Camping Question

[Treasure Ballinger]

Hello Avatars; hope all are well, been a minute since I've been here.  I am wondering, did LL ban camping?  The articles I find in Google are basically stuff from 2011, 2014, and just about traffic bots (the green dot crowd).  Is actual handing out lindens to avatars in any given area, a banned activity?  (I am not talking about skilled gaming here).  Thanks for what you can tell me, or articles.  Can't find a thing in the TOS either.....

 

Treasure

[Lindal Kidd]

No, camping is not banned.  It has largely fallen into disuse though, due to two factors.  The first one is bots.  Back in 2008 or so, camping bots run by "gold diggers" were displacing real avatars from camping chairs.  It became a huge pain for campground owners to keep policing their areas for bots.  Then, the owners discovered that they could solve the problem by using traffic bots of their own, instead of enticing avatars to visit camping chairs.  Besides, the traffic bots didn't have to be paid!  The situation became so dire that at one point unofficial resident surveys estimated that as much as 20% of the concurrency numbers consisted of traffic bots.  And so we come to the second reason...changes in the way traffic affects Search rankings.  Traffic numbers are no longer a major determinant of a place's rank in Search, so both attracting campers and using traffic bots (the latter of which is now not permitted) are not effective strategies.

There are still some places that offer camping, often with amusing avatar animations thrown in.

[Fionalein]

camping got mostly replaced with traffic games: you get payed for an activity like fishing, see related post over there:

basically it is the same as camping