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I did have a bit of a think on this a while back. But in the short term, the new search helps reduce the importance of camping considerably. In theory it's now easier to find a match for what you're actually looking for rather than having to type something like "furniture" in the old system then skip through the first 50 camping sims.
I think my own traffic improvement went something like: The plan was that providing camp pads that worked for over 65 minutes would become obsolete. But it was just one of those pie in the sky ideas :-P "The simple, and only answer, is that traffic must be removed entirely. No possible change to it can work"
Some system is needed to sort the thousands of sites. Random number generation would be a solution, but a very laggy one. Or if there was a much higher limit than 100 hits per page, then users could select their own sort order, but again that might be very laggy. Overall, I think the current system is probably best left as is and we just put up with Popular Places always being Hippy Pay places. --> Fluff
In fact, if a simple visit counter is implemented, and since the number of simultaneous avatars on a region is limited to a 100 max, even if big "camping-investors" do a system of "pay to visit", this will have this consequence: 1- They will not reach a high traffic, because visitors will stay at least few minutes, and this will lower the possible number of visitors by saturating the region. after some time, people not having more money by staying there, will abandon the place. the only way to make them come back everyday is giving a higher sum of money for each visit, and this will cost a lot to the investor and make it expensive to hold a higher traffic position  --> Mercia We need some kind of counting popular places, the vote stations etc are in general techniques to promote websites or sites on SL...the fact that traffic is used as a parameter in search is an aberration!! I wonder how linden lab can find this relevant! who got this fantastic idea??? we could maybe vote for him/her the title of "worst linden ever". Maybe also they could explain to us where they see any logical correlation between Search results and traffic??? Being fairly a new player in SL (less than one year old) I have become disenchanted with the way the system currently works regarding the "camping" as showing as true "traffic"
1) because of lag issues that I have experienced due to camping 2) because the sites are really pretty awful and don't reflect the content of their advertised message 3) because newer players having only small up-start businesses get thwarted by the current system 4) because when i go under search nothing but these same old nasty places keep coming up under "whatever topic" and I wonder with over a million players from around the world why there aren't more interesting places with oh a variety of goods to sell (as a buyer I absolutely hate being marketed the same old cloths - its really time consuming to try to find valuable places that sell original goods). Its valid that the campers love that they are being paid to camp - but shouldn't there gathering places that the Lindies set up themselves if they truly need that kind of warm body "err warm avatar" traffic and Note it in BOLD - CAMPING SITE. I sure wish that there were at least fair days on the search systems that would be true to content and btw the land sales really are far worse - land moguls have hurt fair trade with their dirty tricks. Aside from this I'm actually pretty content and admire most of the work efforts of the Lindens but hey this issue NEEDS a fix. Sincerely, Eden Palen =,,= Clockwork Resident I voted, and i fully agree... Its time to value the real beauty in SL.. This world is an Second Option to enjoy life fully and it should not all be about money in here... :S How wonderfull it would be to see the creative and beautifull places in the top list of most populair places.. That is where lots of people worked very hard to achieve a beautifull world to dream away and enjoy all that is given...
Saronda.. I would like to be able to do searches for sites that have quality in content and design, searches seem to be almost fruitless in SL. Maybe popular places needs to be revamped totally whereas the user pulls up a specific form in a tools menu and votes for specific items such as creativity, content etc. Make the tool a convenient tool to use, just a small little vote button near the top that would pull up a general notecard on the screen with some choices and radio buttons....yes/no......and send........these become personal user generated responses......... and pull out the traffic counter altogether......
to WarKirby Magojiro
I know its not a perfect solution, no solution is perfect. Now do this little count: 1- each visit is unique : If you leave and come back again, you ll not be counted. 2- the regions have a limit of 100 people at same time 3- It is necessary to stay at least few minutes to be counted do you think a 1L$/visit will make them reach a top position? Actually, you need a small number of people staying a whole day to get a high traffic. Thats why it is possible to do camping and succeed to be top positioned. +1 vote for ARTs and Culture in SL
nada brahma Namaste, Perhaps "creative" and 'beautiful" non- commercial sites can be assigned extra ranking points (kinda like a tax credit for a social good) for a fixed period of time that would help them compete with established commercial entities and free $ sites, although who would decide what sites qualify would be problematic. Start up commercial companies could also benefit from a fixed period of time of extra ranking points. Alternatively, one could subtract ranking points from sites that are only camping /survey sites.
Just as a side issue, you can get your "dwell" issus higher by having on the same parcel rentals, where your tenants dwell and give you higher figures. Not as high as those in Popular Places, but sufficient to usually get onto page one of a search.
I could not be more in agreement with the comments of Lukas Mensing. Even if not perfect still much better.
Actually, Lukas/Patricia, I know a professional camper and most campers do not allow you to stay all day, I think they tend to boot you off after one hour. Any traffic type system will be worked around anyway. There are already parcels paying 10L$ for every new Avatar you get to tp into the parcel. Under the visit per day proposal, you would get teams of campers switching to inviting each other into one parcel then after the minimum dwell moving on to the next one. They would make their money a lot quicker than one Popular Places site I just visited where it takes 12 minutes to earn 1L$.
