08-10-2008 12:01
The current visitor count is misleading and causing all these long-standing problems with fake counts by bots and campers who tries to fool the search engine to place them on top.

As long as Linden uses visitor count for their search engine placement algorithm, the camping problem will always be there, be it bots or real people campers.

It is not helping people to find the real place. We need some more honest statistic.

There are better statistics than the avatar-time-spend-in-sim-yesterday. It is neither an average over time nor a unique visitor count.

Suggestions:
(1) Get rid of that useless misleading avatar-time-spend-in-land-yesterday as visitor-count in the search engine algorithm.
(2) Stop displaying that useless misleading visitor count-timer in search results.
(3) Use a more meaningful statistic, such as:
(a) average "unique" visitor count per day
(b) average time spend on land per unique visitor per day
(c) use a moving-average over a time-window such as a month would differentiate those places that are growing from those places that are dying
(4) Use an average measure over time as statistic, which would take care of any statistical fluctuation or someone trying to fool the system.

If Linden fixes this, users will be able to find the real honest places than got fooled into going to those cheaters places.

All those bots and campers would simply be wasting the landowner's time, money and resources for nothing, and gain nothing from it, and they will disappear eventually.