Bot Farms for Traffic?

I was thinking earlier today when I was sitting in my rig at my daughters school waiting to pick her up thinking about her future. If SL is any indication of what the "3D web" is going to be then I will drop my ISP and never allow my daughter to get on the internet until she is 18+.


Just think, walking around a website seeing other people there and thinking "yay" they are looking at the same thing I am! Then all of the sudden they ask your ASL, your phone number and WebCam location and when can we "have some fun"......

In the 2D web we have now I can pretty much filter out all adult stuff and what slips through is not someone asking to have some virtual loving with my 10.5 year old daughter....
Sigh......

Can we get these picks sent to the Media somehow?
Bot owners are obviously so greedy they can't see that if there weren't 10,000 bots online ruining peoples experience, there probably would be another 10,000 real people spending money inworld.
Perhaps if we spread them about inworld?

Who would you send it to?

The gaming rags are far too cozy with LL to post such negative commentary, Wagner Au is an LL puppet who has the poor taste to not get paid by them, the issue is either too complex or not press-releasey enough for AP or UPI. Adam Reuters is too involved in promotion of SL. But primarily, the more reputable the news organization the more they would be loathe to open themselves to the liability of claiming that SL is egregiously lying on very well supported, but statistically extrapolative data from this and other posters.

The only way I actually see this getting any play at all is to form a grassroots organization, issue a press release, and then get prepared for the libel suit and account banning from LL. This doesn't sound like much fun. But then again PR and media were never my strong suit.

Another (and more permanent) alternative that I posted a while-back is implementing a tag-based search:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-172

Such a system is relatively simple (though still at least a week's work to do well) and allows searches to be done by relevance much more reliably. It also provides the facility for LL to charge per keyword more realistically for those who wish to list large amounts of keywords. This means that keyword abuse would cost money, as well as potentially risk you having keywords banned from your parcel if they are irrelevant.

Added to my scum list as with the place in this other thread:
/327/38/223748/1.html



http://scumofsl.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=5

If you know of other places post them on my site or PM me there location and I will add them myself.

Any parcel/sim with traffic over 40,000 and probably half those under 40,000.

50 bots... 50 campers... exact same thing except that the bots are using fewer grid resources and they don't encourage the freeloading camper mentality.

Camper bots sure. Harder to prove though. Bot farms are easy to take a pic and expose. Many places don't want to associate themselves with campers and will do the bot farm ans try to hide them to make themselves not look so bad. Like the thread I linked above.

The more we expose them the less they might try. I really wish LL would not allow more than a couple alts on at the same time. However they like the high numbers to throw around. Have to take the matter into our own hands I guess.

LOL! They look like refugies! Poor noobs!Anyone wants to bring them something from the soup kitchen?

Ok, on a serious note... those are ridiculous practices. It does make me wonder if those places actually make money. I guess if they're the owners' alt, he/she does not need to pay them?

Oh, and how did you find out about those? I've seen places that had high traffic count, but didn't see any camping. Do those bots show up in the map?

Someone PM'ed me another. Added to my site.

I look at the large map with lots of green dots and it shows you how many avatars are in the sim. If I can't find them all I go into the sky or under ground. Hit ctrl>alt>t at the sametime and it shows invisable primes in red. They seem to like to hide them in invisable cubes.

They will rotate the shifs the bots are on also. They are not there all the time.

Where is my bowling bowl!?

I always check the map before teleporting and NEVER go if there are that many avatars at the destination. While many may go because it "must" be a popular spot, I think only of the lag and continue to the next pick in the search.

actually its not as there are fewer premium accounts than basic and non pay.
to me, traffic means jack now. after a while you will see so as well. yes i have been pulled in by the large numbers in search, and once there was disappointed by the content. your best bet is to explore, check old threads here regardin who has the best content and word of mouth.

Might help if you didn't list 'adplotters' as being extortionate when they have their land clearly not set for sale.

well CNN is here now, do a story for them.

I only added ones that DO have their land set for sale. They were found on the Land Sales list in search. If thay changed it after the fact oh well.

EDIT: I do have one ad plotter that has land not set for sale. However his intentions are obvious.

Also only said ONE was extortionist. He has the most 16sq meter plots for sale at or above 50000L each. The others are just scum ad plotters.

I've seen SL go from a fun place to a cheater's paradise and am sick of it.

But! I did some playing around with the new Search. In the old one--if you do a search
on places-----Practically the entire first page is full of inflated traffic numbers from Bot's--all you have to do is look at the map and you can see them all.

