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Second Life traffic gaming: A chat with a bot-operator, and dire portents for Lucky Chairs
The store is a fairly ordinary store in Second Life terms, except that it appears to sell objects that are mostly available for free elsewhere in the virtual environment. Reselling 'freebies' in Second Life is generally considered to be a reprehensible practice, but it does happen. This particular store is one of the places we routinely check out to evaluate the effectiveness of Linden Lab's harder-line policies on gaming traffic (and thus search-rankings) within Second Life. In front of us are a row of 53 avatars, camping out. The provision of such camping facilities being one of the things that are prohibited under the new policy. We tried for a little while to get the attention of one of the camping avatars to see what they might think, and finally succeeded. As it happens, the avatar who responded was a bot – actually one of 70 bots being controlled by a single user who declined to give us a name. The bot-operator was, however, happy to answer a few questions for us, through the remotely-controlled avatar.
Linden Lab expands Second Life traffic gaming policy
Linden Lab, as you probably already know, has started to take action against the use of bots to game Second Life traffic (which is still the most influential of the sorting criteria in in-world search results), although with somewhat lackluster results so far. Yesterday, it was indicated that the action would be extended to other means of artificially boosting traffic figures, such as camping-chair installations.
