Land and Sea General

[#1]

We recently posted a new policy explaining that the use of Bots to unfairly inflate the traffic score (and therefore Search ranking) for a venue would be considered a violation. The overwhelming response to this change has been positive, but many of you have also pointed out that the first post did not make clear the position on Camping Chairs and the use of Bots to model clothing and avatar designs.

So let's see if I can clarify. In addition I thought I would talk about why we don't feel the need to specifically target Land Bots.

The policy we announced is about Traffic, how that relates to Search, and how a deliberate attempt to falsely drive up the traffic score will no longer be allowed. We know from your comments that you want Search to be fair and relevant, and we want that too. Whether a landowner uses Bots or Camping Chairs, or Camping Chairs with Bots in them, the effect is the same - the traffic score for that parcel is inflated unfairly.

Are there other uses for so called Camping Chairs other than for Traffic? If you know of some please let us know in the comments below! However, the feedback and data tells us that by far the main reason for large numbers of Camping Chairs at a location is to unfairly gain a Search advantage.

So the policy statement is that where we see a Resident unfairly increasing their Search ranking, regardless of how that is achieved, it will be considered as 'gaming'. We will give a first warning to begin with and direct people to the policy. However continued gaming can result in suspension or removal from Search listings altogether.

Model Bots / NPCs

As we know, there are some really cool ways to use Bots and we absolutely don't want to lose those. So we're kicking off a project to provide you with an easy way to self-identify that an account is being used as a Bot. This will help us to identify valid uses of bots as we work to enforce the policy above.

So for now, Model Bots will not be affected by the policy, however as soon as we have a mechanism in place we will look to those that use Model Bots to self identify them as such.

Land Bots

In my last post on Bots, I talked about the fact that we expect Land Bots to no longer be viable down the line. A few of you have rightly told me I was being too cryptic, so lets talk a little about why we're not tackling Land Bots now.

First of all, Land Bots can do very useful things as far as managing Land is concerned. The most common complaint about Land Bots is that they grab parcels that have been set for open sale by mistake.

So we want to make setting Land for sale much safer.

To that end, we plan to introduce a series of better Land tools late this year and into early next year. We recognize that you need a safe place to conduct land transactions of all kinds; as well as more, and more useful, market data to help you make the right decisions about what land to buy or sell.

Our current thinking is that this needs to be seamless between SecondLife.com and the Viewer to improve the experience whether you conduct the transaction in world or on the web. We think that one of the impacts of those changes will be to end automated buying by Land Bots. So, for the health of Second Life overall, we think it's more important to focus on a better experience around land transactions rather than spend development time solving for specific Land Bot uses right now.

Specifics are obviously all in the planning stage and may change - and we'll be asking you for your feedback as these plans get more firmed up.

For now, I just wanted to give you an early idea of what we're working on and reassure you that we've heard your feedback and will be doing all we can to include it in our planning.

I hope this post has made the policy clearer. Please let us know your thoughts in the comments!

[#2]

Thank you for the clarification, Jack, but I have a question for you...

In last week's office hour, you said that the main traffic bot users were being dealt with "now" (that was then), and you also said that you'd started enforcing the policy a week earlier. Today, a full week later, the main traffic bot users remain unchanged. Why?

[#3]

Yes I would like to hear an update on how the removal of bots is going. Maybe an estimate on how many have been removed from the grid.

[#4]

1) Is putting up Zyngo at a furniture store, to so that the Zyngo players will increase traffic for the furniture store, a violation?

2) Is it a violation if I idle on my land a half hour while I watch television, instead of logging out and logging back in later, because I know I will increase traffic on my land, a violation?

3) Is making the land a little harder to navigate, in order to increase traffic (traffic numbers do go up when avatars are waiting to rez and searching for what they want), a violation?

I would like to know how far you are going to try to split the hairs.  People will adjust to the new rules.  Because traffic numbers are so important that people are always going to be looking for a benefit, so the Zyngo-filled, maze-like, slow-to-rez landscape is a distinct possibility as a response.  And I want to know if I will be punished for staying logged in a half hour while I'm really watching the Colbert Report.

[#5]

A little clarity would be nice as to what constitutes camping.

For example, some clubs that are little more than gateways to shopping malls have dance poles that work the same as camp chairs although I suppose they are slightly more interesting.

Do lucky chairs fall into the definition?

How about other traffic builders like orbs that give out random prizes or money? Money trees?

