Traffic Alternatives - L$2000 Reward

That's right! The averages really don't actually play out neatly. The benefit to us is the fluctuations.
If someone could have 100 bots on a parcel, with a 1 in 100 chance of one of these bots being counted, there is still no guarantee that any of them would be counted, for days or even weeks on end.
If averages did work out neatly then indeed nothing would change.

Right now, the bot/camper runners have a certainty. If they keep avatars on the parcel, the traffic score absolutely will go up. With traffic as a factor in Search, they will consistently day after day get ranked higher than others.
If the metric is based on a small random percentage of logins, then such certainty disappears.

In the long run of course (over years?) nothing will have changed "on average".
However day-to-day there will have been randomness in results.
The results will not have been completely random. They will have been influenced by avatar activity.

The suggestion of using a small random sample is is not that the system should be "fair". The suggestion is that it would give people who are getting some traffic an opportunity to get exposure in the first page or so of search results. Right now, with absolute relative traffic as a metric, they have no chance of that.

The only way to game such a system would be to have a huge number of bots on a parcel, but that's not possible in SL.

This is completely not true. If you had 24 groups of 10 bots each, and cycled them through every hour, you would average 2.4 hours of counted traffic every day. That will be much better than most places that are not running bots and would only have 10 bots logged in at any time. If you used more groups and cycled them more frequently, you would be very close to the 2.4 total every day. And it's already extremely possible.

They're valid ideas, but I still don't think it would work. Credit cards and Paypal accounts are not accepted as actual Identity Verification. Age verification is just a subset of identity verification since you can't know that I'm telling the truth about my age unless you know I am the same person that I claim to be. Based on what people are reporting about the identity verification results, I think it would be easy for someone to make a bunch of alts. Business owners wouldn't have to be the ones doing it either. Someone could start up a business to provide traffic to businesses, and the business owner would have no way of knowing how many actual people were behind the various avatars used. It would also be easy to program camping systems to stop paying people after they've hit their daily contribution to the traffic number, and equally easy for campbot runners to have their bots tp around to different places every few hours.

Based on the kinds of bots that are already out there, it should be pretty easy to get them to do the things you were talking about.

Unfortunately, counting the TPs would treat people that leave a place shortly after they arive the same as the people that find an enjoyable location to spend a few hours.

No. The games I'm looking for ALL have payouts, but whether a good player can actually expect to leave with more money than they started with comes down to a lot of factors that aren't searchable. Places that attract a lot of players are places that players can often win.

You can apply the same logic to entertainment venues. Places that have good entertainment will be the places that draw a good crowd. You can't really have your search engine look for good jazz, but sorting by the traffic metric will give you a good idea where to find it.


You are right that it will always be popular to game popularity. That's one of my main points in starting this thread. The game that we currently are faced with is very transparent, and it's easy to skip past the worst offenders and use the rest of the list.

Imposing the constraint that it can't be easily gamed was another one of my initial criteria.

The tags idea is what we get with the new All search.

This has nothing to do with verification of any kind. I really don't know why you keep bringing that up.

Each credit card you have that was issued by a bank will have one thing in common: your name. You can't just fill in any random name along with your payment information, it won't accept since the name has to match the name of the person the card was issued to.

Once more: this has nothing to do with age verification. It's about the fact that LL has your RL name when you put payment information on file. Each of your payment verified alts will have your RL name in common so you have a way to uniquely identify an individual across multiple accounts.

It doesn't matter if you have 500 alts, only one will count for traffic since all 500 alts are on record as belonging to the same *individual*.

(The fact that two people might have the same name and would clash doesn't impact anything. It's just one less person count but doesn't skew the results in any significant way and you're "tracking" alts for statistical purposes only so you can err on the side of caution)

Yes, it's easy to stop paying, but you need more unique campers and alts won't work for the reasons I already outlined three times. You'd need 8 times more camping humans than you normally would from a much smaller pool (assuming you cap at 3 hours). There's no guarantee someone will be waiting to take up the spot, and the humans that do camp will have to deal with diminished returns (three hours and they manually need to find a new camping spot) which will make some give up on it entirely.

You actually brought up another benefit that hadn't occurred to me: if someone has 20 payment verified campbots that roam camping sites and camp, only 1 of those bots would actually contribute traffic at most but the parcel owner has no way of knowing whether anyone contributes traffic or not. Campbot runners would actually *help* make camping irrelevant since they'd camp without actually giving any traffic at all but still get paid for it.

I don't know why you keep bringing up age verification. I'm not talking about age verification. I'm talking about identity verification.

If you can actually show that LL accepts a credit card as valid identity verification, I'll count it as a winning idea.

