As Prokofy mentioned, the Second Life metric you're referring to is traffic. Dwell was a reward based on traffic removed two years ago. As for Popular Places, it should not have been removed. It was certainly "gamed" but as someone who reached it and remained on it for months with a public sandbox that had no bots, it served its purpose for newbies well. My only complaint was it only listed 20, With the new showcase allowing 50 entries, it could sit side-by-side with a popular places that also included 50. It would be amusing to see the gamed/populace list in contrast with the brown-nosed showcase.
How to fix searching? Keywords can help, they just need to be implemented properly. My recommendation would be one of two choices: a keyword list on the parcel information page tied to the type of place chosen that allowed up to three keyword choices, or the same with a single keyword where something like "sales - general" implied many product types. The free-text search would still work but a list of parcel types and related keywords for filtering the results. This is no perfect solution but it would help and be easy to implement.
One quick tidbit: while there may be only 20,000 or so regions, search is based on parcels of which there are far more. I made popular places without a whole sim, so have others. Second Life should never be beholden to the mass-land holders.
As Prokofy mentioned, the
Sat, 08/02/2008 - 01:17 — Clubside Granville (not verified)As Prokofy mentioned, the Second Life metric you're referring to is traffic. Dwell was a reward based on traffic removed two years ago. As for Popular Places, it should not have been removed. It was certainly "gamed" but as someone who reached it and remained on it for months with a public sandbox that had no bots, it served its purpose for newbies well. My only complaint was it only listed 20, With the new showcase allowing 50 entries, it could sit side-by-side with a popular places that also included 50. It would be amusing to see the gamed/populace list in contrast with the brown-nosed showcase.
How to fix searching? Keywords can help, they just need to be implemented properly. My recommendation would be one of two choices: a keyword list on the parcel information page tied to the type of place chosen that allowed up to three keyword choices, or the same with a single keyword where something like "sales - general" implied many product types. The free-text search would still work but a list of parcel types and related keywords for filtering the results. This is no perfect solution but it would help and be easy to implement.
One quick tidbit: while there may be only 20,000 or so regions, search is based on parcels of which there are far more. I made popular places without a whole sim, so have others. Second Life should never be beholden to the mass-land holders.