User:Jack Linden/Office Hour/2009-02-26

[11:03] Jack Linden: hello everyone!

[11:03] Jean Swashbuckler: Hi Jack

[11:03] Equinox Pinion: hi jack

[11:03] Dytska Vieria: Hi Jack!

[11:03] Dirk Talamasca: Hello saucy Jack

[11:03] xstorm Radek: ? what happen to Talarus to day ?

[11:03] xstorm Radek: hi Jack

[11:03] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: hiya, Jack

[11:03] Rails Bailey: pretends to be a polar bear rug

[11:03] Timo Daehlie: he couldnt make it xstorm ;)

[11:03] Asterion Coen: hello jack

[11:04] Dirk Talamasca: Hi there X!

[11:04] Qie Niangao frets about dragon-asymmetry

[11:04] Jack Linden: good lord no talarus?

[11:04] Timo Daehlie: lol jack ;)

[11:04] Kyrion Yalin: Greetings all

[11:04] Asterion Coen: oh, a london architect :)

[11:04] Timo Daehlie: [2009/02/25 15:21] Talarus Luan: I may not be at the JLOH tomorrow. I might be there idle to get the log, though

[11:05] Willow Halfpint: Hi Jack :-) long time no see

[11:05] Jack Linden: Willow! hi!

[11:05] Jack Linden: so, have you all been reading the new blog?

[11:05] Jack Linden: thoughts?

[11:05] Sierus Sicling: its, different..

[11:05] Dytska Vieria: You're blog?

[11:05] Equinox Pinion: yep..but need to get used to it :)

[11:05] xstorm Radek: yes :-) parts of it

[11:05] Marianne McCann: Ya... I'm on Safari, so I can't see it

[11:05] Dirk Talamasca: They need to fix the preferences so that all the responses stop landing in my mailbox!

[11:05] xstorm Radek: got lost

[11:05] Drongle McMahon: None. Too soporific.

[11:06] Jack Linden: the new Linden blog Dytska

[11:06] Equinox Pinion: after that i will pester you with messages jack *g*

[11:06] Marianne McCann: Also, where in the heck is Magellan Linden's blog space?

[11:06] Qie Niangao: oh, is it up again? it's still throwing page load errors for me.

[11:06] Asterion Coen: the one teaching how cook eggs ? yes very usefull. my breakfast r much better now :)

[11:06] Marianne McCann: DIrk - yes! The prefs need to be opt out for that

[11:06] Jack Linden: AhMagellan, indeed. He's always out exploring, never writes

[11:06] Dirk Talamasca: They are but they don't work

[11:07] Fontte Newbold: Re: I haven't seen Talarus yesterday or today, but he mentioned having a major dental visit planned. I'm guessing that's it.

[11:07] Marianne McCann: But ya, every time i go to the blog, I get a "connection dropped" error

[11:07] Drongle McMahon: There's no content. Just lots' of hellos.

[11:07] Jack Linden: I think we've a pile of little tweaks and fixes still to work on

[11:07] Fontte Newbold: I figure he'll tell you all himself when he gets back. :p

[11:07] Marianne McCann: I like the idea of the blog an all

[11:07] Jack Linden: most of the different blogs in there will be posted to at least weekly so it'll soon fill up with stuff

[11:08] Drongle McMahon: Nohing about progress with land cutting!

[11:08] Qie Niangao: (oh, Mari, it works for me now, I just had to restart Firefox from scratch. hmmm.)

[11:08] xstorm Radek: can there be a inworld Blog too please ?

[11:08] Fontte Newbold: As far as I can tell, the main RSS tracks all the blogs, or will that stop being the case?

[11:08] Carl Metropolitan: I have a question--what is Ursula--and more importantly--why is it off in the middle of nowhere?

[11:08] Marianne McCann: XStorm - I'd love to see those old info signs 'round the grid 9at infohubs an stuff) get used

[11:08] Jack Linden: not sure if it's all of them Fontte or just he featured ones

[11:08] Marianne McCann: Ooh, the "U" word

[11:08] xstorm Radek: yes me too

[11:08] Jack Linden: xstorm, there is a DPW one under the Land area

[11:09] Jack Linden: and the Land one itself will no doubt have Mainland topics

[11:09] xstorm Radek: oh good ty :-)

[11:09] Willow Halfpint: my friend loves your Toki Doki Top Jack, she is here in RL

[11:09] Jack Linden: hey Carl.. it's a new block of land we're prepping

[11:10] Carl Metropolitan: Will it stay where it is now?

[11:10] Carl Metropolitan: Or move towards the rest of the mainland?

[11:10] Qie Niangao: (Rails, mic is open)

[11:10] Marianne McCann: (An a colorful mic it is!)

[11:10] Jack Linden: not sure Carl, it's just a work in progress. we've several such blocks that are up or down depending on what we're doing

[11:11] Carl Metropolitan: Okay

[11:11] Carl Metropolitan: I'm worried about my maps :)

[11:11] Jack Linden: someone has an open mic by the way

[11:11] Asterion Coen: Carl, dont be, i got a lot of bulldozers

[11:11] Jack Linden: ah, closed now.

[11:11] Rails Bailey: sorry jack was in a conferance call, slaps self

[11:12] Jack Linden: no worries Rails

[11:12] Jack Linden: it's amazing the stuff i hear during office hours on voice

[11:12] Jack Linden: :)

[11:12] Jack Linden: so who has a topic for us today?

