Camping and Traffic Bots - Action in progress

Sometimes things can escape your attention, Linden Lab's action on traffic bots and camping could be one of those things that escape your attention but keeping your ear to the ground you start to hear a murmur. Therefore when I see someone asking how long a region is blocked from search due to camping abuse, I have a good inclination that action is taking place.

I delve a little further and find that this guy's parcel is not showing up in search, it's not in search all, it's not in the places tab yet the traffic figure is over twenty eight thousand, so I guess he's finally decided to take notice of Linden Lab's warnings.

Now this leads to the issue of how many other parcels are now missing from search. There are undoubtedly still parcels out there employing camping and bots. This will annoy those who have been sanctioned for the use of such methods, but progess is being made.

The problem is that at times that Linden Lab seem so laid back on enforcement that they appear to be horizontal. The rights and wrongs of the camping issue are for another place and another time. I'm no fan of traffic due to many factors but until Linden Lab come up with a better statistic I'll live with it, I'd rather live with it than without it at the present time. How long an avatar stays on a parcel is useful for places that want to retain an avatar but not so useful for places that aren't fussed with an avatar only spending a few minutes there but hopefully buying something in that time. Traffic is a flawed statistic but it's better than no statistic.

So have you noticed any parcels no longer showing in search? I have noticed some parcels losing fifteen to twenty thousand in traffic since the new policy arrived, some of these are parcels where the owner employed bots or models and yet their traffic is still high in reality, still over ten thousand. I wonder how their sales are doing compared to pre-policy.

Of course they will be hoping that Linden Lab take action quickly, that should level the playing field somewhat and they should come out the other side relatively happy. I've never bought the argument that traffic bots were only used by people who make poor content, that may be what we'd like to believe but in reality some big names with good products have employed these tactics to keep up with the opposition. That's what caused the traffic wars. People aren't stupid, great traffic and crap produce will not bring major sales to a content creator, they may catch a few sales but they won't flourish, the content needs to be decent to keep the business going.

So we are seeing action on the traffic front, it may well be slow but it is happening, keep your eyes and ears open and you may start to hear complaints.