Let's Find 500 Top Search Result Stores *Without Bots or Campers*

I totally agree with Phil Deakins that Anya Ristow's "statistics" are crap. She does indeed have an anti-traffic agenda, and has seized on bots as the issue. She doesn't explain which of the avatars are bots and which are campers -- many campers are in fact real people earning money. Her claim that 50 percent of the people she finds are bots just doesn't track.

Desmond noted that he has 50 sims where there are no bots or campers. Classy, he says. I have land on 65 sims, many of which I share with others, some of which I own solely, and there are no bots or campers on them, except on one, which is an infohub sim where badly-scripted bots land on Linden Land.

The fear and hatred of bots is, of course, exaggerated. I'm all for making a huge pushback to automatized geek-will, coming in the form of AI, which are bots in SL. But I think the task is to regulate, them, forever, not ban them or remove traffic due to them. If those using the libsl program had to pay for more than the traffic-infusion script, and had to pay for the accounts, we'd see the entire bot program disappear over night.

There's a deep-seated, hateful, hysterical, shrill jihad against traffic in Second Life, for all kinds of reasons, which I've written about. But I think it's time for a tour of stores that come up in the first page of search on different popular key words in search/places, to see if I can find 500 without facing a welter of camped and botted eyeball grabbers. And judging from how quickly I found 25 right away in all the top key words on the first pages, I don't think is going to be the impossibility everyone thinks. Post below your own botless/uncamped store links and let's keep a count.

I had absolutely no trouble in doing so, and had a great time in SL flying around and seeing new stores, meeting live people working on their stores from different countries, and seeing how people do things outside the whining forums and Concierge chatters keyholes.

As a Spanish guy said on one sim called La Frontera, who greeted me with a "Saludo,", when I asked him if there were any bots (there were only 2 green dots on his sim, himself, me, and his friend):  "No. True Traffic." And True Traffic is what we have in SL. And True Traffic is what hysterics and Lindens have to stop trying to kill.

At first I made SLURLS and typed out names and traffic numbers, but it was taking so long, plus I'd crash now and then and lose my data from chat, so I decided to just make a lot of landmarks, which you will be able to find on a notecard giver at my office in Alston -- which, BTW has low traffic, and no bots or campers lol. I'll set it up as a notecard taker, too, and collect a list of 500 businesses that you can give your custom if you don't wish to feed the bot mania.

Unlike other people trying to claim bots make up half of SL (because they might have seen them on 500 out of 32,000 sims lol), I show my work -- visit the landmarks yourself if you doubt me.

In my travels, I found some great places. Like Dodge City, an 1800s RP. Like like Butterfly Hollow, a delightful sim laid out in the shape of a butterfly with nice, quaint cottages at reasonable prices, and the only other rentals I've ever found in all of SL that has a community all laid out sharing one sim, without parcels and TVs -- which I think is an interesting experiment (I do that on Zephyr). I found a Star Wars that was built before the Linden Star Wars. I found only two places (!) in the entire list that used the term "little black dress" -- half the time the problem of sales is that people don't know the basics of making a search ad! They need help...and shoppers need some basic, tips, too.

To avoid the camping and bot morass of a popular search term like "shoes" (good Lord!), I have only to type in "leather boots". The first offering, 5603, is a store without bots that has moved. The second, called STRAPS seems to have lots of jock straps and no boots -- but no bots. A place called simply BOOTS FOR WOMEN with only a traffic of 107 showed up as one of the few dozen returns on "leather boots" -- imagine -- and it looked to have very stylish boots, bags, and shoes.

There's a cliche school of thought that all the sex joints and bits sellers use camping and bots -- although you'd think they don't have to. Well, they don't. Check out Man's Man's World, traffic 5826, no bots whatsoever, nor campers, or even shoppers. Oh, and I seriously have to wonder if this meme about SL consisting of nothing but sex is true, when I found a grand total of *only 82" entries for the word "cock" without the "M" turned on, and only 375 *with* the "M" turned on. If it were true this word was put in falsely on off-topic sites, we'd see many more.