However--in the new search if you do use the same search critiera- you get an entirely
different list. I am praying that that the Alt Traffic scam does not work there. There is no way that ANYBODY can say that padding traffic and cheating everybody else is anything but wrong.

Interestly, I read some things about how the Goggle search applicance works on the net this moring------what I found there, is this kind of scamming it can actually backfire! So what I am hoping is that if someone creates a bunch of alts and fills them with "inbound links" (which is what the New Search uses) that they actually hurt themselves.

It looks to me that "slow and steady" growth in these links is what is the most valuable way to increase visibility. Too many at once throw's a flag from what I read.

If anybody else has any information about this I would sure like to know and I think so would all the other honest people in SL.

I'm sorry I did not save the link--but you can get it by doing a google search. I started with a search on "metaverse" and it led me to the site that explained in some depth how the appliance actually works.

In the works.

Theres no need to have 50 avatars to create good traffic.. having some 20-30 full time is enough to create effective traffic, since many people will teleport to a place which is listed high in the search also and make traffic higher. 200-300 $ isn't that much compared to what people pay for the classifieds.. people pay far more for those: top classifieds vary in price between 50.000-200.000 a week, thats about 800 US$ - 3200 US$ a month.. compared to that having 20-30 camping bots is not unreasonable priced. Not that it will matter much in the new search now.

I guess with the new search camping will reduce a lot.. but one has to wonder.. will it reallybe good for SL economy? About half of my customers are 'no payment' users, and many I talked to earned their skin, hairs and clothes with camping. Who will pay for them getting their items now?

Still not as bad as an equivalent number of real campers, with their full-rendering clients running. I'm not supporting the practice. Just pointing out that before there were bot dens there were camping bots, and before that there were campers. Its not like the bot farms are suddenly crossing a new line... are they? This kind of deception started long ago. This is a refinement of the same lying game.

If you look at what's happening right now with the new search, you will figure that is exactly the opposite. Since the traffic has not been eliminated from the search engine scoring but it now counts less (about 30% of total scoring) you need approx +300% of traffic to reach the same level with the new search engine.. and it means? All the "smart" lands already increased the camping chairs (in number) ...and the bots as well.
So the new search amplified the "problem" ...well if it is a problem.

Cool, be good to see what the real companies think of their names being used in adfarmer fake ads.

I'm currently wondering what the outcome of a campaign to raise awareness of SL's false traffic statistics would achieve.
If business knew that SL's "impressive" account number is actually a complete lie and that increasing online resident numbers are inflated by campers and bot-farms then they would not be so interested in SL. Even the threat of it might be enough to make LL realise that they can't just keep lying to people with their traffic statistics on the front-page, especially when all unrestricted free accounts and easily gamed search engines do is hurt SL for the people that actually participate in it.

Hi Haravikk, i've made a post about this specific issue (how the traffic counts on the sales), it's specific about in-world business, but it is Italian... actually i have no time to translate it (...it'a a way long). Anyway to resume: i'm actually managing with some private SIM, some of them are strictly linked to RL business (the "center" of em is a "social SIM" ...consolidate by the years and the firs born in Italy), we decided to not have any camping/bots nor any "false traffic", the reason it is easy: when someone TP there he expect to find "rea ppl", because you go there to "talk" with other ppl (there's no other reason to come...). The impact of traffic on RL business/evaluation actually is almost ZERO: maye in the past you would have taken some advantage, but actually when a RL brand decides to contact us for some reasons, it's because of our consolidate business in RL (they doesn't care at all about those numbers in SL). To resume: SL traffic to attract RL business, actually (for us) doesn't work at all.

The situation changes completely when you talk about in-world business (like having a shop etc.). I won't comment my products, but well they aren't bad (trust me.. lol), i were almost "unknown" on SL even if i adopted advertising (forum posting, SLX, onrez, sharing freebies, talk with ppl, etc.) ...because all the others were using bots/camping to have a better place on the search (this includes the old and the new search engine). Then i did the same.. and guess what? I'm selling +800% more ...and that happened from a day to another! And this happens for one reason: i do good thing (otherwise i won't sell, traffic or not traffic...) but if ppl doesn't come to see what i build, they'll NEVER know! Now you would say: "...that's not a good excuses to goes on the 'bad' way just because anyone is doing the same..."; i agree! But how it is supposed to have a place in this business when anyone else takes "advantages"? I won't earn money (i have my RL job) but i would like at least to repay my fees... so i'm waiting the day that the traffic does count NOTHING on the search engine... that day we will be (including me) finally happy! <<< i'm not sure about this, because camping disappearing on SL would be an important "impact".