[11:12] Asterion Coen: (that's why i dont have any mic)

[11:12] Carl Metropolitan: I have another question. Can we get the Linden "magic prims" that produce the blue "i" signs on the map put back at the Mahulu and the Periwinkle InfoHubs?

[11:13] Marianne McCann: Glad you got the infohub stuff, Jack, Hope that helps.

[11:13] xstorm Radek: we need protected land settings to stop people from building on them

[11:13] Marianne McCann: Carl - I have a JIRA on that now. One sec

[11:13] Drongle McMahon: How are your conversations with microplot owners going, Jack?

[11:13] Jack Linden: noted Carl. thanks

[11:13] Marianne McCann: I found another couple, possibly, Carl

[11:14] Carl Metropolitan: Which ones?

[11:14] Marianne McCann: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-2391

[11:14] Jack Linden: Drongle, i've just pinged the team to get the latest, if they respond in the next 45 mins i'll pass on the latest hehe

[11:14] Marianne McCann: Luna, Mahulu, Murray, Periwinkle, Plum, and Violet.

[11:14] Drongle McMahon: Is the Govenor going to clean up her microplots and rejoin them?

[11:14] xstorm Radek: Can we have setting put in to place to stop people from building on protected LL Land on all the the Mainland ?

[11:14] Marianne McCann: Murray appears to be decommissioned, and Luna is not an infohub, but does send people to it as an infohub

[11:15] Carl Metropolitan: True

[11:15] Cytherea Eagle: Speaking of microplots.... Myself and other members of Arbor have some concerns about RezAds and they way they are handling business.

[11:15] Carl Metropolitan: And the teen grid transfer station might be able to use one, too.

[11:15] Jack Linden: Drongle, we're going to talk to the micro barons about that yes

[11:15] Marianne McCann: Good point, Carl. I wasn't sure how that one worked specifically

[11:15] Jack Linden: Also, we're starting to audit the Gov Linden land, especially the 16m parcels that she owns. we need to get that land back into circulation

[11:16] Drongle McMahon: Good.

[11:16] Jack Linden: and xstorm, part of that audit will be to set the permissions correctly. a lot of parcels have the wrong settings

[11:17] Qie Niangao: For expediency, would relaxing the "3 sides" rule help merge 16s (or, really, anything sub-512) with neighbors? Or is that asking for conflict?

[11:17] Jack Linden: Cytherea, thanks for the notecard, we'll look into that

[11:17] Drongle McMahon: Jack. Further to Cytherea's question, concerning advertising networks. Do three ad hoardings, owned by one person, none nearer than 50m apart, count as a single location if they are on the same large plot?

[11:18] Cytherea Eagle: I see that all over the grid Drongle

[11:18] Jack Linden: Qie.. we've talked about that. or of offering a quicker way to claim a 16m parcel that is next to you

[11:18] Cytherea Eagle: it is a loophole via affiliates Rez Ads uses

[11:18] Jack Linden: Drongle, we'd have to look at it but 3 ads sounds like, wel, 3 ads to me

[11:19] Elanthius Flagstaff: The ticketing system is pretty fast but not many people know about it. Why not change the description to let people know they can claim land that way

[11:19] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: I noticed more than one such system yesterday as I was looking for a different type of rental ad boards

[11:19] Jack Linden: If someone is using that to get around the poliicy then we will deal with that

[11:19] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: the conflict with those systems is what if I want to rez them inside my place of biz or on my estate region

[11:19] Cytherea Eagle: The NC I dropped to you Jack...is just one small example of many across the grid

[11:20] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: so it becomes a case of what is the real intent

[11:20] Jack Linden: Elanthius, true. There was a KB article but we could do more to push that. Now we have a new blog..

[11:20] Dirk Talamasca: Jack, now that the blog is in action, can we expect to see an announcement regarding the culling of traffic and camping bots soon?

[11:20] Elanthius Flagstaff: The KB is an unknown known, you can't look for something you idn't know would be there

[11:20] Twilight Difference: hey jack my profil button away

[11:20] Jack Linden: Dirk, yes.. the next post to the Land blog will likely be to start a discussion on Bots. Traffic. Camping.

[11:21] Yann Dufaux: yeah i have see the new blogs, i take more time for search the loink on this but its have a great look :)

[11:21] Dirk Talamasca: Fantastic, Jack..

[11:21] Jack Linden: We especially want to look at the people who are selling traffic via piles of bots. That is clearly not cool.

[11:21] Willow Halfpint: yayayay,,

[11:21] Elanthius Flagstaff: Jack you mentioned traffic injectors before but I think it's a tiny tiny almost irrelevant part ofd the problem

[11:22] Elanthius Flagstaff: Any noob can run 50 bots on their computer for free, only idiots pay for it

[11:22] Jack Linden: Actualyl Elanthius it's becoming rapidly more of an issue.

[11:22] Fontte Newbold: Human.... bot trafficking. :)

[11:22] Sierus Sicling: cant you g down the wow route and make bots illegal, or would that be a step to far ?

[11:22] Jack Linden: And with people investing large sums to move up the rankings, well it's something we need to look at

[11:22] Willow Halfpint: some bots can be usefull

[11:22] Elanthius Flagstaff: I think if your blog focusses on that to the exclusion of anything else it will be a real waste

[11:22] Willow Halfpint: not all bots are used for traphic

[11:22] Fontte Newbold: Bots still have legitimate service roles that aren't easily served otherwise in SL.