[#6]

I don't find any of your points an abuse of traffic as far as community standards go, to be honest, Amity.  Making land a little more difficult to navigate for the expressed purpose of traffic gaming is a bit skeevy, i'll admit...  but it sorta points to the fact that there are loads of other methods towards maintaining a high traffic count - some of them intentional and others not.

I agree, splitting hairs on a case by case basis is a time consuming and unnecessary thing.  I'd really prefer to see a system that does not reward parcels with better ranking due to traffic metrics. Implimenting such a system would go a long way towards avoiding the governance nightmare that is on the horizon.

[#7]

Thanks for the clarification about bots and camping,  I have a question too:

what about prize camping chairs? I used to give dresses for about 30 minutes of camping, people was happy to stay for a while and have a present then... is it a violation now, have I to take them off?

Thanks in advice

[#8]

I personally find banks upon banks of camping chairs/dance pads, etc abhorrent.  I would like nothing better than to see them go away...  HOWEVER... i agree - i would really like to know just how finely split that hair is, when shop owners offer incentives for shoppers to return in the form of lucky chairs and prize camping, some folks might park their avatars online at home for a while, etc etc.

Lucky chairs and prize camping provide visitors with a one time 'deal', providing them with samples of merchandise they could not otherwise have gotten for free.  They are also a form of product advertising for the business in question.

I can recall seeing a lucky chair and lucky fortune teller at Katat0nik Pidgeon's place...  and a few months later, heard about the fishing game promotion she was doing with custom catches.  What an interesting idea to build hype around her products!

This highlights the fact that not all setups that are *similar* to camping are about the traffic...  and much the same as the bot situation, a ban on all things that look like camping would be ill-advised.

When it comes down to it, the problem with traffic gaming...  is traffic.  Plain and simple.  Various folks will probably jump on this particular comment in disgust...  and so be it.  But this particular metric will always be gamed so long as it is in place.

[#9]

I hesitate to post again, because I am hoping that being quick and concise will lead to my comments being reviewed and having an actual impact.

But the problems are (a) trying to use Traffic as a measure of "popularity," and (b) Traffic being so important in searches, and (c) Search predominating any form of advertising or consumer information to be had in Second Life.

I think that "Whack-a-Bot" will lead to a lot of time and money spent without anything to show for it at the end.

I think that time and money would be better spent creating alternatives to the Search for effective advertising and consumer information.

I also do not understand why a "popularity" measure is so important to Second Life.  I don't see why we can't just let go of trying to measure "popularity."  But if there is some real benefit to measuring "popularity," I think time and resources would be better spend reviewing why it is important and developing a more accurate way of measuring it.  The noise in the Traffic measurement overtakes the thing it is supposed to measure.

[#10]

I really hope the Lab cleans up all the bots and camping devices out there soon.  As far as I can see it is not happening fast enough.

Also...on the subject of "gaming" the search...I would like you to consider outlawing carving up land into many little parcels and naming them something like FREE FURNITURE FREE FURNITURE FREE FURNITURE FREE FURNITURE FREE FURNITURE etc in order to bully all competition off the first page of search.  This happens way too much, and there is no way to compete against this tactic without stooping to the same childish level. It cheapens the users experience and hides a lot of quality parcels from the users search that do not use such low tactics.

If this is already a violation, please let me know.

Thanks!

[#11]

This is a further step in the right direction.

It could do with being clarified further though.

It should apply to all forms of camping. Not just camping chairs. There are camping systems which do not require the avatar to be sitting (they use llSensor instead).

This should be extended to any system which pays the avatar for staying on land.

Add an option to flag an avatar as a bot so it gets excluded from search and make that information available in the Profile's first page. That would make it easy to report gaming.

If you only manually inspect high traffic places, people will still try to use traffic bots to gain an advantage while keeping out of your radar. It needs to be enforced universally so nobody benefits.

I think there should be a penalty for gaming too. Currently people will game until they get a slap on the wrist and only then remove campers. You could have a deterrent like having the traffic score zeroed for 24 hours the first time they get caught, 48 hours second time around etc. Otherwise it's unfair to those who abide by your rules upfront.

[#12]

This is fairly typical thinking. Forget problems, they can't be solved, let's only deal with the symptoms of the problem. People "game" the traffic system because it's the only way they can get visitors to their land without spending boatloads of cash. With so many sims in Secondlife, getting people to visit your sim is nearly impossible unless you offer some form of incentive. The goal of any incentive is to bring people to your sim ie TRAFFIC. So by all means let's ban all the methods by which land owners can bring people to their sims. I'm on board with that,.. no seriously. I am working on realistic scultpy animated blowing tumbleweeds and I'm going to be RICH!  I'll have to sell them on Slexchange but that's fine.

