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Perrie Juran wrote:

Some of that goes back to the old problem of a lack of any sense of zoning on the Mainland. 

People used to be virtually forced off their parcels when someone would open a Club rendering the SIM almost unlivable because of the lag fest.

I believe in being a good neighbor myself, but not everyone does this.  Can really suck at times.

 

I actually encountered this exact scenario on a mainland plot back my early days. I owned half of the region which had a prefab store on it, a new club opened up on the other half. The increase in lag was instantaneous for me and at peak times they filled up the region and my customers could not even get into the store. The whole thing got very messy and petty and it nearly put me out of business. The only way I could stay in business was to take control of the traffic. I was running between 30 and 40 bots constantly, manually adding and removing them as my customer numbers increased or decreased. This was difficult to maintain but eventually I managed to drive the club out of business and they abandoned their land. I ended up paying through the nose for the other half sim at auction to stop it happening again. It was a **bleep** thing to do on my part, but it was either them or me...so I chose me. Thank heavens for traffic gaming :-)

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Man, having an automated system would have given me a decisive advantage, especially as it was little old me against a group of people. Unfortunately this took place before your time I think, I was at very start of my gaming exploits and I remember dwell was one of the things I was gaming. I rekon it was must have been late 2005, early 2006. By the end of 2006 I had left the mainland entirely and was on private estates. I hated mainland by then as that was when the spam fest was in full swing. Dickheads cutting up parcels into tiny plots and filling them all with massive ads boards. I returned to the mainland in 2011, all 4 brands, 7 stores in total, and I have to say I have not really had any negative mainland experiences since then.

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I was quite annoyed when they banned pick gaming after GSA 6 was rolled out. I had held the number one ranking on keywords such as houses, homes, and stores and had a good system in place to ensure I was attracting the majority of those people prostituting their profiles for a few L$. The ban came into effect, and as a good citizen who tries reasonably hard to abide by the TOS I stopped gaming picks. Overnight I lost my rankings and my listings were buried and I was left floundering around for weeks trying to make sense of the new search engine in an effort to successfully abuse it again.

Maybe I am seeing the past through rose tinted glasses, but it was allot more fun doing business back in the days when the majority of business was driven by in-world search. The factors that determine ranking were constantly changing and gamers were constantly competing with each other, with allot more one upmanship going on. It added an exciting edge to doing business in SL and winning "the game" resulted in real financial rewards.

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Porky Gorky wrote:

I was quite annoyed when they banned pick gaming after GSA 6 was rolled out. I had held the number one ranking on keywords such as houses, homes, and stores and had a good system in place to ensure I was attracting the majority of those people prostituting their profiles for a few L$. The ban came into effect, and as a good citizen who tries reasonably hard to abide by the TOS I stopped gaming picks. Overnight I lost my rankings and my listings were buried and
I was left floundering around for weeks trying to make sense of the new search engine in an effort to successfully abuse it again.

Maybe I am seeing the past through rose tinted glasses, but it was allot more fun doing business back in the days when the majority of business was driven by in-world search. The factors that determine ranking were constantly changing and gamers were constantly competing with each other, with allot more one upmanship going on. It added an exciting edge to doing business in SL and winning "the game" resulted in real financial rewards.

LOL. I like it :)

I never got into Picks gaming because it cost money and I had very suitable free alternatives that allowed me to control to top 10 results. Picks were just links to the target parcel pages. There were, and probably still are, other ways of getting loads of such links that didn't cost anything, and I used those.

I did have a huge advantage though. Before I lost myself in SL, I made my living as an SEO (Search Engine Optimiser) - I got business websites to the top of the rankings. When I started doing that there were a number of top engines (and Google was still being invented) but by the time I arrived in SL, Google was the only that mattered, and I was good at getting top rankings. So when LL started to use Google's GSA engine, I was in my element. I actually wrote some good instructions for getting top rankings in the GSA - back in the RA forum. I do know that some people got top rankings by following those instructions but most people probably didn't try, or maybe didn't understand them.

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If I could find where to get the old RA archive I could probably find the thread - it was made sticky so it should be easy to find. But I don't know where to get the RA archive.