[11:23] Dennis Lagan: you mean how you can make them pay you that money instead of a bot baron lol

[11:23] Marianne McCann: Ya. It's not the tool, its how its used

[11:23] Carl Metropolitan: That's right. NCI has a legit invite bot. And we will be happy to pay for a premium account for it if need be.

[11:23] Jack Linden: Sierus, we think that there are legitimate reasons for bots. So we're not at the point where we'd consider removing them all

[11:23] Fontte Newbold: Although it's less of a problem these days now that tier payments aren't tied directly to traffic offset, it's still a problem.

[11:23] Marianne McCann: I really don't like bots, but some do have their usess.

[11:23] Sierus Sicling: sure thing :)

[11:23] Carl Metropolitan: I think bots should be required to have premium accounts.

[11:23] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: yes, there are many good bots. Lindens use several themselves <G>

[11:23] Qie Niangao: I think anything short of removing Traffic as a search ranking tool altogether will be at best a stop-gap

[11:23] Fontte Newbold: The distinction falls in where bots "count" as actual avatars.

[11:23] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: agreed, Qie

[11:23] Jack Linden: There are bot bartenders for heavens sake, I mean who'd want to remove them?

[11:23] Fontte Newbold: In the cases of sim blocking and traffic.

[11:23] Jack Linden: :)

[11:23] Carl Metropolitan: Traffic is extremely valuable once you get past the first ten entries or so.

[11:24] Carl Metropolitan: Removing it would be a mistake

[11:24] Fontte Newbold: Land bots are irritating for mainland sellers.... but unfortunately, that's given.

[11:24] Dennis Lagan: I think a person can normally own only 1 free account, if i'm correct? ofcourse nearly anyone violates this rule

[11:24] Jack Linden: Qie.. I can't compute that but i am not a bot. :)

[11:24] Equinox Pinion: but it should be real traffic carl

[11:24] xstorm Radek: there are to many people using free account BOT's using up to much upload time on the server and not paying LL for it

[11:24] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: they've removed that stipulation, Dennis

[11:24] Carl Metropolitan: No--that's not the case anymore, Dennis

[11:24] Equinox Pinion: why did you remove that jack

[11:24] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: and, frankly, anyone willing to host an army of bots would pay the ten bucks a head anyway

[11:24] Dennis Lagan: i see. and why not jack?

[11:25] Fontte Newbold: I don't think rent-seeking will fix this problem.

[11:25] Willow Halfpint: we carnt go at bots, with pitch forks ,,and fire, inless, there anoying spam bots, or Traphic lovers

[11:25] Willow Halfpint: :-p

[11:25] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: roleplayers often have several avatars for different purposes

[11:25] Jack Linden: Yes, we've had people with 40 bots sat in a skybox making the region inaccessible to the landowners there.

[11:25] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: I have a bunch of alts (this is one of them) for various biz purposes

[11:25] Fontte Newbold: My opinion would be to ignore "traffic" and go with a PageRank system.

[11:25] Sierus Sicling: prehaps there should be guidleine on the use of bots then ?

[11:25] Dirk Talamasca: They attempt to cap you but you use a mac spoofer and you are in like Flynn.

[11:25] xstorm Radek: needs to be a program that makes a person that sets up a free account for bots to pay $1 for every free account and have a limmit to every main account

[11:25] Yann Dufaux: well, why you don't add a captcha code on the new viewer?

[11:25] Jack Linden: And bots are getting stuck at infohubs too which is spooky for new residents

[11:25] Jean Swashbuckler: Jean nods on the 40 bots in a skybox

[11:26] Qie Niangao: (Well, Jack, it's a debate: does Traffic provide any useful information to Search ranking, even if not gamed? Carl says yes, I say no. I expect we'll expound on those positions, come blog-post time.)

[11:26] Fontte Newbold: What Qie said ^

[11:26] Willow Halfpint: hahaha yes jack,, alot of the welcome bots come to hyles

[11:26] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: model bots are useful too, even if they do contribute to traffic

[11:26] Elanthius Flagstaff: So what is going to be the focus of your attempt to solve the problem. In your eyes what even /is/ the problem?

[11:26] Carl Metropolitan: Charge bot users for the resouces they consume. Make them have premium accounts for their bots.

[11:26] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: lets face it you can make a great outfit look horrid and a horrid outit look great, depending on your skill with cam and photoshop

[11:27] Jack Linden: Yann, captcha is an option

[11:27] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: captcha for login?

[11:27] Jack Linden: hehe yes Qie, i'm looking forward to reading all the views

[11:27] Drongle McMahon: Crucially, can LL dentify bots reliably?

[11:27] Fontte Newbold: Unfortunately, Captchas have proven defeatable.

[11:27] Willow Halfpint: forcing people to pay will make it more tempting, or decress popularty even more

[11:28] Jack Linden: Elanthius, from my perspetive it's about how they impact other residents first of all, and our systems second.

[11:28] Drongle McMahon: Capcha not much good ... doesn't take long to answer 40 capchas.

[11:28] Qie Niangao: ooo... crowdsourced captcha-decoding for L$s--something for newbies to do, in the absence of camping. :p

[11:28] Fontte Newbold: Adding a paywall would have roughly the inverse effect that making SL free did.

[11:28] Jack Linden: When you can't reach the land you own because the region is full of camping bots. That's clearly not fair

[11:28] Willow Halfpint: if you ban something it only makes it more want able, note : griefers

[11:28] Yann Dufaux: Charlene, yes because this option can eleminate one couple of bots , with a special security and crypted response

[11:28] Fontte Newbold: Ie, traffic statistics plummet, but free riders go away.