Having said that, there were some who used bots to excess and those people will find relentlessly creative ways to achieve the same effect. Services that hire people to hang out and walk around your place with become popular, but you have to pay those folks. Are we getting rid of money and prize orbs, cause if not they are going to be huge!

If anyone hits their head on something and goes temporarily insane and decides that fixing the actual problems might be a good idea, more protection for content creators might be a good plce to start. You see when I first started exploring the secondlife grid, it was all about looking for the "Cool content". The amazing builds, the lifelike scenery. Many of the people that created that content are long gone. Why you ask? Because people stole those cool creations and sold them for next to nothing ot gave them away as freebies to try and get traffic. Ah yes there's that word again. Irony of Ironies that in a world where the biggest problem on most of the grid is that there's nobody there, that reducing excess traffic is such a major concern.

This past month since the bot ban is the first month I have failed to break even with my land. I went more than $100usd in the hole for the first time since I started my mall.

I still paid my tier tho! Am I a sucker or what?

[#13]

Just wanted to say I'm very happy to see this kind of policy! It was always very sad to go to a place that looked like it was very populated only to find they were all campers. Made going to clubs/"parties" so boring! Now you can actually MEET people, go figure! When it was all campers everywhere it felt like Second Life was a ghost town with no "real" people anywhere.

[#14]

This will be interesting! Will prostitution get deeper and competition get steeper?

There are loop holes that people will always find as a way to meet their ends. But, on the real side:

Camping is an unfair use of sim resources. In some cases, it causes major problems, such as, deny entry to ones land, major lag and a lot of intruders entering nearby lands.

[#15]

The downside is that new players will no longer earn a bit of spending money from the geniune camping spots. You know that bit of money that ends up buying goods from retailers. If Money trees, sploders and lucky chairs are also going to be withdrawn don't expect increase sales for the retailer.

[#16]

Thanks, Jack.

RE "Making land transactions safer":

We desperately need a way for people who build custom content on-site, or who do landscaping, to be able to transfer ownership of all transferrable prims on a parcel to the parcel owner or to a specific designated individual. Right now there is only one way to do that rationally: Sell the parcel to the content provider, and then the content provider sells it back, with "Include all objects" checked. But that can't be used on the Mainland if the content provider isn't a Premium member, or if selling the parcel will bump the person over their tier level, or if the parcel is rented and you're selling to the tenant, not the landlord. It also can't be used if the parcel itself won't support the full prim count involved.

There is no "Sell object to designated individual" option, like there is for land sales. We need that too. If I build a 2000-prim custom castle for a client, the above "sell the parcel to me and I'll sell it back" method is the ONLY safe way to transfer ownership in-place for the rezzed castle.

Aside from the above, the only other option is to sell each linkset and loose prim, one at a time, as the client follows the content creator all over the parcel, and pray you don't miss something, and that no bot swoops in and buys it out from under you.

[#17]

Hey sorry for posting again but I almost forgot a very important point. If you can't put whatever you want to on your own land why are you paying $200 bucks for mainland or more for a private sim? I mean that's the deal right? You buy land so that you can build whatever you want on that land (as long as it's not illegal) am I right? What if you want to build an art installation that consists of 24 animated bots? What if you have a mall and you want to provide automated group joining to each shop by using bots?

Of cource if you really wanted to nip this problem in the bud, you'd base tier fees on traffic. If almost nobody shows up to your sim each month you pay nothing! Kinda like Google Adwords. The more traffic you get the greater the resources needed the higher the tier fee. Then you'd see creativity because it would be all about trying to make the most sales with the least traffic!

That's never going to happen...

I think those that think that there should be other ways to determine a place's overall popularity are the people who have really thought about this problem. Next we argue about what those "other ways" should be!

[#18]

I'm not trying to single out Amity. It's just that the questions raise some interesting considerations

"1) Is putting up Zyngo at a furniture store, to so that the Zyngo players will increase traffic for the furniture store, a violation?"

Why is the machine there? How does it relate to the goods on sale?

If it's there simply to attract people who primarily want to play Zyngo and have no parrticular interest in the store as a store, then I would say that it's a violation.

2) Is it a violation if I idle on my land a half hour while I watch television, instead of logging out and logging back in later, because I know I will increase traffic on my land, a violation?

