Help end the camping

If the traffic was calculated from picks, we'd have people paid to put places in their picks and people creating a group of alts to sell off pick traffic on those alts (want to buy 5,000 traffic anyone?). Unlike the current system, you could actually guarantee the numbers with enough certainty to sell it.

How about building the traffic simply from the amount of unique visitors? Discard all the dwell info completely, discard counts from repeat visitors (such as campers) and discard all info relating to alts.

Love it!

I believe the number of unique visitors is the answer. That is currently a small part of the traffic equation now if i'm not mistaken.

No camping chairs on Sala, I won't have them even if the competition does. Due to this I accept the fact that my traffic is never going to be steady and I'm never going to make popular places. I'm ok with that.

When we hold a big event, the traffic jumps to 10k for a day, though since an event is usually connected to one of the large stores which have the land divided from that of the mall, the event tends to help the mall just due to people looking around during the actual event, so that traffic number .... what the hell does it even mean anyway?

On the weekends the traffic is a nice number between 5 and 6K and on the weekdays it fluctuates anywhere from 1K to 5K. This is called real traffic, actual shoppers. Its the way traffic numbers for a mall are supposed to look in my opinion.

Anything that has a steady spot on that popular places list or a steady number keeping it at the top of find places, you can guarantee is nothing but zombies and lag and is the worst possible place to rent store space.

When this is done, venues will buy/rent spots on people's picks

I think you quoted the wrong person, I'm against pick based traffic

Unique visitor counts would still be open to abuse as you could still pay people to visit, but doing away with counting alts would ensure they are real people, and those with money would no longer be able to beat smaller places that are of genuine interest to a lot of people (think small, well planned shops were you don't have to spend an hour looking for what you want). At best they could throw money at the problem and draw even in traffic ratings.

Yikes I meant the one above you LOL

Ill fix it =) thanks for pointing it out.

I agree -

I think All popularity contest based numbers are useless.

The truley good, popular places will be BETTER if Traffic is gone, becuase word of mouth popularity is superior to gameable systems.

You'd get "paid to show up" schemes, and nothing would change.

Basing it on payment status and account age should eliminate most gaming I think. Any place with worthwhile content or fun events that can entice older residents and those who won't sell their soul for L$1 is going to be worth visiting by everyone.

Maybe newbies won't be able to save up a few measly L$ anymore, but the overall experience would improve as the approach shifts from quanity over to quality, making SL a far better place.

Same here. I avoid them like the freaking plague. "Traffic" is never a factor to me when shopping, because I know it's mostly generated from camping chairs and probably has no bearing on the actual quality of the business. I've found some of the coolest things at places with hardly any "Traffic" and usually end up leaving places with high traffic before I've totally looked around because of the lag caused by zombies.

Where do they sell those? I want a dozen

Ever since I got to SL I have never understood the point in having camping in the first place really. I mean it causes hella lag, it costs the person who puts the camping equipment there money... I don't get it. I mean ok so they do it to drive traffic... There are so many other ways to get traffic I just don't see the point to it. Anytime I go someplace and I see anything to do with camping I leave ASAP cause I know its going to lag the hell out of me and we all know what comes next.... CRASH!

Every time I suggest counting picks as an alternative to traffic counts, somebody changes the subject by saying well, they'll just buy show-ups and picks in profiles. Maybe, but HEY! THAT"S NOT THE POINT! The point is to knock off camping that causes lag and overcrowds sims, remember? If the numbers builders are spending their Lindens on pick votes, they are not spending them on campers, and the heavy infestations of campers go away.

Hypothetically buying people's votes might game the "Popular Places," but haven't you noticed the "Popular Places" is gamed anyway? So you want an actual type of gaming the system that produces pathological camping in favor of a possible type of gaming the system that would not produce camping pathology?

You have a point it would alleviate how many people stay logged on at once. Camping zombies would be replaved by phantom avs who dont log on cept to prove they have the picks in their profile.

No, Colette - they don't have to be online to confirm whether or not they have a store in their picks. People search takes care of that, or keep calling cards.

If traffic gets replaced, it might as well get replaced with a system that's the least susceptible to gaming.

I saw them on the SLEX

Have a nice day

This is also true

I would love to see Traffic gone , yesterday.

However, I think Linden Labs uses the inflated numbers Traffic gives them as part of their sales pitch.

SO ..

I think traffic and campers are here to stay.

Any system they implement is going to be gamed. So if the picks-based system will reduce the amount of lag on the system, so be it.

