Is BOTs traffic gaming SERIOUSLY breaking Second Life search?

[Phil Deakins]

9 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Except the know-it-alls on the forums don't really know how this functions because the Lindens, like Google, do not reveal their algorithms. 

But the know-it-alls in the forum do know that the web search and the legacy search are totally different search systems Or at least some of us do lol.

There is no need for LL to reveal their algorithms concerning the legacy search because it's blatantly obvious. When they had the GSA, is was known how that worked too. They replaced that with an open source engine, so those algos are known. All that's left are any modifications that LL has done to the open-source search engine. So don't confuse yourself with the know-it-alls in the forum

 

 

Edited March 1, 2021 by Phil Deakins

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Phil Deakins said:

Obviously, I have to enter this thread. It's traditional 😁

I haven't even fully read the first page, but I want to post a couple of things.

Imo, traffic isn't far off being as effective now is it ever was for inworld search rankings. That's because the majority of users use 3rd party viewers, and the default search (I believe) in them is the legacy search. So I believe that most inworld searchers use the legacy search, which ranks on traffic. That's my opinion, of course.

When LL brought in the web search system - the Google Search Appliance - they incorporated traffic as a factor, but it was only a small factor. After that, they used a free, open source, search engine (Apache, I think) because they didn't have the degree of control with the GSA that they wanted. They are probably still using it. But the results it produces (the web search) are likely to only be produced for a minority of inworld searches, while the results for the majority of inworld searches are provided by the legacy search (traffic). That's still my opinion, of course.

The OP's question is "Is BOTs traffic gaming SERIOUSLY breaking Second Life search?" and the answer is a resounding YES for Places in the legacy search. It's not new like the OP seems to think. Bots have always changed the results in the legacy search, so that they state false popularities for places. The inworld web search isn't spoiled by traffic bots though. I suggest that the OP uses it.

LL did things to change it, like bringing in a web search, and not counting scripted agents (bots) for traffic, but they stopped short of doing the one thing that would have killed traffic bots off. If they'd stopped providing legacy search results, traffic bots would have died out at a stroke. They could still do that if they were in the slightest bit interested.

Well, Gosh, how would Phil have something to say about search lol.

I generally agree with you that it is generally still effective in theory -- that is, was, until it broke on the SL viewer 3 months ago, and on Firestorm, apparently occasionally? Or on some things? Someone who uses it can tell me, I hear anecdotally from tenants that it is not broken, or that it is broken.

So the crippled Viewer 1.23 search that became the default Search in the regular SL viewer works fine, and the Legacy Search, which *is* 1.23 viewer, with maybe some polishes here and there in 10 years, works BETTER on Firestorm or Alchemy. It's not true that people never use that tab. Of course they use that tab.  How do I know? I ask people how they found a rental and they tell me, and most often it is search/places, then search/all, then classifieds, then "my friend told me" or "I saw an ad in a store".

I disagree that Bot searches even "break" anybody's search anywhere because people have learned to ignore it, to go around it, to type more search terms to refine it, etc. People aren't stupid. They adapt. They adapt so well that the users of bots have to sometimes think up some other gimmick or they even stop wasting money on bots.

The SL Viewer algorithms in the form of the GSA the Lindens use, because it wasn't perfect for them, in fact tries to compensate for bots by creating algorithms that use other factors to surface parcels on the top (the bots are illegal so they should just be removed but that's harder to do that putting in some snippet of code).

The Lindens may be at one of their philosophical dithering points now where they are upset that there are bots distorting traffic -- lol -- because their handiwork not banning bots as they should have has caught up with them.

Or (my theory) because Google is changing its Adsense in March in various ways with "Native Search" and "Auto" and taking out "line search" for web sites and blogs -- and probably changing other things I don't understand that are the real reasons -- the Lindens have held off fixing search. They haven't said that, which is worrisome, and they also have engaged in the most incredible tap-dancing on this topic since the Nicholas Brothers. (That's why it's important that I not be the one who keeps asking this but somebody they love and respect so that we can all hear the truth).

I've put together all my observations and I realize there is something odd going on. I only have the ability to try this hypothesis or that tweet or this inworld query and be laughed at, until the right answer comes to me or them. THAT something deliberate and not negligent is going on is clear to me now.

