Does L$ camping still exist?

[Exocet Kungler]

I have a ton of old scripts and pads that still work perfectly, for generating traffic from back in the old SL days. Any reason to keep these around? I don't see them used anymore in that typical fashion or anyone dancing on pads for L$ anymore. These wern't banned for some reason were they? Not a single parcel I've seen has them anymore nor on the marketplace. Having an inventory full of all "Old Life" SL is a little daunting to sort through and readjust. Finally getting there but, these are sitting there looking me in the face everyday.

Appreciate the responses in advance.

[Persephone Emerald]

A saw 2 camping chairs on an Adult club parcel not long ago. A woman was sitting, fully invisible, maybe sorting inventory or listening to music while trying to collect a few lindens. They can still generate traffic and those little green dots people look for in regions. I think region owners just decided to go with bots instead of paying people to hang around.

Edited July 13, 2022 by Persephone Emerald

[Rolig Loon]

If the scripts in those old things are mod, so you can open and play with them, they might make interesting puzzles for you to work on as you learn LSL scripting.  Except when they use a deprecated function -- there have been blessed few of those in the life of SL -- those old scripts ought to still work.  Many could be written much more cleanly today with modern functions, but that too would make them interesting learning puzzles.  Otherwise, keep them only if you find them personally useful. (I can't believe I just typed that.  I am SL's quintessenial pack rat.)

[Eddy Vortex]

Camping pads? What are those, Grandpa? 

Though I have heard of them money pads, I don't recall seeing one in the wild since my noob days in 2010. I have seen like 3 stores with camping chairs that gives out free merchandise for prizes in recent years. The camping chars are becoming a rare breed.

[Love Zhaoying]

Didn't "being a Slex bot" replace "camping"?

[Rolig Loon]

1 hour ago, Eddy Vortex said:

I have seen like 3 stores with camping chairs that gives out free merchandise for prizes in recent years.

Hmmm.. I don't think you can call those things "camping chairs" in the classical sense.  They just expect you to sit down for a second to claim a prize if the first letter of your name matches the letter on the chair at the moment.  A camping chair, however, encourages you to sit for a really long time, to pump up the traffic stats for the parcel.  It pays you a trivial amount of L$ for every minute you sit. It's just enough to make you want to stay until you get rich, but not so little that you'll realize how futile that hope is.

[Mollymews]

there are still a few product camping chairs in stores. LIke sit here for 90 minutes and get this thing. Personally I have never felt that there is anything wrong with doing this. From either the shop keeper or customer pov. Then again I like lucky boards as well.  Just stand round waiting for your letter to come up. Some times can end up in having a chat with somebody else playing as well, a person who we would not have met otherwise

[Nalates Urriah]

Some places do still use them. I saw some just last week somewhere.

More places use the prize machines. Those that randomly pick a letter and if your first name matches, you get the prize. I see lots of those and people hanging out. I think those have less negative blow back than a bunch of parked robots.

The Firestorm viewer has a list of the place with lots of avatars on the splash screen. Check out those places, See which ones consistently appear in the list. Then figure out what they are doing right.

[Eddy Vortex]

3 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

Hmmm.. I don't think you can call those things "camping chairs" in the classical sense.  They just expect you to sit down for a second to claim a prize if the first letter of your name matches the letter on the chair at the moment.  A camping chair, however, encourages you to sit for a really long time, to pump up the traffic stats for the parcel.  It pays you a trivial amount of L$ for every minute you sit. It's just enough to make you want to stay until you get rich, but not so little that you'll realize how futile that hope is.

Yep, lucky chairs.  I’m familiar with them. 

The camping chairs I’ve seen actually give out products for sitting after a certain length of time. I believe you about the camping chairs for money. I guess they died out in popularity by the time Greg was rezzed.

[LittleMe Jewell]

1 hour ago, Eddy Vortex said:

Yep, lucky chairs.  I’m familiar with them. 

The camping chairs I’ve seen actually give out products for sitting after a certain length of time. I believe you about the camping chairs for money. I guess they died out in popularity by the time Greg was rezzed.

