The Discussions on Traffic Reform with the Lindens

Remember all those charter memberships the early adopters have? The free 4096m of land tier?

That's not 25 USD/mo being paid out of Philip's saving account, nor is it free bandwidth being delivered from on high, sprinkled like pixie dust. The paying users of the grid support all those people. I don't begrudge them this, because they got in early and it was fair.

Shouldn't somewhere like Bare Rose or Bits & Bobs show up higher in search?

Yes, it does make sense but I'm just trying to say that _ungamed_ traffic is a useful metric.

Shouldn't somewhere like Bare Rose or Bits & Bobs show up higher in search?

People with high traffic numbers generally aren't getting it for their merchandise. They're getting it from rentals, clubs, campers, or other things on the same parcel..

Yes, it does make sense but I'm just trying to say that _ungamed_ traffic is a useful metric.

Shouldn't somewhere like Bare Rose or Bits & Bobs show up higher in search?

Campers - the blessings of my wallet die right here. I do *not* want to support someone else's legion of system-gaming, performance-draining abusers. No way, no how, and especially when it is at the expense of people trying so hard to do things the right way.

I guess I shop differently than other people here, then..

If I search for something and see a place with high traffic that's not full of bots/camping, I'm more likely to take a look. If it's full of campers or has obviously been keyword spammed, I'm less likely to take a look. How others can _not_ do that is beyond me but, /me shrugs, to each their own.

Perhaps others realise by now that a comma delimited list of keywords is essential for places that sell many different items, so that they show up for as many of the correct searches as they can

Yup this is an unfortunate side effect of the system, it's silly not to put a lot of keywords in a parcel description, it's a shame there's not a meta tag type box for the keywords so the description makes sense, same with the parcel title too, being descriptive is often a waste of space.

Because if you lose traffic, people searching for places won't know which ones are successful and which ones aren't?

Again, I'm talking about non-gamed traffic.. See page one (2?) of this thread for me saying that I want the ToS to say camp/bot traffic should be disclosed in the parcel description and a way to do "NOT camp" in search.

Camping bots are different, they don't add any value to the community.

However where do you draw the line? Money trees? Are they acceptable? Money orbs? Free gifts? They're all likely to attract those who currently engage in camping.

Moving on, I'm somewhat concerned with some of the views expressed here about popular places, they're a drain on resources, so let's stop people having successful venues? Surely that's not the correct attitude to be taking. Some places that attract a lot of traffic are genuinely popular and have no camping or gaming of the traffic system going on.

It doesn't need to be gamed to skew the results. It just has to be a mixed use parcel compared to a parcel that's only a store. The store will probably be more relevant to the searcher but it will invariably be listed far below the mixed use parcel. How is that useful to the searcher when the reason for the high traffic has nothing to do with what they're looking for? They might assume that it translates directly to the popularity of the merchandise but more often than not that assumption is probably wrong. It doesn't reward quality. It only rewards bodies, no matter why the bodies are there. I don't consider that useful. On the contrary it's been pretty harmful to my business.

The mall/WalMart vs downtown shops problem.. So what's the solution?

Well I disagree somewhat with this point of view, camping bots I don't agree with but camping itself is a marketing tool that is aimed at the two fold effect of increasing visibility and hoping that some of those campers come back there and shop. People employ camping because they see it as a better use of their funds than classified adverts and in the past that certainly has been the case. Genuine campers are engaging to earn money, they're surely looking therefore to do something with that money, I can't see them wanting to do it to withdraw money for their US dollar balance.

Camping bots are different, they don't add any value to the community.

However where do you draw the line? Money trees? Are they acceptable? Money orbs? Free gifts? They're all likely to attract those who currently engage in camping.

Moving on, I'm somewhat concerned with some of the views expressed here about popular places, they're a drain on resources, so let's stop people having successful venues? Surely that's not the correct attitude to be taking. Some places that attract a lot of traffic are genuinely popular and have no camping or gaming of the traffic system going on.

