Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Bizarre and very NPIRL ways to beef up traffic numbers?

Hobo King Orhalla Zander just TP'ed me to a poorly made, untextured prim skybox. Inside were 9 avatars in various states of Ruth, all members of the Blue Bay Beach Club and all apparently "manufactured" between October 10th and 13th of this year. All of the avatars were facing one direction and all were silent. None were "away." Creepy.



We were above Athena's Mall & Beach Club where, it was advertised alongside the sim name: "Mall Space for Rent."



Want to take a look for yourself? Teleport directly from here.



It was Orhalla who surmised - and I can't imagine that he's wrong about this - that these were traffic generators. What else could this be, and is this camping taken to new and ghastly heights? Traffic numbers for this parcel: 12,766.

Hmmm.

Posted by Bettina Tizzy at 1:25 AM

Labels: , , , , ,

View blog reactions

10 comments:

Peter Stindberg said...

Seen this a couple of times above (otherwise empty) clubs already. I agree with Orhalla and your assessment.

December 12, 2007 at 3:57 AM
Peter Stindberg said...

It's now at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Bleston/95/113/620

December 12, 2007 at 8:08 AM
Bettina Tizzy said...

Thank you, Peter. Appreciate your posting that. Cold bodies for traffic... shameful. Like you, I also generally avoid the high traffic areas, but if you are new to Second Life, this ploy might work on you if you're looking for a rental space.

December 12, 2007 at 8:26 AM
Anonymous said...

/me thinks of a business "Traffic R Us" 50% now and 50% when the traffic hits 10,000. A very good find, unfortunately there's always people looking for ways to "improve" their presentatoin and not always done the right way. Business competition is big out there yet we still have people opening up malls next to malls and clubs next to clubs trying to gain others' business. I sincerely believe the old voting system was a much better way, for me it was a sense of helping out a place you liked and wanted to see them attract more people / business.

December 12, 2007 at 11:01 AM
Anonymous said...

Yes these are "bots" running off libSL. I can show you how they work sometime, ive been playing with them as cheap AI based help staff.

December 13, 2007 at 11:44 AM
Unknown said...

This is unfortunately fairly common, Betti. This is actually less insidious than some examples I've seen (and have been blogged), where the sky box is invisible, cut in invisible compartments, and stocked with 40-50 zombie avs...

Traffic is a useless measure by any stretch of the imagination. Here's hoping the new search somehow permits better ways of ranking good sites in SL.

December 14, 2007 at 9:00 AM
Bettina Tizzy said...

Thansk for writing Jolly, Sean and Aenea.

Since posting this, I've had the displeasure of learning more about this practice. Your input further confirms it. Thumbs way down.

Aenea, any more thoughts on how search might rank places more accurately?

December 14, 2007 at 12:00 PM
Anonymous said...

And hey - can we send along examples of our own for posting? :) Maybe a little rogues gallery of floating traffic boxes would be a fun little project with SLURLs to put on our no watch lists?

Keep up the brilliant work, NPIRL is IT.

December 19, 2007 at 7:01 AM
Bettina Tizzy said...

Dusan... woohoo, you just made my day :D Thanks for the props, and yea, do show/tell us what you found out there. I'm all for poking at these lag-inducing knucklebrains.

December 19, 2007 at 9:26 AM
Anonymous said...

I've met these too. They were very nice and patient and didn't mind listening to me talk for three hours about my toe nail clippings collection. It's nice to be able to share your thoughts with people sometimes.

January 4, 2008 at 12:55 AM

Post a Comment