BOT places! List them here!

But it's not genuine, popularity traffic, and it falls into the same category that you and others have been vehemently arguing against - non customer traffic. You said that it's an exchange of values, but what values? The campers gets money - that's value. What does the camp pad owner get? Traffic. S/he's paying for traffic to improve the rankings - almost always. You can't have it both ways. Either influencing the traffic numbers is wrong, or it isn't, and camping is almost always to influence the traffic numbers.

Sorry, but you're mistaken about that. Google became very popular because of it's uncluttered front page and the superiority of its results, and it achieved the popularity by word of mouth. After it became the top search engine, they added AdWords. And, btw, search engines don't have a choice about differentiating paid results from organic results. It's either the law or the rules - I forget which. But whichever it is, it came about because a major engine was blending them too well. End of history lesson.

I agree with the first part that completely, but that's not what the discussion has been about. Nobody can say that my place is not *very* relevant to the results where it's ranked highly - it is supremely relevant. The discussion is about how such places get to rank highly.

As for the second part, it's *you're* idea that the goal of a search engine is to avoid what you said, but it depends what you mean by "subvert". If you mean getting relevant places/webpages higher up the rankings for relevant search queries, then you are mistaken as far as actual search engines are concerned.

It wouldn't bother me a bit if camping was done away with as I think traffic bots should be, but they are quantitatively different. I don't see camping as a particularly legitimate tactic for enticing people to visit a parcel, but the traffic it generates is created by actual visitors who made a conscious choice to go there based on an attraction being offered. I'm not sure I'd agree with it, but I think a reasonable argument can be made that it's a legitimate attraction. No such argument exists for traffic bots. They add no value to someone visiting the parcel and have no purpose other than to deceive.

Wow, that's a bit of a stretch to me. Especially since most campers are bots anyway.

Personally I don't see a difference between traffic bots and camper bots at all, they are both used for the same purpose, good or bad, however you want to define it.

FaTeke

I think it's a matter of disclosure...

Hmmm.. I wonder if it can be said that traffic bots are actually better then camping ones. I don't know the toll on performance that the scripts in camping chairs have on the sim. Does anyone know if there is much?

Depends on if they use the hovertext and no payout trick... or the actual camping script.

To many the camp pads are bit more honest, it's till inflating the numbers... but you're paying for it. Where bots are free

One reason many are turning to the hud systems for boosting traffic, they know the person hopping in is a real person since the hud can't be automated.

Corrections:

(1) They deceive nobody, as has been pointed out already in this thread - and not by me.

(2) They certainly do add value for people. Without them, many people wouldn't reach the store, and so many people a very glad they found it. They don't add such value for everyone, but that's not the point. However, I understand what you mean.

I wonder, with the recent succesful suit launched by Blizzard against the maker of Glide ( a "bot" program for World of Warcraft) could Linden Labs sue the guy who wrote the "bot" interface for second life?

Though to me Linden Labs definitly dosn't consider Bots a problem as much as Blizzard did.

Linden Labs seems to want this to be a game about making real life money at any cost or method, rampent open market capitalism with no rules. Screw your neighbours, customers or competitors any way you want... its the Linden Labs way.

Generally speaking, avs that are in view range of other avs use a lot more resources than avs that are out of everyone's view range. So traffic bots that are placed high in the sky consume much less in the way of resources than any av on the ground, such as camping bots - especially since they log in up there and don't even need the static textures that are at ground level.

Er.. The SL viewer is open source - they'd sorta have to sue themselves, too. Or you might mean libsl, which Lindens participated in making.

Ah, and from pictures I have seen often bots don't completely rez so that would be even less. Thanks, Phil.

Thanks to you too Mort. Good to see you again. I guess in my mind I am more of a seek out the exploit type. When you said that about some people finding camp pads more honest my first thought was "Ok, but what if the owner of the pads/chairs are just putting their own bots on the things most of the time" Then they are using script resources and as Phil said viewer resources.

@ Kyllie: Bots were made by Libsl. A Linden blessed group of programmers who were allowed to reverse engineer the viewer before it was ever made open source. The idea was for them to debug stuff and help LL find flaws and exploit potential in the viewer. Well, they did find a lot of stuff and the bot was a side project. It would be very hard for LL to sue them since they had full reign to do as much as they could with the viewer.

I can agree with you up until your last eight words.

Traffic is what Linden Lab defines it to be.

I, as a customer, have no legitimate expectation that Traffic should stand for anything other than what Linden Lab defines it to be.

Traffic bots defy no Linden Lab rules.

From my perspective- and I'm usually the customer, and rarely the merchant- Traffic is a mysterious, arbitrary hinderance to my Search attempts for products anyway.

I can't blame a merchant for using the few tools available to the merchant to deal with the arbitrary mechanism of Traffic.

I have never felt cheated when going to someone's store, looking for a product, and found people camping there. Since I would have preferred that Traffic not be included in my Search at all, I do not feel deceived at all that the Traffic number has been manipulated. I didn't want to just go to the high Traffic places anyway.