 

ETA: I should say that LL no longer uses the GSA engine. I understand that they now use a freebie engine, but that doesn't mean that it's not a good one. I've never looked at it but it's probably fair to say that it almost certainly works in a very similar way to the major engines, all of which emulated Google once Google had shown the way. So inbound links are almost certainly still important for rankings.

Picks were one way of getting those links, because a Pick in a profile page was displayed as a link to the target (parcel) page. That may still be true. There were other ways of getting links too. What you need to do is find out what html pages display links to the parcel html pages. For instance, group pages did it - maybe they still do. I used a lot of those and I also used objects on my own parcel pages with actual html links in their names and descriptions. The links pointed to my other parcel pages. It all worked back then. Being able to use html code in names and descriptions worked for other aspects of seo too, and not just for links.

The thing about links, though, is that the LL search team were well aware of what we were doing to create them. I know that because the team leader at the time previously worked in Yahoo!'s search dept., and we used to discuss it. LL didn't have access to the GSA code so they couldn't prevent it from rating links so highly. They could do things outside it though. Now that they have the freebie engine, and full access to its code, they can modify it in any way they like, and it may not deal with links in anything like the same way. I wouldn't hurt to test it though. Also, the LL system creates all the html pages, so they can put in them what they want. I haven't looked at one in a very long time so I don't know if there are still any links in the various html parcel pages or not. Even if there are, it doesn't mean that the engine treats them as powerfully as the major web engines do.

Things have changed since I used to use my seo knowledge to get top rankings in SL. It may be that the information I posted in RA won't work any more, due to LL having their hands on the current engine's code. I do know that, even when they still used the GSA, they prevented html code in descriptions from working. My memory may be wrong but I have an idea that it still worked in object names. It probably doesn't now. 

So things have changed since the RA thread. What you need to do is understand general seo basics and see how you can manipulate your own parcel's page to improve its ranking ability. Here's a page that will give you the basics.

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More....

I just had a look at a parcel page - first time in years - and I'm pretty sure that putting html code in in the names and descriptions of objects stopped working (they countered it) before they stopped using the GSA. So we were stopped from bolding words, making them headings, and stuff like that, which is a pity because we were able to format our parcel pages and make them more attractive. It still wouldn't hurt to test it with the freebie engine though - you never know. I've just set up a test for it.

I also noticed that they are still using Google GSA codes in the page. I learned in the forum that they'd stopped using the GSA but the codes still being there indicates that (a) they still use the GSA,or (b) they've incorporated the codes into the freebie engine,or © the freebie engine ignores them (they are comments) and they haven't bothered to change the programme that creates the pages since they changed engines, or (d) they use them themselves in a peripheral programme that allows them to feed only certain parts of the page to the engine for indexing. Probably c or d.

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If you read the webpage at the other end of that link I posted, you can work wonders with most websites - just with that.

And you can also work wonders with the SL html parcel pages, even though you can't do all the things it talks about. You control most of the content in your parcel's page and you can tailor it accordingly by writing suitable Names and Descriptions for your objects that show in search. And, with good use of certain characters at the beginning of object names, you can even arrange which ones are higher up the page, which also helps.

But, if you read that webpage, you'll know that the most important thing you can do to your parcel's page itself, to achieve higher rankings for your main searchterm, is to name the parcel well, because that's the text that is used for the parcel's html page Title, and that's very important for rankings. That's assuming that the freebie engine works in a similar way to Google and the rest, but it doesn't hurt to assume that it does. The parcel name used to have even more power for rankings when they were using the GSA, but they then used GSA codes to remove that extra power. Meanies!

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Well since I started to play with it I managed to get my place to show up first for the word "photo" which I consider like the most general one, then first for "photo studio", 4th for "photography", 3rd for "gallery", 6th for "profile" and few others that I am too lazy to check now but I still am not sure I know what I am doing and kinda think it was an accident lol.

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accident? lol Well done!

But I'm surprised that you got changes so soon. I've been assuming that it days a few days for changes in a parcel's html page to be crawled and indexed. Maybe it's a lot quicker these days.

 

ETA: I think your results are just coincidence because you only started to do it today. The test I set up (that I mentioned) hasn't got through yet, so crawling and indexing isn't that quick.