I recently sat in a Camping Chair to get a really cute dress.  It was only a 30 minute requirement -- I've seen them up to 90 minutes in some skin stores.  I used the time to sort inventory.  

The camp/dance pads that paid out money mostly fizzled out by then end of 2007, maybe mid-2008.  That is about the same time that most places also phased out their lucky letter/number chairs/boards.  Stores used to have dozens of those to encourage folks to hang around.  There are still quite a few stores that have some now, but almost always they have no more than about a half dozen or so -- and often they are limited to group members these days.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

11 hours ago, Exocet Kungler said:

Not a single parcel I've seen has them anymore nor on the marketplace.

Second Life has moved on. No more L$ camping sites (save a few abandoned places). No more Linden hair. No more Linden 'shoes'. Etc.

Instead, there are now things called 'adult AFK places'. Find out what these are at your own discretion.

Why would you want to bring back all this stuffy old junk? If it bothers you that all these script are sitting there there in your inventory doing nothing, there's also the trash can. Or put them in a museum, like VHS tapes and punch cards.

P.S. Did no one ever do the math with these 'camp sites'? As a camper, they cost you more in computer power consumption than you will ever gain in measly L$ - a total waste of everyone's money and time.

Edited July 14, 2022 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[JUSTUS Palianta]

No one has them because they became illegal under gaming traffic laws.

[Phil Deakins]

4 hours ago, JUSTUS Palianta said:

No one has them because they became illegal under gaming traffic laws.

That's not true. They were never illegal, and they could always be used anywhere as long as the land they are on is not set to show in search.

The reason they are rare these days is because they were mostly used to improve search rankings. Doing things to artificially improve the traffic numbers, and consequently the search rankings (know as 'gaming'), became illegal, so people who used them for that purpose stopped using them. But camping and bots have always been legal. Bots can be registered as scripted agents so that they can be placed on any land without counting for traffic. Camping can be placed anywhere except land that's set to show in search.

There was a time after the rules changed, when I had 8 camping chairs in my store. They were in the middle of the stuff for sale, but they were perfectly legal because I'd cut a small parcel for them that was not in search, so people using them didn't count for the store's traffic. It was just a way of giving a little something back.

 

@Exocet Kungler If you want to use your camping pads on your land, you can put them out and give a little something back, provided that the land they are on is not set to show in search.

Edited July 14, 2022 by Phil Deakins

[Aethelwine]

Pretty sure there are camping chairs for Linden dollars still at Da Boom. I think you join a group sit on them and get a Linden dollar an hour or something. There always seem to be people using them so I presume they are still functioning 

[xDancingStarx]

2 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

Doing things to artificially improve the traffic numbers became illegal

And the definition of "artificially" is what? The whole business model around games like Crystal Craze, Fishing or Vaults is only about increasing traffic, and Crystal Craze was even an exhibitor at SL19B. AFAIK the only requirement is that you can't go AFK, even though fishing and vaults come pretty close to that. But that traffic is all "artificial".

Edited July 14, 2022 by xDancingStarx

[kali Wylder]

One of my alts sat in a camping chair recently.  I forget where it was.  It didn't give money, it gave an item for camping for one hour.  That was the first time I'd seen one in ages.

[Phil Deakins]

1 hour ago, xDancingStarx said:

And the definition of "artificially" is what? The whole business model around games like Crystal Craze, Fishing or Vaults is only about increasing traffic, and Crystal Craze was even an exhibitor at SL19B. AFAIK the only requirement is that you can't go AFK, even though fishing and vaults come pretty close to that. But that traffic is all "artificial".

I have no doubt that you know what I mean.

There are other ways of increasing traffic too, one of which is, or was, the cones. But paying someone to just stay there, or placing unmanned avatars on the land, is artificially (not natural) increasing traffic.

If you want a really detailed explanation, ask LL

 

[xDancingStarx]

1 minute ago, Phil Deakins said:

But paying someone to just stay there, or placing unmanned avatars on the land, is artificially (not natural) increasing traffic.