You've answered the questions yourself. "because I know I will increase traffic on my land". If the intent is to game up traffic, it's a violation.

However, it's a violation that can never realistically be actioned. It's impossible for anyone but youself to distinguish between that intent and you being interrupted while trying to to get something finished in SL. "*thinks* Mother - Get off the phone already.Yes, You told me about Aunt Bertha twice,,,  uuussh!, c'mon, c'mon".

People will log on and leave their avatar idle. They shouldn't, but they will. Perhaps in time, LL might get around to profiling avatar activity and raise a flag on an avatar that has a pattern of being idle for long period daily. I would guess that such a move would be some way off even if it's on the radar at all.

3) Is making the land a little harder to navigate, in order to increase traffic (traffic numbers do go up when avatars are waiting to rez and searching for what they want), a violation?

Again. if the intent is there, then it's a violation, but yet another one that is impossible to detect.

Maybe that one cancels itself out though. You get a reputation as an ultra-laggy store. People TP in and leave as soon as they see a sea of grey.Unless they stay for at least one minute you can't be sure of covering the instant at which their traffic minute registers.

The scheme might result in less traffic that you would have got by just playing straight.

It's the systematic bigger gaming that stands a chance of being whacked.

The small mean little gaming realistically has to be left to the soul of the person concerned.

I would say that any scemes in which people are rewarded financially or in tradeable goods for lingering in a parcel are clear violations.Real live employees who actually engage with and help people would escape that. Random people just dropping in would not escape that. It's never going to be perfect.

If someone want s to give away freebies or money, then give them away. Just don't make lingering on the parcel a condition for getting the freebies.

I would say that if someone considers something and wonders "Can I get away with this?" Then it is almost certainly a violation. It just might not be a violation that is detectable, particularly if it does not have a large effect.

[#19]

The people that need to "game" search with deceptive techniques like campers, traffic bots, or carving up a region, and flooding the land description with key words are often NOT also the ones providing the highest quality products or services attached to those keywords. Why else would they need to deceive the user into coming to their parcel? You don't see the truly great places in SL doing this.

Sure, you could say to leave it up to the user to decide, even if it means scrolling through 10 pages of FURNITURE spam in search or tping to 10 "packed" sims only to find ghost towns...but ultimately SL would be a better more streamlined experience for the new user if search was not littered with all this garbage.  Let natural selection play a role in determining search placement. REAL traffic should play a role for sure. Land description for relevence should play a role..but NOT spammed land descriptions. This should be outlawed.

[#20]

Zed, they're making camping bots illegal. Therefore, you've just gotten shirty over something you already admit you're forbidden to do. You can't run a casino, you can't have a free sex space on a PG sim, and you can't use camping bots.

They've already been discussing the valid use of bots, so your hypothetical lag demon ideas are coming across like pearl-clutching.

[#21]

The death of the money tree is a sad thing.

Perhaps they will return en masse. That would be a good thing.

Or, the new users can do what all of us did at one time or another: buy Linden Dollars from Lindex?

Camping chairs are a scurge.

And to put my money where my mouth is: as soon as camping chairs are outlawed, I'll be among the first to plop-up money trees with a generous pay out.

[#22]

What I do not understand, Sarah, is why you are introducing topics that are irrelevant to this. Lucky chairs and money trees are not camping chairs/pads/poles. And considering the usual camp pad pays out $3L/30 minutes and money tree trawling has apparently become very unpopular if the lack of traffic to mine is any indication, the retailers who are benefitting from the tiny amounts of Lindens earned by those tend to be resale-only shops with four-year-old POS outfits that get you mentioned on the fashion police blogs for wearing them to get freebies at Armidi. As for sploders, the ones that aren't skill-based are officially illegal as gambling, so anyone running one just hasn't been caught yet.

[#23]

How about models who aren't bots Jack? Where do they lie? You're going about this from the wrong perspective and will be constantly chasing your tail as people make more legitimate looking ways to inflate their traffic.

[#24]

Camping chairs is a tough one. I don't use them to gain traffic & I don't sit on them. One camping chair in a store for a prize doesn't seem too bad (in most situations). But when you have a million chairs in one store, or a place that only has camping chairs, then that just goes too far. Personally, I think camping is a big joke. It's annoying to find yourself at a place surrounded by "zombie" campers who are bringing nothing to the table except for their vacant presence. I came to a place for what you have, not to be drawn into a camping zone or trying to walk around "zombies" to get to something that might be (remotely) interesting.