[11:28] Marianne McCann would find a login captcha to be kinda annoying

[11:28] Ciaran Laval: You already have a policy for that Jack

[11:28] Elanthius Flagstaff: Yeah I already plan to send CAPTCHAS out to some group channel and have people solve them in exchange for a couple L$ if it ever comes to that

[11:28] Ewan Mureaux: please don't make it harder to use LL products

[11:28] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: Yeah, but it would make the response time for my estate bot longer when a kick/ban is needed

[11:29] Carl Metropolitan: No--you ONLY require premium accounts for bots; not for everyone!

[11:29] Qie Niangao: there must be a Mechanical Turk app for that already, Elan. :)

[11:29] Dennis Lagan: why don't you just make it a violation of the TOS, and battle it the same way you do as 16 sq. m. land owners? every child can see if bots are used or not at a certain place.

[11:29] Jack Linden: Ciaran, to some extent. We have acted in extreme cases

[11:29] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: right now the login is nice and automated and all I have to do is a couple of clicks on my end to tell it waht is needed

[11:29] Willow Halfpint: i do feel there sould be a login limmet,,

[11:29] Fontte Newbold: Good lick with that distinction, Carl. :D

[11:29] Fontte Newbold: Good luck too

[11:29] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: no clue how the programmer will program in what I'd need to handle that

[11:29] Elanthius Flagstaff: You can pay asians a dollar to solve a thousand or some ridiculous thing

[11:29] Jack Linden: But we also want to talk about whether traffic is a valid measure, if whether it should be in the search ranking

[11:29] Sierus Sicling: add trafic bots to Abuse reporting ?

[11:29] Marianne McCann: 's true, Dennis. I can see 'em

[11:29] Marianne McCann winks

[11:29] Yann Dufaux: Qie, its not an good idia, because ll lost the possible clients if he add this mesure i think

[11:29] Willow Halfpint: say about 14 hours then it asks you maybe log of, if theres not interaction with the world

[11:29] Ciaran Laval: Well it doesn't get much more extreme than 40 camping bots making the region unusable, 40 would be rampant idiocy on mainland anyway!

[11:30] Fontte Newbold: Technically, you can short-circuit the process and pay gold farmers to farm traffic just like bots.

[11:30] Elanthius Flagstaff: Only a few crazies think traffic is a useful metric

[11:30] Dennis Lagan: lol

[11:30] Fontte Newbold: And then we're right back to the /exact/ same problem.

[11:30] Fontte Newbold: Which is why traffic, as it currently exists, should go.

[11:30] Ewan Mureaux: rampant idiocy comes free with some accounts though :/

[11:30] Willow Halfpint: that would save on Rendering cost, and remove unwanted, Sqwaters

[11:30] Marianne McCann: Recently spotted a bot box in Nautilus, for a "tringo" place that clearly gets no real traffic. Seems few think it through

[11:30] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: we need the statistic

[11:31] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: I just don't think it should impact search

[11:31] Dirk Talamasca: That might be good Sierus but I'd like to be able to report via a landmark rather than camming in and typing in or individually reporting on 40 different bots.

[11:31] Jack Linden: I expect that as long as something is gameable, someone will probably try to game it. But then we have to balance that with how useful it is

[11:31] Carl Metropolitan: I think Traffic is a very useful metric

[11:31] Elanthius Flagstaff: It would be so simple to just remove Search Places. Then the whole problem would be solved

[11:31] Dennis Lagan: asl M linden, he has a nice board with economic statistics he wrote.... even updated real time, and our statistics page is taken offline?

[11:31] Carl Metropolitan: Only a few people with their own agendas want to get rid of it.

[11:31] Fontte Newbold: Personally, I'd favor a switch to pagerank based on profile hits and either teleports, or SLURL links.

[11:31] Jack Linden: As a measure on land, for the owner to see, it has value. As a way to decide search order.. if gameable it's unreliable.

[11:31] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: except that there's still a huge number of people in SL who use search places above any of the other searches

[11:32] Ewan Mureaux: well deal with it as a givernance issue, if you cant tie the bots to one main account warn the land owner and suspend them from search for a week

[11:32] Carl Metropolitan: And they tend to mock the tens of thousands of people who use traffic-based rankings daily

[11:32] CharleneTrudeau Lorefield: I used to, but I'm liking being able to search by non-exact search strings so I'm using all more

[11:32] Willow Halfpint: i dont think traphic sould really,,improve your search,, i mean look at NCI, and US, we give usefull help,

[11:32] Ciaran Laval: How many people even know what Traffic means though Carl?

[11:32] Willow Halfpint: but some sex place will have 50000 traphic

[11:32] Fontte Newbold: I seem to recall similar arguments about the old Vote boxes :D

[11:32] Fontte Newbold: And stipend based on positive ratings.

[11:32] Carl Metropolitan: If they care enough to find out they, know.

[11:33] Fontte Newbold: It's not a question of having a useful system, Carl.

[11:33] Fontte Newbold: It's about having a useful system that /works/

[11:33] Carl Metropolitan: Just because something can be gamed does not mean you should throw it away.

[11:33] Carl Metropolitan: Elections can be gamed; should countries stop having them?

[11:33] Carl Metropolitan: It is impossible to create a system that is perfect.

[11:33] Dirk Talamasca: Make the numbers visible only to the parcel owners much as you make certain land settings private.

