@Jackie Wallace OpenSim has a similar problem, but it's even harder to solve.

OpenSimWorld has a very basic ranking system for the most popular sims. It isn't for specific parcels, it's for entire sims. The problem, of course, is that it can be manipulated very easily, and it is actually being manipulated constantly.

The ranking "algorithm" is very simple: It only counts how long how many avatars are present. It does not even recognise individual avatars, much less IPs. Also, it allows for sims to rise in popularity very quickly: One sufficiently big event, and they're in the top 10.

There are many ways of manipulating this algorithm, including:

• telling your friends to park their avatars on your sim (Lbsa Plaza is not much more than an avatar storage for OSgrid residents to make sure that it's always the number one most "popular" sim)
• using alts as "sim decoration" where NPCs (unlike Second Life, OpenSim supports actual NPCs) or even only animesh would do the same job
• parking alts on a sky platform for which only you have a landmark
• dropping a few alts that are basic Ruths with running numbers in their names under a pier where you think nobody will look

If you host your sim yourself, or if you're even the grid owner, the Radegast viewer is your friend. Install it next to OpenSim and automatically launch a bunch of instances right after your region server has come online. Instant top 10 ranking if you do that with at least four avatars.

Of course, this goes along with claiming either that you don't care for ranking or that it's regular visitor traffic.

A trick that has never been that popular is to make visitors camp on your sim. Offer content on your sim for in-world "Monopoly money". Give visitors a limited amount of that money to whet their appetite. And then give them the chance to earn more money by doing something on your sim for long enough. I've seen this come with a time limit to ensure that the camping is not too obvious, but this also means that you'll have to come back often to earn some more money.

I think there may still be some scoundrels who try to acquire older versions of the OSW beacon that still count NPCs as avatars, or who try to modify newer versions into counting NPCs as avatars. However, OSW no longer recognises these older beacons, and it will ban your sim if you use a hacked beacon.

That is, you can also report sims which obviously cheat their traffic figures to the OSW admin who will then turn the visitor counter for that sim permanently off. However, when a sim owner discovers that this has happened, they do what they also do after one negative comment or review or zero-star rating: They delete the whole entry and make a new one for the same sim. This comes with extra the advantage of the sim also being listed among the top 10 newest entries.

By the way, this feature was introduced after someone exposed the system of popularity rigging with alts by dropping 60 alts on one OSW-listed sim. And I guess countermeasures against this were mostly demanded by high-ranking OSgrid residents because it took that sim mere hours to outrank Lbsa Plaza.

Unfortunately, many of your suggestions for counter-measures wouldn't work in OpenSim.

• OpenSim does have picks and ads, and you can pick sims anywhere around the Hypergrid. But OpenSim has no centralised first-party infrastructure that has access to the picks and ads of all avatars on the Hypergrid, much less on all OpenSim grids. OpenSimWorld is third-party, and it has even less of a chance to harvest all this data from all avatars out there.
  Seeing as how few avatars have picks in the first place, this could also easily be rigged by making a hundred alts with the same picks and stashing them away on a private sim with no OSW entry.
• Second Life's event registration is something that has never been implemented in OpenSim. OSW does have its own event calendar including announcing events on specific sims. But this would rank popular event sims higher than popular freebie sims. And not all events on OSW-listed sims are listed on OSW either.
• Counting unique visitors is out of question, too. Nobody would want a third party like OSW to know which avatars were on any given sim at which time, also seeing as theoretically anyone who knows a bit about scripting could latch onto the data generated by an OSW beacon and use it to track down avatars.
• Adjusted visitor time and interaction events can be rigged, too. OpenSim has its own scripting language, OSSL, which builds upon LSL, but with tons of extra features. You know AVsitter? That sit animation controller? OpenSim has SFposer which largely does the same plus tons of stuff that are unimaginable in Second Life. The host and presenter avatars at the last OSCC were entirely automated by "sit scripts". These scripts even make interaction with other objects possible. And I bet that OSSL can even be used to automate avatars through attachments without them having to sit down. Just about everything that requires manual interaction in Second Life can be automated in OpenSim.

In fact, if actual movement (as opposed to animations) counts, then events will be heavily downranked anyway. I mean, what do people do at DJ events in OpenSim?

• They either sit their avatars down on dance pads or a line dance floor.
• Or they use a Clubmaster to launch a dance animation. Oftentimes, they keep the same dance animation running throughout the entire event.
• Or they use a Clubmaster to rez a pair of dance balls and sit down on one. In this case, you can only measure how often the animations are switched, and many simply put the Clubmaster on automatic anyway.
• Or they use a dance HUD which may or may not automatically change dance animations.
• A few use Firestorm's viewer AO feature to switch to a self-made dance AO.

Many actually leave the music running in the background and do something else in the meantime. Others only interact by gestures or "Yay" confetti throwers or other scripted attachments; I mean, that's at least something.

In fact, I know someone who sometimes sends one avatar to a DJ event and then another avatar with the same identity, but from another grid, to a non-DJ event and only actually operates the latter one. That same someone has also sent an avatar to a five-hour DJ event and then gone AFK to attend a nearby real-life music festival for some two hours and actually announced it.

Even I sometimes have avatars at two events at the same time; I focus more on the event which requires switching dance animations and turn the music from the other one down. But even when I attend the same event with two avatars (I can't go anywhere alone without people asking where @Juno Rowland is, how she's doing and when she'll come), both contribute to the local chat occasionally, and we do change dance animations along with the music (unless the DJ plays four hours of house or something).

Due to the abundance of event locations, DJ events can actually last quite long, sometimes three, four or more hours with one DJ. So a 90-minute threshold would be counter-productive.

All in all, it's next to impossible to implement fair and realistic sim rating that cannot be rigged in a decentralised system of virtual worlds where just about everything is third-party.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #OpenSimWorld