[#25]

I would be interested to know why, if using bots to "game" the search statistics is now considered abuse and a violation, that LL doesn't want Abuse Reports to be submitted. It seems to me that 10 bots standing in a skybox at 800 meters would fit easily into the category "Disturbing the peace > Unfair use of region resources."

If Linden Lab has sufficient numbers of employees with nothing better to do, and they can afford to send them out to locate and tag all the bots on the grid, that's great. However, I don't believe there are that many Lindens around. So why not open up bot abuse and solicit ARs from residents? After seeing a blog somewhere that was all about bot hunting, I tried it and discovered that it's great fun! Can you imagine a bot hunting blog where people compete for a Champion Bot Hunter award? Each hunter could post a SLURL and a picture of themselves standing beside the pack of bots or group of camping chairs. The hunter gets a score of one point for each bot in the photo, and Linden Lab gets a whole stack of free Abuse Reports without having to send a single LL employee out to search.

[#26]

Hey GreenLantern! I'm a good friend of Ceri Denimore and Cathy's.   I LOVE your idea. Do you know if residents will get in trouble if we start ARing known violators?

[#27]

I'm curious ... what about those of us who, in the use of camping areas, are not out to actively increase traffic, but trying to do something nice for the new users to SL?  When I came to SL for the first time, someone told me about a camping area that I could go to to get some lindens, because most clubs, etc, will not hire someone until they have been on SL at least 30 days.  And, as we all know, we want our avi's to be beautiful/handsome, and in most cases they need to be to find that "job" in SL.

So, how will you determine the people who are trying to drive up traffic from those who are actively trying to help new players?

[#28]

Jack, the answer to my concern was alluded to in your post.  I would like to reinforce the need for a solution to this issue.  I am in the early stages of developing bots that will be utilized in clinical scenarios for physician training.  The feedback I am getting from casual visitors who interact with my current bots is helpful in working out bugs and improving the programming of these bots.  Thus I keep them active for that purpose, not for the purpose of raising the traffic statistics of my parcels.  I would like to see a means where properly identified bots could be registered as such and not have them viewed as being in violation of the policy on bots.  If there is some way to prevent these bots from impacting the activity statistics so much the better.

[#29]

Clubs are camping chairs too, please don't forget this.

People who are visiting a pub or a club will not be paid in L$ but with hearing of music. And club owners paying indirectly to DJs and singers for get a better club traffic.

If you forbid camping chairs, you must forbid ALL Assemblies or count not the traffic on Assemblies.

That is a really bad joke...and now you also dictate your paying customers how they have doing marketing..."Your world, your imagination". What is still left?

[#30]

Thanks for that Lysanna. Spoken like a true BASIC ACCOUNT holder. Try paying 200 Bucks a month to Linden Labs only to have all the policy changes be about YOU doing or not something. They should be introducing a new search that deals with things like quality of content and some sort of visitor rating system with feedback to landowners that gives them the information they need to improve the experience of the visitor. That would be true progress! Until those things that we all deem to be "Virtues" are rewarded in some sort of tangible way this is all just a waste of time.

Secondlife has been setup so that the business models that work produce sims that we don't want to visit. I get it. We need to establish a framewark for new business models that make sims inviting for visitors AND at least sustainable for land owners. That's the goal here.

I am getting sick of people who don't own anything, create anything or contribute anything to Secondlife getting on their high horses and telling me what I can and can't do on my own very expensive land. Especially when I am known for helping newbies out, giving them clothing and other items and helping them to find the things they are looking for! I always try to be helpful to anyone I meet on my sim. I have always tried to be one of the good guys in SL.

In short I say to Linden Labs, instead of telling me I can't do something why not change things so that I can reach my goals in such a way that benefits everyone? It's not impossible people! You simply have to find out what's most important  and then set the search metrics accordingly and this problem goes away. But instead we get this confrontational banning of what is basically the only thing that's working to get people to show up!

I say give people an alternative! What's the grid freindly way to get visitors to your sim. You created this world Linden Labs, WHAT SAY YOU?

[#31]

I would like to see a precise definition of bot.  Certainly, if they are going to be restricted, we need to know exactly what one is.  On the Web, LL gives this definition of a bot: "The Viewer you use to access the Second Life® world (and the fact that the Viewer code is open source) allows for the creation of custom Viewers that can log in without a human operator and perform the same actions as any normal avatar inworld. Avatars controlled by these custom, automated Viewers are called "bots" (a contraction of "robot")."

