What's going to replace traffic then?

So would this hurt clubs the worst? How is anyone going to find anything like the Ivory Tower of prims unless its in the classifieds? I'm interested in seeing what happens.

It was from the Town Hall yesterday:



Now the way Cory said it "the current trafffic metric" doesn't necessarily mean remove it altogether, they may plan on using it another way, I don't kow.

Well if they improve it I'm all for it.

Well he says they are "revamping search" so that could mean a lot of changes, we will have to wait and see.

i stated that camping will not be disappearing anytime soon but for some reason a lot of people thinks that it will disappear when traffic based search is removed.

The bet has not be defined exactly. But it should have something to do with the exact date that camping will disappear and also a definition of what it means for camping to be gone.
Also a definition of what exactly camping is will probably be helpful.

I am not offering odds i am simply offering an equal bet with anyone who disagrees.


Camping will not be disappear any time soon!!!!!

Definition of camping? Paying avies a few linden every couple of minutes to be on your land to drive up your traffic numbers in Search Places. If traffic is no longer used in Search, why would someone pay people to sit on their land and drive up the now pointless number?

Vale your doing well with those lucky chairs...........and now there are 5 we love you for it

What about the casinos that require you to pay a machine in order to activate the seat? Is that camping to?

What about the camp chairs that offer prizes instead of lindens?




Some successful business owners provide camping as a way to give newbies an opportunity to earn not to improve their traffic.
Also it could be said casinos offer camping so there place doesnt look so empty and also because it gives the impression that the casino owner actually has money to give away so people are more inclined to play (Especially if they see someone who is earning i high rate from winning multipliers).

It is true that casinos use a kind of camping but they are also trying to get those campers to spend their lindens on gambling and drive more people to come to their casino through traffic numbers. Anyway, aren't casinos banned from Search, now, supposedly?

Lucky Chairs serve the same purpose as camping chairs, really. It's keeping avies on your land with the promise of money as a reward.

As for people who do this for altruistic purposes, to "help newbies" that is what most people have money trees for. Camping, in large numbers, lags sims and makes everyone else on the sim hate you. No one does this kind of thing because they are kind and thoughtful people, that is bs. They want high traffic numbers.

well if you think camping will disappear along with traffic related search, put your money where your mouth is.

Im willing to bet otherwise and i can also guarantee i will win.

I really don't give a flip. Why the hell would I want to "bet" with you, who gives a shit.

If we were going to bet, we would also need to define what you mean by "camping will not be disappearing". Do you mean that it won't be gone completely from the grid? That it will be impossible to find a camping chair anywhere on the grid in any of the 10,000 sims? Well, that would be a silly bet to take.

There will be some kind of lag time. Some people won't realize that traffic has changed right away, that may take weeks for some of them to figure it out. A few might think camping is a great way to help newbies. And some might find some other benefit. Will it be completely and utterly eradicated? Probably not. Will it be substantially reduced to the point that it's irrelevant? Most likely.

The real question is, how we would prove who won the bet? Your idea of choosing a specific date for when it will disappear is a silly bet since we have no idea when traffic will be removed from Search Places. With LL, their little trial balloons about removing traffic might mean it's gone in two weeks or in 6 months. I'm not about to bet on how long it takes them to implement their idea.

A better idea would be something like this: We find a way to select 20 random locations that use camping chairs now. It would be preferable if we didn't know who they were. We then pick a time frame, say 1 month from the time that traffic is removed from Search Places. And then we decide how many we are predicting will drop camping chairs. Maybe you say half of them will keep them. Maybe I say that at least 15 will drop them within a month. Then we also have to decide what happens if a place that used to have 20 camping chairs gets rid of 18 of them but still keeps 1 or 2 for some reason. Does that count for me or you?

That's what I mean by terms, hon. If you want to bet a serious about of money, you have to think through your proposed wager a lot better than you have.

My point exactly!!!!

*sigh* I'm sorry i ever read this thread. Didn't realize you were simply trolling.

On to the next thread!

There will always be some small group that dream up some 'innovative' method of getting people to their property, which will then be copied by everyone else so the advantages disappear once more.

Unfortunately, the one thing that many people fail to implement is the one thing that truly cannot be gamed, abused, or otherwise used to negatively affect others.

That one thing? Providing a quality service, product or venue.

I personally don't take any notice of traffic except to know if it's excessive it's probably best avoided. It certainly won't affect my gameplay in the slightest. I know one or two individuals have begun complaining already, even blaming Lewis for bringing the question up - even though from the answer it's clear that Linden Lab have been working on this for some time.