Even a regular user becomes a 'camping bot' when sitting there for hours on end.

Money trees - they can come and pick something, or if it's not there, leave and come back later - fine. I have no issue with those. Freebie stuff - fine. It's of no use to system abusers. I don't know what a money orb is. If it encourages people to sit there 24/7, the people sitting there 24/7 can get banned, I could care less about the money orb. It's the practise, not the motivation. We have grid inactivity logout for a reason.

Sitting there 24/7 when the grid's performance is crap and *my* experience and that of tens of thousands of other is impacted - that's not broadly offending?

Or hammering search with a bot until it is unusable for human use - is that not broadly offending? Is it somehow less offending if people don't connect the dots?

The bots and the campers are straining the system, exacerbating multimillion dollar engineering issues that we *all* suffer from - and for what, thirty cents a day maybe.

Campers who can afford broadband and high powered videocards can *not* whine to me about no money in SL. Sorry, but that's bullshit. It's enough they are let in to look around for free.

Obscure foreign country that doesn't do Paypal? Well, do some graphics work for somebody or something - but don't destroy the grid experience for tens of thousands, simply because Tardistan doesn't do major credit cards or Paypal. There are deserving barefoot orphans in the Andes without computers too, but I wouldn't destroy our functional grid performance just so they could have a minimal SL experience. Let alone a DSL-running adult with a high end computer.

As for people and their marketing - suicides and executions and porn on national television would surely attract interest too. Extreme, but it illustrates the point: there has to be a limit or it's an instant tragedy of the commons. Marketing abuse in the form of email spam, web pop-ups and grid camping needs to be shut down.

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I don't want to hear anyone complaining about the grid not working, ever, and then back up camping.

It's sort of like a dozen people hitching their car onto the back of yours, and then whining about your car not going fast enough - make your engine perform, perform, perform - but ooooh no, never end their parasitic abuse, that's sacrosanct. Doesn't fly with me.

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Travis, I hear what you are saying - but that's not a reason not to tackle the camping problem. We just need to be vigorous and punish exploiters. Making littering unlawful doesn't perfectly clean the streets - but it sure helps.

This truly does work. I don't have people pulling crap on my private estate, because there's no way to 'game' an estate manager. They generally know better than to try 'stupid stunt B' when 'stupid stunt A' was caught, regardless of how novel and different. By the time you get to C or D, most people get the idea and all the problems are much more manageable.

Popular places will be especially easy to check out for exploitation. Abuse in this case would be designed to raise the profile of the abuser.

Popular places will be especially easy to check out for exploitation. Abuse in this case would be designed to raise the profile of the abuser.

...I'm somewhat concerned with some of the views expressed here about popular places, they're a drain on resources, so let's stop people having successful venues? Surely that's not the correct attitude to be taking. Some places that attract a lot of traffic are genuinely popular and have no camping or gaming of the traffic system going on.

Well said, Desmond, all of it - but this bit really rang the cherries for me:


Now that LL has taken the leap of adding human intervention to the mix, it creates an unprecedented opportunity - dare I say responsibility - to at least weed out the cheaters from any chance of inclusion in this very desirable group. LL damn well better take advantage of it and make "lack of blatant camping in any form" one of the criteria for being Showcased.

Speaking of which, since the extortionist ad farms were deemed AR'able, have most people noticed a difference? My point is that what with all the thousands of ARs LL receives every day, now including banks, casinos, ad farms, age play, griefing, billing problems, etc, are they really going to have time to respond/act upon traffic botting ARs as well?

Sitting there 24/7 when the grid's performance is crap and *my* experience and that of tens of thousands of other is impacted - that's not broadly offending?

Or hammering search with a bot until it is unusable for human use - is that not broadly offending? Is it somehow less offending if people don't connect the dots?

The bots and the campers are straining the system, exacerbating multimillion dollar engineering issues that we *all* suffer from - and for what, thirty cents a day maybe.