It seems to me that most residents consider bot to have a much broader meaning, and Jack seems to, too.  It seems to include any account that is logged on for some unspecfied length of time with no one attending to it.

If I have one instance of a non-graphical client logged on and I am AFK, is that a bot? It certainly does not conform to the definition above, since it does require human intervention to log in. If I have a dozen instances, are they bots? Two dozen?

What if I am doing the same thing using one or several instances of the LL client? Are they bots, or is the LL client, by definition, never a bot? If I leave my account logged on with the LL client during interruptions by rl that can last up to many hours, might I be considered a bot?  Especially, when I am in my house, I often alternate between RL and SL without logging off.  Do I need to start logging off whenever I quit paying attention to SL?

[#32]

Excluding registered bots from traffic calculations seems like the way to go.

Registered bots should probably show up something other than 'green dots' on the map, (perhaps grey or magenta), because they are also used them to visually fake "Big interesting party or something going on!"

I'm only moderately opposed to camping chairs... they do keep L$ in circulation, and some seem to use them as a form of marketing/loss-leaders in addition to traffic-boosters.

If camping chairs could detect registered bots and refuse to pay them, it might help discourage the kind of people that run *MANY* camping bots on the grid concurrently.

And of course, there's the question of how to enforce/encourage people to register their bot accounts.  I know from personal experience in this kind of thing that the carrot method is *FAR* more effective than the stick.  Introduce a few bot-account-only-accessible API-like functions which are useful to bot-creators, and only usable to accounts that have registered as bots/cyborgs.  (cyborgs being part human/part bot).  They won't mind so much if they don't count towards traffic, or get shunned by camping chairs if they get a little additional functionality out of it.  (and script kiddies using code they don't understand will have crippled/defunct bots unless they properly register them.)

[#33]

I have exactly ONE camper on two sims.  I think of the people that camp there as employees, they stay in contact with me and let me know when people are seeming to need assistance or there is something weird on the sim.  i interviewed these people and added them to a special group of ladies, they chat and have fun camping...they rez their items and go through inventory...and i pay them a wage that many of them then spend at the store.  I would continue this even if it had no bearing on traffic...i LIKE having someone there.  Is this sort of thing going to be wrong?  These are real players not bots, they contribute to the economy and it allows them to have homes, furnishings and pay tier.

YES there are people with a zillion campers that are just going to put all their bots on camp spots...surely linden labs can check to see who is real and who is not, do they ever have chat?  do they have groups, do they ever BUY things?

things that make sl fun for so many are lucky chairs, honest camping spots, midnight mania vendors, mob vendors etc.  there are LARGE groups for the purpose of following the hunts, the sales and who has the best chairs.  I dont participate in most of these things...its not something i personally want to do, but oh my goodness....SOOOOO many of my customers and friends do.  Punish the people obviously gaming the system...tens of thousands of traffic in an empty sim is farely easy to spot.

[#34]

Ok here is what I have to say on this Lucky Chairs are a form of camping chair but personally I use them as a way to give out free products in a limited way. Though it does have a side affect of generating more traffic. So I say camping is a good way for giving things away at a limited way without involveing anyone's money.

As for people using bots to generate traffic I agree that needs some sort of control or limiting method other then what has been inplace in the past since someone is always figureing out new ways to do things agains the systtem as such.

That is all for my opinion as things are for now.

[#35]

Are there other uses for so called Camping Chairs other than for Traffic?

Yes - they're advertising if they're camp-for-products and they're a way of giving a few L$ to newbies without just throwing it around.  Honestly - does anyone need the miniscule amount of money otherwise?  At least some require positive actions before paying-out so bots aren't much use.

Lucky-chairs and money-orbs are just like camp-for-products, in that people wait around (camping) waiting for their luck to strike.  I'm thinking of NCI, and other organisations, that use lucky-chairs at some of their parties as an interesting way to give away items and money.  They don't need 'traffic' and don't need to look popular, as such.  They just need to help people!  Then again, Carl Metropolitan has already been banned so what's the point in looking for sense from LL?

Good luck sorting out good from bad!  I'm cutting-down my SL time while LL continue in this shallow and ineffectual way.

[#36]

Reality Check - Am I insane for thinking that it's Linden Labs responsibility as the "service provider" to create a search system based on ALL the merits of each individual sim AND NOT the landowner or "customers" responibility to lose traffic in order to prop up a seriously flawed search system?

Obviously my customers looked around my mall and bought things so they couldn't have been too miffed about a few bots. Now my sim is a ghost town. How is that serving anyone?

