Camping/Traffic - Maybe we need a protest

The forums have been over this issue time and time again. Mainland owners must always live in fear of a "business" moving in next door with 40 camping pads and keeping the sim full all day long with campers in order to augment their traffic based search listings.

Possible solutions to camping were discussed at length in this thread: /327/c0/169374/1.html

What it boils down to is that the only realistic way to get rid of camping is to get rid of the camp pad owner's incentive - Traffic based search rankings. It's totally meaningless these days anyways, at least for search purposes. The high ranked places are all due to camping or modified client connections. It has nothing to do with actual traffic anymore and is only going to get worse.

I'm considering organizing a grid-wide protest against camping, and more specifically against traffic based search rankings.

I'm looking here for ideas about what allowable actions we can take as part of our protest. Anyone involved in the tax protests of yesteryear, please share your tactics here so we can discuss.

It should involve nudity. Definately nudity.

I agree completely! In fact, in support of your idea, I have decided to hold a daily protest right in front of my store. I have conveniently arranged 20 chairs around the entrance with a huge sign that says "Down with Camping!" Now, these chairs won't pay you anything, because that would be wrong. But they do provide a convenient way for people to organize and come together to protest.

/sarcasm off

I agree with your frustration, and Linden Lab is well aware of the problem with using traffic to rank search results. They have indicated that they do intend to change the way this works. But it seems right now that they are more focused on scaling the grid to meet the needs of an expanding user base. I think this is a good thing. But like you, I hope they get to these other things soon.

You'd get more mileage out of buying a plane ticket to San Francisco and trying to speak to some LL employees in person than from any attempt at a protest, in-world or in the forums. At least that would be harder for them to ignore.

LL has, historicly, completely ignored any protests or organized consumer complaints. You could have polls that indicate 99% of all SL Players opposed an idea, and LL will bull right on ahead with it.

Vote to eliminate traffic ranked search results:

http://secondlife.com/vote/vote.php?get_id=2979

The text of the proposal:

Traffic stats are a useful tool for land owners, and should be available in the parcel "About" dialog, but should never be used as a means of ranking search results. Currently, traffic counts are useless for ranking locations in world as all of the top ranked locations use one or another form of parasitic traffic generation in order to game the ranking system. On top of making the system useless, this also has serious side effects for legitimate users of mainland sims where these traffic building schemes are being employed.

More and more frequently residents are being locked out of sims because those sims are filled with campers, either legitimate beggars, camp chair mining bots, or traffic boosting bots. With the proliferation of alternate client code (libsl and modifications of the official open source client), it is now possible to simply buy traffic from someone running a collection of bots. This was clearly not the intent when the traffic system was created. Things have changed, and so should this feature.

In order to help with the mounting problems of high concurrency, search load, and "sim full" messages, I propose we eliminate traffic based search rankings. This will have the effect of lowering the number of parasitic client connections and ending once-and-for-all the debacle that started with the abuse of dwell payments and has now morphed into automated gaming of the search rankings. The benefits are many, the drawbacks none (since the current system is broken) and it amounts to simply removing a broken feature, so effort on the programming end should be fairly small.

I would vote no on a proposal to get rid of traffic, if the voting set-up made any sense at all and you could vote no.

I don't think camping places should be able to prevent people from reaching their own homes at all, but I do want traffic to stay.

If you are going to rent a space in a mall somewhere, for instance, the traffic tells you how many people come there. (Even if they spend their time camping.)

Also, I like to have an idea of how much time people spend at my shop.

Less information is almost always a bad idea. Leaves a person flying more blind.

As it is, we can factor in the camping phenomenon when making judgements about places based on traffic.

coco

I am with Coco. I like the idea of giving a landowner priority to access in the sim, so that they are never locked out. That is the most reasonable suggestion to alleviate part of the problem so far.

Coco, how about you actually read that proposal? It doesn't say "Stop counting traffic", and specifically mentions that traffic data is useful. It says "Stop ranking search results by traffic". Read. Then post.