Under the word "hats," Awori Cassini in the number one slot had a huge stack of green dots on their sim, but go down a few slots more to Luxury Warehouse, traffic 5577, a Russian sim without any bots or campers.

And so on. You try it, and post some links, too, of bot-free, camping-free places that still show up on the first two pages for any search key word search.

Comments

[Ann Otoole]

I'm hearing about people being banned for having too many alts and using them to run bots for traffic now so maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Punish the abusers not the platform.

Programmed AI bots functioning as agro mobs will cause a major ground shift in Secondlife. I'm not too sure how well the sims can handle it right now but it will eventually happen.

[Khamon Fate]

True Ann, it's a constant battle of limited resources LL are fighting. Traffic calculations are so poorly coded that it takes at least two days to update them when the nightly routine fails. LL has no choice but to depreciate the current function to recover mountains of storage space and processing cycles.

The options for them are putting effort into recoding the traffic system, to work efficiently under the ever expanding demands on The Grid All Hail The Central Grid's availability, or removing the feature in favour of adding something new.

Unfortunately, that decision has nothing to do with residents, what we need, or any of the commuuuuunity-oriented points Prokofy argues. The decision rests solely on tekki wiki considerations.

[Prokofy Neva]

Traffic has not been updated for four days. It is stuck on what it was at back then. I hadn't realized that calculating traffic was some database/energy/whatever burden, but I guess it stands to reason as there is more land mass, i.e. more servers, with more parcels, with more reports to gather.

And in the end, yes, the Lindens will cite that as their technocommie argument. Gosh, you don't want lag, do you? So we have to retired this database call on a figure nobody really believes in anyway, as it's a luxury we can't afford, and good riddance anyway.

Of course, Khamon, I do have to wonder why, even with 76,000 concurrency and a huge land mass, traffic worked like clockwork all this time...until 4 days ago. Um, what?

[Ciaran Laval]

Traffic has been broken like that for ages Prok, but it's not on all parcels. Some parcels just don't update, then they work, but other parcels then inherit this bug for a short time and on it goes it seems.

My parcels are working fine right now and have updates today, but I intermittently get this issue.

[Prokofy Neva]

Traffic is still stuck on some of my parcels; others moved. Many complain in the Concierge group about their traffic being at 0 or being stuck. Looking around yesterday at all those stores, I saw lots of them with "0" which doesn't make sense (as they were in fact showing up higher in search).

[Khamon Fate]

Realistically, my sales and traffic proper figures correlate daily. They have for years; so I'm comfortable tracking visits using either figure. Fate Gardens' standing in an ALL search for "trees" is steadily in the top twenty despite radical changes in the sim's traffic figures as well. So writing traffic out of the system doesn't seem a radical change to me personally.

I say "proper traffic" above because the system is truly broken, not in the esoteric social sense, just due to lousy programming. It's not the only feature that either needs to be wholly recoded or surgically removed.

What are people doing to prepare for the derezzing of traffic from the interface?

[Desmond Shang]

Is traffic truly, for certain going to be removed Khamon?

I wasn't aware of a decision one way or the other on that.

In my personal view I am very much hostage to other people's research regarding traffic; I simply haven't had much time to examine it directly myself. I would, save, I've got the whole openspace issue and more to deal with right now.

One odd thing I did note. The group "Independent State of Caledon" - 1000+ members strong, and by far the bulk of those active, doesn't come up top in search when I type in "Caledon" - BUT - the Commonwealth of Caledon group with far fewer members *does*.

The difference? I use the Commonwealth group to hold onto infrastructure land; in dozens of cases 1/2 of a region at a time, essentially the remainder of 'double prim' land used for the space between parcels. It contains easily well over 1 million square meters of lightly used land, maybe more. Insofar as the resources of that land are already dedicated to the rented double-prim parcels.

