The Discussions on Traffic Reform with the Lindens

Joined the LL traffic Futures Group run by Jeska Linden to see if enough people could pursuade the Lindens to give Camping and Bot areas their own Traffic Listing tab. Gamed traffic ratings should not receive the ultimate reward of top traffic rankings.

I believe seperating the people gaming the traffic system from what is deemed legitimate traffic is the frist step in reforming the traffic system.

I do not know that any of the resident members of this group will be acknowledged but please join the LL Traffic Future group and advocate moving camping and bots into their own category (a tab entitled FREE MONEY perhaps) so we can see some valuable content on the traffic list in our lifetime.


Of course the bot creator and the camping island owners have joined the group to advocate status quo and derail discussions about re-classifying their gaming activities. Have we become so complacent that we will allow this gaming to continue on into its second year without making our service provider know that it is extremely unnacceptable?

Organized community action convinced the Lindene to make a half-hearted effort to discourage adfarming. This may be our only chance to have LL focus on the traffic gaming issue and respond to it.

Not to mention that this is the Linden way of not enforcing the TOS as they are LEGALLY bound to do!

Lol creating cheating and non cheating search systems ROFL! As if they won't just keep abusing both systems.........
Bots are cheating, and have to go, they might as well replace traffic with a box that you can enter your own number into
Any other ways of cheating the system would be better than bots, the grid can't handle the weekend load, and botowners refuse to give up places for actual residents to get inworld and function correctly.
Hey it's ok because bots don't notice excessive lag and have no problems with transactions, skirts or relogging.

I joined the group yesterday to advocate getting rid of traffic altogether, as I've been doing in the blog and in the other thread here - and I use traffic bots, so don't paint us all with the same brush, Lias

Somebody here mentioned that that that group is bedlam, or words to that effect, and it is. It was bedlam when there were only about 4 participants last night. There's no way that anything worthwhile can come out of it through discussions there. It's just a very bad method of having any meaningful discussions.

And now you see whatthe bot advocates are preaching: extreme actions and community chaos. Just joined teh group to divide and conquer. We need some more people that can stay on topic and not be baited so easily to make change happen in a timely manner.

I got the impression that Jeska really just wants the group to schedule in-world meetings, and the word "small" was used repeatedly in there. So it's already understood that group chat isn't likely to produce anything at all.

I agree that group chat is too all-over-the-place to be effective. I do hope these in-world meetings are not run in this manner. We shall see what these small group chats bring.

I just logged in to deal with something, and the group chat was already going. Like I said, it's bedlam there. Of course, Jeska is asleep now so it was wasted bedlam If that's an indication of what a meeting will be like, then they'll be a waste of time too. The best thing that Jeska can do is start a thread here.

However, I don't see any need at all for the discussion. It's like saying, "we monitor traffic - what can we do with it?" The discussion should be about the Places tab, and not about the traffic metric.

If your at the meetings then it will be just like what seems like your one sided group chat. Any mention of something your against you just beat with your stick...Its suppose to be a discussion group open to all to discuss there thoughts on the subject without being shafted and kicked aside by you.

I'm not sure what you mean. There are a lot of us who think exposing traffic figures to the public is a mistake--even if by some magic those numbers weren't gamed at all. Here's why:

Back when SL started, paying for "dwell" made some sense as an incentive for creating appealing content that would draw the masses. But now we've far outgrown that--so much so, in fact, that the behavior of residents clustering at high-traffic areas causes everyone's in-world experience to degrade, and actually hurts grid stability (higher population sims are more likely to crash, and a restarting sim necessarily puts extra load on central services).

Even if high traffic density weren't a stability issue, it's still a problem for resident experience because of lag in the congested areas. Indeed, real traffic is much laggier than the gamed stuff.

At this point, if anything, traffic should be used to steer residents *away* from congested parts of the grid, as a simple form load-balancing. It's a scalability thing, really: it's true now, and will become more true as the population grows. It's just not sensible of LL to cling to this quaint notion.

But that's not what happens in the group IMs. From the 2 short spells that I've seen, they are just fast moving free-for-alls without any recognisable semblance of a reasoned flow of discussion.

Lord gaming the traffic system is wrong, dishonest and unfair for real content providers who cannot get into the top search listings because of camping sites and bots. Re-classify the camping sites and bot sites under anothe rtab and do not allow then to have any impact on real traffic metrics. New Players will still click on a serach tabe entitled FREE MONEY and teleport to your camping site. And others will be able to click on a TOP TRAFFIC SITES tab and see real content (if they uncheck the mature box).

Lias, what's the name of this group? I'd like to join next time I'm In-World.

LL Traffic Futures. If you cannot find it look me up or Jeska Linden. Double click the group name in her profile and join.

I hate to say this but, as far as I understand it, the Lindens are not legally bound to enforce the TOS. It would be a fantastic addition to the TOS if they were, but I doubt they would ever agree to it.

The best way to prevent abuses in the traffic system and yet still have its information is to only count premium and concerge members in traffic

It works because:
1. bots and campers are not usually premium due to the expense.
2, Even though it doesnt count non premium members, it still gives a good estimation of which places are genuinely popular since premium members visit these places more than they visit unpopular places.

Traffic, as a popularity metric, has outlived its usefulness and should be eliminated entirely.

As long as the client remains open source, there will be no way to eliminate bots from the grid. Nor will there be any _reliable_ way to detect a bot from a living human player.

I really don't see any way to categorize avatars between real players and bots in order to make separate places for them. Any attempt to do so would just provide more opportunities to game the system.

