Camping/Traffic - Maybe we need a protest

Sadly, the traffic count has a purpose for me as an "end user", too. In search, I do use that number to avoid overcrowded places.

I know I can teleport away if I end up in a place that's not comfortable, but avoiding it in the first place is better, I think.

Completely off-topic to this thread, but why the heck are Gaybot Foxley's posts always in bold?

Now regarding traffic numbers, I would still like to see LL change the calculation method to work by looking at "activity" in a parcel as opposed to just traffic, as I've mentioned in other threads. I think this is probably what they will be doing as part of their solution. I expect it will work until someone works out the calculation secret and figure out a script that will cause their camping pads to count as "activity".

Another point I'd like to make... I too have started to go to the BOTTOM of the search results in order to check out the quiet places first and give them a chance. Maybe if this caught on, people would start working out ways to get rid of traffic on their parcel... ha ha!

That would get rid of camping, and still give an accurate assessment of how many people visit one shop compared to another shop.

I own a mall and one thing that does bug the heck out of me is when a designer comments to me that my traffic is low. Ok so I don'thave 50k traffic, but then again I don't have campers, would never have them. My traffic is TRUE traffic. Shoppers, ppl actually doing things on the island.

Question though if we don't have traffic then when you do a search, which order does your search come up in? alphabettically, goodness everything will be A something.

I do agree there has to be a better way. I remember the days before camping "sigh". Traffic was meaningful, told you that the place had things happening.

Sexy Partridge

It will not work, for the same reason that spam continues even though 99.9999% of people abhor and ignore spam in their e-mail.

It only takes a small fraction of clueless people for it to pay off. And, there's always a stream of fresh newbies who've just come in, spent their initial L$, and see what looks like an easy way to get more L$. It takes them a while before either they understand SL well enough to recognize how antisocial camping chairs are, or they read the forums or otherwise talk to people who have been around enough to hear people complaining about them.

How about voting? Some sites have those little "vote" boxes where you are allowed one vote per day. Bump it to a few votes a day, or some number of votes per week. That way, at least people must make a conscious *decision* to vote. Of course, that can be gamed too; buying votes will probably make *this* system useless too.

What we really want is some way for "word of mouth" to make its way around efficiently. Traffic is supposed to do that, and is not. Voting will probably end up similarly gamed and bribed. Other than that, I dunno.

In the good old days of the web, Yahoo was not a search engine, but a hierarchical directory. There was some tiny amount of editorial input in some sites like that; sometimes they'd list key links near the top. Nowadays, the web is too big for that. But SL is smaller than the web was when that sort of thing worked for the web. It's effort, but perhaps somebody could make some headway doing that sort of thing. Perhaps somebody clever could come up with a business model and actually make money doing this.

IMHO it's a fault of SL's primitive search function, which is bad enough to convince many to leave SL altogether.

There's a lot of great stuff in SL but without meaningful filters, it's too much. SL's search is not a meaningful filter, because it's not sortable and it doesn't make rich search terms easy, thus it's easily gamed. Google spends a lot of time making their searches more useful to searchers and less spoofable for businesses, and therein is a big part of their popularity.

I'd just like to be able to find a place, or a classifieds item, or an event, that isn't clogged by casino advertising. I wouldn't mind looking at the massive list, if I could sort and filter it. It'd be easy enough to avoid campers that way. But the bottom line is that now, it's too hard to find what you're looking for, and I suspect it turns away a lot of new users. Maybe the new 2D features will address that, when they materialize.

But I do agree that LL's business model pretty much precludes the effectiveness of a protest. I'd guess that the most effective solution would be to just leave the camper sims to the exploiters and work for more robust covenants and camper-free islands. There are a lot of shopping areas that depend on the quality and uniqueness of their products, and the blog networks, to get customers, and they almost invariably are in sims without campers.

This has in fact been done before - you can still get the old Linden provided "VOTE!" boxes. They didn't work for exactly the reason you describe - people could be bribed to vote, plus people could invite their friends over to click on their vote box no matter whether they liked the location or not.

Similarly with Classified ads - they were originally sorted alphabetically, and were full of "AAAAAAAAAAAA" names. Yes, anyone can spot that such a business is only at the top because of this game, but that doesn't cause the reader to be bothered to read further down than they otherwise would, or help the ones further down get noticed.

Come on people... not shopping in certain place because it has a camping chair isn't too smart. I know one very nice shop where there is just a prize chair and a random prize giver every 5 minutes. This shop has got very high traffic because it sells good stuff.

And I found this shop not because I was searching for it, but from my friend's recommendation. Use your picks list, people!

(Aside: prize chairs aren't camping chairs; different things altogether.)