To date, I've never tossed keywords beyond say, 'commonwealth of Caledon' on those parcels or that group. But I wonder sometimes, if just as a test, what would happen if I redid the group description to read something like "Commonwealth of Caledon - Fate Gardens Khamon Fate!" for a week. Or what would happen if I made that million+ square meters of land into 100,000 separate parcels that contained the keywords "Prok's Seafood" or something.

Would we need to start cooking a lot of freebie lobsters in advance?

[Khamon Fate]

Prokofy has some experience with people using his proprietary keywords in their own advertisements to gain business via redirected searches so you might ask him how awkward and damaging that can be. I'm answering you backward Desmond and hoping that's okay.

Dunno, it doesn't really matter what we have and haven't heard. Employees of Linden Lab say anything they please at any time without batting an eye. I've been lied to so often that I can't believe any thing any one of them says ever.

It's all very well cloaked in Taoish confusion of various aspects of the compelling mixture of ideas and formulations that are the strength of this innovative virtual commons of minds we call the lab. But to a simple mind, LL can't be trusted at all.

Talking about what Linden Lab might do tomorrow, or next week, is like predicting the stock market. There are too many influential factors and unknowns involved to do any better than play a hunch.

What were we talking about? I've lost my train of thought.

[Agnetha Vuckovic]

"She doesn't explain which of the avatars are bots and which are campers -- many campers are in fact real people earning money."

Lol...no....campers are a despicable low life form of leeches. People who are just too freebie minded and cheapskate to actually open their own wallets or purses and...OMG....spend their own money rather than someone else's !

Lol....the other day I had the ultimate irony. Trying to get into one of the best known fashion stores in SL...to..er....spend some money ( yes, some of us do that with our own money )...I could not get into the sim as it was too full of campers.

In terms of traffic stats, campers are a complete waste of time...as the traffic formula only counts the first 5 minutes of anyone being on a site. And frankly, in terms of green dots on the map attracting more....people are as likely to arrive because a site states what it is, than as a result of anyone searching for 'camping'.

[ichabod Antfarm]

I did some field research on this because I just couldn't believe the 50% figure. Rather than flying around looking for clusters of dots, I chose the keyword "Retro" and visited the top 20 locations provided by Search Places. I counted ~90 avatars.

The fifth highest traffic location had evidence of bots - ten avatars at altitude, clustered together, and unreachable as the owner had placed a sky "ceiling" at 200 meters beyond which you could not fly (no rezz either so you couldn't bypass the sky prim). Either it was a very exclusive party going on up there or someone was hiding bot tracks.

That yields a bot figure of 11%. Of course, my method wasn't especially rigorous and I can only infer the botness of the 10 dots at that one location; however, I feel my evidence is less useless than Ristow's as it is reproducible.

I kept notes as I went and I plan to survey the remainder of the first page. I suspect the bot number will drop when I include the 80% of search hits that have traffic below 5000.

I suspect finding 500 top stores without bots (or campers/hosts/models) would be a cinch. I did this initially because I was curious to know if my favourite retro store was in the list. It was. *cough* artilleri *cough*

[Prokofy Neva]

I found stores with bots, too in the top spaces of search, of course, suspected bots of a pile of green dots that you couldn't find on the ground or even seem to fly up far enough to see -- or campers staged in even rows. But what was surprising is that I easily found many places without bots. I will try to keep up my research.

[Anya Ristow]

"I chose the keyword "Retro" and visited the top 20 locations provided by Search Places. I counted ~90 avatars.

The fifth highest traffic location had evidence of bots - ten avatars at altitude, clustered together, and unreachable as the owner had placed a sky "ceiling" at 200 meters beyond which you could not fly (no rezz either so you couldn't bypass the sky prim). Either it was a very exclusive party going on up there or someone was hiding bot tracks.

