Traffic Alternatives - L$2000 Reward

In all the discussions about traffic, I'm seeing a lot of suggestions by a lot of people, and none of them work. Any system that you can code into SL for ranking places ultimately breaks down into calculating a number and putting the places with the highest number at the top. This means that any system that can be coded can be gamed. As a challenge to anyone and everyone, I'm offering 2000 lindens to the first person that can come up to a viable alternative to the current traffic metric that will be better than the current system.

Your idea has to (1) provide a programmable metric that should reasonably reflect the popularity of the place, (2) not be easily gamed, and (3) provide more information or better results to the searcher than the current traffic metric.

I think the current method is worth keeping. It's easy to skip the places that are obviously gaming the system, and it's also easy to avoid the places that are obviously empty.

I will respond to every idea posted here about why it won't work, why it won't provide more information/better results, or when they can expect to recieve my money.

There are already plenty of other discussions about whether to just give up trying to rank places by popularity. Please keep those discussions on the other threads and save this one for ideas on alternatives that would attempt to list places by some measure of popularity.

Who's got some ideas?

Editted to add: After paying the first $2000 prize, I offered $1000 for a second idea that I thought would work. Now I've been given another $3000 prize by someone that wants to help come up with more ideas. Now we've got $2000 for anyone coming up with the second workable idea that I agree with, $1000 for someone that significanly improves the first prize idea (post number 89), and $1000 for someone that can convince me that the first prize idea won't work.

Sorry, I really don't have any ideas other than LL needs to give better search options like a lot of retail sites do. Allowing the user to filter search results better like most populous to least or whatever.

I do not see the new system any better than the old system. The new system is being gamed with profile picks and object listings the same as the traffic metric is being gamed by bots and camping. The only difference between the two is the new search returns more irrelevent results if you are searching for a truely busy place to visit.

I like the idea given by Cortex Draper:

/327/99/256222/1.html#post1969767


Only count traffic for premium members. I wouldn't use just concierge members though - all premiums. Since this will drastically cut down the number people in the count the numbers will go to the floor. Because of that, make the count include the past X number of days, perhaps 30 (tweak to suit).

--Hugsy

Keep the current system but allow only premium accounts to contribute to the traffic number?

It would cost less than $2 US per day to run 10 traffic premium account traffic bots with the yearly $72 US charge. When you include the stipend and tier bonus, it becomes even more negligible and may even result in a profit for running the bots.

Get out of my head...

See post #5.

Yea, maybe so, but then LL will also be making more money and can hire people who know what they are doing and quit having to look to the community for answers that they then ignore?

See post #6

In my professional opinion all traffic stats should be eliminated as they no longer serve any useful purpose. I mean no traffic anywhere at no time for anyone. Once they served a useful purpose, but once people started gaming the system, it all became meaningless.

Let the SL businesses do the same thing as first life companies do and that is to compete against each other in a fair and equal manner without the government (SL in this case) taking part.

Whatever traffic system SL comes up with there will be plently of people figuring out a way to game it so it seems to me that just eliminating the entire thing is the way to go.

I agree with that, best traffic system is no traffic system

The money they take in is almost entirely wiped out by the loss of stipend and tier revenues.

Stipends do not cost LL real money.

As most people, you are focusing on the wrong part of the search system.

The part of the search system that needs work is that there are no options available to the searcher to refine the search.

If the searcher had options to refine search, the searcher can exclude elements that are there to solely game the search.

Here's the idea. You can have it for free. The search system should allow the searcher to use combinations of "and" "or" and "not". I'm not a tech person, but to the extend that every other search engine on the internet allows the searcher to use combinations of "and" "or" and "not", my guess is that it is technically feasible.

I don't want traffic to go away. I don't run bots or provide camping. My numbers are piddly for various reasons but they are honest and I like checking them on a daily basis. If traffic goes away, then I have to run visitor counter scripts. I'd rather the system just do it and tell me the numbers. In fact, I'd like to see traffic information enhanced (i.e., who stopped by, how long, etc...)

--Hugsy

OK. I can concede that. It could be argued that stipends reduce the demand for the lindens that Supply Linden sells, but there's no need to go that far. I still say that using Premium Accounts only in traffic does not produce a better result than the current method. Anyone can run 40 Premium traffic bots for about the cost of a cheap sandwich per day. That would be no problem for established businesses already making decent money in SL, but would prevent many new businesses from starting up. You could argue that the cost is still low for new businesses to do the same thing, but for many people, $2 US per day for 10 bots is a lot for someone trying to get a business off the ground. You can say that for anyone with a computer and fast internet access it shouldn't be a problem, but there are many places to get that kind of access for free.

