Second of life: Changes to the Traffic Scoring

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Every parcel of Land on every region inworld has a Traffic score. Traffic is a measure we developed some years ago to show Land owners how much time other residents spent on their parcels. It's been used in various ways throughout our History to help reward and highlight popular places. More recently it became a part of the way we rank Search results.

This was fine whilst we had fewer regions and lower concurrency but as we approach 30000 regions calculating the amount of time that every resident spends on every parcel they visit, every 24 hours, has become an increasingly heavy burden on our systems. Over recent weeks the Traffic calculations have sometimes failed to complete during the 24 hour cycle causing frustration for Land owners. So we have been redeveloping the way that Traffic is being processed. The aim has been to make it more reliable and scalable as we grow.

Along with improving the process to remove load from our core systems, we have also taken the opportunity to improve the calculation itself. Liana will be posting more details on the specific changes on the technology blog; the new Traffic score will be simpler, more granular and therefore more accurate than previously.

Traffic will be the cumulative minutes spent on the parcel by all visitors to the parcel within the previous day. It will be calculated from the total seconds spent on the parcel, divided by 60 and rounded to the nearest whole minute (up or down). It is calculated in real-time, and will be updated every morning at 1am PST for the previous day.

Over time we expect the Traffic scoring used for Search ranking to develop away from the measure used by Land owners; it makes sense that the two diverge and the Search team will be talking more about their plans on their blog.

We will be moving across to the new Traffic scoring process on Monday 31st August, which means that the Traffic scores you see on Tuesday 1st September will be the new ones.

For the large majority of parcels the impact of this change will be negligible. Your traffic score may be a little higher than usual but your ranking relative to other parcels will remain close to where it is now. A small number of parcels may see a drop in Traffic score, especially if those parcels are visited only briefly, for example where residents are just flying through on the way to somewhere else.

Lastly, we realise how important our continued efforts to deal with Search gaming are. The announcement has had a clear impact but there are still venues out there that are gaming the Traffic score so we will be pushing harder to make sure that unfair use of Bots or other means to game Search are stopped.

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