Traffic Farms

These bot farmers milking camping sites aren't as common as this reporter would have us believe. It's expensive to pay out to campers, who earn cash while sitting, and most venues cannot afford the luxury - and find that paid classified ads simply work better, and give them a better relationship with real customers who return.

By calling into question the very metric of traffic due to the fact that a relative few game it to show up first, the hard-earned traffic of businesses that do not game it with camping gimmicks is then undermined. Traffic overall does have meaning in SL; while camping and gaming infuriate some average citizens, they should look at the entire set of returns in search as it exists now and realize that the overwhelming majority of returns for most categories are not camped.

The new revised Search being tested by LL now and available on the downloads page removes the advantages of camping by making other relevancy metrics like picks, landmarks and such part of what makes parcels turn up in search. Nevertheless, we will not see an end to bot campers and those who pay them until advertising is both encouraged better, made more accessible *and* regulated in Second Life.

Yes as Prokofy says the new search will make this problem even less of a problem because land owners wont NEED the traffic to be high up on the search. It is more land content oriented. I have seen this it is horrible but not very extensive, I agree.

Prokofy Neva,
You do realize it is not expensive to run a 50 alt bot farm right? All you need is 1 computer and a client that only runs by command line with no graphics or anything else loaded. You can log in multiple accounts with almost no resources used.

Also these farms are used in more ways than you think. Many hide them better by placing their alts on their own camp chairs so they don't lose money yet appear to be handing it out.

I challenge anyone to go to any place on the popular list and actually come out of any of those places with some desire to go back. All of them use traffic farms in one way or another. Go to the large map in world and hunt for large numbers of green dots and go there. Go to a few hundred sims and tell me how many of those sims you would want to return to. After visiting these places then refresh the slogan of SL in your mind. "Your World, Your Imagination". Was it really such a good idea for LL to let anyone do anything with the pitch of possible profit?

Things like this http://www.your2ndplace.com/node/635 don't make SL any better place to visit either.

The key metrics are also interesting. http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxbDc4B2FH94Dsi3na_riHw

As is the daily traffic.

"Population
Residents Logged-In During Last 7 Days 303,304
Residents Logged-In During Last 14 Days 433,251
Residents Logged-In During Last 30 Days 779,108
Residents Logged-In During Last 60 Days 1,325,474
Total Residents 11,286,164 "

Humm 779,108 "accounts" logged in in the last 30 days? Now add in all the alts and bot farms and much of that is whittled away into unique users?...

Hi,

Traffic farms are even worse than most think.

Recently, SL changed their search engine so rather than alphabetized it pulls the names of placed that have the highest traffic.

On the new search engine, you basically have to set up tons of alts, pay out your butt in camping ,or pay out your butt for classifieds to even be on the first few pages of the new search engine.

I went from selling 30 items a day to around 2-3. SL used to make me around 400 USD a month and now the amount I make barely pays for the tier.

Alot of us "middle class" business owners are dying slowly since these changes and if this continues then all we can see in the future of SL are large RL companies buying their way into the seach engine.

This will eventually kill originality in SL, which honestly has been slowly dying for around a year or so (some may say longer)

Anyways I wanted to give my 2 cents from a long time SL user.

Thanks!

We have a neighbor who's been running 30 alts / bots / zombies for a while now. The sim's performance has changed horrifically since she started doing it. There are 6 other land owners in the sim so we each sent her a notecard asking her to scale back. In response she moved all her "zombies" from the box in the sky down into her store, gave them each different outfits, and started parking them on a bunch of modeling pose stands. Then she wrote back and told us her "models" choose their own "hours" because they're people who live all over the world... Riiiiight. Anyway, it has succeeded in putting her near the top of even SL's New Search system. The new system does seem to weigh "traffic".