Sorry I didn't read it more carefully, Nite. I guess I still want them ranked in terms of traffic. Otherwise, I would have to dig very hard for the information to be very meaningful to me. On the other hand, you're right - this is better than the idea of chucking it altogether.

coco

Maybe do this:

If you go to buy from a place and discover camping chairs, leave without buying anything. Go somewhere else (a place without chairs) and get what you need. Then, send a single IM to the owner of the first store saying, "Hi! I came in to buy {thing} but you had camping chairs. So, I went to [other place] and bought [thing]."

It would only work if everyone would do it, of course, so it's not happening. Still, I bet it would work.

Traffic has becoem a totally useless indcator that is unappolgetically gamed by Venue ownes witht he use of camping chairs. It leads to Tacky, Nasty builds winning out over innovative ones.

The only competition criteria becomes how deep the venue owner's pockets are.

It should be removed - yesterday. It would solve lag, bad neighbors, and terribly tacky locales.

It would encourage competition in builds, in quality of service, of better entertainment. Of more FUN.

Even when you use it to shop by its useless since the top traffic areas in any serch are poor quality items.

Traffic has NO true redeeming value to residents of Second Life.

*****************
That all said - The Lindens wont get rid of it.

It pads all their numbers. It increases Lindens spent, Accounts created, accounts logged in, and Online now numbers.

Unrealistically pads them? Yes of course.

I think they will act blissfully unaware their numbers are all basically fake.

Makes good business sense to play dumb.

Gaybot, your suggestions are unrealistic at best. First, the lindens aren't going to ban behavior or scripts, that's not their job and they've been very clear about it. Also, they are not going to get involved in an arms race with "camping detector" vs. "camping detector defeater", LL is smart enough not to engage is such silliness. the only solution is to remove the incentive.

The AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA's would be pretty darn obvious to all residents with more than 22 brain cells.

People are accustomed to such tactics in the phone book.

You could still use the classified to make your ad stand out.

where the traffic numbers require knowing alil bit about SL first.

Too bad there isn't a way to count money transactions (in which money is going into the landowner's coffer, not going OUT) vs 'traffic' to get a median or something. I don't know if it would be too much better, but it would knock the camping places down a few pegs.

But protesting is pointless as far as LL is concerned. Everyone, not just 99%, could hate an idea and LL would just push it through, if they felt it would actually help their bottom line.

hehe would be funny if Lindens picked a different letter every day to start with.

I was going to post that search results could be ordered by the number of unique visitors to a parcel, instead of simple avatar-hours. But then I realized that this would require lots of database queries to maintain unique visitor lists per parcel. Not gonna happen.

Any non-random ordering scheme for searches will be gamed. So searches should either be random or you should be able to pay for search priority as you can with the classifieds. Then at least there will be transparency about the gaming of search order.

I think that's an excellent idea. Not least because it provides a benefit to LL: the money that people now spend on bots, alts and chairs in order to game the system in ways that harm other residents, would just go directly to LL, and that answers the question "what's in it for us".

I agree that search results have to be ranked somehow, and given that it's not going to be "fair" in any normal sense, I think transparency is a great way to go.

You could get an army of 40 camping zombies to stay permanently in Linden Village...

...except no one would notice.

theyd highlight it as proof they were popular

Don't they have like 3 sims now? And can't Lindens override the avie limit to always all them access to their land.

Noticed the new "window washer" and "sweeper" campers? Or the ones crooning over open guitar cases? What's left - hobo campers?

Hello everybody,

I started to stop buying in shops with camping chairs. There are such beautiful and cozy
shops at the end of the list.
Granted it takes a bit more time when I start at the end of the list, but I found some very
talented people and beautiful places to shop at. And as a little bonus I had some great
talks

So just invest a bit of time and stop buying at shops with camping chairs

Regards,
Lillyann