It is the mechanism of Traffic that is unfair to merchants, and customers. Anger at merchants who cope the best they can with an arbitrary system is misplaced anger.

And quite frankly, at least to this particular consumer, it seems childish to see some merchants hurling accusations of deception at other merchants who openly acknowledge that they are manipulating the Traffic numbers with bots.

By the way, my own particular coping mechanism for the unhelpful Second Life Search engine- when it comes to locating products- is that I don't use Search to find products. I use slexchange.com. It's much more consumer-friendly.

I guess this is just a morality debate and, like all morality debates will probably never end. To say that traffic bots are not dishonest or that they're some clever marketing idea or that they somehow provide value to customers is, IMO, just absurd. I really don't get how anybody who's put any thought into this can honestly say those things.

/me applauds Chip, and other business owners who don't try to game the system. It's nice to see that there are people out there that can see beyond "is this strictly legal?".

*sigh*
There is little danger of me ever thinking that.
I have never in the past thought that.
I don't think it now.
I can't see that I would ever think that in the future.

Improving search rankings by honest methods is completely legitimate.
- Improve content and structure
- Gain reputation such that others link to you as relevant to their content, and not in a bogus network of sites whose sole purpose is to improve ranking
- Pay to get ranked in the sections that are clearly ranked by payment.

Know what I find Ironic, Ive been to both Phils and Chips store...

when I rented a house I asked some friends where to get good furniture and one gave me a LM and suggested Phils store...(though I dont think I ever bought from any from him)

Chips store I stumbled upon in search looking for fantasy skins one day....(did buy a few clothing bits)

Heh.

What I find ironic is that I actually found something in this thread I agree with Phil on

Sort of makes them like Cylons.

Yes, but just not as cool somehow.

So the traffic bot user gets word of mouth reference, and the non-bot user gets found in search. Coincidental I'm sure, but still makes me chuckle a little.

I just don't agree. If I were to go to a store based on it's traffic number, I don't, but if I did, and I saw a product that I liked at a price that was agreeable, what's the problem? I got my product and the merchant got his sale. if the product isn't to my liking, I don't buy it and go somewhere else. The merchant loses a sale. I wasted a few minutes of my time, that's it.

More of my thoughts on the subject:

If LL were really happy with the situation of gaming results then they would just have a business channel available where you could pay for more traffic or better results. That would legitamize the whole practice of getting the traffic or results placing you wanted. Then nobody could argue that it was not honest or against the rules and bot owners could happily retire lots of no longer useful bots.
Of course LL would probably have to put a disclaimer in the search or on the website somewhere saying that the search results were not truly generated by popularity, relevance etc...

However when faced with the issue, they choose not to legitimize this practice and give those using it a more optimized method of achieving the same or better results for them.
No instead they decide to deprecate traffic and not provide an optimized way of paying for placings with the new system.

Picks are not optimized in my opinion as they still rely on convincing people to carry your place. Optimized would be a straight pay for placement.

So you have to ask why? Could that be an indication that LL do not like people to be able to buy or decide their own placings?
I mean it isn't as though LL would not benefit in a big way as a price war amongst vendors broke out to get the top listings, the prices would only keep going up and up and up and LL would be laughing all the way to the bank.

Of course the little guy would disappear from anywhere near the top of the results so perhaps LL do care about it and do want the system to be reasonably fair for as many people as possible but are unable to find a really good exploit proof method.
Maybe they hope that if the effort is significant enough then most people will not exploit the system. Of course though just like other schemes that try to provide some security against being exploited, nothing can ever be completely unexploitable but people who want to use a system in the way that it was setup to be used are naturally going to abhor the actions of those seeking to discover and use exploits.

By the way you can often tell when a system is setup to be used one way or another by the effort needed to use either way. In this case, one way requires multiple bots to be logged in continuously in addition to normal activities and the other requires nothing to be done above normal activities.

Also remember people who find and use exploits in games and computer systems all over the world are never hailed as visionary people with uber marketing ability, no they are seen as criminals for the most part regardless of whether they have actually broken a law. Once there was a time when using computer exploits was not a crime, today it is. Today exploiting traffic or gaming new search placements will not get you banned, tomorrow it might.

You're right, traffic is what LL defines it to be, and by their own admission they consider traffic bots an exploit. Traffic is supposed to represent popularity of a parcel. If most of the traffic is faked, it no longer serves the purpose it was designed for. That LL doesn't want to get into an arms race should in no way be mistaken for tacit approval. I've no doubt they would tell you the same thing.

Alright, but it sounded a bit like you were against any and all actions to improve search rankings.

Just a little off-topic...

You don't optimise Picks and things like that. You optimise your webpage. Gaining Picks is a part of optimising it, as are other things, but it's the webpage itself that is being optimised. Having said that, we can't fully optimise it because we don't know the exact algorithm, but what can do is push it up the rankings by using the 'optimising elements', for want of a better phrase.