It doesn't have anything to do with verification in any way, it's simply about finding the most unique piece of data that LL has on an account that's least prone to faking.

If your name is John Doe, that's the name the credit card will have been issued to and that's the name LL will have. If you register an additional 5 alts with 5 different cards, all 6 accounts will still have "John Doe" in the name column since your bank isn't going to issue you a card under any name but your own.

It doesn't even have to be John Doe, you can hash the name into a unique numeric identifier. If 2 payment verified accounts log on that happen to share the same identifier (be it name, or a hash value based on name) only one's traffic will actually count.

At no point is it really important whether you're truly John Doe... you could be Jane Doe and using your significant other's credit card but that doesn't matter since the name is simply being used as a unique id, it doesn't have to be factual and that's why it has nothing to do with identity verification, it doesn't matter.

Yes, if you use your own card, your spouse's, your child's and a parent's then you'd have 4 accounts that are considered to be unique and can be used to game traffic, but the number of alts you can get that way without starting to commit actual identity theft is quite small and the advantage of only 3 extra accounts is much reduced.

Did that make sense? Or are we just talking past each other still?

You are still talking about identity verification. You are trying to assign accounts to the real person running them. The point that I've been focussing on is that LL doesn't accept a CC as valid ID verification.

But the true point to be made is that they COULD accept it for this specific purpose. You could hash up the account name and/or billing address into a unique identifier and apply it to any verified accounts that I made. It would be dangerous to pay campers because the land owner wouldn't know how many alts the camper had logged in simultaneously. It should make traffic bots much less affective because of the requirements involved in legitimately getting the extra accounts. Even if you left a couple logged in all the time that counted separately, it wouldn't be nearly as big a boost as people currently get, giving places with legitimate traffic a much better chance to compete.

I'm going to think about this one some more. If I can't think of a reason to believe it won't work by tomorrow night, you win.

For anyone else, even if I pay Kitty, I'll give $1000 for second place to the next idea that is significantly different from this one that may also work. I want every plausible idea that people can think of to be listed here.

Duh!
OK, so I had just finished a long tiring RL day

Yes. The way to game the small random sample regime would be to continually log bots out and log new ones in. You get more tickets in the lottery that way.

What would be good about that?
Right now, a large number of avatars logged in from the same IP could either be a bot cluster, or it could be a legit group from a commercial or educational organisation.
Even if all the avatars from an IP were in the same SL location, it still might be a legit meeting or classroom.
If the logins from an IP are constantly cycling, and particularly if they are doing that 24/7, then it's more likely the profile of a bot-runner.

What would be the point of identifying bot-runners by activity profile?
Perhaps not much point if LL don't actually want to lose the inflated numbers brought about by bot runners.
If LL really wanted to ban the gaming of traffic, they could simply have one person sit down for a few hours, hit the visit the high-traffic parcels, eject and warn the owners.


Our problem is that although LL have apparently begun to realise that current 'popularity' rating is sub-optimal, they don't want to do anything that would reduce login numbers.
Check out my sig. LL would prefer, for instance, that we go through asset and transaction server hell rather than they would restrict logins.


How about a compromise?
If it is so that traffic-gaming bots are low-lag, then they are not a problem in themselves.
The problem comes from people becoming disillusioned and frustrated because Search sends them to places that should be hopping due to greatness/coolness, but in reality are generic to bad and populated by bots.

What if there were (yet another) flag on a parcel?
"This parcel uses campers and/or bots - Yes/No"
If a parcel flags 'No' and then uses bots, it's a TOS offence and a mandatory exclusion from Search index for a time period initially and rising to permanent for repeat offences.
The flag could be displayed against Search listings or could be a check-box filter in Search.

Three issues with this might be
1. A parcel owner could be griefed by a.n.other putting a cluster of bots on it and then crying foul.
2. It depends on LL modifying the system
3. It depends on LL actually taking action and additionally making judgements on (1). This one, as always, is the killer.


The more I read on the issue, the more I begin to believe that the situation is hopeless.
We are jumping through all sorts of hoops trying to get around the fact that LL's first priority is to increase *apparent* concurrency numbers. The quality of our experience runs a very poor second place.

There is a process available right now that would stop the gaming of traffic. It requires no modifications to the system.
Traffic-gamed parcels are just like the ad farms. Everyone knows one when they see one.
LL won't do it.

This is a specious assumption. Most people go to places that have better advertising, not better payouts. Besides, this can be gamed in a different way: Set your payouts high until you get decent traffic, and then lower the payouts. If the majority of people are basing their decisions on how popular the place is, it will be a long time before the lowered payout reduces the popularity.


