BOT places! List them here!

Affter being called lower then a griefer, and a thief by you, do you really think I feel like answering any of your questions?

And what I actually said was: "gets more sales at the expense of their competition which doesn't stoop to using exploits". You can't chop off the highlighted bit without signifcantly changing the meaning into something I never said.

Competing with others isn't wrong, competing by using questionable tactics (picks camping of any kind) is debatably unethical, competing by using exploits to increase ranking is inexcusable.

Where did you get that saying from? I've never heard it before. The only one I know is, "he who laughs last, laughs loudest" - or longest - not sure which.

How many more times do you want straight answers. How many times to you want to regurgitate the same old things. It's all been stated before. I went into the question and answer stuff with Cheyene, thinking that she was trying to get somewhere with it, but she wasn't. It just fizzled out when she switched to posting insults. Is your Q&A session going to be any different?

Yes.

No. You didn't ask me to expound on it, so I won't, except to say that the fact that you asked that question appears to indicate that you don't know much about the All search.

Who uses exploits? I'm not aware of any. Tell me about them, and I'll decide whether to use them or not.

Do you mean that having avatars on/over land is an exploit? Do you mean that paying for IBLs is an exploit? I suppose they are, if we see them as exploiting a situation. In that sense they could be called exploits. Is there something wrong with exploiting a situation to gain an advantage over the competition? Not in my book - or in the books of the business world - or in general.

Marcel put it exactly right in a recent post when he said that we use the tools that LL allows us to use. I can't see past that - sorry. If LL is against us using those tools, they could stop their use in an instant, by simply making a blog announcement. I know it's not what the anti-bots want, but I am happy to go along with LL on it.

Btw, my leaving off the end of your sentence didn't alter it's meaning at all.

Think of it as answering the type of simple questions that someone (for instance Bella) might ask in trying to understand the core issues here.
You would not be answering me as a person. You would be making a very simple easily understood statement of principle in front of a general audience.

I just don't believe the small-mindedness of some of you people.

To the very best of my knowledge, Bella is someone who has never met or spoken with either myself or Marcel. She is simply someone who read the thread and had an independant view of the subject, but you're going after her something wicked.

FFS, go after the people you think are doing wrong, if you feel the need to be abusive to anyone at all, and leave the others alone. Some of you are wrong in your heads.

Phil if you really thought that was a serious question now is the time to take that deep breathe again count to 10. I consider myself neither for or against your opinions, I understand arguments from both sides, but both parties seem to have gotten their knickers in a twist regarding this subject.

And you apparently are choosing to ignore the fact picks were there before all search was added later when picks were not part of any search metric.

You're injecting HTML into the places listing for your store which allows you to gain a higher ranking solely by targetting tags that GSA uses to determine "relevancy" and you created an interlinked web of parcels where each parcel's faked "popularity" boosts your store's ranking far more than any profile pick would which is the only legitimate option others have to create incoming links.

What? Was that supposed to make any sense in this discussion?

Only to point out arguing the current situation does not mean that the original use is not of importance.

You know like traffic was originally to measure popularity, but once it was gamed into uselessness LL switched to different means for search (as in search all).

Picks were originally places you liked and wanted to share in your picks.

Now it's being turned into a small set of paid advertisements.

I finally got the point of all this - you're all addicted to Mulberries aren't you?

That's not the subject of this thread, but it's something that you've been bursting to say ever since I told you about it. What surprises me is that it took you so long. From the day after I told you, I could see from your posts that you are a wholly untrustable person, Kitty, and any slight friendship we had was revoked by me back then. Luckily, I didn't tell you what the important discovery was at the time.

That might have gone above everyone else's heads. Some time ago, I told Kitty that I'd discovered two things concerning search, and I told her the details of one of them. I asked her not to tell anyone, but that's what she just described for all to see. Within a day or two of me telling her, she alluded to it in two posts, but she didn't actually spell it out. That's when I saw that she is untrustable. Luckily I'd decided at the time to keep the main one to myself, because it's very effective for high rankings. I've told 3 people about it since then, and I trust those people implicitly. I was right not to trust Kitty with the information, or it would have become common knowledge.

I hope you're happy now that you've finally blurted it out for all to see, Kitty. Clever girl.

Oh - I almost forgot. Yes, that is an exploit.

Yes, but Picks were screwed long ago as far as places you like are concerned. I'd guess that more than half of Picks are people, and the places where the pictures are taken are not intended to be Picks of places you like.

Since people keep saying that traffic and picks were introduced with a different intention, I will put in my 2 cents as well.

Yes, traffic was once ment as a way to measure popularity. Not the best way, but is was the intention.

Yes, Picks might once have had the functionality of showing what places you liked in SL, so also a way of measuring popularity.

And now the big BUT (one T ).
It might come as a surprise, but every system evolves. Every system needs to be tuned and developed during time, as things do change. Google search has been changed over and over again to get the best results. The google appliance probably will as well.