Again, all those things I've listed are artificially increasing traffic. Are non naturally increasing traffic. Hence the defining element that makes generating traffic illegal can't be "artificial".

To visualize it, I'm using an example that is one of the most obvious because it often tops traffic charts.

There are tons of escort clubs that put a vault on their place. Or Crystal Craze. The purpose of an escort club is to sell escort services, though. Traffic should indicate how well that escort club is doing. Generating traffic through a vault, or other unrelated games, is "artificially" driving up traffic. And obviously it's not illegal, if even one of those games, whose business model is around this artificial traffic generation, is an SL19B exhibitor.

[Phil Deakins]

I'm not familiar with those things, but there are ways of intentionally generating traffic that are perfectly legal. The fishing you mentioned is one, I think. Don't people fish for money? Don't they buy bait and stuff? That was probably a bad example. The cones was/is definitely just for the traffic, but people are actually doing things to get the money. They TP to the next cone place, find the item they're looking for, and get the reward. It's legal.

A traffic generating maze could be set up where the user has to find the way through to the middle to get the money. That would be legal because the users are actually doing something. The user wouldn't have been there except for the money, but it's legal.

Camping is the user doing absolutely nothing - getting paid for just being there to increase the place's traffic. That's what's against the rules. But I'm sure you know all this already

 

Edited July 14, 2022 by Phil Deakins

[Phil Deakins]

@xDancingStarx

I've now seen that you've only been in SL a few months, so I'll assume that you haven't been around a lot longer with a different account, and that you are not particularly familiar with camping. I thought you were just looking to argue, so I apologise for assuming that, and I'll write a very potted history of it.

The only search system way back ranked places solely on traffic. The more traffic a place had, the higher is was ranked in the search results. Camping used to be the way for place owners to game that system, by increasing the traffic on the parcel. Camping devices were pads/stands to stand on (often animating the avatar), chairs to sit on, etc., and people were paid money according to the time spent on the devices. There were some where people had to stay with the vicinity. With all of them, people did nothing at all to get paid except be there.

In general, people weren't against camping, but many people were very much against traffic bots gaming the system, presumably because a great many more traffic bots were used than camping devices. LL received many complaints about them until they finally outlawed them. What they did was outlaw the gaming of traffic, which is exactly what traffic bots were doing, and it's what camping was doing too. With both of those things, camping and traffic bots, the avatars were doing absolutely nothing other than being there to game the traffic counts.

People found alternatives for increasing traffic, such as the fishing systems and the cones system. I think things like Midnight Mania were thought up for the same purpose. Waiting for chairs to show your letter, and things like that were thought up for the traffic. The difference is that the people taking advantage of those systems are actually doing things. They are not getting paid for simply being there.

Yes, those legal systems are there for the same reason - to improve traffic counts - but they do it by giving people things to do, rather than pay them for just being there.

I don't know what a "vault" in an escort place it, so I can't comment on it. But adding games to a place, so that traffic is increased because of something different to what the place is about, is legal because people are not being rewarded for just being there. Yes, in the legacy search it does improve the rankings for the escort place because of something that has nothing to do with escorts. I can't disagree with that. It's the very reason why I started to use traffic bots - to outrank a place that was ranking highly solely because it was on the same parcel as a club that got people.

Edited July 14, 2022 by Phil Deakins

[Anna Salyx]

11 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

P.S. Did no one ever do the math with these 'camp sites'? As a camper, they cost you more in computer power consumption than you will ever gain in measly L$ - a total waste of everyone's money and time.

I never camped for L$, but I have for merch from time to time back in the day. Shoes and clothes and such mostly.  But the flaw in your comment (as I see it) is that for me (and probably for a good chunk of the population* ) my computer never gets turned off. So.... if I decided to park my avi at a camp and go off for lunch or dinner or go watch a movie, with the expectation of getting some swag when I got back and stood up, well no matter that I got, no matter how little, it was still an overall net gain and not 'a total waste of time', as you put it, for the camper.  And back in the day when camping was used for its traffic generation purpose, it was benefit to the merchant as well.  Now a days it's less of a benefit to the shop owner because of how the traffic generation rules have changed, but it's still would not a total waste to a potential camper.