At times like this, take your rarest ultrare single copy item you treasure and hold it close, take a picture again, you may never see it again. Get the landmark to your favourite store, you may never see it again. It's a virtual world.

People don't necessarily float conspiracy theories because they are Wal-mart shoppers and vote for people you don't like; they do that to see if anyone will prove it wrong or right. So maybe it's good that Oz has left as he watches his handiwork of 10 years keeping Legacy Search in the TPVs -- something that wasn't even his goal! Which he disdained as a concern of mine! -- is destroyed *in the TPVs too*.

Then all the people using the TPVs, you know, 90% of the user base, will finally understand what I, a user ONLY of the standard SL viewer, have been crying about for 10 years.

Or it won't be that, but some variation of tthat.

Edited March 1, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

9 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

But the know-it-alls in the forum do know that the web search and the legacy search are totally different search systems Or at least some of us do lol.

 

Except the know-it-alls in the forums don't know HOW MANY PEOPLE USE VIEWER 1.23 SEARCH STILL IN THE TAB IN FIRESTORM AND NOT WEB.

And the know-it-alls who like to be man-splainers on this subject don't realize that their differences ARE BROKEN AND ARE CHANGING. They think it doesn't matter.

They don't think it's everybody. They think it's nobody but losers. They also don't think anybody uses the SL viewer made by LL.

 

[Phil Deakins]

 

14 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The SL Viewer algorithms in the form of the GSA the Lindens use, because it wasn't perfect for them, in fact tries to compensate for bots by creating algorithms that use other factors to surface parcels on the top (the bots are illegal so they should just be removed but that's harder to do that putting in some snippet of code).

LL doesn't use the GSA. They stopped using it a lot of years ago. They replaced it with a free, open-source, search engine - Apache, I think. LL didn't do what you said with the GSA. They had no choice but to let it do things exactly in its own way. They added a traffic factor to it by making use of the GSA's own way; i.e. by adding links to parcel's page according to the level of traffic it got. If you'd seen it, you would have known. But, unless you read the forums at that time, you probably wouldn't have known how the GSA ranked pages. I explained it all in the forum back then. It's still there in the archives.

Edited March 1, 2021 by Phil Deakins

[Phil Deakins]

3 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Except the know-it-alls in the forums don't know HOW MANY PEOPLE USE VIEWER 1.23 SEARCH STILL IN THE TAB IN FIRESTORM AND NOT WEB.

That's true. Personally, I said at every stage that it's my opinion, and I don't recall reading anyone claiming to know those numbers. Can you point me to any posts that claim to know, please.

I can't respond to the rest of your post because I simply don't understand it.

[Prokofy Neva]

Just now, Phil Deakins said:

 

LL doesn't use the GSA. They stopped using it a lot of years ago. They replaced it with a free, open-source search engine - Apache, I think. LL didn't do what you said with the GSA. They let it do things exactly in its own way. They added a traffic factor to it by making use of the GSA's own way; i.e. by adding link to parcel's page according to the level of traffic it got. If you'd seen it, you would have known. But, unless you read the forums at that time, you probably wouldn't have known how the GSA ranked pages. I explained it all in the forum.

The Lindens used GSA out of the box years ago, yes. But they modified it -- "adding a traffic factor to it is" is not "letting it be used its own way" -- it is MODIFYING it. Then using Apache IS that. 

I did see it. And I did read your beliefs about how you had discovered how they did that. That was not enough to prove to me that they did it that way.

Just as your say-so that they somehow stopped using GSA isn't confirmed; or that their open-source Apache is ONLY what they use and not other things.  The Lindens do not answer questions about how they do Search, they think for obvious reasons. They throw up the shield of proprietary interests to avoid answering the hard questions about how search is broken, doesn't work for this world, works in TPVs, etc.

AND you don't know that they aren't planning to use GSA NOW. That something about Google, even if they use Apache, is forcing them to change how they do things.

It's easy to rant all day that someone isn't in the know like you are, or isn't some technically competent person as you believe yourself to be.