This is a key point, I think. The picks list makes "word of mouth" more efficient. A shop you like? Stick it in your picks list.

When I meet and talk to people, I generally look at their profile. And, sometimes, if there's something interesting in the picks list, I'll check it out.

Perhaps we just need more advertising that people should put stuff in their picks, and look at each other's picks. That's harder to game. Yeah, you can put junk in your picks list, but you can't just stick the picks in lots of alts and have them automatically count. And, folks are more likely to look at the profiles and picks of people they *talk* to, not just zombies.

-Rob

Prize giver and random giver is not camping chairs. I don't find those offensive. You are promoting your product. That is different then rewarding zombies.

I think a real solution has already been touched on -- SL needs better search functionality.

I do agree that having the search catagorized by traffic should be eliminated. Keep the traffic numbers, but eliminate the sorting by traffic.

Here's a quick suggestion - how about sorting by the number of clicks you get on 'Teleport' and/or 'Show on Map'? Teleport is more meaningful (bodies in the store) so how about you get two points per teleport and one point per map-display. That is a way of ranking places by popularity, which doesn't involve zombies or camp-bots.

Still, I would love to see better search options... the ability to search on some words, all words, complete phrases, exclude words, etc etc. The more powerful the search tools are, the less important the ranking or sorting becomes. When you can search on 'ancient egyptian jewelery but not scarabs or ankhs' you don't need traffic to help you wade through 15,000 jewelery stores. All this would apply equally well to both Places and Classifieds...

-Atashi

What you call a "Protest" in SL.. is what ISP's in the real world call a "Denial of Service Attack".. and last I heard, it was now a federal crime.

It won't work. Sorry to say that, but the idea is worse than a traffic sorting. Think about how many newbies will click on the "Teleport" button when they see something like: "L$15/3min!!!!!!!". It won't matter if there is a high payout chair or not. People will TP anyway.

What's worse, is that if we substitute dwell counters for TP counters, someone will just make a TP bot, which will actually cause WAY more problems than just idle agents. SL is evolving into an open platform, and the long term solution is that someone other than LL will provide search services, there will be competitors each with their own system for ranking and accepting payment (think google vs. yahoo vs. MSN search). In the meantime, LL needs to eliminate any search ordering than can be automatically gamed through code, since code that interacts with SL is now a reality and it is increasing daily.

Currently you pay 30$L/wk to show up in places search, which is then ranked by traffic. Changing this so the price is flexible, exactly like classifieds, would make good sense. Then we'd have the question of "what is the difference between a classifieds ad and a places listing", and the answer, of course, is that there is none. Doing away with places search seems like the solution in the short term, just list your place in the classifieds.

So, what is the negative affect if the traffic calculation was to be changed to only count premium members? That seems like an ideal solution to me.

changing it to be listing based on pay would be redundant - since theres already a Classified / search based on who has to most money listing.

Alphabetical is the fairest. They sinply should make a system to make the !!!! *** AAA , etc Apear at the end, not the begining.

Though Im positiive people would easily spot the AAAAA's for what they were doing - how stupid do we have to assume the average user is?

Then everyone will make ZZZZZZZZZ companies.



The problem is that the average user will say "oh, they're gaming the Search" - but that won't make them bother to scroll down and see who else is there. Shops want to make sure that buying from them is as effortless as possible.

Being on the top of the search is more important for social places than Shops

I am in the middle on traffic and classifieds for shapes = yet im confident Im amoung the top 10 shape sellers based on Sales in L$

With age play now being restricted in SL, it seems to me that camping is now the most despised thing in SL. Frankly, I don't think furries will be the next to go, I think it will be camping chairs.

At least, I hope so.

Kam

simple solution, send a sim wide message every 4 hours that the sim will go down, and reset it. all the afk campers will not relog, and the all day camper will be a thing
of the past.
I'd gladly put up with my home sim going down every 4 hours if it ment I and my customers could actualy access my land.

Traffic is much to one dimensional and unreliable to base a search on. Instead, search could be based on the number of teleports from another region to the region, like counting clicks on links. Or even better, count the number of teleports offered from other regions to a region and make the ones that come from high ranked regions have more weight then the ones coming from low ranked regions.

Look at what Google is doing with the web and translate that to SL. Maybe even incorporate web search results from Google. Spider the web for sl-urls and incorporate that information. Etc, etc... Search does not have to be dependant on traffic.

Quick question:

What if only the first visit counts and not the time spent?

That will ridicule the camping chairs, as the time is no longer counted against the traffic. And
the visit counts once per day for the place, so repeated visiting by the same person on the
same day is also not helping.

All one can do is to create alternative Avatars, but then teleporting them to the place once
a day is a cumbersome thing, even with bots one would need quite a few accounts.