This is exactly the kind of elitist thinking that will kill SL. Camping provides an important source of income to may users of SL. Because someone has a basic account does not mean they are less valuable in terms of traffic. Take away camping and you wont see an upsurge in creativity , you will see an exodus of players to other more friendly communities.
"Also, This proposition could be rewritten according to your comments here. But its important to vote it. "
Please, please, please re-write the Description, it is an interesting history lesson, but I don't actually know what you are proposing and therefore what I would be voting for (but I am not likely to vote anyway). A Description should be short and describe the proposed feature clearly and not hide the proposal (I have finally found it after several re-reads) amidst all the verbiage. I have to agree with one of the early commenter, Fluf Fredriksson. The solution, if there is one, is at least approximated by a combination of quantity and quality. So, if an avatar TP's in for a quick payment of money the owner has promised, then they must remain there for a certain amount of time afterward - up to a maximum to prevent camping - as well. I would also do away with the "apportionment" system. If I TP to 100 places in a day and spend a certain amount of time there - again,up to a maximum amount of time in each in order to discourage camping - and spend the minimum amount of time there, those places should get 1 vote each.
For the minimum: make it a time frame that makes camping too expensive for the owners. If the average payout is 1 or 2 Lindens per 10 minutes, then make the required minimum stay 15 minutes. For the maximum: All the points to be awarded based on the length of stay beyond the minimum up to the maximum - say an hour. However, as other's have noted, this is not a perfect solution to the camping issue. To solve the camping issue, we would have to call upon a further committment from Linden Labs. There are ways to distinguish between an inactive camper and an active shopper or participant. Numerous online games and virtual worlds will log you out for inactivity for example. If the server is intelligent enough to know you should be logged out for inactivity - it is a small leap of logic (and coding) to tell the difference between a camper sitting immobile and a shopper moving back and forth. The solution to this lies not just in a change in policy - but also in a change to the software logic. Wow dude! I think you like totally over cooked the description there!
And it isn't helping confusing 2 issues: Camping & Traffic Count. Many people will be pro camping, but anti the current traffic count system. I'm all for a more representative traffic system than we have currently, hence my brief description of a system to benefit music venues, where a DJ or musician will generally play for an hour, and if they get good attendance, they deserve a higher traffic figure or at least one more competitive with the 24hr camping sims. I'm not about to get drawn in to trying to ban camping though. Tomas, the system already does recognise someone sitting immobile, but the serious campers have developed software to circumvent the system. Camping is not just about allowing a noob to afford a new dress, some residents are earning sufficient to subsidise part of their RL lifestyle. That means they are prepared to pay serious money for anti-booting devices. It is only fair to compare SL to other online world's that give the same level of scripting power to users.
Traffic is not broken. It works wonderfully. It is the best thing since cream cheese, and I love the Lindens' invention. Blows air kiss. It truly is a marvel of engineering.
The Lindens first made a crude voting system that had avatars coming on land and clicking on voters. So this was just crude foot traffic, gamed by alts of course. That didn't work, because people could flash mob it, and those who stayed on a long time win automatically, as they did on the Sims Online. With the Lindens algorithm, it was a pool of how many people logged on that day – you are forgetting that important element of it. Secondly, it involved your pool of time and where you went that day. You would have to stay on a land at least five minutes. Logging on and visiting 5 places for more than five minutes would give them, if I understood correctly, no more time than if you spent an hour on the land, if you only visited the one place. Putting traffic to some cruder formula that involves raw points of foot traffic strikes me as even more gameable than the current system. The irritation and absolute vengeance that people feel about campers and popular places is a direct function of their using SEARCH ALL and even paying attention to the Popular Places section of the tabs in search. Ignore Popular Places, they are all gamed. Don't use Search All, unless you want a grab-bag of junk. As you would on amazon.com, refine your search to say, "books" or "CDs". Use Search Places, and it will get rid of a lot of camping clutter in the results for many words. Sure, the first one or two slots may be gamed, but you are a grown-up, you can look down further on the list, and scroll to the next page. THOSE ARE PARCELS THAT MERITED THEIR TRAFFIC AND DIDN'T USE CAMPING. A search result that shows you 2000 or 1000 or 5000 as a traffic is a true number much of the time, as campers will have numbers like 20,000 unless they are very very popular places. So that is extremely helpful in ordering results. Futhermore, the Lindens have CHANGED the way search works. Haven't you been following it? Traffic is no longer the only element used to book search. Now links to picks, landmarks, etc. are also in the mix. So it's not as gamed as it once was. Ultimately, camping will go away when there are a) better entry-level jobs for people in this society online and b) better advertising capacity so that the poor man's ad doesn't have to be literal grabbing of eyeballs. When the Lindens are willing to outsource newbie management, when they are willing to bite the bullet and allow ads on orientation island so that people can click on places of their choice, then we will see camping begin to ebb away, as it is not really profitable. I personally ban all camping, lucky chairs etc on all my properties so I have no stake in it. I do point out, however that the hatred of traffic and camping is primarily at root a hatred by the more "sophisticated" of mass culture. Camping works for the poor masses because it works. As always you must address the root causes of poverty. There's no poverty in the thousands of asian farming bots here run by a select few whose idea of resednecy is logging into the accounts page to transfer money out of SL.
