Camp chairs, dance pads, etc. question about returning

I assume with dance pads, camp chairs, etc. that they are designed for people to use while they are away from their PC in RL.

I have done this a few times to come back an hour or two later to find that I have crashed or will still look like I am in SL, but when I click "stand" nothing happens. Assuming most likely I crashed, I have to log off.

Is there a setting I should check?

Probably just glitches. the only thing I can think of is if you had an inventory operation still executing - they can take a time to sort out even if things look ok. If you took an item of clothing off and sat down, the item clearing in inventory when it does, automatically makes you stand up.
Sit down, wait a minute before leaving just to make sure. Not guaranteed but it has helped.

I understand what you mean about the inventory and clothing.

The situation I am running into is if I sit and camp without doing anything with inventory, etc. And come back a couple hours. I usually find when I click to "stand" I wont't get up. Only to find out I crashed at somepoint beforehand.

Part of it I think is on my end with my Internet providor. I find that I get that packet loss bar (upper right corner - left bar) showing red every few seconds. Whether 2% packet loss or 20% packet loss. I think it's just one of those, however I can play for hours doing stuff without crashing......

Is there a idle setting that might be crashing me?

Also, sometimes the region you are in gets restarted (and no, you don't always get that nice blue screen warning). Unfortunately, the client doesn't always get the message due to various issues, like lag. If you TP back, chances are some of the older chairs will still have the timer running on them. Just sit down at the one with your name. This only happens if you are very, very lucky, though.

Usually, you just crash due to lag and connection loss (especially bad over wireless)

There's also a setting that autologouts you if you are afk for a certain period of time, but that should not look like a crash.

And I am sorry, but I cannot help adding: before you do more camping, please consider the following:
1) currently, the servers are strained for capacity; while you idle afk you are taking server capacity from people who actually would like to do stuff in the world, and it can be argued this is not fair, and
2) most camping chairs/dance-pads pay so poorly you will make about as much by say just turning your computer off and saving electricity, or having one instead of two cups of coffee at the Starbucks next time, and using the saved rl money to buy lindens.

Make sure to leave your mini-map on. If the mini-map is bleached red, it means that the region crashed, and usually you'll have to restart Second Life to continue. Normally, if this happens, the entire screen also goes into greyscale and a warning message appears but this hasn't always happened recently when a region goes down.

You may also simply be experiencing idle timeout. You can get objects that prevent this, though. Some clubs allow you to camp while away from your computer, but some others require you to show that you are active from time to time - the idea with those is to get paid while hanging out and socialising.

Janka's absolutely right, camping is one colossal waste of time and resources. Although I did it to begin with to just get those first few lindens it just isn't worth it now.
However, your reported problem does sound like a data flow fallout. I've come across the time away logout but clearly not this when you are locking up.
I used to be able to camp for a couple of hours without a prob but these days the system is just too flaky. I'm meeting increasingly frequent sim restarts

I have noticed some camp chairs will animate you gently shifting around in your chair. Is this to counteract the idle timeout I wonder? Other places like dancing for money mebbe too.
Still .. it's peanuts.

No argument at all. Community standards, 6: Disturbing the Peace

"Every Resident has a right to live their Second Life. Disrupting scheduled events, repeated transmission of undesired advertising content, the use of repetitive sounds, following or self-spawning items, or other objects that intentionally slow server performance or inhibit another Resident's ability to enjoy Second Life are examples of Disturbing the Peace. "

Sounds like camping chairs to me.

Broccoli

I don't think camping chairs are "intentionally" slowing the performance. Any script you run, and any avatar anywhere, takes its share of resources and slows the performance, but this is not their purpose. The intentions of camping chairs is to generate traffic (from the owner's point of view) or lindens (from the user's point of view); they are not griefing items in the sense that they intentionally cause harm.

So, yes, there is argument. I still hold that eating resources while you are afk is not fair in the case where resources are not abundant; I do not hold that camping chairs usually are intentional griefing or "disturbing peace" in the TOS sense. They could be used for that purpose, and tens of chairs in one sim could be seen as being so excessive that they count, but camping chairs in general are not intended to cause harm. People are just a bit clueless about the fact that they do.

Is there any reason camping chairs exist other than so crappy shops and malls could artificially boost their traffic ratings so they looked more popular than they are?

(its Christmas, I work in a shop, customers are grouchy, I am all cynical today, sorry guys)

I know several shops that use camping systems to "pay" their "models"

I know several shops that use camping systems to "pay" their store staff.

I know at least one club that used camping systems to "pay" their dancers.

And yes, I know lots and lots of places (stores, not malls) that use camping systems to simply increase their traffic scores, raise their "place" ad higher in the search rankings.

And a few malls that do it to artificially increase traffic to make their rental spaces look more attractive to new retailers.

The real problem is.. there's nothing NEW to be said on this issue, for or against. We've talked this to death. The campers and the anti-campers are never going to see eye-to-eye. It's all been said, done, and argued to death.

To the OP (original poster): I think you're simply getting disconnected due to being away from the keyboard for too long. You're SUPPOSED to get a message saying that you were disconnected for inactivity, but I've recently heard there may a bug that suppresses that message if you're in the middle of an animation.

There are ways to keep from appearing idle to the Second Life client, but I've never used any of them.

