Talk:About Traffic

Requests For Vetting

Post-Stipend Realities

I've done some re-rigging of the article to reflect the current post-stipends reality that we live in. Could I get someone to look over the edits just in case I FUBARed some of the details? Thanks in advance! --Patchouli Woollahra 23:39, 20 January 2007 (PST)

Please stop editting this page and replacing everything with nonsense about complex formulas just because some stupid Linden told you some BS about how traffic works. Conduct your own experiments and present the methodology and results if you disagree with what is written here. We absolutely cannot rely on the word of devs or other random Linden Lab employees on this topic and MUST resort to simple experiments. - Elanthius Flagstaff

• Personally, I disagree on both the content and the tones of your comment. I think word of devs or other random Linden Lab employees on this topic is absolutely relevant --oobscure 13:04, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Removed section

I removed this section because it does not describe traffic as actually measured. -- Argent Stonecutter 14:25, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

The current traffic algorithm

In May 2008, Linden Lab provided a description of the traffic algorithm, which they assure is still current:

How ‘traffic’ works:

• Every user gets 1 point of dwell to give out during the 24 hours between midnight and midnight. Any parcel of land that the Resident spends more than 5 sequential minutes on gets counted as a place that they spent time.
• Parcels owned by the Resident (or group) are counted as if they were the same parcel. The user's 1 point is then evenly divided between those parcels.
• So, I if was online for 1 hour and spent 20 minutes on Resident A's parcel and 40 minutes on Resident B's parcel, Resident A would get 0.333 from me and Resident B would get 0.666 from me.
• Alternately, if I only spent 5 minutes online and spent all of it on resident A's land, she would receive 1 point from me. Those raw point totals are what is reported in the find window.

Traffic does not take into account the length of time someone spends on a parcel, but rather is based on the proportion of their inworld time spent there.

As you can see, the traffic measurement is confusing to understand and doesn’t necessarily result in useful statistics for Residents, which is another reason why the Popular Places tab is being replaced with the Showcase. (Source, LewisPR on behalf of Linden Lab, 16 May 2008)

How the algorithm evolved into its current form

The original idea was to reward builds of ‘good’ content. We first tried to detect "good" via Voting Stations -- green pillars placed in-world on which a user could click to indicate a parcel was "good". Only one vote per day per user per parcel was allowed. We would then tally up the votes nightly and distribute L$.

This didn't work well because users would gang up, fly around to all their friends' parcels and click the voting stations. Or they created vote farms - collections of 16m² parcels each owned by a different person each with its own vote box, to make voting for friends easier. So we decided to replace it.

Dwell (subsequently renamed to ‘traffic’) was an attempt to limit how many "votes" a single user could provide in a day. The idea was to give each user one "aggregate vote" per day, and divide that contribution up among all parcels that user visited. Visits under 5 minutes were discarded as "just passing through".

(Source, LewisPR on behalf of Linden Lab, 16 May 2008)