UK government spends £2.8 million on road safety browser MMO originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 14 Jan 2011 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Ever notice that the Second Life grid's performance tends to suddenly drop at midnight, Pacific time? That's the hurly-burly of batch processing. Stipend payments, group disbursements and traffic calculations. In fact, some parts of the traffic calculations system is so dense and arcane that processing the previous 24 hours worth of data doesn't always even finish within 24 hours.

Linden Lab have been making noises about simplifying the traffic system for about three years, and there have been a number of under-the-hood tweaks to the algorithms during that time. In fact, the majority of Second Life users believe that the new system that has been announced has actually already been in place since 2006 (partly because the existing system can appear that way, as an edge-case of some overly-simplistic testing methodology).

Continue reading Second Life parcel-traffic scoring to change at the end of the month

Second Life parcel-traffic scoring to change at the end of the month originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 22 Aug 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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.

Continue reading Second Life traffic gaming: A chat with a bot-operator, and dire portents for Lucky Chairs

Second Life traffic gaming: A chat with a bot-operator, and dire portents for Lucky Chairs originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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.

Continue reading Linden Lab expands Second Life traffic gaming policy

Linden Lab expands Second Life traffic gaming policy originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 22 May 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Our first birthday is this weekend and we're very excited -- so excited that we're giving away tons of stuff with reckless abandon. As you know, we've been leading up to it for the past month by listing our best work in the Best of Massively series. Well, folks, this is the last episode! We're wrapping it up by presenting what are arguably your favorites -- our five most viewed featured articles ever! Three of these are top five articles, so we're three-fifths of the way to making a top five top fives list, it would seem. The numbers don't lie, though, so enjoy, and tune in Sunday for the first giveaways!

Click to start >>

Gallery: The Best of Massively: Our five all-time greatest hits

The Best of Massively: Our five all-time greatest hits originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Over the years, Linden Lab has put a lot of effort into attempting to reward, or to give recognition to (another kind of reward, really) Second Life users who made positive contributions to the overall user-experience. The Lab staff used to refer to it as a mandate or as a part of "their charter."

So far, almost all of these efforts have fallen a bit flat. By flat, we mean flat at the bottom of a deep hole. A deep hole full of explosives.

Continue reading Peering Inside: Rewards and recognition

Peering Inside: Rewards and recognition originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Completely oblivious to the decoupling of traffic from search rankings in the new Second Life system, Traffic Injection has just started up a business to boost your traffic, promising variable amounts of dwell up to 150,000/day. This apparently seems to be achieved by mule avatars and (if we're reading this right) by spamming group IMs.

It isn't easy to tell, actually, since their Web-site (actually a blogger.com blog) is so poor on the grammar and spelling fronts, that much of it almost defies any attempt at comprehension whatsoever. English, we guess, isn't their first language -- which might be why they seem to be unaware that the basis for their business model is about to disappear (within the next week or two, most likely).

If you don't recognize the .nr on the end of their domain name, that is -- regrettably -- Nauru, the smallest nation in the world, and one with a grim history.

[Thanks Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Boost your traffic, without bots, camping or coherent spelling originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 31 May 2008 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Linden Lab is having a second stab at reworking the Second Life dwell (also known as traffic, but dwell is a more accurate name since traffic is not actually what is described) algorithm based on user-feedback. Last year, at Linden in-world office hours assorted feedback was gathered from users, and it appeared as though Linden Lab had settled on a new algorithm as a result.

This year however, Linden Lab is having another go at getting user-input for a new dwell algorithm, so we presume that something must have blocked progress on the previous attempt.

Continue reading Peering Inside: Trafficking in meaning

Peering Inside: Trafficking in meaning originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 26 May 2008 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.