But the bottom line is, I don't see a Linden blog on this; I'm not aware of an office hour transcript on this (although there could be, I can't read a lot of them). So be right and have other people be wrong all day if you like and it makes you feel good, but the reality is, you don't know, the Lindens aren't talking.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

5 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

I can't respond to the rest of your post because I simply don't understand it.

Grumpity has ascended the crystal void throne with the void greatswords hidden behind the Iron Throne of He Who Was First Among the Named Ones.

Do you get it now?

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

4 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

the Lindens aren't talking.

Maybe it's something that causes them embarrassment

 

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

2 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Grumpity has ascended the crystal void throne with the void greatswords hidden behind the Iron Throne of He Who Was First Among the Named Ones.

Oh gawd, please let's not go to Tolkien-land

[Prokofy Neva]

7 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

That's true. Personally, I said at every stage that it's my opinion, and I don't recall reading anyone claiming to know those numbers. Can you point me to any posts that claim to know, please.

I can't respond to the rest of your post because I simply don't understand it.

Any useful discuss on these topics has to start with a firm grounding in what Viewer 1.23 was in 2011, people forget. Compare and contrast to how Legacy works in Search/places. Someone can screenshot how Firestorm works now, and you will see, although of course with some changes, that it is similar and therefore useful.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

Just now, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

Oh gawd, please let's not go to Tolkien-land

Look, do I look like an elf who talks about himself in the third person?

Oh, wait, I think I just did that.

But I may be the only person in America who hasn't read LOTR or seen the movie.

I'm just reporting on what I saw on YouTube and Twitter.

[Phil Deakins]

19 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The Lindens used GSA out of the box years ago, yes. But they modified it -- "adding a traffic factor to it is" is not "letting it be used its own way" -- it is MODIFYING it. Then using Apache IS that. 

They didn't modify its algos. They couldn't. Google didn't allow it. They could tweak some parameters, and that's about it. They added traffic in exactly the way I said, so that the GSA could incorporate it in exactly its own way, just like I said. I suppose you didn't actually see the html pages that LL created for that purpose. I did I even described them in the forum.

 

19 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

And I did read your beliefs about how you had discovered how they did that. That was not enough to prove to me that they did it that way.

That's fine. I freely gave my expertise. Nobody had to accept it if they didn't want to. I use the word 'expertise' because I was an expert at that time, and well-known in the RL world for it.

 

19 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Just as your say-so that they somehow stopped using GSA isn't confirmed; or that their open-source Apache is ONLY what they use and not other things.  The Lindens do not answer questions about how they do Search, they think for obvious reasons.

Ah but what you don't know is that I had an inroad into the SL search team at that time - specifically, the leader of it. So I DO know what happened, and I was privvy to "how they do Search" back then. It may not be confirmed to your satisfaction, but it certainly happened as I said.

People are free to accept whatever they want to accept, and reject whatever they want to reject. I'm perfectly content with that. Back then, I was very helpful in the forum. You chose not to accept it. That's fine.

 

19 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

AND you don't know that they aren't planning to use GSA NOW. That something about Google, even if they use Apache, is forcing them to change how they do things.

No I don't know that. The GSA was VERY expensive and they had to have 3 of them, each costing a fortune every month, so I would be absolutely astonished if they went back to it, knowing that they can't tailor its operations to they way they want, AND that they can tailor the free, open-source, one to their needs. I think that's a tree not worth barking up.

Edited March 1, 2021 by Phil Deakins

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

It's probably relevant to this and a couple of other threads to point out that I am renting the current place I call home because I found it using legacy search, saw that the traffic figure was reasonably low, and furthermore had a working world map that allowed me to see how many adjacent plots were showing yellow-for-sale colours. And this wasn't many weeks ago, when search and world maps were all supposedly broken.

But then, I'm a recidivist 1.23 viewer-user, I've used Singularity ever since it first came out.

[Prokofy Neva]

5 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

Maybe it's something that causes them embarrassment

 

No. The people who gave rich, diverse meaning to Philip's (and Silicon Valley's) mantra of "fail fast and fail publicly" aren't embarrassed at things like "search is broken and we didn't fix it for 3 months". They are just busy or it's hard or they don't care.