With picks based traffic, it would require getting a count from the database of how many people have that parcel as a pick for every parcel on the grid.
There's also the problem of what to do if someone has had a place as a pick between the last update and the current one, but removed it. If you count them towards traffic, you have to store lots of data anyway and you may as well record visitors.

If you take just the number of meters sold in march (not final yet), that's 79,438,992 sqm, or the equivalent of 155,154 * 512sqm plots. There have been 551,548 residents logged in in the past 14 days. Even with this tiny subset of data, that's a minimum of 85,574,878,392 (or 85.5 billion) record searches.

With visitor count, it requires updating a simple counter everytime a unique visitor TPs or flies in. It wouldn't even have to touch a database if done right. If the counter is reset every hour or two, even a serialized array of avatar keys would be usable to check for a unique visit.
There may also be logs stored outside the database containing lists of who has TPd where (presumably AV keys are handed off between servers on a sim crossing), thus allowing processing of traffic on a different set of machines off the main grid.

For less lag, I would say visitor counts.

Another advantage to visitor counts is that it's harder to game if you reset the counter on a regular basis (which keeps the list of visitors low and reduces lag). If you pay someone to place a pick, that pick stays and they don't need to do anything. Pay someone to visit to increase your traffic, and unless they are visiting every time the counter is reset, that traffic count will drop.

Google could be thought of as a pick based system, giving higher rankings based on how many other sites link to yours. Google requires massive amounts of hardware to do that and they are now having to introduce ever more complex formulas to reduce gaming (set up many pages all referencing your main site).

If it's worth changing the system, then it's worth spending time looking at the best way to do it and doing it right.

Feel free to poke holes in my suggestion above, because I really can't think of many when you scrap traffic contributions from the new and the unverified.

Swarms of trafficbots will tp from place to place. People would pay money to the bot owner to have their place added to the parcels the bots will visit.

I notice that a lot of people posting here are fairly new and so i doubt many of you remember when it was Dwell and not traffic, and LL paid land owners based on their traffic. The thing that did work was events. They brought people and raised traffic and the people with the highest traffic got paid. That was changed because LL decided it was not in the spirite of what it was designed to do. (At least thats what they claimed).
Now it is all a money game. new people dont know about camping they search for clothing and then they go to the first thing on the list. Unfortunatly this is the highest traffic number. If they did it alphabeticaly you would find people with places named AAA clothing and AAAAA Mall. I think the best solution would be to do the same thing they did in the classified and go with the highest amount paid gets listed first. This could work.
What is important here is to try to get the people who are being made fools out of to stop the madness. The designers and mall renters that pay good money for a stall to show their wares are being made out to be idiots. They pay someone because they think they will get sales from a bunch of zombies. All you designers out there...especially the big ones. PLEASE help this stop. if you see a camp chair DONT RENT. If you are new to SL ask people where the good clothing and items are at and go to the home stores ...dont rely on the search to find it cause you wont you will only find lag bots. I think the "traffic" numbers would work best based on a simple number of how many paying accouts have visited that property in the last week. Its simple and would not get gamed

I do remember the fight to get dwell bonus and am glad it is gone. It was welfare for people who really couldn't afford their land. Not to mention sparked the widespread use of camping chairs and dance pads.

The simplest method to eliminate this - Is just to remove Traffic numbers entirely.

SL doesnt need to be a popularity contest.

Indeed. Though despite campers skewing the numbers, Traffic ratings aren't without merit. When you search for a club, and you want to be sure that it's well established and popular, you look at the results at the top of the list with Traffic numbers in the thousands. They probably have camping chairs, but they undoubtedly also have a relatively high number of genuine participants. If this rating was abolished and results were ordered alphabetically (or by some other value), it would be more difficult to quickly locate popular places.

Mind you, this is coming from a complete newbie. There's probably a better place to ask, but what exactly is the huge problem with campers? Don't get me wrong, I certainly don't promote the activity. The point of Second Life isn't to leave your avatar dozing on a chair while you wander away from the computer and do something else. But are they really such a big deal? I just ignore the people sitting on chairs or dancing on pads with a caption below them explaining how much money they've made. Are they really lagging up the server that much? It's not as though their client is having to send any data, seeing as the user isn't providing any input.

I want to hate them, because I'm typically opposed to seedy business practices and people who don't play properly, but I just can't see the harm in five or six people lying on pay-by-the-hour lawn chairs inside a mall. The money they earn is hardly throwing the economy into turmoil. I mean, L$3 every 20 minutes? You'd have to sit there with your computer running for over 30 hours to earn a single US dollar.

Am I missing something?