Traffic has not been a way to correctly measure popularity for long, maybe not even ever. So if I decide to fire up a handful of bots tomorrow, I do not change a thing: traffic is not a correct metric as far as popularity is concerned. Probably traffic as a metric for pupularity only worked in the early days, when SL was small enough.

Picks are in fact the same: The intention might have been to point out popular places, but it does not work well. Go to a busy place and check 50 profiles. How many of them just have stories about the avatars themselves, their families, and things they like to do? Without linking to any parcel at all? This is not new and did exist long before picks camping was introduced.

It does seem that things do only become problematic for people as soon as they see someone earns money with it. No one complained about the "abuse" of Picks like I mentioned, it became only abuse in the eyes of some people after it was used for business. Why would that be?

I took it as a pop at Bella - sorry that I made the mistake. I read it after reading 2 other people's pops at her, and I just saw as a third one. My apologies.

So basically you lied.

"Low Ethics Furniture" made it to this website

"various pics by various people" Torley Linden snapped one of the pictures.


[url=http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/ViewAlbum.aspx?id=1362
[/url]

Just a first time would be very nice thank you.
If I just keep asking the simple basic questions until you give a simple answer, then we won't fizzle out and readers can understand the basic positions of principle.


Excellent.
Would you therefore accept that LL's intention in 'traffic' was the presence of live users , and that measures such as traffic bots work against LL's intentions? They subvert the intention of the traffic metric.


I find your "No" to be intriguing.
I can picture LL's designers saying "People put places they like in their Picks. That's a good general measure of popularity. Let's make is a factor in search ranking."
You don't accept that?
Why do you think that LL made Picks a search factor?

Hoarding knowledge for self-enrichment (or using what you know for malicious intent) while meanwhile soaking up knowledge that is freely shared is contrary to community helping.

If you're so self-involved that you don't want to report an exploit that can be used for cross site scripting attacks because you're profitting off of it then that's your regretable choice. My choice was to verify that it would indeed work as such and then to report it to the appropriate Lindens.

As far as "trust" goes, noone should tell me they found an exploit and are actively using it for their own gain and expect me to not go ahead and report it, or to call them on it when they're pretending to be a saint who's playing entirely by the rules and doing no wrong.

Failing to report an exploit to LL and actively exploiting it on top of that should be a bannable offense as far as I'm concerned.

Remember Bragg?

Thank you Marcel for saying:
"Yes, traffic was once ment as a way to measure popularity. Not the best way, but is was the intention.

Yes, Picks might once have had the functionality of showing what places you liked in SL, so also a way of measuring popularity."

However, your BIG one misses the point.
The reason that traffic and picks are no longer a good measure of popularity as intended by LL is that some people have subverted the system for their own profit.
Your argument seems to be that because the systems have been subverted, then it's ok to subvert them.
Do you have shades of grey here?
For instance, do you think it will be OK to subvert any future system as long as somebody else has subverted it first?
Is it only the first person to subvert a system that can be faulted? Or maybe just the first 5 to do it?



Your point on picks does not stand up to inspection.
When people use Picks to talk about themselves and their friends, this does not have an effect on the popularity rankings of places.
The Picks are a section of a person's profile. A persons profile tells us about them and their interests.
"Hi. I'm X. My best friends are Y and Z. I really like the clothes in shop.A."
That would be an honest 'vote' for Shop.A and would work as LL intend.

However, if someone sets out to systematically buy Pick 'votes' then they are subverting the design. Once enough people do that, then Picks ceases to be an indicator of popularity.



Gaming traffic is like email spam.
It subverts and devalues the system for everybody apart from a few who are abusing it.

I didn't actually. I'd forgotten about that one. What I said wasn't true, but it wasn't a lie because I'd forgotten about it when I was writing the post. Also, my "Who uses exploits" questions were obviously not intended to suggest that I don't exploit things, as is clear from the rest of that post - the part that you omitted in the quote.

You've ignored the first time, and you want to regurgitate it.

Yes.

Yes.

No. LL could not have thought that Picks were a realistic representation of votes (popularity), because half of them at least (my estimate) were being used for personal things and not as favourite places. They couldn't possibly have not known that at the time.

The off-the-shelf system that they bought *needs* IBLs to work well, and LL used what they could to provide IBLs to it. It's as simple as that. Some of the Picks represent popular votes, but at least half of them don't, and they knew it.

They decided to use something for IBLs that was already mostly screwed for the 'popular votes' purpose. It's all they had that could provide a sufficient number of links. Picks camping is only a miniscule amount of the 'screwedness' of Picks. LL chose to use something that simply wasn't working for it.

And your point is? People shouldn't discover things that can be used to their advantage, and keep them to themselves? You can't be serious.

Exactly. Totally untrustable.

I agree. Nobody should trust you with anything. That's been made perfectly clear.

Nobody here is "pretending to be a saint". Actually, it's the anti-bots who are closer to that description than me