As for Oz,

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

Franz Kafka

 

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

2 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

But I may be the only person in America who hasn't read LOTR or seen the movie.

You are singularly untainted. I wish I was that innocent.

[Prokofy Neva]

11 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

 

They didn't modify its algos. They couldn't. Google didn't allow it. They added traffic in exactly the way I said, so that the GSA could incorporate it in exactly its own way. I suppose you didn't actually see the html pages that LL created for that purpose. I did

I said "modified," you said "it wasn't modified" and now you say "oh, but code snippets in little boxes can't be modified". OK, but if they did something by ADDING their own bow on top of that box, that's modifying. Plus, we don't know if this is true. Gosh, it's great that you can peer under the hood and look at HTML pages. I do that some times to fish out photos and Russian provenance but generally I can't be bothered and don't care and that isn't proof of anything in the larger sense for me.

That's fine. I freely gave my expertise. Nobody had to accept it if they didn't want to. I use the word 'expertise' because I was an expert at that time, and well-known in the RL world for it.

Um, ok.

Ah but what you don't know is that I had an inroad into the SL search team at that time - specifically, the leader of it. So I DO know what happened, and I was privvy to "how they do Search" back then. It may not be confirmed to your satisfaction, but it certainly happened as a said.

Great! I do hope you will not only write your own memoirs and get that Linden to talk. I have Linden admissions about all kinds of things that are fascinating but if the subject hasn't given consent to the journalist to be quoted "off the record" or "on background" even, I don't quote, especially if it isn't arguably a matter of "public interest" (like in my view, the selling of "grandfathered" sims not to the open public, but to only the Solutions Providers). You're not a journalist so I guess you'll do you.

What I'm interested in getting, in the form it can be given which is going to be a crippled, unrecognizable thing, some explanation of why search is broken and how it will be fixed. I realize answering that very question could reveal some Big Bad Thing or some Big Complicated Thing. Oz was good at answering those questions without answering them but he's gone now.

No I don't know that. The GSA was VERY expensive and they had to have 3 of them, each costing a fortune every month, so I would be absolutely astonished if they went back to it, knowing that they can't tailor its operations to they way they want, AND that they can tailor the free, open-source, one to their needs. I think that's a tree not worth barking up.

Well, that's exactly why I didn't understand why they had to buy GSA like the big kids, when various sites I worked with lived in blog search hell for well past the sell date because GSA was too expensive and hard.

But now they may have walking around money from the new snacks and car parts guy who bought LL, and I'm really excited about that because SL is really all about snacks and car parts, and I feel for the first time ever, we may have someone from our culture steering this boat.

SO you don't know what they may buy or not buy, and PS I'd like to see a robust graduate student level thesis about the ways that Apache really copies proprietary GSA or mimics it or has to link to it. You never get away from Google.

Edited March 1, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

9 minutes ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

You are singularly untainted. I wish I was that innocent.

Well, I like the Narnia tales a lot better, they're more holy.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

I agree, and furthermore, the prose is a lot easier on the mind. I recently re-read LOTR and suddenly realised where Yoda came from.

[Solar Legion]

Oh for - I am well aware of the history of the Search system. I was there.

That entire "response" is absolutely meaningless and an attempt to alter the history.

As usual.

Edited March 1, 2021 by Solar Legion

[Phil Deakins]

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

PS I'd like to see a robust graduate student level thesis about the ways that Apache really copies proprietary GSA or mimics it or has to link to it. You never get away from Google.

I have no doubt that the Apache engine mimics Google (not specifically the GSA). Every general purpose search engine has mimicked Google since Google showed them how to make money, and produced better results than the others.  Search engines weren't making money before Google. Maybe Inktomi was because they sold their results to websites and didn't face the public themselves. But none of the GP ones made money until Google showed how. Even MSN, which didn't have its own engine, got into the act and came up with Bing. They all copied Google's fundamental method of ranking pages, which was easy since the method was published online (it's still there). So I'm sure that the Apache engine did exactly the same thing.

 

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I said "modified," you said "it wasn't modified" and now you say "oh, but code snippets in little boxes can't be modified". OK, but if they did something by ADDING their own bow on top of that box, that's modifying.