Again, I think that's specious. Check the other recent threads on what people want from clubs. The quality of the music doesn't stand out as being the key deciding factor; at best, it's one of several. I belong to a group for a particular DJ. His groupies follow him around, so the venue tends to be irrelevant. But I don't know of any way to search for good DJs (unless they have groups setup, and that could be gamed, too, though I think it less likely).


Anything based on popularity can be gamed as long as alts are readily available. And even if LL prohibited alts, they'd have a difficult time stopping them.

But maybe a quick and dirty thing to do would be to see if the popularity results produce a bell curve, and if so, automatically cut both tails of the curve from the result, leaving just the middle. Or even easier: Position the results one third of the way down, forcing people to go backwards if they wanted to see higher popularity.

Not exactly. Tags need to be distinguished from the rest of the description, preferably using a fixed list. Think of it as more like the dropdown filter for the current Places search, instead of the dropdown for the All search. Or else, add in the previous suggestion someone made to limit the number of tags a person could assign to an item.

I think Amity Slade has the right idea. Rather than having one solution that solves the problem for some, and creates problems for others, let the person doing the search use criteria that are important to them. it could be done either by including keywords in the search string, somewhat like how Google or Gmail does it (perhaps something like ignore:traffic or ignoreicks). Or it could be done with checkboxes. Google uses the keywords because there are many different options, and because of the nature of the web. Since it would be in the UI, adding checkboxes would be easy do code, and easier to use.

If next to the search box there were checkboxes (by default checked) the user could easily use whatever criteria they feel is important. Empowering the user is a good thing. Some options I would like to see would be the ability to ignore traffic, picks, and even the amount spent on the ad. There are other features I would like to have, but would make for an overly confusing UI (perhaps have an advanced button that gives more options). If I am looking for a low lag rental, the ability to give traffic a negative weight would be useful (not a good example, actually, since that parcel might have low traffic but the club next door might have a lot).

Personally, when I am searching for something, I will quickly skim the first several entries, and unless they are very specific and targeted to what I am looking for I will skip them.

The best solution to the problems with gaming search isn't to find a universal solution, but rather to empower the person doing the searching. Search shouldn't be designed to benefit the person placing the ad...it should be designed to benefit the person doing the search.

Kitty's idea for a way to limit traffic to Payment Info On File (PIOF) accounts and limit it to 1 account per unique person is good enough for me to declare her the winner. Here's a summary of her idea, along with how I'd implement it and maybe some other ideas mixed in to fill it out.

LL may or may not accept CC info as ID verification, but for traffic calculation purposes it would work well enough. LL could hash up the account name and billing address into a unique identifier and apply it to all PIOF accounts that an individual made. On login of a PIOF account, the list for that identifier would be checked, and if more than one was logged in, one would be selected at random and only that one would count for traffic. On logout of a PIOF account that was being counted for traffic, the list would be checked again, and if others were logged in, a different av would be selected at random to count for traffic. This would limit each unique person to 1 avatar that would be counted for traffic at any one time. This should provide enough of a sample to give a very good ranking. The number could be on a seven day rolling cycle to be more fair to places with less consistant traffic.

It would be dangerous to pay campers because the land owner wouldn't know how many alts the camper had logged in simultaneously. It should make traffic bots much less affective because of the requirements involved in legitimately getting the extra accounts. To get bogus accounts, you'd have to commit ID theft or credit card fraud or something similar. You'd be using a fake name or fake address to get a credit card. Even if you had access to a couple of extra accounts with different names and logged them in all the time, it wouldn't be nearly as big a boost as people currently get, giving places with legitimate traffic a much better chance to compete.

And it could still be limited to 3 or 4 hours per unique identifier per parcel per day.

It seems like there were more details I wanted to include, but I haven't slept and want to get this in for others to review it. Let me know if any of you can find a fundamental flaw of why that won't work. There's still $1000 second prize for anyone that can come up with another workable way to do traffic.

Not that I don't appreciate the L$2000 but I only posted here with a suggestion to help, not for shopping money . I'd take a big choc chip cookie as incentive already .

I don't want to get into a "you keep it" "no, you keep it" tug, but I do offer to just give it back. As long as whatever "solution" comes along is better than what we have now already, everyone wins .

*looks at a new shoes notice* oooo... purrrty... *slaps self* must be strong!... so purrty.....

If we can get the Lindens on board with this, it'll be worth 100 times that amount easily. (but I won't be paying the other 198K)

Now I've been given another $3000 prize by someone that wants to help come up with more ideas. Added to the $3000 I offered before, this is $6000 total for your best traffic ideas. The new prizes are $2000 for anyone coming up with the second workable idea that I agree with, $1000 for anyone coming up with a significant improvement to the first prize idea (post number 89), and $1000 for anyone that can convince me that the first prize idea won't work.

i only let people with aged verified and given payment info to my land, this are for me the only avatars i am interested to have in my land, mayve that can be a way to count the traffic....