[#37]

I very much do appreciate and applaude efforts to un-do the inflation of traffic/search rankings via past use of bots for the sake of traffic.

Can we have further clarification on camping chairs, in particular, prize camping and promotional devices/incentives such as lucky chairs, midnight mania boards, picks camping, prizes for picks, random-item-orbs based on picks, (I am sure there is a bunch of other stuff, but off the top of my head)?

Getting rid of camping chairs, especially prize camping, I think will negatively impact on newer users to SL, as well as those who simply enjoy prize camping for the random conversations that are had during, as well as the fun of hunting places down.

While yes, there are freebie locations galore - they tend to be visual burnout, in looking at everything, trying to find something that interests or looks good to us in terms of what we have in mind for our avatar. Looking back, I valued more the items that I 'earned' through prize camping, than items that were set as freebies within a store (even the same store). There is a sense of it having more value, due to making an effort of some sort to have in my inventory.

My interest in all of this --- is in how much I enjoyed it during the early weeks, and how much I continue to enjoy stuff like Midnight Mania boards. I've thought many times of wanting to setup a money tree, as well as prize camping, and MM boards (but I need to create content that is polished and complete for people to want to have, rather than stuff I start building and then have a nap-attack before I am done and forget to come back to), to let other people enjoy things too. My main thought in terms of wanting to offer prize camping is the potential for conversations, as well as being able to be helpful if I am there when someone is camping who is newer that would appreciate some guidance in how the viewer works, basic concepts, etc.

(I mention lucky chairs in the context of when groups of us end up waiting in hopes that our letter will come up.

Midnight Mania boards in the context of when a board is called in a group and a few dozen people simultaneously are trying to TP in and rez, stuff gets lagged. The board clicks get lagged, and I've wondered more than a few times what the experience of neighbouring stores is like during those time periods.

Picks camping in terms of gaming of traffic, some may add to picks because they like a place, but are more motivated by the payout, when there is a payout possible)

[#38]

Maybe Jack you should look at this like the advertising policy and say no more than one camping spot per x amount of land instead of just saying camping is bad and should be sent to the fiery pits of Mordor.

[#39]

I was not banned. I was suspended for one hour, which was later reversed and removed from my record. The suspension was related to a nipple being visible in one piece of art in my collection of SL-resident created art on display in Castle Kuula across from NCI. At the time, I was under the impression that limited artistic nudity was allowed in PG sims.

Were I a vindictive sort, I would have teleported over to the Linden-showcased Dresden Gallery (PG sim) and ARed every nipple and penis in their collection of classic artwork.

(Note: NCI does use Lucky Chairs at some of its parties, but as you wrote--not for purposes of traffic. The main problem NCI parties have is too many people in the sim and lag!)

[#40]

Jack,

Only a fraction of the residents ever see this blog. Do you plan on putting this policy change on the login screen so everyone has to agree to it and thus know what is coming?

Also how do you plan on enforcing this? When the policy was first announced we saw a dip in traffic falsification by the long term system abusers. Subsequently they put them all back but just spread them out so as to not be as obvious. Since your previous discussions indicated you would not be accepting abuse reports then how will you enforce this policy? How will you prevent the allowing of friends and accounts that represent a lot of revenue to LL to get away with it while enforcing on others someone at LL might not care about? Why can we still start at Linden Lab HQ in world and start working out and find the longest term business operations still running bot/camp farms? I mean they are right there. How can you guys miss them when they are in your back yard?

As for model bots they are vapor clouds in the latest release candidate so unless the bot apps are recoded to perform the necessary graphical functions then they will become useless. Actually this will apply to any "bot use case" unless a smoke cloud is acceptable for the use case. Bot apps are going to have to be a bit more sophisticated in the impending future.

[#41]

Jopsy Pendragon's suggestion of using grayed-out green dots on the map to represent bots is a great idea! Please--someone who knows how to work the JIRA, add that.

[#42]

Fatima--I think your people are pretty clearly legitimate customer service employees. Claiming they are a camper would be like claiming a NCI Instructor (who was paid to teach a class) was a camper because he or she stood in one spot for an hour while teaching.

[#43]

No camping= no lindens, no lindens= no buying

No camping, no lindens = no time on SL,

traffic is heading down, down, down!

[#44]

If I were really cynical I would say that

"We recognize that you need a safe place to conduct land transactions ... data to help you make the right decisions about what land to buy or sell ... this needs to be seamless between SecondLife.com and the Viewer to improve the experience ..."