 

*I admit my sample size is quite small on who leaves their computers on all the time and is limited to just myself and the people I personally know, but anecdotally most IT people I've interacted with all indicate they follow this practice as well.  But, I will grant, it might very well that the amount of people with idling computers that would benefit here is not as I put it 'a good chunk of the population'. But even if the ratio is small, there are going to be a class of people who it's still not 'a total waste of time'.

[Persephone Emerald]

11 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Second Life has moved on. No more L$ camping sites (save a few abandoned places). No more Linden hair. No more Linden 'shoes'. Etc.

Instead, there are now things called 'adult AFK places'. Find out what these are at your own discretion.

Why would you want to bring back all this stuffy old junk? If it bothers you that all these script are sitting there there in your inventory doing nothing, there's also the trash can. Or put them in a museum, like VHS tapes and punch cards.

P.S. Did no one ever do the math with these 'camp sites'? As a camper, they cost you more in computer power consumption than you will ever gain in measly L$ - a total waste of everyone's money and time.

If one is going to be organizing their inventory anyway, why not do it at a store where one could get rewarded by camping chairs and lucky boards? Plenty of stores still have both, including 7 Deadly Skins. If I like a skin, hair or outfit well enough to sit there for 30 minutes, I'm also going to be stalking their lucky boards. You can usually hit lucky boards while camping or fishing, so you can kill 2 birds with one stone. If you're camping, stalking lucky boards and sorting inventory, that's 3 birds, so it's a good use of time, especially if you find it relaxing.

Edited July 14, 2022 by Persephone Emerald

[Love Zhaoying]

2 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

If one is going to be organizing their inventory anyway, why not do it at a store where one could get rewarded by camping chairs and lucky boards? Plenty of stores still have both, including 7 Deadly Skins. If I like a skin, hair or outfit well enough to sit there for 30 minutes, I'm also going to be stalking their lucky boards. You can usually hit lucky boards while camping or fishing, so you can kill 2 birds with one stone. If you're camping, stalking lucky boards and sorting inventory, that's 3 birds, so it's a good use of time, especially if you find it relaxing.

I suppose the same goes for scripting..

[Rat Luv]

Does anyone remember Virtual Fitness? It was a gym where you got paid 1 or 2L for running (camping) on the treadmills for 10 minutes...it was actually run by an American university, I think it was a study to see if exercising on SL encouraged patients to exercise in RL, but most people went for the free money...

I never liked Lucky Chairs much...it was always Is, Us and Xs winning 😐 If there was a big crowd, by the time R rezzed on my screen, another R-name had jumped on the chair  I saw a fight break out at the Lucky Chairs in Psychotic Neko once!

Much preferred Midnight Mania 👍 

[Phil Deakins]

Way back, I'd camp if there was one where I was, and I had nothing better to do. One time, a tenant asked me to go to the club where she was working, so I did. There were dance camping pads so I got on one of those while I was visiting. It paid 1L$ every 5 minutes. It actually paid out every 5 minutes, and didn't wait until you got off as some did.

The sim crashed while I was on it. I thought it was just me crashing, and I logged back into SL, but it was the sim that had crashed and I couldn't get there. A few minutes later, the camping pad paid me another 1L$, even though I was at Home. And it kept on paying me 1L$ every 5 minutes. From time to time I'd try to TP to the sim to see if getting on and off the pad would stop it, but the sim never came back up that evening. In the end I logged out, turned the computer off, went to bed, slept, got up the next morning, and logged back in, only to find that I'd been receiving 1L$ every 5 minutes all through the night, and I was still receiving it. The paying eventually stopped when the sim was rebooted, of course.

They don't make camping systems like that any more lol.

 

 

Edited July 15, 2022 by Phil Deakins