I said they couldn't modify the code/algos. They couldn't. I've no idea where "oh, but code snippets in little boxes can't be modified" came from but it wasn't from me. I suspect that there's something I wrote that you haven't managed to grasp.

They created html pages, and told the GSA where to start its spider. That's it. That's all they did to get traffic taken into account. That's not modifying anything. It's not a little module, or code snippets in little boxes, or anything similar. The spider had to start somewhere, and the operator,  LL, had to tell it where to start. From there on, the spider found and indexed pages. You could have known all this if you'd read the forums back then. I described it all.

 

3 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Plus, we don't know if this is true. Gosh, it's great that you can peer under the hood and look at HTML pages.

Sigh. YOU don't know that it's true. Get it right Some of us examined the pages. As for peering under the hood - do you know how to look at html pages? You type their URLs into a browser's address bar and up they pop. You are looking at one right now! They weren't "under the hood". That's EXACTLY how we looked at the traffic pages. First I had to find them, but they weren't difficult to find. It was actually Kitty (forgot her 2nd name) who first found them, and gave me a clue about them. Would you like me to explain exactly how they dealt with traffic? I will if you want me to. I can even tell you where the pages were if you want me to, although that was changed when LL realised that the secret was out.

 

Edited March 1, 2021 by Phil Deakins

[Silent Mistwalker]

4 hours ago, Doc Carling said:

The value that ranks places in the search results is the same which you can find as traffic in the parcel details of the particular place. And then, if you see 50 or 60 bots more or less hidden all over that place, but no regular avatars. What do you think causes the traffic? Well, boosting traffic with bots is forbidden. But what about AFK places? A loop hole in the TOS?

 

Loophole in the scripted agents policy.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Bot_policy

[Phil Deakins]

5 hours ago, Doc Carling said:

But what about AFK places? A loop hole in the TOS?

If an AFK place is on a parcel that's set to show in search, then avatars that are operated by programmes, rather than by humans, are prohibited. AFK places that are not on such land can have bots all over the place.

If the avatars that are in AFK places are logged in with viewers, then they are operated by humans, regardless of whether or not the humans are at the keyboard, so they are allowed. Maybe the occasional super-keen Linden might see it a bit differently, but the rules are only against avatars that are operated by programmes, so they do allow it.

That could be considered as a loophole. It's certainly a way to have avatars counting for traffic. But they each need a viewer and it's unlikely that very many avatars can be run that way, even with thin viewers.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Phil Deakins said:

I have no doubt that the Apache engine mimics Google (not specifically the GSA). Every general purpose search engine has mimicked Google since Google showed them how to make money, and produced better results than the others.  Search engines weren't making money before Google. Maybe Inktomi was because they sold their results to websites and didn't face the public themselves. But none of the GP ones made money until Google showed how. Even MSN, which didn't have its own engine, got into the act and came up with Bing. They all copied Google's fundamental method of ranking pages, which was easy since the method was published online (it's still there). So I'm sure that the Apache engine did exactly the same thing.

 

I said they couldn't modify the code/algos. They couldn't. I've no idea where "oh, but code snippets in little boxes can't be modified" came from but it wasn't me. I suspect that there's something I wrote that you haven't managed to grasp.

They created html pages, and told the GSA where to start its spider. That's it. That's all they did to get traffic taken into account. That's not modifying anything. It's not a little module, or code snippets in little boxes, or anything similar. The spider had to start somewhere, and the operator,  LL, had to tell it where to start. From there on, the spider found and indexed pages. You could have known all this if you'd read the forums back then. I described it all.

 

Sigh. YOU don't know that it's true. Get it right Some of us examined the pages. As for peering under the hood - do you know how to look at html pages? You type their URLs into a browser's address bar and up they pop. They weren't under the hood. That's EXACTLY how we looked at the traffic pages. First I had to find them, but they weren't difficult to find. It was actually Kitty (forgot her 2nd name) who first found them, and gave me a clue about them. Would you like me to explain exactly how they dealt with traffic? I will if you want me to. I can even tell you where the pages were if you want me to, although that was changed when LL realised that the secret was out.