Translates more or less as .. "We intend to put a stop to direct resident-resident transactions by interposing our web site into all of them."

That is really very cynical.

But totally in line with recent 'experience'.

[#45]

I spend a lot of time camping or going to xploders, but that is while I'm dong work on my website or occasionaly when I go to the store or something that take's no more than an hour or so. I don't do it while I'm sleeping or gone for too long. It is the only way for me to buy clothes and etc. I'm completely lacking in building skills.

I think it is fair for there to be camping, as most places that have camping and/or xploders as a lot of land owners rent small spaces on their land to others who then can some of their goods. As a result, the land owners make money and the renters earn money for having their goods bought by campers or those waiting for xpolders to count down. (A good example of this is Cheryl's Land.) Most people starting out selling out their goods want a small space that they can sell them and places with camping (in particular those with good rates) will see more sales than those without.

To turn off camping would hurt everyone and bring the SL economy down in various ways. First, it would force people to buy L$ and with the real world economy the way it is, not much of that would be happening. Second, those land owners who once relied on renting out spaces to others would see a decline because there would be less people buying the renters items. Lastly, if land owners can't make money via renters they might sell their land and people would be disappointed for many reasons. All of this would bring the SL economy down as a whole and affect LL's profits as some land owner's decide not to keep their land anymore.

Your thoughts?

[#46]

That's an easy one. Cut a small parcel for the camping, and don't set it to show in search, so that the campers don't increase the main parcel's traffic - at least not while they are actually on the camping chairs. Camping isn't banned. Camping to increase the traffic number of a parcel that is set to show in search is banned, although, if the parcel is only about camping, and set to show in search, my guess is that LL wouldn't do anything.

[#47]

I love the idea of having registered bots (even classes of bots) which don't show up in traffic and are displayed in different colors on the maps.

Regardless, Search is so completely borked that I hardly use it any more. Until LL fixes Search so it's meaningful, most of this discussion is moot.

[#48]

So while reading all ur comments i made a linden camping.  And yes when i camp i like to read & learn more about sl maybe go thru & organize my inventory. And yes some strangers come up n talk local isnt it my perogitive to talk or not to them. im not a welcoming comittee or a information booth. i think camping is a great way to get lindens. dont take camping away. if it a traffic issue then what are u going to take away next? events, concerts?

[#49]

If I see someone hanging around the lucky chair in my store i usually go down and set them to wild card.

Generally speaking lucky chairs are no longer a means of raising traffic. The huds out there that track the chairs make sure people don't have to stand around. They see stuff come up, tp in, grab, and go. All lucky chairs do now is regulate gift disbursement.

[#50]

I've seen plots of land with seemingly nothing on them but camp chairs.  No stores, no club.   Nothing.  Have often wondered why a land owner would try to run up land counts when there is nothing there to earn money from.  Camp bots are a waste of space and resources perhaps.  So maybe the idea of being able to sort out the bots and not allowing them to count in the traffic numbers is a good one.

As for Zyngo or Lucky Chairs, what's the problem?  You can be fairly sure people (not bots) are coming there because they like to play Zyngo or have fun waiting out the chairs.  They get a prize or a few $L and have fun and the store or club owner gets a little traffic.  Sounds like a fair trade to me, unless the owner packs in a ton of chairs or machines and uses up resources to the point of lagging the sim or denying entrance to others.  So perhaps a limitation on such devices according to parcel size?

.................................................................................

JACK LINDEN: "The most common complaint about Land Bots is that they grab parcels that have been set for open sale by mistake....... So we want to make setting Land for sale much safer."

Well...... knowing the thrust of this blog post is about bots & traffic, still Jack brought up land bots, so.......

If the main complaint about these bots is they grab land set for open sale by mistake and do it too fast to stop, then perhaps a second layer of land sales support may be in order.  If land is set for sale  (mistakenly or otherwise) and somebody attempts to buy it, bot or not, then how about a notice of intent to buy and a final box the seller needs to tick in order to authorize the sale and allow the deal to go through?  To be fair, give the buyer a chance to back out BEFORE the seller is sent the intent to buy notice.  That way the buyer has a chance to get cold feet without the seller being  any the wiser.  :-)

[#51]

anything which improves the search facility has to be welcome -- free competition on the web in the '90s eventually led to Google, which set a new standard for fast relevant results -- it's disappointing to be using networking apps 10 years later which often have search facilities that don't reach that standard