How many actual 'people' are in the radar plot?

[Rick Nightingale]

I'll tell you my answer... three or four. My wife and I are at a store, and she said why are there so many people on the radar, but it's empty? They are all on an empty floor just above the sales floor; just above the two of us. Sometimes the store really is elbow to elbow, but when it's empty, it's like this.

Notice the dice-like five dots? There are three, but one is partial. Apart from two of the dots (me and my wife) and another two that are indicated higher up, almost every one of them is either 6 years and  6 or 7 months old, or 1 year 1 month, with a couple of outliers. All of them are standing still, most in a starter avatar outfit, no profile, picks or groups, not indicated as bots, etc.. The odd one has a bit of a profile (the age outliers as mentioned), as if it's an abandoned alt.

I guess someone's playing the traffic game. So much for using traffic as a search criterion... is that still done?

[Lucia Nightfire]

Is this another one of "those" threads? 🙄

[Rick Nightingale]

Oh, you mean those that get locked? Well, I didn't intend it to be... I just found what I saw quite amusing so I posted it.

[Rowan Amore]

You'll see the same thing at 99% of all the escort clubs in SL.  Nothing new there.  

[EliseAnne85]

1 hour ago, Rick Daylight said:

I'll tell you my answer... three or four. My wife and I are at a store, and she said why are there so many people on the radar, but it's empty? They are all on an empty floor just above the sales floor; just above the two of us. Sometimes the store really is elbow to elbow, but when it's empty, it's like this.

Notice the dice-like five dots? There are three, but one is partial. Apart from two of the dots (me and my wife) and another two that are indicated higher up, almost every one of them is either 6 years and  6 or 7 months old, or 1 year 1 month, with a couple of outliers. All of them are standing still, most in a starter avatar outfit, no profile, picks or groups, not indicated as bots, etc.. The odd one has a bit of a profile (the age outliers as mentioned), as if it's an abandoned alt.

I guess someone's playing the traffic game. So much for using traffic as a search criterion... is that still done?

Let's hypothetically say all those avatars are abandoned alts.  How much needless lag would that create for those who want to go shopping in an almost empty store sim?  Maybe they should moved abandoned avatars somewhere else?

Edited February 13, 2023 by EliseAnne85

[Phil Deakins]

On 2/13/2023 at 2:51 PM, Rick Daylight said:

Notice the dice-like five dots? There are three, but one is partial. Apart from two of the dots (me and my wife) and another two that are indicated higher up, almost every one of them is either 6 years and  6 or 7 months old, or 1 year 1 month, with a couple of outliers. All of them are standing still, most in a starter avatar outfit, no profile, picks or groups, not indicated as bots, etc.. The odd one has a bit of a profile (the age outliers as mentioned), as if it's an abandoned alt.

I guess someone's playing the traffic game. So much for using traffic as a search criterion... is that still done?

There is no way for users to indicate their avatars as bots that the rest of us can see. So you don't know whether or not they are indicated as bots. They probably aren't but you don't know.

Traffic is the only search criterion for the legacy search, which is still available, and no doubt used quite a lot, in Firestorm and maybe other TPVs. Also, since LL incorporated traffic in a small way into their use of the Google Search Appliances, it is probable (imo) that they continued to incorporate it when they changed over to the freebie search engine.

So the answer to your question is, yes, it is still used.

[Orwar]

   It could be a means to game traffic. It could be Tiny Empires alts. It could be anything, really - it's not like anyone here will know, and all we can achieve by discussing it is to develop conspiracy theories as to what nefarious purposes they might be up to (they're piloted by lizard folks from Mars, stealing IP addresses via virtual telepathy to rig the Kyrgyzstani election, I tell you!).

   If you suspect any kind of foul play you can try ARing them, other than that, meh? 

[AnastenBlue]

It does not seem to me like traffic on a  sim is an indicator of how that sim shows up in search.  As when I do a search using the main search page, I see sims with like 5 traffic, at the top of the list and sims with hundreds or even thousands lower down on the list.  Various searches seem to yield various results. It looks to me like it's more random. Or the search relies more on search key words?

[Love Zhaoying]

I think there are no actual people, just people's avatars.