Weird Traffic Bug Causing Unwarranted Angst

A forum thread, then a Jira entry, arguing, accusations, pointing of fingers, yes it’s a hoo-ha over traffic being broken in Second Life. The bizarre part here is that the person whom actually created the forum thread to open this can of worms, appears to have been getting higher than expected traffic figures in the first place!

Traffic is generally believed to be the combined number of minutes avatars  spend on a parcel in a 24 hour period. Therefore one avatar not moving for 24 hours should record a score of 1440. This isn’t an exact science, there are tweaks and allowances and some voodoo…. allegedly, plus traffic scores only get updated once a day.

The issue seems to be that traffic scores inworld aren’t getting updated, indeed they’re declining at a rate of knots.

Here’s an example of the issue, popular place Franks club will be used in this example, here’s the inworld search results:

Traffic in search

As we can see from that screenshot, there’s a whopping traffic score of 64,757 for that parcel. That’s a lot of avatars, spending a lot of time on that parcel. However if you go to the actual parcel inworld and look at the traffic score in about land, you’ll see this:

About Land Traffic Score

Hmm a Traffic score of 23,571, which to be quite honest is a bloody good score, but it’s a massive 41,186 down on the score showing in search. What’s going on here then? I have no idea, 64,757 divided by 23,571 comes out at 2.7 something, so there’s no obvious maths score here to send a lightbulb on, but some people are claiming the scores in search haven’t changed for a few days.

When I went to Franks Place there were 52 avatars on the sim, so they should be getting a healthy score. People are now wondering if Linden Lab are tinkering with traffic calculations, they may well be but until the traffic score in search matches the traffic score inworld, I’d consider this to be a bug.

I’m not sure why this is causing quite so much angst, it looks to be a grid wide problem, in the past some places have seen their traffic scores frozen or set to 0 for a few days, that is a cause for angst because it puts places at a competitive disadvantage, but if the current bug is grid wide, everyone will see their scores reduced accordingly, meaning nobody is really losing or gaining a competitive advantage.

People who decide to setup advertising and stores on traffic scores alone quickly begin to realise that’s a futile exercies, clubs with malls can be in a situation where plenty of people go to the club, but nobody goes to the mall, traffic scores alone are not a good guide, they should be looked at, sometimes with a pinch of salt, and then added to how a place is laid out, where the landing point is, etc.

Traffic scores can be useful, they can also be extremely misleading. At the moment, they’re just confusing matters as there appears to be some sort of borkage with them, but I don’t see the need for the anger on this one.

3 Replies to “Weird Traffic Bug Causing Unwarranted Angst”

  1. Unless you tell search to sort by traffic specifically now, it won’t.

    Traffic is largely not even used anymore.

    So it kind of becomes a ‘who cares’ problem.

    the only “traffic” that counts is the green dots on the map. Picks now seem to open up map view – and maybe a few other methods of finding will as well. So people will see your green dots.
    – But that really only matters for a social venue.

    1. Traffic is shown as a figure again in the new viewer when you search places, so it’s making a mini comeback in terms of importance. Although those figures have been frozen for about a week, which is something I haven’t seen too many complaints about for some odd reason.

      Traffic has always been an overrated statistic, you’re correct about social locations, people want to go and see others there, the traffic figure isn’t that helpful, how active it is when you want to go there, is important.

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