 

I realize you are labouring under a deep assumption that you know, if not everything, everything about this topic. And I need a second opinion on this for lots of reasons. It's also not important if I'm wrong or don't get it, because the purpose is to ask questions until the Lindens answer it properly. If they don't, believe me, just as I found something to do for 10 years when 1.23 was taken -- and that something wasn't Firestorm's Legacy tab -- so I will go on for the next years.

You're belabouring the literal search-string words of me saying "code snippets in little boxes" the way I might say "little houses on the hillside made of ticky-tacky" but that is merely my way of saying *code*. That is, that *is* the thing. Code to me is not some precious thing you think it is -- to me, it's just junk, a chore, collecting the mail, taking out the garbage. Something that, in the Google API we had to manipulate at one of my jobs where we didn't have to know what we were doing, but just had to copy and move it like monkeys. It came in a little box, literally, visually this box on a proprietary CMS system whose secret was literally just this Google API snippet that pulled up stuff. I remember it even took me a long time to realize that this "GSA" thing was the same the Lindens became entranced with for months and ruined Viewer 1.23 over. That's all.

Of course it was more complicated than that. You couldn't just paste that snippet on your own blog in a "Typelist" box in the "Library" on typepad.com and have it work (tho I tried). Seems to me our IT guys *did* change that stuff around and weren't in some position where they "couldn't" but I'd have to ask them.

You seem to think that people who know code and manipulate code are superior. I think many of us don't see it that way.  Especially because more and more things that even 5 years ago required having in a programmer who was paid $50 an hour are now automated, or put in templates, so that ignorant monkeys like low-paid bloggers for some vast media corp can put the thing over there in that thing. That's all. We're intelligent enough to mouse click in a sequence and use pattern recognition.

I've thought about this bit regarding the HTML code you could see, which of course, any dummy can see and peel back the page, and if they can't understand everything on it, ask somebody, and then know, too. See, that part might startle you. That someone can see what you see, not know what it is, but ask someone *else* who isn't superior about explaining it, and they'll say "Oh, that's a thing". Your arcane knowledge is becoming less and less special and you have worked yourself out of a job. You (the class of coders) believe you need to speak airily about "guaranteed minimal income" for the plebes and figure out how to distribute low-cost tiny houses or nomad RVs, but in fact, you're going to be among the nomads yourselves.

I've thought for about 17 minutes, which is all the time I'm prepared to spend on this now, and I have to wonder why search algorithms, which are supposed to be secret, so they can't be gamed by people in furniture stores with bots, er, I mean mannequins showing off the "styles" of "furniture" in a virtual world, are simply put on a visible HTML page so that even Prokofy can see it and then Prokofy can ask some IT guy at work who isn't a tool to explain it. Was that prudent?

I mean, Google does not reveal their algorithms. We all know how all kinds of SEO gurus wail and gnash their teeth, and various PR flaks on Facebook who use it in PF gnash their teeth, when Google or Facebook or these other big companies move their cheese. And now they have to start doing things a different way and can't make money the way they used to. I mean a smart person like Loren Feldman would tell you 10 years ago, do not tie your business to FB, do not have the URL with your name, do not do this, tie down your own properties etc etc. And people laughed at him then but don't know. People like Robert Scoble have a blog, then Twitter, then Facebook, then they cut all their friends, then they do this, then they do that, all because the PR thing it did for them that got them gigs or views or reputational enhancement either stopped working, or become tiresome for them, so they do something else. Of course you can spend 10 years on the forums complaining about how they moved the cheese -- and you did -- but I didn't on my issues.

I screamed long and hard about Viewer 1.23 disappearing when it was still possible to try to delay it; when Oz killed it I hollered especially loudly and denounced him thoroughly, and don't regret one bit of it, nosireebob. Wouldn't take back a thing. After all, I was fighting for something that he in fact left for the TPVs to have, and with TPV users actually used heheh.

And his fanboyz mocked me and rolled their eyes urging him not to read toxic blogs blah blah but I was merely a bellwether for other people who didn't blog, my customers, who were annoyed, and even left SL. Oz seemed to think my beef with 1.23 was mesh because I had a major critique of mesh and still do -- and those who took part in that cynical and nasty PR campaign trying to ridicule people who wouldn't turn to mesh privately later had their own problems with mesh. It's not above criticism. I get a lot of it, and I still buy prim and sculpty things too.

