Beware Business Owners

I really don't know what forums to post this in. So, I am just guessing. This is a vent. Please feel free to post here your similar vents.

I have camping chairs and rugs at my stores. The reason for my putting them there is to bring my traffic up, so my store will be listed in search on the first 100 listings. It's working. But, I have recently taken a close look at my campers and discovered they are all the same person, and it's not such a coincidence, that they all have lower cased names(weird ones to boot), they all were born on the same day, and they all have no payment information file, and they belong to the same group and look like they stepped off of newbie island.

This makes me sick, that one person can come onto this game as seven (7) different av's, go to someone's business where they spent countless hours creating beautiful builds, and then take the hard earned money away from the proprietor. I am so mad. No Payment Info = No SL. That is how it should be. Makes me wonder what else is going on.

To end this facade, I ejected and banned them. 2 different groups of av's on 2 different days, all being the same person.

Please BEWARE of these types of people. The do indeed bring your traffic up, but it's not fair to the other residents who do not cheat like this.

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Nope, fraid not.

There is at least one person that appears to be using bots to camp on his/her own property to avoid paying anyone else to get the traffic up.

So there's all sorts out there abusing the system.

I don't personally feel that camping has any place in the system. It gets the businesses the placement they desire, but its all fake to me. There is no way to tell if anyone has 'real' traffic at all the way it stands now. I refuse to use camping in my mall or to allow it on my commercial estate sims.

You can count me in the category of 'eagerly awaiting the redo of the traffic system' or even the elimination of it entirely and let search places results be randomized.

Char

1) it's still 7 avs and since the whole point was to bring up traffic they are doing the work of 7 people. I don't see the problem since you're getting your intended result: gaming the traffic system

2) you CHOSE to give your "hard earned money away" by putting up camping chairs.

You should try putting your hard earned money to advertising and marketing instead of paying people to do nothing at your store to cheat the system.

You have no reason to complain since YOU provided this opportunity to people.

I'm not quite sure if it's a TOS violation or not, so you might want to be careful with this, but... why not run multiple instances of a thin SL client yourself, for free?

At some point I'm sure it's an ethics issue (say 30 avatars on a mainland sim would be waaaaay over the top), but a basic avatar or two may not be the end of the world for any given sim?

Tragedy of the commons, though... if *everyone* did this, the grid would be close to useless, so... tread lightly, even if this is allowed...

What do you care, as long as your traffic numbers go up?

It already IS an ethics issue. She's gaming the system to make her store look more popular than it really is. Ethical, business-minded people actually WORK to make their stores successful. Sure a lot of people do it but that doesn't make it right.

I hate to say it, but these two points are what I was going to write...Amen.


OH, and one thing...are you saying that no account information…means no SL? Does that mean basic accounts shouldn't be allowed? I hope that's not what you're saying, because you should take a few minutes to research my design firm, the projects I freelance, and the collaborations I take part in. I'm a HUGE asset to SL, and I have a basic account. Take a look the studio I rent sometime.

Yeah, I too am trying to see what the point of this thread is?

That's one of the risks of running camping chairs. At the end of the day you've got the traffic you paid for and there isn't really any way to stop it happening again other than banning people from your land.

Camping provides genuine residents with extra lindens, sometimes this is the only source of income in SL for new residents and many people buy the shiny things people create in SL with them and pay their tier fees/rents to estate owners/LL. Some people I know create items while they camp and pay for their shops/stalls from the camping money they get so they can get a foot on the ladder....camping money oils the grid.

i don't get it. why do you care who sits in the chairs, as long as you get wut you were shooting for. if anything, you owe THEM a favor. they brought your traffic up steadily.

you can ban them all day and all night. they'll just make new camping bots since they know your place is a gold mine.

man half of yall missed the point, and yea i am taking a risk by putting out camping chairs, but I make thousands and thousands of lindens per day and i dont spend all day on SL to do so. The camping equipment helps keep the business running, what I was getting at, is the SAME person in Rl created several accounts to camp. It's just a vent, lay off the insults.

Just to bring it back to the original post, I can understand what she may be implying here.

Campers are also a way to help those that don't have funds or don't have access to them. If all of the alts are there camping, yes, she gets the traffic numbers she is looking for, but it is defeating the purpose of providing a few bucks to those who do need it. By filling all the chairs, those folks don't get a shot at camping either.

Camping chairs are designed to pay people for generating traffic in your store. From that point of view it doesn't matter if it's just 7 alts sitting in the chairs, because they'll generate as much traffic as any other 7 people.

If what you want to do is to help new players get some starting income, may I suggest replacing the camping chairs with a Money Tree? Pay some extra money into it, if you like, to make it flower faster. It is set to only support new players and I believe they can be set to only pay to people with payment info on file, too.

I had heard there were also money-tree harvesting bots. Has something changed to make them unable to strip the trees before real players get there?

exactly, thanks Xplorer. I dont care about my traffic if it doesnt benefit other people

Yes, we've had this happen to a lesser degree...

We have a couple of camping dance pads. They were not however put there to increase traffic (we don't need it, we get good numbers anyway), we put them there no new users can earn a few lindens whilst they are in the club chatting to the other visitors.

We were detemined not to encourage zombies by making the camper click on a dialogue box every now and then - if they don't, they stop earning. They also have a miximum camp time set on them.

We did, however, notice a few weeks ago a couple of similar AV's using them. Looking at the info, showed they were both "born" on the same day and when I clicked on the pad to "kick" them off, they vanished - so it looks like they were bots rather than real alts.

They got banned, and it seemed to have been an isolated incident. It did annoy me though that someone was using bots to take places that our real and genuine users could have had at the time.

Just to reiterate, we don't use them to increase visitor numbers, it's just a way for new users visiting us to earn a few L$ whilst socialising.

Gomez

Thank you for ur suggestion Yumi, i havent thought about it, and it sounds good

At the moment pretty much nothing in SL can beat a bot.

The only thing that can do it is a CAPTCHA and that requires free generation of a texture, which SL scripts can't do. (Or sound CAPTCHA but that requires voice synthesis which is ditto.) There has been research into text-only CAPTCHA, but nobody has managed to make one that's even vaguely reliable yet.

Then dump the camping chairs, and just give the money away when you are online.... IF traffic is of no consequence.

I was just thinking the same thing.

In the first post, you said that you used camping chairs to bring your traffic up..

/me looks confused

I wonder if an annoyed landowner could FREEZE the bot, set the camp spot at L$0.01/hour or something, and let the damn thing rot there until its owner comes back to his computer. Stil get the traffic numbers from it, FWIW.