 

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Phil Deakins wrote:

That's an old argument, Amethyst, and one that was never valid and cannot work. According to that argument, a person who owns a 512m mainland parcel can't go onto his/her land because s/he would exceed the number of avatars for a 512. And the same is true of a 1024m mainland parcel. So it's obvious that there is no need for mainland parcel owners to limit the number of avs on their parcels in proportion to the land they own.

All that's needed by a parcel owner is to be sensible about the resources that are used on the parcel.

 

I agree that a parcel owner should be sensible about resources but there are a lot of people that aren't.  They keep putting out poorly scripted objects until the sim lags so bad, someone has to stop them.  I've seen it happen time and again on my own estates and in other's.  I've seen it happen on the mainland too on sims where friends mine that are the victims of resource hogs have land.  I see nothing sensible in one guy keeping 15 bots on his land to control how many his neighbors can have on their land. 

Actually LL's goal is to allocate sim resources by parcel size in a similar manner as prims or LI is used now and they have stated that in many Official SL Developer meetings I have attended over the years.  Each parcel will be allocated so many resources based on size and you won't be able to use more.  Its why we now have access to script information on the parcel tools level and not just the region level which we didn't have before and why that same dialog has a tab for avatar usage.  It is a first step.  Avatar resources will probably not be measured by numbers but by server impact, but numbers is all we have now.  The part circled in red doesn't work yet but one day it will. 

So don't make statements about the argument being old and never valid or can't work like its a fact when it's only your opinion, and a misinformed one.  Actually it is an idea coming to some land near (and under) you in the future.

parcel script info.png

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Phil Deakins wrote:

That's an old argument, Amethyst, and one that was never valid and cannot work. According to that argument, a person who owns a 512m mainland parcel can't go onto his/her land because s/he would exceed the number of avatars for a 512. 

Adding some maths using Phil's concerns as an example...

If we go for the general rule that a full region of 15,000 prims and 65,536m^2 gets 800Mb of RAM...

Some 0.0122Mb/m^2, though since the smallest possible parcel is 4m * 4m, 0.19Mb per block of land.

A 512m^2 parcel would get 6.25Mb, more than enough for the attachments of a couple of well-scripted avatars (~2Mb each) and some left over for furniture. 1024m^2 would get 12.5Mb, and so on.

I have never seen it discussed that these limits would prevent avatars moving around freely, Amethyst, it would limit the performance of their attached scripts. This would slow or disable (this bit hasn't been clear) resource requests (script time per sim-frame, but also total memory allocation - as shown in your picture) to scale them with the parcel size.

Assuming it was implemented correctly, it would use the same 'sensible' use of resources that sims should've been adhearing to all along. You could still (in theory) cram 40 avatars on to 512m^2, but they'd get 0.15Mb of script space - about 9 non-Mono scripts - each, assuming there were no scripts rezzed in objects (and, a proportional amount of calculation time per sim-frame).

I'll save the chapter on triangle/poly density and detail scaling according to resource allowance for another time. ;) It's doubtful that these controls will get added to SL in any timely manner, having been first discussed in 2008 IIRC.

Hope that helps.

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Why don't we stick to just one thread to discuss this in, Amethyst :)

You didn't say anything about memory, etc. You only talked about the number of avatars. And you were wrong.

I proved that you were wrong already in this thread, and now in the other thread. In case you missed it...

If I own only a 512m parcel in a sim, or a 1024m, or a 1536m, and the sim can only accommodate 40 avatars, how many avatars can I have on my land to be in keeping with your idea about only having the number of avatars on the land in proportion to the size of the land? The correct answer is none, of course. That alone is categorical proof that what you said is wrong.

The fact is that, as long as the functioning of the whole sim is not being affected, there is no wrong use of resources, and LL will never prevent more avatars on a parcel that its proportional share.

On the other hand, if a person owns almost all of the sim, and s/he alone is on the parcel and using so much in the way of scripts etc., that the sim is badly lagged and the other owners are affected by it, LL will act against that large parcel owner.

Whether or not LL acts has nothing to do with the number of avatars. It has everything to do with what, if anything, affects the functioning of the whole sim. In both threads, you spoke only about the number of avatars on a parcel, and, in both threads, you were wrong. I'm sorry, but you were.

 

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Amethyst Jetaime wrote:

I see nothing sensible in one guy keeping 15 bots on his land to control how many his neighbors can have on their land. 