That yields a bot figure of 11%. Of course, my method wasn't especially rigorous"

You're right, it wasn't especially rigorous. I checked the top 10 and found only two without bots or campers. My method requires further visits to verify, but just on a first inspection, and not even looking at all the avatars, I found...

BODY DOUBLES SHAPES Most Celebrity Shapes in SL! Bodies Shape
11 mannequins
9 bots in box above sister store across street
1 more above that store

EMERY Mainstore

::::: MAGIKA ::::: Body Shop & Fashion :::::
3 people camping for prizes--my method probably wouldn't count them since this is short-term and probably has a more active player than a camp-for-hours-for-pennies avatar

Dermagraphicus Rex! Tattoo -=+=- Tattoos for Ink Enthusiasts
9 bots outside store, 3 more upstairs

FASHION FORWARD DESIGNS: Womens clothes & Mens clothes
9 bots in a skybox

~~Ivalde~~ Vintage & Retro fashion
1 mannequin
1 60-minites-to-win-prize camper
everyone else is milling around the lucky chairs--my method would only count the mannequin

Pretty N Punk Place - Urban Grunge Modern Industrial Fashion
1 camper
2 bots in individual skyboxes
3 possible bots in another skybox

Floating Comet Mall - Comet Club-Hell Bop Bar-DVD Rentals-Zyngo
4 bots in a skybox
1 possible bot near zyngo machines
1 probable bot in hellbopbar

KN Design SKINS / Shapes / Schoolgirl / Lingerie
11 bots in a skybox
3 probable bots in store (2 with 10 profile picks for the store, 1 non-rezzing, empty profile)

SWING SWING SWING Dance Club

I'm going to post a link to your post whenever I need to point out that the naysayers are clueless. Okay? Thanks.

[Prokofy Neva]

Um, possible bot? probable bot? I don't allow bots on my properties, and I urge that they be paid for. But your investigation is worthless unless you can come up with better verification than that.

[Anya Ristow]

What part of "My method requires further visits to verify" are you having difficulty with?

[ichabod Antfarm]

"I'm going to post a link to your post whenever I need to point out that the naysayers are clueless. Okay? Thanks."

We count differently. Does that make me clueless? I did my survey Sunday night at 10pm SLT. When did you do yours? Is the time difference relevant? I don't know. I didn't say my method was rigorous. I noted campers and hostesses/models in my records. I don't count them as bots and bots is what we were looking for. I saw the large group of people sporting the same group tag at the tattoo place but wasn't able to verify one way or the other if they were bots. Alas, I don't have the power to peer into their souls. Sure, we can infer they are bots and in a complete analysis I would have included them as a probability and tried to work out a margin of error for my findings. My intitial reaction, however, was there was no way 50% of the avatars I encountered were bots. I still stand by that.

I may be clueless but at least I stated exactly how I went about doing my research so that others could repeat it and possibly come up with different findings. You obviously did. It's called science.

I am curious, how did you bypass the barrier at Fashion Forward in order to confirm those avs were bots?

Happy bot hunting!

[Prokofy Neva]

Um, the part where you don't do the visits and don't interview the avatars you claim are bots, but then book them as bots and make false claims that 50 percent of the people inworld are bots? That would be it.

Yes, it's called "science".

And I think you need to make up your mind whether you are counting bots or campers. Campers are live people earning money. While it's true some people put out campers as bots to somehow remove the stigman of bots, most people don't do that.

[Ann Otoole]

Don't count the "Chinese" camp gold farmers as legit Prok. OK?
("Chinese" is an example. Could be from anywhere including the USA. Gold farming is what it is but L$ farming is more attractive to economically repressed countries since it more closely matches a normal wage for them.)

Think thousands of accounts out camping all over the place funneling the L$ back to aggregation accounts that cash out.

These are parasites and need to be deleted without warning. These can be identified via data mining too. No need for in world evaluation.