Are today's bots premium members? I really don't know. I don't spend my time seeking them out.

Perhaps, LL could put a limit on the number of premiums per CC? Household address?

A bit off topic but perhaps LL should implement CAPTCHA when logging in and out log-out anyone on-line for 8 hours regardless of activity. Or instead of logging out the account right away, present a window with a CAPTCHA and if that's not addressed within X minutes, then auto-logout.

Just throwing stuff out there.

--Hugsy

i can earn L$2000 in 6.94 days of 24/7 camping, and then earn that much the next week, and so on.

just saying.

Work backwards from your supposition.

*Who abuses the traffic system? Business owners.

*Why do they abuse it? Because high placement in search results generally means more bodies in their store and higher sales.

*Why do shoppers go to those stores? They have to in order to see if there are any products that they might want to buy.

So, the real problem is that shoppers have to go to stores in order to view the products. Eliminate this step and you elimate the unneeded teleport to stores that don't have products the shopper is interested in and you make it easier to connect a buyer with a merchant carrying something the buyer wants. Everybody wins.

You can still keep traffic and still use it to order search results, but shoppers can bypass the whole system and decided for themselves based on the products where they want to go and shop instead of trying to find a needle in a metaversal haystack of search results that may or may not relevant.

Solve the real problem and traffic becomes a non-issue.

Product search results should be delivered in total random order every time so they can't be gamed and shoppers should be able to narrow results to color or price range.

That is a very interesting idea. I think it would be easy to code the bot clients to log in again everytime they get kicked out. I also think the CAPTCHA thing would be extremely disliked by people actually using SL, but it's an interesting idea. 8 hours is a really long time to let a bot run, but having frequent CAPTCHA requests would be really annoying. Making the CAPTCHA thing pop up after an hour would knock off a lot of idle users that may not be back for a while. That may help with some server load issues, but may not be worth the trouble caused by upset users that were multitasking while running SL.

As for limiting the number of Premium accounts per payment info, you'd have to make it a pretty low number. I've got 4 credit cards, and I may get a paypal account soon. Even if you limit it to 2 per account, I could easily get 10. I'm not running bots, just saying what would easily be possible for someone that isn't even trying hard.


BTW: I'm not trying to be an ass to anyone in this thread. The way I look at problems and possible solutions is to quickly see the problems and sub-problems and possible pitfalls. It can sometimes cause problems when people think I'm crapping all over their ideas, but the goal in my mind is to identify the problems as soon as possible so they can be solved.

This is another good idea, but would only apply to places selling products. We still need something that works for places in general.

And returning products in random order means that the most likely result will be a BIAB product.

I agree. All searchs should be forced to use a filter. If I decide to search for "Apple", I should have to choose a category like, Place, Store, Product, Classefied, Profile, etc... No "all" searches. Then once I get the listings there should be even more filters to refine the list to make the results more relevent to my particular needs.

7 days to earn what one could earn in 8 minutes in RL...This is why I don't understand camping. sure I did it my first week and thought I was rich with those 8 lindens I had saved up.

Today I tp'd to a store that was shamelessly plugged in another RA thread, to see their great store they raved about. Right at the TP landing there were 4 people sitting on a bench, and since the camping hovertext hadn't rezzed yet, I thought they were hanging out. I said Hi.. no response... I made some rude comments about sleeping campers... again no response. I wanted to offer them 5L just to stop camping and go exploring! Last time I follow a shameless plug to see their great architecture

I don't understand bots and traffic cheats, but wouldn't there be an easier solution similar to unique visitors vs. page hits on websites? Every day my welcome mat tells me who stopped by, and if says 12 but my traffic is at 300, then I can estimate the real visits vs. time spent.

If you go with unique visitors, bot runners will set up a client to constantly log different avatars in and out. This would put a bigger hit on the resources than just leaving them logged in to begin with.

If she was running 10 camping bots, she'd get 20,000L/week, or close to $300 US per month. It wouldn't take long to pay for a second computer to run just the bots, and then buy a private island and have your tier covered for life. All for free. That's why people run camping bots.