No, 1.23 for me was only useful for the search, and search being in LL's control and not in the control of people named Fractious.

Now, the Zen koan of all this that I have understand after 10 years -- I can be slow learning tech things -- is that while Viewer 1.23 was pried from my cold, dead, little avatar hands, it wasn't for anyone who used Firestorm.  At first I believed the LL office hour groupies who nerd-splained you the difference between Legacy and Web that no one used Legacy. They didn't -- but as I explained for reasons about the Bored-Gored-Stored -- they don't search.

That is the funniest thing really, that all those people who looked down on me for 1.23 clinging had it in their viewers, they just thought that seeing mesh, or putting in BOM later or whatever enhancements were put in were the important things, and search/places? That old thing? Oh, you mean that "Legacy" LOL? That wasn't important. To nerds in the office hour. But it was to the legions of shoppers who kept using it. It was secretly important even to them. There's a guy in this thread scorning traffic and saying it should removed and then telling you how he just searches for things and goes to the highest traffic lot -- but yeah, it doesn't mean anything and is useless LOL.

Oh, I was made aware of that soon enough, but it wasn't enough for me to use Firestorm. I had many, many reasons not to use Firestorm and still do that I don't need to belabour now but let's just say that chickens come home to roost. The thing is, I couldn't know how much having clean search returns organized by traffic -- any traffic, it didn't have to be 100,000, it could be 10 -- was really valued when there are other ways of getting things as I explained with the Bored-Gored-Stored-list - and I could put "Adored," for FIC at office hours.

Lindens may have put some code in some page, but I still think there was more to it than that in how they decided to weight certain things because you could see it change from week to week, and because they didn't tell you. You cite knowing the head of Search on the LL team. That's another thing that strikes me as dubious. The Lindens all have their little friends and talk to them in ways they won't talk to us mortals under the guise of being fellow coders and the TPV program which is merely the institutionalization of part of the old FIC. That's all that is. I get that. But I do think they are careful not to reveal proprietary information and information that benefits one group of users over another. They weren't careful in the early days -- but then a lot of the Lindens came from the user base and there wasn't quality control. LL is run by people who worked in real companies for years and didn't work selling prim hair by grabbing newbies from the Orientation Islands, you know? It's a different level of Linden completely. We went through many protests and scandals back in the day demanding they institute a code of ethics and an HR handbook and they did, and they enforced it. So yeah, I get there are private little tech guy know-it-all talks that are useful -- but people gaining that information usually don't have stores but just kind of sandbox it. So there really is a guru Linden saying, "My Son, I will tell you the secret of how to Game Traffic for your adult furniture store, so put out those beds where they hop on the balls this week, you will make a killing -- but not for long because Kitty, to whom I also told this, will tell her friend with the prim shoe store." I mean, really? Really lol?  "And when Thou seest the Kitty prim shoe store rise to the top of the list, Thou shall know that Adult Furniture had 3 days left before we change the sauce."

The narrative of history now being recorded by the victors, as it always is, is that LL had this set of disgruntled high-powered users or pro-somers whom they needed to "win back". This was Phoenix/Firestorm that hadn't cleared the new program which had criteria for TPVs. Criteria is a good thing; their not clearing it wasn't merely because they didn't put a bracket or comma right or didn't use an elegant approved solution for handling this or that routine. There were real reasons of violation of the TOS, and refusal to cooperate openly in an opensource program about an opensource viewer. We all know which script kiddies hijacked the code on websites and harnessed it to user log-ins; we all know who held big good-bye parties with my giant head as an effigy to dance on because I abuse-reported people who harass me, crash my sims, and copybotted things. Joe Linden, who died in RL, knew all this of course and was among those trying to supervise it. Oz was brought into fix this, and while the "lore" maybe that this group of Tragically Misunderstood Artists who supplied a viewer most of the population loved had to be soothed and feathers unruffled, there are other ways of looking at it. Very extreme leftists might see it as corporate sellouts when something like Firestorm began to use real names in the real world and have women in proper pantsuits hold board meetings and all the things you do, while somebody "Fractious" or whatever the kiddies' names were is now free to go...start his job at Intel. You see how this is more complex than people want to realize? If they want to take an extreme right-wing view of it about evil Silicon Valley -- but as a long-time critic of it, I'm not interested in that side of it. New kinds of businesses provide products that are value to people, deal with it.