P.S. Although I really dislike when places put camping chairs down to drive traffic (the places that do this are rarely worth visiting otherwise), I don't believe they put any more strain on the system than sex toys consuming 2ms of script time sitting idle or avatars so covered with bling you have to squint through your fingers just to find your way to the exit. Popular places experience more lag whether it's due to camping zombies or active customers/guests. There are LOTS of things that SL's builders, users, and developers could do to alleviate SL's problems, but the elimination of camping would be a minor one on the whole.

In those three examples, the people getting paid are associated with the establishment, and they're required to be at the keyboard and interact with guests or customers.
Camping by nature allows everyone to camp, and has "'earn' while you sleep" as its motto.

If camping actually encouraged social interaction or served a useful purpose (like your examples), almost noone would have any real problem with it.

You're missing the point. It's not that camp chairs are in and of themselves lag creators, it's that they attract avs to fill up sims without providing any benefit to the sim. The mere presense of lots of people causes lag; ordinarily that lag is not a troubling issue since the system's resources are being used by active visitors, but when inactive people are sitting around then that's just wasting resources.

So your examples aren't an either/or thing. It isn't bling or camp chairs, the things like bling that avs wear is the exact reason that camp chairs cause problems.

Wrong. SL as a whole is not designed to be used AFK, aside from the usual 2-10 minute breaks, to answer the manifold calls of mother nature. That's why the client logs you out when you stay away for too long.

Actually, you seemed to miss when I said: "Popular places experience more lag whether it's due to camping zombies or active customers/guests."

I don't deny that camping areas can be a nuisance, but seriously, go to a camping hangout and take a good look at the people there. The great majority of them are default avatars with no attachments.

Next go to one of the popular sex clubs. Girls with 200-prim hairstyles and scripted nipples, lips, buttocks, and clitorides. Men with blingy necklaces and chat-spamming penes. 1024x1024 copyright-infringing erotica textures.

Then hop over to a dance hall and you've got all of the above in addition to additional blinged-out prim accessories, to say nothing of the swirling floodlight prims, dance scripts, animations, and sound files firing right and left (vVvVvHowlzvVvVv anyone?)- and I think you'll find that most camping dens are downright conservative in comparison.

That's all I was saying.

Ah, I was confused because you just said "experience more lag" not "waste resources," and just "active guests" not "overscripted guests." It's not a problematic point that additional active guests take up more resources, but it is an issue when guests take up more resources than they need to.

Maybe what you say is true, I wouldn't know; I don't go to sex clubs but have seen plenty of lagged out camp spots.

Does that mean we're not gunna make out?

This issue can't be discussed enough IMHO. I had to move due to lag and "Region Full" messages because a casino moved in and shoe-horned in a bunch of camping chairs in a small area. Well, I am now settled in my new shop (about a week now) and guess who my new neighbor is? A new casino that is bigger and produces even more lag and Region FUll messages than the last! How is it that less than 10% of landowners can hog over 90% of server resources? Where is the equity? Iknow I speak for the 90% of landowners that are impacted by this. I can't fly into my heliport because of the full server messages, only TP. My customers cannot get to my shop either. Casino owners do not care in the least about their neighbors as they blame LL for enabling them to be resource-hogs. Casinos are not the only ones: Clubs, Escort services, any establishment with tons of camp chairs. Why can't they just buy an island? You will find that there are casino owners that do not live in the region their casino occupies, but on an island that is lag free. SL is quickly becomming camp-chair hell.

Well, there's always new people coming in, who have not heard it, so sometimes things bear repeating. We don't stop holding basic building classes just because "it's been done to death" either, do we?

Anyway, the point is not whether the AVs in camping chairs cause less or more lag than some other AVs, the point is that people who are AFK are taking resources from people who are actively "playing". I feel that if you are not active in the world and don't intend to be in the next 10 minutes, you should log off so resources are free to those actively exploring / building / whatever. Whether or not you are in a camping chair should not affect this principle.

Come on over to see my new neighbor's casino. He/she has a ton of camping chairs that result in 0 traffic for my store because my customers cannot get to it. I can't even fly into my property! And I sure will take you to task and prove to you that the AV's in the casino or the scripts run by the casino have contibuted so much to lag in the region that I can barely move in my own home! Those poor innocent camping chairs and dance-pads are being abused by big-box casinos and clubs!

It's a shame you're experiencing that, and I really wish the Lab would do something to help legitimate residents such as yourself access your homes and businesses that you're paying to maintain. My whole point- my ONLY point- was that in terms of resources used, camping areas generally amount to less of a strain than other crowded places. That 40-avatar-per-mainland-sim limit's gunna be there regardless of whether the people there are sitting in a camp chair or actively dancing/mating.

The real problem there, of course, is that SL can't gracefully handle that many users in a region despite the fact that games like World of Warcraft can run much smoother hosting many more players in much bigger regions than any SL sim. (And the argument that SL consists of player-made content does NOT adequately explain the difference. After all, SL textures and meshes are downloaded/cached to your hard drive before you can see them.)

Don't get angry at the campers. Get angry at the club owners who put so many camping devices that their visitors fill your sim. Get mad at the Lab for providing a traffic system that STILL rewards establishments for filling their areas with zombies. And get frustrated that the Lab is still letting literally thousands of new users sign up despite the fact that a given sim can't handle more avatars at a time now any better than it could when our total population was in the low six digits.

I absolutely agree. I am not upset with campers at all. It is not their fault, it is the greedy casino owners that could care less about their neighbors and especially LL for not doing a damn thing about it. Their system of reward for dwell traffic is lunacy.