[Tabliopa Underwood]

I went to Fashion Forward because I was curious about the ceiling thing. Is there alright so I just smash through it. And I went up to join the yoga group at (15,140,4000)

Is 8 avatars up there all sitting in meditation position. Their names are:

Brice Kanto
Genius Briner
Marilyn Morrow
FashionForward Kanto
Simple Khandr
AGIFT Exonar
FashionQueen Aeon
Talent Kraus

I only took their photo because they all look so cute and peaceful sitting there meditating on their platform with a nice warm sun shining down on them.

I think the yogi is Marilyn because he is in the middle at the front. I think he maybe Marilyn Manson in n00bie disguise =)

[ichabod Antfarm]

I guess I am clueless because I couldn't figure out how to smash my way through.

Yoga was it? Are yogis now to be hunted across the grid, rounded up, and executed at dawn? They seem so peaceful and lag free. Oh well, if Yoga is being used to game the top 15 spots in search then pass me a pitchfork because IT'S ABSOLUTELY INTOLERABLE!!

And they say bots don't draw legitimate traffic. ;-)

[Agnetha Vuckovic]

"These are parasites and need to be deleted without warning. "

Frankly, all campers are parasites. Anyone who wants something for nothing is a leech. The pity is that they are necessary sometimes...but I could think of better ways of doing things....like charging by the hour for visiting ANY sim. How utterly absurd that people are paying others to visit their sims....and not the other way round.

I only yesterday had the irony of some camper coming up and showing off the avatar he had effectively bought with MY money. Campers make me sick, and having to rely on them makes me sicker.

[ichabod Antfarm]

I'm confused, Agnetha, if you pay someone for a service (i.e. boosting your traffic numbers) why would you then begrudge them spending that money? Are you making a case for bots? Bots don't cost you anything, don't bang on the asset server, and if they are visible, have an ARC of 1. If traffic numbers is what you want then bots seem the low impact way to go. As a plus, they know their place in the brutal hierarchy of Second Life.

If wanting something for nothing is the sign of a leech, what would you say about content creators who use gamed traffic numbers to attract eyeballs? Camping "wages" might not be nothing but they are sure next to nothing.

*puzzled*

[Sean Williams]

"I only yesterday had the irony of some camper coming up and showing off the avatar he had effectively bought with MY money."

You mean the Federal Government's money, and even that is pushing it. all money comes from so many sources that in reality, only the numerical value belongs to you: One it has changed hands (or in the case of SL, IPs or Avatar Keys)it is no longer 'your' money.

[Agnetha Vuckovic]

"Camping "wages" might not be nothing but they are sure next to nothing."

The reality of camping is that as far as stats are concerned, only the first 5 minutes of being on a site count towards those stats. The rest is wasted time. Whether LL have changed this farcical traffic algorithm since I read it....I don't know.

Camping includes systems which, for example, randomly give out Lindens to people with a group in their profile Picks. And which, unlike many camping pads, do not contain time or Linden limits.

While the amounts 'earned' per 15 minutes may seem small, it soon adds up over time. In 10 hours, a person can quite easily 'earn' 150 Lindens......over 1000 a week. Hell, that's like the rent from 4 or 5 shops.

I know of quite a number of campers who simply use alt accounts....it's easy to log into SL multiple times. This is something a bot count would never show up. Just how many of those campers, seemingly boring themselves to death dancing or sunbathing 24/7, are actually living the life of Riley in some other account.

[Ciaran Laval]

Agnetha you're wrong about only the first five minutes counting.

[Agnetha Vuckovic]

"Agnetha you're wrong about only the first five minutes counting. "

Well I'd love to see an algorithm....or some chicken entrails....more recent than what I've encountered. The most recent I found from LL themselves still quotes the 5 minutes.

Apparently everyone gets one point awarded a day...which is then divided between whatever sites they have been on ( for more than 5 minutes ). So a person could spend 10 minutes on one site and 15 hours on another......and both sites would get 50% of that person's point.

That's the most recent I have seen.