It depends. According to you, if the guy owns at least 3/8ths of the sim (at least 24k), he's entitled to have 15 avatars on his land. It doesn't make any difference if they are bots. So what are you trying to say?

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Phil Deakins wrote:

It depends. According to you, if the guy owns at least 3/8ths of the sim (at least 24k), he's entitled to have 15 avatars on his land. It doesn't make any difference if they are bots. So what are you trying to say?


Bots also generally run on text-based viewers (no texture pulls) and wear minimal assets (no script overhead) - making them far and away cheaper than operating a 'live' avatar. I don't think resource control would have anything to do with bots at all. Unless you count a couple of sims that use avatar attachments on bots to massively increase prim density for decorations, which I'd say definitely goes unfairly against resource usage.

I am inclined to think Amethyst tried to choose a simplistic way to explain the method behind resource use - a method that doesn't really hold water. It can have effects on avatars, but only because of attachments (with embedded scripts).

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I thought that all bots ran on either text-based clients or less (e.g. LibSL/OpenMV). It's hardly a bot if it needs a viewer :) Anyway...

Quite a few years ago, when I was getting into bots, I had 4 LibSL-based bots running, each with it's own LibSL-based instance (later all my bots ran in just one instance) plus a viewer for my av, of course. My bandwidth was 8Mb at that time. They were in the store but, from what I could see in each bot window, they were receiving very little from SL. Some time later, the internet became very sluggish every day between certain hours - regular as clockwork. Some time after that, my ISP let all customers know that they were throttling the bandwidth if more than a certain amount was used between other certain hours of the day. If you used more between those hours on a day, then you would be throttled later that day.

I couldn't believe that I was using too much at any time in any day. What the bots received was minimal so they couldn't be the cause. I phoned my ISP (Virgin) to complain and only after that did I use some programme or other to monitor each running programme's bandwidth usage, and I was astonished at how much each bot was using. They were receiving a lot more than I would have imagined. I upped my bandwidth and it's been fine ever since. Being in the store, that always had a fair number of customers in it, meant that each bot was receiving data on every av and movement within range. So bots can use a lot more bandwidth than one would expect.

Those bots were demo models, and needed to be in the store. Later, when I used 30+ traffic bots as well, I placed the traffic bots as far out range of changes as was possible - over 4000m up. So resource usage of bots depends a lot on where they are. If they are placed within range of avs moving around, they each receive a constant stream of data.

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Phil Deakins wrote:

I thought that all bots ran on either text-based clients or less (e.g. LibSL/OpenMV). It's hardly a bot if it needs a viewer
:)
 Anyway...

I've snipped for the sake of brevity, but I definitely agree with this particular part of your post.

Unfortunately, maintaining any kind of link inside SL requires a viewer-sized instance. Even without textures, they still get sent prim-type parameters, avatar display pictures, and of course information about every prim change/update, adjustment or update within range, to any prim or avatar at a potential rate of some 450 updates per second (potentially higher, and obviously the payload is variable. It's not exact mathematics here). On top of this there is the infrastructure load for SL (which isn't measured in Statistics AFAIK), and has been increasing dramatically since the arrival of Viewer 2.

I've never operated a bot, and I'm not sure how LibSL etc pull it off, but I would be suprised if they could prevent the majority of this useless (at least where bots are concerned) data being sent. That would be down to simulators themselves.

I'm also fundamentally against traffic throttling or shaping from ISPs, it's too easily abused simply for the sake of convenience, and allows an easy side-step from service quality complaints. But I'm sure this is off-topic. :P

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While I was writing the previous post, it occurred to me that, because bots must be registered as such, SL doesn't need to send an awful lot of data to them. But, on reflection, not sending an awful lot of data to registered bots, would probably prevent some of them from doing their 'jobs'. Pity. Although it's not beyond reason to have a system where a bot runner, or any av I suppose, can deselect types of data, so that it is never sent.

 

ETA: The OpenMV system is big. On-screen it looks small because it can run in a small dos-like window, but behind the scenes it still has to deal with everything (I think) that a viewer deals with. OpenMV isn't a programme that can connect to SL. It's a collection of background handlers. It does come with a ready-made basic programme called TestClient that can be run to connect to SL, but that uses OpenMV. It isn't OpenMV in itself. I think that all text-based clients also use OpenMV.

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