Give groups with deeded land a traffic rating
Toothless Draegonne
A persistent problem, one that gives a dark incentive against really using the existing parcel controls, is how traffic is parcel only and bears little reality to how a venue or community may be set up.
By giving groups with deeded land their own kind of traffic rating, this could help people to find communities that are active and have real footfall and activities. Exact methods on how to count traffic might be something for future discussions, but it's plain to anybody who has been here longer than a day, that the existing system is broken beyond repair and has been absolutely unusable in practise almost since its inception.
Communities join and follow groups, not land. Base traffic (and other things such as dynamic landmarks) on those groups. Keep the old system around for compatibility's sake and for people who for whatever reason refuse to adopt a better way, and give people looking for places to go a much more relevant way of doing so.
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AlettaMondragon Resident
I'm not sure if the point here is that if the group owns multiple venues, the group should show a traffic score gained from all these venues, rather than each venue its own score separately?
Traffic scores are very unreliable, I still look at it, but I find more active places if I sort the results by lowest traffic first, so as for the idea to show a score in group search (if that's the suggestion here), why not, but it probably won't be a solid way to promote such groups.
Toothless Draegonne
AlettaMondragon Resident
I'm using traffic as an "understandable by SL residents" way of describing it. But I could say rank, if you're more the search engine optimisation type of guy. I'm also leaving it open to further discussion as to how exactly you'd rank a group, but I would suggest that the traffic from deeded parcels would be part of it. This would mean that someone can split their region or estate up into parcels for fine control over things like audio, voice, parcel streaming, combat damage etc, while not ruining traffic for the region or estate. This would immediately be handy, eg for clubs that might want a dance floor with all the gesturebating and group dancers, and a chillout section off to the side in another parcel.
It's also worth recognising, as mentioned, that communities are not land. If you're looking for a community rather than a venue, you're not going to be interested in exactly what region is being used, so long as you know where they are.
Caelan Whimsy
I like this idea. My only concern is that no matter what safeguards are in place to keep people from inflating group traffic numbers, people will find a way to get around them. Especially with AI bots becoming so common.
Toothless Draegonne
Caelan Whimsy Oh there's always going to be black hat SEO gaming. But it might be more tricksy to game a group-oriented system than simply plonking a Lindo terminal down and throwing $L5K into a 100-avatar bender event. The precise way such a system might rank things could be hidden by the Lab and tweaked and twiddled just so the blackhat SEO types can rage and cry more. But making it so the traffic of land deeded to the same group can be combined would be a good start.