Again, your difficult here is 0/1 thinking and literalism -- are you, too a coder? Is this the problem? I thought you were a graphic artist. "Under the hood" is exactly the vivid description for something that shows up when you look at HTML -- it's raggedy incomprehensible stuff. You find it by typing a line or clicking on a thing. It's not hard. But it's still under. And the thing it's still under is a hood. I had a job where I had to learn a list of that stuff and paste it into this thing and that thing -- see, monkeys do this now and you are obsolete. Recently when I had to go back to this one site and I couldn't understand where the list of those phrases were, the IT guy said, oh, that's now tucked under the hood, i.e. it's even more in the background and monkeys like me who had to put and take don't even have to do that any more, we just highlight and click a button.

I don't care how they deal with traffic in 2011 even for historical archival purposes because the social history is what I follow, that's only an artifact around which the social history coagulates or doesn't. Obviously when people find stuff out -- as gaggles of FB engineers and PR consultants wrangling SEO do all the time -- Google and others then change stuff. The Lindens are a microcosm of that. So you didn't do anybody any favours except yourself, while you gamed traffic with your insider knowledge for awhile, while your competitors were in the dark. I'm not sure that is legal under the TOS. I think in RL, this could lead to litigation. I don't know. The fact of the matter, neither what you find under the hood -- that is, in the openly viewable HTML cluttery stuff that still isn't the surface of a page with normal text obviously -- whatever someone named "Kitty" told you (not surprised there's a "Kitty" in this story); whatever some Linden in charge of Search with some exotic name  triggering silly insider engineering jokes like "Pi" or "42" -- that's not the whole of it. Because 42 Linden at the end of the day takes directions from some other higher up Lindens who decides it, or at least the outlines of it. 

And -- we don't know.

What is important to the Lindens now? What are they preoccupied with? We can't know. We can only look for clues in the Release Notes. So the colour of something that likely only occurs once in itself is the preoccupation du jour and I'm kicking myself for not seeing it when it was hanging right there in the sky:

SL-12740 [EEP] The EEP moon has a hardcoded blue light that is not present in Windlight-based viewers

[Silent Mistwalker]

10 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

If an AFK place is on a parcel that's set to show in search, then avatars that are operated by programmes, rather than by humans, are prohibited. AFK places that are not on such land can have bots all over the place.

If the avatars that are in AFK places are logged in with viewers, then they are operated by humans, regardless of whether or not the humans are at the keyboard, so they are allowed. Maybe the occasional super-keen Linden might see it a bit differently, but the rules are only against avatars that are operated by programmes, so they do allow it.

That could be considered as a loophole. It's certainly a way to have avatars counting for traffic. But they each need a viewer and it's unlikely that very many avatars can be run that way, even with thin viewers.

 

 

It's what the bot policy doesn't say that gives it away. lol

Just for the grins and giggles, we have several desktops and probably at least 4 laptops we could use, so doing a bit of rough math here, say 2 viewers per pc, we could have 18 avatars logged in at one time.

[Prokofy Neva]

Just now, Silent Mistwalker said:

 

It's what the bot policy doesn't say that gives it away. lol

Just for the grins and giggles, we have several desktops and probably at least 4 laptops we could use, so doing a bit of rough math here, say 2 viewers per pc, we could have 18 avatars logged in at one time.

People put the home bases for these bot nests that aren't technically bots in Linden Homes, because it's always best to hide things in plain sight, as Sherlock Holmes knows, and even if you ask a Mole who all those slumped people are, they can't care because they are owners of Linden homes.

I'd like to understand why there are so many roving bots now. Like, an incredible number. Perhaps this is Linden-directed and they are like scouring all the "pages" of SL as Google does with everyone's pages. Or maybe people who knows something about another thing have decided to do this themselves. They are not scraping land scale information from what I can tell. I'm mainly concerned about them because so many tenants have complained and we eject and ban them but of course they can stay slumped on Linden water then.