[11:33] Dennis Lagan: but much worse then this is not possible

[11:34] Fontte Newbold: And should that stop us from trying to improve the systems we have? :P

[11:34] Willow Halfpint: rules come from majority,, if everyone agreed on things it would be a rule, its freedom that removes rules

[11:34] Willow Halfpint: so to set rules is very hard

[11:34] Fontte Newbold: (Also, elections have their own issues that are being sorted out. I highly recommend reading some of Lessig's stuff on Citizen-funded elections)

[11:34] Carl Metropolitan: Fontte--you are not talking about improving traffic--you are talking about getting rid of it.

[11:35] Carl Metropolitan: There are lots of great ideas for improving traffic

[11:35] Fontte Newbold: I'm talking about replacing it as a metric with a better system that is provably more effective than having people camp sims.

[11:35] Ciaran Laval: What do you get from traffic? I'm more interested in unique visitors, I have no idea how long someone spent on my parcels

[11:35] Jack Linden: Carl, if there were fairer measures of how high things should be in search, wouldn't that be worth doing than leaving traffic as the only one?

[11:35] Fontte Newbold: I need only cite the difference in search ratings between MSN Search, Yahoo, and Google, in terms of bot-driven results.

[11:35] Carl Metropolitan: "I'm talking about replacing elections with a better system that is provably more effective than having people vote"

[11:36] Fontte Newbold: -_-

[11:36] Fontte Newbold: Now that's just a silly twisting of my words that utterly misses the point. :D

[11:36] Willow Halfpint: i think, it sould be judged on Usefullness,, Traphic,,, And Lindenlabs

[11:36] Fontte Newbold: I miss Linden Picks. :)

[11:36] Carl Metropolitan: I find traffic very useful

[11:36] Willow Halfpint: via seeing a place is the only real way to know if it benifits users

[11:36] Carl Metropolitan: Places is the first tab I used when looking for an item.

[11:37] xstorm Radek: all bot's are not the same and you can not look at them as the same

[11:37] Willow Halfpint: LL started this with the showcase

[11:37] Charlene Trudeau: Carl, one thing to remember there is that we are old school

[11:37] Ciaran Laval: How do you measure it Carl? It's generated by how long people stay, we don't know how many people visited or why someone stayed longer.

[11:37] Charlene Trudeau: is that true of people who started after the new all search came into being?

[11:37] Carl Metropolitan: The thing is we have a google-type system already: Search All. We also have Classifieds--and Places

[11:37] Carl Metropolitan: Each has their place and users.

[11:38] Carl Metropolitan: If you don't like traffic, no one forces you to use Places.

[11:38] Charlene Trudeau: and all can be drilled down to places too

[11:38] Equinox Pinion: how is traffic calculated....if you would take unique visitors per day...wouldnt that solve the problem

[11:38] Carl Metropolitan: If you don't like paid ads, no one forces you to use Classifieds

[11:38] Fontte Newbold: Well, before we continue, I'd like to hear you defend traffic as a metric with merits beyond "it's the incumbent system"

[11:38] Dennis Lagan: not everyone knows how the search results come to them Carl

[11:38] Dennis Lagan: i even think most don'rt know it at all

[11:38] Fontte Newbold: Seriously. I'd like to know what makes Traffic such a special system.

[11:38] Carl Metropolitan: If you don't like Page Rank type systems , no one forces you to use Search All.

[11:38] Charlene Trudeau: but I"m pretty sure all has some effect from traffic too, doesn't it, Jack?

[11:38] Fontte Newbold: I doubt many in this room know why we have elections and a democratic process in most first-world nations.

[11:39] Dirk Talamasca: A problem with picks and a determination of usefulness is that it requires staff to make those determinations and the location of an establishment can change at a moments notice. Very hard to keep that sort of thing updated.

[11:39] Jack Linden: Not sure but I think it features in All too, to some extent

[11:39] Fontte Newbold: (Also, bear with me, this is so not a governance debate)

[11:39] Jack Linden: But i could be wrong on that

[11:39] Charlene Trudeau: and, hate to tell you this, but all is being gamed heavily, as well

[11:39] Ciaran Laval: Traffic is supposed to have some effect in all, but much diluted

[11:39] Qie Niangao: if Search All were more reliable, I think eventually nobody would use anything else. but yeah, it has problems, too, with very weird SEO effects.

[11:39] Drongle McMahon: Easy Fontte - it's to keep the electorate quiet

[11:39] Carl Metropolitan: My point is that Traffic is one of three "incumbant" systems

[11:39] Fontte Newbold: Drongle: Ha! :D

[11:40] Carl Metropolitan: Each have their strengths and weaknesses.

[11:40] Charlene Trudeau: and all can be gamed

[11:40] Carl Metropolitan: I'd like you to defend why you want to eliminate a resource that many many people find very useful.

[11:40] Marianne McCann: Without elections, yu'd have no presiedent's day, and wouldn't know when to have yer president's day sale. Simple!

[11:40] Charlene Trudeau: classifieds are just the most obvious about it <G>

[11:41] Jack Linden: I'm not sure we talked about removing traffic completely, for a parcel owner it might be a useful stat, but as a way to decide search order, it's not great

[11:41] Fontte Newbold: I think the real question we need to be asking isn't "how do we stop traffic" or "how do we can all the bots," but instead, "how do we make searching both more useful to actual searchers, and tied to their results?"

[11:41] Charlene Trudeau: Jack, would it be feasible for mainland to put an avatar cap per parcel to the % of land owned for the region?