The biggest concern I'd have with Kitty's proposal (and similar to the proposal Carl suggested)...is that it could end up adversely affecting new residents.

This could create a situation where an increasing number of venues ban people for having "No Payment Info on File", because people with NPIOF will take up a precious "Avatar Slot" in the 40/100 avatar max that's worth nothing towards their traffic. If venues ban NPIOF residents, they can make sure their sim is full with payment-on-file folks simply to maximize their traffic score.

In the absolute worst case - instead of lots of venues with camp-chairs encouraging new residents to visit like it is today - new residents could become a pariah that deflate one's traffic numbers.

Stores are not going to do what you describe because the net result to them would be less sales.

If a social venue goes "payment info" only, it risks loosing people who have a mix of payment info and non-payment info friends. If it comes to a choice between going somewhere specific and leaving friends behind, or going somewhere else where everyone can go, I'd guess the latter is more likely. You loose both a visitor here and exposing your parcel to someone who didn't know it existed before.

Something more compelling: there are plenty of great places that aren't currently gaming traffic, they wouldn't ban no payment info for the same reason they're not using camping right now. They're happy with the traffic they get.

There's already been a compelling reason to "ban" no payment info for a year and a half: it cuts down griefing significantly (read: cuts down, not removes entirely). Very few hangouts wanted the extra security though, including ones who don't care about their traffic. If they didn't do it then, they're not too likely to do it if traffic reforms to only include payment info and up.

Places most likely to turn back no payment infos for the reasons you mentioned, are places we don't want to be sending them to anyway as an introduction to SL .

(And for the majority "no payment info" is a choice, not something they're incapable of changing)

(Edited to add that I do think it's a very good point to bring up though, I hadn't thought of it like that until you mentioned it )

How many sims even COULD fill up with PIOF account avatars? If land owners paid PIOF avatars to show up, people would log in more than one. The land owner has no idea which ones are being counted for traffic. How often have you seen a 100 avatar sim that wasn't the result of extremely gamed traffic? I agree with Kitty that businesses that block unverified accounts because of the traffic issue will be hurting themselves far more than they are helping.

Argos, I would not even pretend to have any way of out thinking Kitty on this and won't even try, but I am curious about something......why is traffic significant to anything more than clubs or hangouts or games places withing the realm of advertising...or really much at all beyond a location owners wish to identify consumer activity ?

Why wouldn't they just refine search, with traffic simply being a filter, or advertising a category a business would need to be categorized into using (clubs, games), again with traffic as a filter among others ?

I did not read many other threads on this, so there may be something I am not getting.

*bump* I completely forgot about that portion of my suggestion! I need sleep .

Travis: my suggestion was primarily based on reducing the effect of alts (be it bots or human alts). If you log 2 avies on, only one's traffic would be counted.

Camping bots (the L$ farming ones that are run by someone other than the parcel owner) would all be upgraded to payment info, but that's fine. They help make gaming search less "profitable" so that's something you want.

The botrunner knows their bots won't contribute any traffic, but the parcel owner has no idea who counts and who doesn't, just that payment infos *might* count.

If a parcel owner wants to game search they have two options: pay people to spend time on their parcel which will be successful to a point, but camping bots/alts will help limit how successful that will be. The other option is to reward interactive humans with things like contests and hope they're only logged on once. As Argos points out, you'd be hard pressed to be able to fill a sim with interactive people 24/7 or even for a few hours at a time, unless of course you truly are popular and people *want* to spend time there in which case they'd do so anyway already.

Keeping no payment infos out to clear room for payment infos really wouldn't an issue, if someone thinks it would help their traffic they'd quickly find out it doesn't.

One other thing...why isn't traffic 1=1 for length of stay in a sim...you increment the total with time right ? Unique tp's could also be a filter....with a capped popularity reading.

No matter how you offer people the option of searching on a traffic metric, you have to provide a traffic metric to do so. This discussion was about coming up with a new way to calculate the number that would be fair, give a representative value for the population, and not be easily faked. You could apply this new traffic metric to the current Places tab, or you could use it as an optional way to sort in the new search. Why is traffic significant to anything other than clubs, hangouts, or games places? For the same reasons owners of clubs, hangouts, and games places like it. Not every owner likes it, but many do. Not every searcher likes it, but many do. The functionality that exists on the Places tab can not currently be duplicated with the All search, and it's a very useful tool for the people that choose to use it. Creating a better traffic metric that can not be easily faked makes it a much more powerful tool for the people that choose to use it.