Broccoli

When the Classifieds first came out, they were in alphabetical order, but it quickly became ridiculous as people first started putting AAAAAAAAA at the front of their classifieds, then !!!!!, and then finally getting into using client bugs to enter unprintable characters that were considered to "come before" any real letter or symbol... all just in order to get themselves on the front page. The RL Yellow Pages directories are specific to local areas, but there's no equivalent to the locality concept in SL.

I suspect that some other traffic metric will be useful - traffic has a lot of problem at the moment other than camping, for example the fact that certain types of shop are disadvantaged because people don't spend time there. Maybe it will be the number of teleports to a location? I can still see that being abused unfortunately..

Wouldn't the number of teleports work though. If traffic is abuse by money chairs, then measuring by teleports would kill the money chairs, but yet still show which places were most visited. It could be abused slightly maybe but it would be difficult wouldn't it?

Well, I am afraid this is going to be the end of the smaller shops and starting sellers as well as smaller clubs etc. simply because people are unable to find you when advertising becomes too expensive.
Many shops, clubs etc. might close with a boring SL as a result and in the worse case people giving up on SL........

Unless size of a parcel is taken in consideration.

We'll just have to wait and see how relevant results will be when the new search engine is launched.

The ideal scenario, though, would be for third parties to be able to offer their own search engines in-world.

did they also mention when the traffic-count will stiop?

As far as I currently understand it, the current Traffic metric works something like this (off the top of my head, without recourse to reference material):


This sets up the sad camping situation where landowners can choose to bribe residents to spend a long while on the same parcel, because that's good for their traffic.

What I'd like to see is a much reduced emphasis on the "less people for longer" and instead measure honest visit lengths instead. My proposal / wish / vague idea is as follows:


(The "points" from my idea wouldn't be on the same scale as the current Traffic Score - I use the term to indicate the granularity of scoring of my idea.)

Not difficult to game this at all. All you have to do is give something away to every visitor. I have a money tree and I'm convinced that there are some avatars that do nothing but make the rounds to pick from the trees (they sprout L$s on a fixed schedule), because they're teleporting in to my property 10-20 times a day.

The money trees only work for the new folks, but I'm sure it would be easy enough to have another device that works in a similar fashion do the same thing for all visitors. And of course advertising high quality items for free to people will bring them in. Just put it at the landing point, you get your teleport credit and the visitors go on their merry way to the next place that's offering a goody.

Dang, now I just killed my advantage by revealing my secrets, should they start ranking places in search this way. Why must I be so darn helpful?

Thanks Io

Yeah its still not 100% clear

He could have meant - "replace it with the shiny new traffic metric"

Which could mean anything from -

No Traffic to An even easier gamed system than we have now.

Buxton's idea could still be gamed though, Just set up a system that automatically pays out L$10 once a visitor has been on the parcel for more than 30 mins. Not as effective as camping but you know that people are going to try and take whatever edge they can over the competition, so if that means getting a 2% increase to traffic using illegitate means, then people will do it. Personally, after allot of consideration on this issue since the inception of camping, I dont think there is a fair way for search places to work. Even if traffic is abolished and search 'places' lists the results purely randomly then people will still abuse the system by entering false or misleading keywords to give them a better chance to show up in more search results. I have not seen a single idea in this thread that will offer a fair and un-gamable search 'places' feature and I think they will abolish it all together and that a battle of the classifieds will begin. I also think the saturated advertising market will need to pull it's socks up and abolish ad farms and come up with some original and effective plans to increase their customers exposure and ultimately their sales. I think malls will come into their own more as there will not be allot of point in a small business setting up in their 1024 sqm plot of land as they wont be listed in places search (if abolished) and they cant afford an effective classfied. Being being part of a mall/community, reources can be pooled together to get a large classified ad up and running in addtion to other advertising. This will allow them to complete more effectively with the big boys (and girls)

Any system will be gamed.

Its the effectiveness of the gaming to make competition unfair thats the real issue.

Traffic numbers being high are much harder for people to realize as gaming then a name like AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA clothes would be.

People do eventually catch on though to gamed traffic numbers. However a lot of businesses cater to newer players and thus they are hurt badly during this learning curve. Most of these businesses who are offering quality products dont have the resources or the inclination to game the traffic system.

Meenwhile the places gaming these results will offer lackluster products in these same areas or even none at all depending on the keywords but still want to get peopel through the door, resulting in even higher numbers.

Traffic as a metric has additional negative besides gaming, which are the use of Second Life resources when they arent really participating in Second Life - afk camping and worse afk camping with multiple accounts.

So whatever system gets put in place hoepfully is only gamed in a way that doesnt make the performance of the whole system (on a sim level and a grid level) suffer - Like camping does.