[11:41] Elanthius Flagstaff: The main thing about gaming all is it doesn't involve bringing the sim to a grinding halt by overloading it with avs

[11:41] Charlene Trudeau: see, for bots on an estate where you own the whole region, you can program the bots to auto log if the parcel or region is full

[11:41] Willow Halfpint: i have to go people RL, thanks for letting me sit in, and good luck Carl keep cracking at it

[11:41] Charlene Trudeau: but on mainland....

[11:41] Jack Linden: Charlene, you mean have visitors limited like prims?

[11:42] Charlene Trudeau: yes

[11:42] Jack Linden: make it tough to fly about

[11:42] Jack Linden: you'd never be able to cross an area with people in it. :)

[11:42] Dirk Talamasca: Objects set to Show in Search are majorly gaming search... Type in "Mens Hair" have a look at the objects on the parcel beneath result #1

[11:42] Charlene Trudeau: you can't now with bots filling a region

[11:42] Carl Metropolitan: This is fucking insane. Why break existing things to fix a problem (camping bots) that is not a technical problem.

[11:42] Fontte Newbold: Dumb question, Jack? Internally, do you have any statistics whizzes crunching out bot behavior?

[11:42] Fontte Newbold: As in, "we see these bots doing X, Y, and Z across this many sims?"

[11:43] Fontte Newbold: That'd probably be the best way to get a handle on the scope of the problem.

[11:43] Ewan Mureaux: bots= abuse of region resources, please just nforce it

[11:43] Jack Linden: Fontte, we do. We see the db load for example

[11:43] Jack Linden: We see the searches that Land Bots run

[11:43] Charlene Trudeau: see I have to explain this to commercial folks who want bots/campers in my regions. You only have x number of avatars allowed, if every commercial parcel starts having even four or five campers/bots/whatever, no one will be able to come shop

[11:43] Marianne McCann: I agree. Losing traffic is not the cure to it. Busting the bots is

[11:43] Drongle McMahon: Charlane - that would be only 0.3 avs allowed on a 512!

[11:43] Charlene Trudeau: /menods, so not workable

[11:43] Fontte Newbold: "Busting bots" is an extremely hard practice, though.

[11:44] Charlene Trudeau: so different on estate

[11:44] Marianne McCann: So taking the lazy way is better, Fontte?

[11:44] Elanthius Flagstaff: So you bust bots and go back to camping. Is everyone happy with that because that kinda sucked too

[11:44] Fontte Newbold: And, as presented, bots in Second Life do have their limited service uses.

[11:44] Carl Metropolitan: Offer a 100L$ a head bounty for the first person to report each traffic bot :)

[11:44] Sierus Sicling: Make it n ARable offense ?

[11:44] Charlene Trudeau: I think realistically, you're left with having to rely on an AR system

[11:44] Charlene Trudeau: but

[11:44] Fontte Newbold: How is "getting an idea of the types of bot abuse" the lazy way?

[11:44] Rails Bailey: busting bots, if in doubt, ar and let gteam make the call

[11:44] Fontte Newbold: Seems like a good angle on the problem to me. :)

[11:44] Charlene Trudeau: what about estate? do the same rules apply? if not its a hugely unfair advantage to estate

[11:44] Carl Metropolitan: License (or require premium accounts) for useful bots.

[11:44] Marianne McCann: Fontte - I was referring to losing traffic as a viable stat

[11:44] Elanthius Flagstaff: And then you get bots campping. The underlying problem is that the metric for ranking is proprtional to how badly the sim runs

[11:45] Fontte Newbold: Busting traffic is really more of a sub-topic, because it (like Events) is slowly petering out as a useful measure of actual traffic due to bots.

[11:45] Fontte Newbold: But it's a symptom, not the cause, of the behavior. :)

[11:45] Fontte Newbold: And it bears mentioning that moving to a system like PageRank, while better, would just offset the use of bots in gaming practice.

[11:46] Fontte Newbold: What I'd like to know, is how Google handles this problem.

[11:46] Charlene Trudeau: in many instances traffic for shopping for clothing, furniture, etc is in inverse proportion to the quality

[11:46] Ciaran Laval: With shopping I really don't see how long someone stays in a store is a useful metric after the first five minutes.

[11:47] Charlene Trudeau: not the same with places like NCI, of course, wherever every dollop of it is earned :)

[11:47] Ciaran Laval: With a club, that's probably a useful metric

[11:47] Fontte Newbold: What I will say is that policy in putting a lid on technical practice is /very/ hard to enforce, unless you have a clear interface that you can use to stop abuse.

[11:47] Fontte Newbold: A captcha is a good idea from an earlier age, but those are gameable, and put a lid on /useful/ bots.

[11:47] Carl Metropolitan: NCI doesn't get much traffic from traffic.

[11:47] Dennis Lagan: google mostly takes the amount of links to the page, like you have the pictures in some people profile in sl infuencing search as well.... (and can ofcourse be tricked too) at least this doesn't cost extra bot-load on the database.

[11:47] Elanthius Flagstaff: Google doesn't take into consideration the traffic to a site at all. It uses nothing like traffic. Probably because it knows it would be hopelessly gamed

[11:47] Jack Linden: for some people the L$ spent would be a better metric

[11:47] Carl Metropolitan: But it is useful to to us as a metric.

[11:47] Jack Linden: than time spent stood there

[11:47] Charlene Trudeau: what kind of lid on useful bots?

[11:48] Carl Metropolitan: That's a great idea for a metric. Just as gameable as traffic, though.

