do not appear on the current first page, when they WOULD appear on a sorted first page, could pay a reduced rate for being listed in Find Places. I'm not trying to sound like a jerk, but we have no control over which page we're listed on, and we're paying the same rate for a less effective listing. Some gesture to acknowledge this would be appreciated until we can arrive at some compromise satisfactory to landowners and less of a strain on the database.

Sorry... when I said "only blank entries were changed", I meant "previously, searching for a blank entry was the only way to pull more than 100 results and sort them by traffic." We now return only the first 100 results for all searches, whereas before blank searches returned everything (with the accompanying performance hit).

Trust me, we know this is important, but right now, we need to display the list of results in the order the server retrieves them, until we find a more efficient way to try and do a sort on that much information every time someone asks.