Camping is ok, Mass Botting is not. And it's sad to see even with 98 votes this issue remains unchanged. I'm starting to think perhaps search other than for events and educational, or non profit reasons should be dumped as a whole and let to business to make a 3rd party solution. Though LL won't do this as they earn money from classifieds of course. And we as residents keep paying them money to participate in a corrupt classifieds system. I'd like to vote, but I see no proposal here, just a complaint.
If the proposal was "Discontinue ranking search results by traffic", I would vote for it. It raises the question of how search results should be ranked, which would need to be addressed, but that's a very difficult subject to handle in the limited form of a Jira entry. People are NOT investing in SL like they did once, and the reason is they don't trust the numbers.
Any of the numbers-------residents on line, traffic, any of them. It's a sad commentary, but true Nobody is going to invest money in a world that is corrupt. Allowing Bot farms is corrupting everything. People don't stay in SL because they don't trust SL. My vote is to get rid of traffic altogether, but enhance the visibility of what is offered. People can find what they are looking for, creators that make the best stuff will get the rewards they deserve, and scammers will automatically be weeded out. Thanks to everyone that read this proposition and participated to help resolve this serious issue,
Obviously, it doesn't seem reasonable enough to be assigned or even looked at. Let's consider it as resolved then... Removing traffic alltogether sounds like a bad idea, but heres a good one maybe, a voting system of sorts, like a thumbs up thumbs down sort of thing, but i supose ppl would start offering cash for a thumbs up huh? well, atleast maybe that would get rid of camping and ease the stress on the grid. Also more deserving parties would get better ranks in the search, since ppl that like the location could give their vote without having to sit there and wait. And owners shouldnt able to vote for their own parcel, ive had traffic of over 600 when i had a shop, while getting almost zero visitors, maybe thats something that should be changed about the current traffic system, even if nothing else is
Camping harms both honest businesses and visitors!
THE UNSOLVABLE PART OF THE PROBLEM: Business owners (from GOOD to BAD) want to advertize their place as more popular than it really is, and are willing to do almost whatever it takes including any spammer-type act if they think it's cost effective. The alternative is to not get business from the search engine at all, meaning advertizing money will automatically being much less cost-effective or pointless. THE SOLVABLE PART OF THE PROBLEM: Any ranking based on traffic numbers will be manipulated to no end, by bribing campers with less money than they are spending in electricity fees while camping, and owners using single-computer hacked clients in control of multiple avatars. Or young people with no access to a credit card who are willing to waste the price of a real life meal in electricity to get say 100 lindens (which is why people actually online while camping are are more often than not, young clueless and excessively begging at the same time). The one time I went to a "popular" site and wanted to buy a zombie avatar, some youth caged me and then orbited me because I wouldn't give him some lindens (too fast for doing an abuse report). Camping sites attract those like moths to a light. And of course, I couldn't find the site again to buy my item... All this ruins any "coolness" of the spot the business is trying to advertize, and makes the business owner look and feel like a lowly cheating spammer and highly attractive to clueless greedy griefers. THE SOLUTION TO THE SOLVABLE PART: Let business owners BUY search rank from LL, the same way they'd buy it from a search engine. Rename "popularity" to something else to dispel any illusion of actual popularity. This solves the actually solvable part of the problem, and not waste energy on a hypothetical "honest" traffic system. Keep the traffic system as a way for the owner or curious people to check traffic, but no influence on searches. Much like a syringe exchange program to help junkies not get AIDS, it might not be popular with everyone but having business owners BUY SEARCH RANK FROM LL directly it clearly is a lesser evil. As a bonus, LL will actually get honest income instead of camping money going into the pocket of hackers, cheaters, and young beggars willing to grief for 1L who camp those places. WHAT ABOUT SEARCHING FOR COOL, CREATIVE STUFF? Let go of the idea of a single ranking for everyone, it's always hackable to no end! Unless you have massive human ressources and decent programming talent like Google it's not worth it. The alternative is a stumbleupon-style model of searching, where searching for say "shoes" yields not only actual shoes, but the most cool stuff will automagically show up on top of searches and the crap at the bottom. Cheating this type of system is incredibly hard! How hard could it be to actually be able to use stumbleupon or identical technology from in-world, anyhow? |
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Traffic calculation algorithm is based on a old game system and is no more adapted to secondlife economy. It has also camping as a major consequence.
The simple answer to how people would cheat with that. Give everyone 1L$ who visits. Or even just every third, fourth, fifth person, etc.
Advertise that people can get free L$ simply for visiting, and before you know it, you have a huge swarm of newbies. Who all arrive, grab their 1 free L$, and leave, onto the next place which offers free L$.
No meaningful visitors, yet the traffic counts would still soar for those with money to spend.
The simple, and only answer, is that traffic must be removed entirely. No possible change to it can work.