[11:48] Charlene Trudeau: on an estate region, how many models is the region owner allowed?

[11:48] Fontte Newbold: Elanthius: Yes, but Google's link-based system still has a gaming angle. Particularly, bots that spam links to blogs and wikis.

[11:48] Jack Linden: Yes google also doesn't explain it's full ranking method.

[11:48] Fontte Newbold: Which is why I, again, ask how they handle this problem.

[11:48] Carl Metropolitan: I have alt 1 buy stuff all day from main account store 1

[11:48] Fontte Newbold: Because what they do seems to work.

[11:48] Charlene Trudeau: what about if you register useful bots and their avatars are removed from traffic ranking?

[11:48] Charlene Trudeau: is that possible?

[11:48] Elanthius Flagstaff: Right, but that was my earlier point. If I make lots of fake sites pointing to my site to game google at least I'm not bringing the internets to a grinding halt by creating so much network traffic

[11:48] Dirk Talamasca: Realistically it is tough to gague that sort of usefulness even in a club, Ciaran. People can get involved in an IM, in an e-mail, on the phone or on the web and pretty much just stand in a location or on a poseball completely oblivious to SL.

[11:49] Fontte Newbold: Forced registration probably won't happen; it'd just give a recourse if you're caught with your hand in the cookie jar.

[11:49] xstorm Radek: if the Bot in using a free account its not a good bot at all and just makes problems as long as its on the sim server

[11:50] Ciaran Laval: Sure Dirk, but I'd expect that to happen less. If I'm looking for a location to rent a store the first thing I look for is bots or camping because most of those guys won't be shoppers.

[11:50] xstorm Radek: you can have a bot that will not use up a free user account but will use a prim bot server

[11:50] Dirk Talamasca: Agreed

[11:50] Rails Bailey: dont see why LL cant get rid of free accounts and charge a min of 5 US a month for a basic account, pay to play

[11:50] Charlene Trudeau: bear in mind, xstorm, that I'm from the other side, my focus is on estate where its a lot easier to manage the resources. And we do have good legit uses for any number of types of bots.

[11:51] Charlene Trudeau: WE started there, Rails. It had its issues, too. I'm very pro free accounts.

[11:51] Sierus Sicling: Rails: paying would realy put people off joining

[11:51] Rails Bailey: and reduce the griefing element

[11:51] Fontte Newbold: Really, the only effective answers I can come up with are a Turing test for bots (good luck there), or moving the issue to a centralized system that's easily queriable and updatable by the Lindens.

[11:52] Sierus Sicling: you shouldnt have to pay to enjoy second life :)

[11:52] Fontte Newbold: One idea comes to mind:

[11:52] Fontte Newbold: On a per-avatar basis:

[11:52] Fontte Newbold: Are Lindens able to compute the traffic ratio across all sims that avatar has visited?

[11:52] Ciaran Laval: Plenty of people with basic accounts pay, you don't need to be premium to own a private island

[11:52] Carl Metropolitan: Free accounts are not the issue here.

[11:52] Jack Linden: what if only Premiums and above generated traffic?

[11:52] Charlene Trudeau: no way, Jack

[11:52] Ciaran Laval: No Jack

[11:53] Sierus Sicling: that would be an intresting idea

[11:53] Charlene Trudeau: do you know how many people don't have premiums?

[11:53] Elanthius Flagstaff: Yeah let's be cautius about all this bot-fever. I use bots to monitor my estate performance, track new renters, create dynamic notecards, send group invites and a million other things that it would be a shame to lose.

[11:53] Fontte Newbold: Pay to vote?

[11:53] Ciaran Laval: Estate land doesn't need premium members

[11:53] Qie Niangao: Well, Jack, I'm afraid the traffic bot would still be cost-effective.

[11:53] Charlene Trudeau: I know estate owners that don't simply because they don't have to

[11:53] Carl Metropolitan: I proposed that in a forum thread. The idea was soundly taken apart for good reasons.

[11:53] Charlene Trudeau: never mind all the folks living on them

[11:53] Carl Metropolitan: Let me send you the link.

[11:53] Charlene Trudeau: thanks, CArl

[11:53] xstorm Radek: even if a person owns a estate the free account running a bot is the problem and will make problems on other sims and sim wide grid problems

[11:53] Fontte Newbold: I would say that's interesting, but would skew things extremely.

[11:54] Qie Niangao: (For other reasons, parcel owners *might* be interested in Premium traffic statistics)

[11:54] Fontte Newbold: Given the notoriously low premium adoption rate.

[11:54] Jack Linden: hmm yeah estates being different would make that trickier.

[11:54] Elanthius Flagstaff: I think it would be an interesting move Jack. It would be one small way to make premium more valuable and any traffic bots would at least be paying into LLs coffers for the privilege

[11:54] Dytska Vieria: If LL can identify bots, why not limit the number of bots/sim?

[11:54] Fontte Newbold: Well, as a statistic, sure. But as a general metric...

[11:54] Elanthius Flagstaff: It's hard to complain about people paying for the services they use

[11:54] Dennis Lagan: in many casesthe percentage of premium visitors should be about the same as normals, but guess there are as many specific places with an audience where it wouldn't work for.

[11:54] Charlene Trudeau: I know one heavy bot user, her estate is attached to mine

[11:54] Carl Metropolitan: http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=256330&highlight=Premium+Account+Bots

[11:54] Charlene Trudeau: her justification? I can so I do. If I can't, I won't.