I searched for the group... Joined... Saw the group chat flood... Left... (>_<

There HAS to be a better way. (=_=)

one who speaks with no knowledge, and no intention of obtaining knowledge.... just tossing out accusations and generalizations and stereotypes with no factual basis to back them up.... attacking the very people who are working for the same end result as you.... well, this type of person appears an idiot, receives no respect, and will not be taken seriously. to sum in up in simple laymens terms so you get my drift here.... you're sabotaging your own cause because you are too close minded and afraid to hear the truth.

I'm kinda surprised Jeska didn't intuit that from the start. And I don't think folks will just say their piece on the channel and then lose interest so a meeting/discussion can be civil, if that happened to be what she was thinking. I guess they're all just Forums-phobic.I actually floated a variant of this idea in Everett's last office hour, and then caught myself: What you'd really be learning is where Mainlanders hang out. It may be a proxy for what one really wants to know, but my scheme (reporting both Premium and Basic numbers) is pretty much a loser, except for those few who have products only of interest to one group or the other, or are running ads somehow targeted to one of the groups. Just not worth the data collection, I think.

Also, the cost of an annual-plan Premium membership for a trafficbot is pretty low compared to the cost of feeding camping chairs. So if non-Premiums didn't count, this might kill camping (in favor of trafficbots) even faster than just canceling traffic altogether.

There is gonna be a real issue about how former campers can get L$s. Camping is a sad situation, but for those desperate enough, it fills a need. I suspect that a creative way to satisfy that need post-camping will be richly rewarded.

Really, traffic is a losing proposition all around. Besides being worse than useless in directing residents to locations (my earlier post in this thread), it's a pathetically bad way to collect any data useful to a business. I doubt if any serious in-world business uses the current traffic numbers for anything--they're just too broad--and the Lindens simply don't have the right data to make anything useful. Anybody really trying to understand spending behavior on their parcel *must* collect data about visitors across locations *and* what and how they spend; LL just can't know which transactions are of interest in studying spending.

So really, whatever computing cycles are currently spent collecting and reporting traffic data for each parcel on the grid would be much more efficiently spent running user-created scripts for collecting the specific data that actually helps merchants, on the tiny minority of parcels where any visitor volume data is of interest at all. And this becomes even more true when Mono hits the Grid. (This is just one example of LL trying to do stuff that residents could do better and more efficiently. The current initiative to revamp Landmarks in the client suffers from this NIH syndrome, too.)

There is blessed little volume data available to LL that's not available to scripts, and what there is, probably shouldn't be known to merchants anyway, or is at best of very rare interest. Average IDV status of visitors, maybe, or that Premium/Basic distinction; but without knowing how it actually influences spending on a per-avatar basis, it's of very little value to a merchant or venue owner anyway.

You're making me think of another possibility...

On the internet, web site statistics count "unique visitors" to a web page to give an idea of how popular a website/web page is. Could we do something similar with our SL Places, i.e. count unique visitors per day?

They would probably need to stay for more than a few minutes to be counted (like the "Bounce Rate" in Google Analytics) - i.e. they *meant* to go there, or found something useful once they arrived and everything rezzed.

This could still be gamed, I guess, but I think it would be harder as you would need to make many unique Bots (or Alts) and only log them on to your parcel for a few minutes a day. It could still be used as a way to pay newbies for 'camping' - just that they'd only have to camp at one place for 5 mins, then could move on to the next place.

If it could be combined with some sort of Transactions Count for the parcel (for commercial places only, i.e. parcels which have items on them which are set for sale), *than* you might begin to get something useful, and something harder to Game - like a conversion rate - number of visitors vs number of transactions, i.e. how many of the visitors actually bought something?

So, for example, in one of the big clothes/skins places where there are usually at least 40 people there at a time, browsing or buying, they will have a large volume of transactions in a 24 hour period, a good conversion rate plus a large number of unique visitors, so will get a big Traffic-Transactions figure.

Somewhere like Svarga or Greenies that attracts a lot of visitors but doesn't sell stuff will just get a large unique visitor count.

A smaller store (like mine) that has less sales per day and less visitors than a Skin store will have a smaller Traffic-Transactions figure (rightly), but should still have a better number than somewhere similar that isn't so busy, or somewhere that doesn't sell such good quality stuff therefore doesn't have such a good conversion rate.

It needs to be based on *number of transactions* not *overall sales* as my average item sale is about 50L$ vs perhaps 1000L$ for somewhere selling skins, so you're not comparing like with like if you do it purely on sales. But transactions volume should be fairer.

I'm sure there are flaws in this idea (since it just came to me ) - any suggestions to improve it?

I don't agree.. My place has 15-20k of honest, non-bot, non-camping traffic. Why should my place get listed next to somewhere that never has anybody there?

I would rather see them make it a ToS requirement (and AR'able offense if violated) to require places that provide camping or traffic bots to say so in their parcel description. Popular places should be tossed or maybe reworked so that residents can add their own search filters to it. If you don't like places that have camping, add "NOT camp" to your filter. If you like art galleries, add "art OR gallery" to your filter.

By losing traffic, you're punishing people who actually work to make their place popular and giving a boost to those that don't. I don't like this idea.

Well perhaps offering traffic stats is a good idea, perhaps it's not. But as long as the feature is there, using bots and campers is just cheating, and cheating is uncool no matter who's doing it.

How punishing? How giving a boost?

A popular place is succeeding. I don't follow how it's therefore entitled to make it extra difficult for anybody else to succeed.

Yeah, we've had this weird traffic thing in place for a long time, but that doesn't mean it serves a social good. And we know for sure that it discourages new market entry--and this in addition to the huge barrier to entry of markets largely saturated by already successful businesses.

Sure, successful businesses have to work at becoming successful. Then they succeed. They don't need to be given a tax on all newcomers to the market, too.

Reuters weighs in with a slightly bizarre article opining that this will kill camping:

http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/04/29/new-sl-site-rankings-may-signal-end-to-camping/
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