Jan 2
Rigging Search in Second Life with Spamatars
A post over at Grid Expectations points out how B&B Skins has become one of the most visited places in Second Life, at least according to the visitor counts. Here is a shot of the room below the store that she found full of avatars, what she we call them, marketing avatars, advertising avatars, spamatars, any good names for them?
When I popped in tonight I didn’t think I would see any, and I didn’t. Which brings to my mind right off, is, if they aren’t really “cheating” then why aren’t they still there?
So, I checked a couple times tonight, with the latest time I checked being 2:30 am Eastern time. They have a couple avatars in tubes as avatar models, both live profiles, and both with B&B Skins in their picks.
And in just using this plan, having many alts and unused avatars hidden under their club, and a bunch of keywords in their description like shapes, skins, skin, sex, sexy quality, escorts, etc, plus, having lots more avatars picks including B&B skins, all those fake alts that is, this allows them to be in the top three for many search terms, for instance, when I search the places tab. Not to mention top ten in the most popular places tab.
Using the search for freebies.
Using the search for newbies.
Using the search for sex.
Using the search for escort.
Even when you search for CSI.
Boy, if every business starts to do this, just think how many registered and signed in avatars we will have every month. I see new records in the future. But, seriously, Linden Labs needs to take the popularity factor out of the equation, or at least make it not worth anything in the equation, this is ridiculous and is another reason stuff is hard to find in Second Life.
Added:
As noted by in the comments by Emmaline Thorn, apparently I was looking at the wrong spot, the empty spot I found and focused on was under the building here.
The spamatars are still there, they are just two levels under the little pond outside.
Kinda creepy looking for sure, I wonder how wide spread of a practice this is. I guess it will be time to go down the popular sites list and some high traffic places we can find and see how many places are doing this. I know there are others as I have read about skyboxes being full of them.
Popularity: 19%
8 Comments so far
Leave a comment
[…] you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!The Grid Live has some fascinating screen grabs taken from another blog showing masses of avatars gathered in a small area - allegedly to boost […]
Just wondering — did you go down both layers? There is a false floor above the bots that are idling. If you only go down one level, you’ll see a blank room. If you go down two, you’ll find them. (Three is the ground as of this writing.)
I checked at roughly 8:50 AM Eastern US time, and they were still there, winning the “giveaways” that the store was having. We have tried to contact the Sim/shop owner about this practice, but as yet have not gotten a response.
You know, I just checked under the store, that is where I found the empty room, going over to the pool is where the two levels are, and sure enough, the bottom floor was packed with avatars winning a linden every so often.
This definitely qualifies as hilarious. ^_^
We call these Fake avatars Traffic Bots.
This has been going on for almost a year now. Every location listed in Popular Places does it in one way or another.
These are not true campers. These are ALT’s used by the Sim owner or groups. These alt’s run no scripts, no bling and things like that. This way it does not slow their sim down.
It’s just one more thing to add to the overall Fake settings you now see every where in Second Life.
Add it to the Classified scams, Land Bots to control land prices (try selling a parcel for less then 7.2 a sqm and see for your self) and Linden Labs manipulation of Stats.
So why not have Fake avatar traffic bots for what has become suce a empty world. They fit right in with the use of Content from canceled accounts and their own employees alts accounts to fill Fake Malls and shops.
Spamatars is catchier if you ask me, traffic bots have been used on the web as well. Either way, are they as easy to find in the rest of the popular places? I may have to find out tonight.
90% of the most popular places do it, don’t just pick on this one, get pics of everyone that does it and lobby LL, its not an issue with this owner but the fact that LL allow people to have free accounts now. Its also not true Bimbo that every most popular place uses Traffic Bots. But I think most do.
To be honest the new search and the old search are completely rubbish anyhow - people cannot find anything anymore and there are too many places out there, selling stuff that isn’t worth selling.
People should go to Skin Oasis and see that actually the stuff there is really good quality and the sim looks to be created by someone who has a talent. I am sure they only did this to compete with everyone else doing it, not to exclude people that don’t!
[…] of avatars are not the only indicators that bots are being used to bump up traffic, as we covered here, I see many of the popular places sims with single avatars under water, some are under the land, […]