[11:55] Fontte Newbold: Back to what I was poking: Can LL run a query that shows the traffic throwoff of individual avatars, versus the number of sims they dropped traffic on?

[11:55] Asterion Coen: oh, need to run soon :)

[11:55] Ciaran Laval: That's the general response from bot runners Charlene, I fully understand why they do it

[11:55] Sierus Sicling: have an LL suported client for bots so that they can be identifeid and removed from a parcel when it is rahing the avatar limit ?

[11:55] Jack Linden: we have all the dwell data etc so yes Fontte, we could

[11:55] Fontte Newbold: I would presume that a very focused traffic rating (one parcel over the course of say, a month) would signal a bot.

[11:56] xstorm Radek: and again not all BOT's are the same !

[11:56] Elanthius Flagstaff: Fontte all those ideas would just be gamed as easily. The traffic sellers would just make their bots moe around amongst the customers

[11:56] Qie Niangao: well, but then dwell-for-hire would be a bigger business: flit the bot from parcel to parcel. same problem with unique-visitor counting

[11:56] Dennis Lagan: i'm sure lindenlabs detection could be easely tricked with updating the bot programs and make them move around a bit for example.

[11:56] Asterion Coen: /nice meeting you folks! i will comeback, the sofa r very confortable :)

[11:56] Charlene Trudeau: Fontte that still doesn't address something like a model bot

[11:56] Elanthius Flagstaff: If you're going to obfuscate and make it harder for bot runners, a legitimate tactic, at least think of something that does slow them down

[11:56] Fontte Newbold: Elanthius: Yeah, I'm just trying to get a handle on the low hanging fruit.

[11:56] Asterion Coen: and have fun :)

[11:56] Fontte Newbold: Charlene: Define model bot.

[11:56] Jack Linden: cheers asterion!

[11:56] Charlene Trudeau: who would still have the focused on one area thing but is useful to the shoppers

[11:57] Charlene Trudeau: someone who stands in place wearing an outfit or a skin

[11:57] Fontte Newbold: I'm not attacking bots in general; I'm attacking a specific gamed traffic use of bots.

[11:57] Charlene Trudeau: to show the customers as it it looks really on an avatar

[11:57] Dennis Lagan: you just have to make it a TOS violation for producing traffic. not speaking about crawler bots.

[11:57] Fontte Newbold: Ahhh.

[11:57] Carl Metropolitan: Model bots could be replaced if LL offered a static Avatar prim type

[11:57] Fontte Newbold: ^

[11:57] Charlene Trudeau: which is why I asked for a means to register one sthat wouldn't count for traffic

[11:57] Elanthius Flagstaff: What about greeters and notecard creators and my ticketing system for visitors

[11:57] Charlene Trudeau: that's fine, Carl, but its not realistic now

[11:57] Sierus Sicling: I agree camping bots needs to be a YOS violation

[11:57] Rails Bailey: yer can buy static prim avatars

[11:58] Charlene Trudeau: again, Elanthius, I'd bet you'd register for traffic exclusion in a heartbeat if it meant keeping your useful system

[11:58] Elanthius Flagstaff: Bots are no problem at all, they don't hurt anyone. It's the gaming of traffic by overloading pacels that causes problems.

[11:58] Fontte Newbold: Anyway, I feel your pain on this one; we have the same exact issue where I work, but with the internet as our domain instead of a contained system like Second Life.

[11:58] Carl Metropolitan: I have to run.

[11:58] Carl Metropolitan: Bye

[11:58] Charlene Trudeau: bye carl

[11:58] Fontte Newbold: o/

[11:58] Ciaran Laval: Bye Carl

[11:58] Rails Bailey: had mainland and couldnt get on cos of the bots

[11:58] Charlene Trudeau: take care

[11:58] Marianne McCann: Not the tool, but the use of that tool

[11:58] Fontte Newbold: Have a good one, Carl.

[11:58] Marianne McCann: See ya Carl

[11:58] Jack Linden: Yes, as with scripting it's not the bots that are the issue here, it's how they are used

[11:59] Ciaran Laval: If you work towards introducing more metrics traffic gets squeezed

[11:59] Fontte Newbold: What I've discovered is, it is rediculously difficult to distill results to a PASS/FAIL policy when bots or malicious intentions are involved.

[11:59] Rails Bailey: gerroff the polar bear rug

[12:00] Fontte Newbold: My advice? Find a way to penalize sims that are known bot abusers.

[12:00] Fontte Newbold: Traffic bot abusers*

[12:00] Yann Dufaux: i have see an different source of clients to connect a bot.. but its not a second life official viewer ..

[12:00] Jack Linden: :) okay folks, I have to head out. this has been a really good debate,lots of good input, thanks all!

[12:00] Ciaran Laval: Cheers Jack

[12:00] Fontte Newbold: Thus targeting a central source of the problem, instead of just The Bots.

[12:00] Fontte Newbold: Have a good one, Jack.

[12:00] Ewan Mureaux: the penalty should be removing them from search for a week, the punishment really fits the crime

[12:00] xstorm Radek: when one person takes up 10 free user accounts and sets up scrips to run them accounts as a bot it makes problems and load on the sim and servers

[12:00] Sierus Sicling: have fun :)

[12:00] Charlene Trudeau: thanks jack

[12:00] Rails Bailey: be safe jack

[12:00] Marianne McCann: Have fun, Jack! Hope that infohub stuff comes in handy!

[12:00] Qie Niangao: thanks Jack.

[12:01] Jack Linden: cheers!