Sudden decisions are frequently made by Linden Lab that radically change the economy for many people. There is a concerted and intense lobby to remove traffic for all kinds of reasons (people hate camping; they hate gaming of statistics; they are embarrased that their corporation doesn't get traffic; they hate commerce). That's why it's extremely important to create JIRA requests that appear as "new features" but in fact are bids to keep this existing feature exactly as it is". Here are the arguments *against the anti-traffic gang: o The Lindens could have removed the Popular Places interface – the most painfully visible reminder of the reasons why traffic is hated by some – on the viewer where all or nearly all venues are gamed by camping bots or money trees. Yet they didn't. Why? They realize that newbies need a place where someone will take care of them, given them groups, money, and low-cost items, and those places need to be visible. o Camping is merely the poor man's classified add. For those who can't pay $25-100 US or more at a pop to get on the front page of any category, camping enables them to pay out $1s in money trees or sitting schemes that can work out much cheaper, but put the venue up higher in the list. Like all advertising of the tacky variety, it will only disappear when there are more avenues for really reaching people with effective advertising created (a system of Linden road billboards for rent by Linden would help, for example). o Once you get past the first few "gamed" returns on most search terms, you see the merited parcels that really have honest, democratic footfall. The people on those stores/venues attract people through content or events and deserve their traffic – they don't use bots. They deserve a marker for being found and signalling to others the genuine appreciated content. o Public traffic metrics visible to all help everyone obtain necessary feedback in what can often be a very closed society where people can't be part of the major economic decision-making because the servers are run by a private company, and can't find out what is going on as they would in RL, through mass media, public reports in city hall, etc.. Traffic remains the one place where people really can get the truth about how well a given place is doing, despite the claims of advertisers or the private company or RL media. o Traffic helps organize searches wonderfully. Even if the Lindens have skewed search now away from traffic in the mistaken belief that this rewards campers, search/places, which organizes by traffic amounts, is a very good organizer of popularity of lots – again, once the obvious few at the top are removed for gaming (and they are easily discerned even to casual students of search). o Traffic plus search plus places = most sales in world. Yes, let me say it again, since there are some persistent detractors to this point: traffic plus search plus places = most sales in world. Yes, there some special boutiques, mainly of oldbies, that have word-of-mouth for sales. Yes, there are some Slexchange.com customers who make most of their sales there on the website. Yes, there are people with lower traffic who make more sales than those with higher traffic. We've heard all that – it doesn't lesson the truth about search/places/traffic. No matter. The fact remains, demonstrated by thousands of businesses across the grid, that search plus places = sales. o Corporations keep referring to traffic as "broken" because a) it doesn't help them gather all the hot spot and engagement data they need b) it can show them in a very poor light. Too bad. They can use one of many commercially-available scripts or services to get deeper numbers and they can refrain from hobbling sales for inworld business just because they have a demonstrable need to look better. o Some residents keep referring to traffic as broken because it is occasionally buggy, turned off, or stalled for a few days. All of that never detracts from the fact that most of the time, it works to bring most sales, and the most happy findings of interesting places, throughout the grid. I've also found that those technically inclined are opposed to traffic because it bothers there sense of an absolute mechanical perfection of a system if somebody games it, and they also tend to use SEARCH ALL rather than bother with tabs showing categories – and therefore their experience of searching can be very negative. o The Lindens (as well as some of their competitors) keep telling everyone that they give less weight to traffic, and that they now user other factors, like whether sites are in Picks, whether they are landmarked, other algorithms mysterious to us. But I can only urge them to retain the public manifestation of traffic as it is now, as the best, most truthful and democratic indicator of what is really valued. o If anyone has doubts about the efficacy of traffic, please contact me in world for a demonstration of real key word searches and real findings and real visits. So many people base their heavy prejudice against traffic not on real inworld experience, but a kind of psychologically-driven deep meme. Traffic does not harm anyone. Traffic helps sales inworld. There are other ways in which sites can be measured and evaluated; some of them are not public. Traffic remains the best sort of feedback we could ever have in our economy – leave it alone, leave it exactly as it is.