What’s the deal with those SL Voting Stations?
We’ve all seen them, clicked them, thought how archaic by today’s graphics quality standards they look and even wondered about what happens when we do click them … those funny looking green SL Voting Stations.
Even when they were new, were we sure what they did? Well, their intention was to provide an income of sorts, to the property owner, based on how their visitors felt about their build. In other words, if we “liked” the build, the owner of the voting station would get money from Linden Labs each night. In the beginning of the program, a really popular night club might actually make a profit thanks to the Votes to the Station each day.
Torley Linden shared, “the voting station was used in a similar manner to dwell–a builder or property owner would put one out on their property and gain money nightly from the voting station depending on how many residents clicked it to “cast their vote” as a way of saying “nice job” on the build or property.”
What a fabulous concept and I bet you’re all thinking “lets get ours back out there” … except they don’t work anymore … they haven’t functioned since 2011 when Linden Labs discontinued them. You can still click the station to vote, but the back-end system to tally votes and do something with them, no longer exists.
The SL VOTE Station program was discontinued because too many people tried “gaming” the system; inflating popularity for their clubs and stores using camping chairs and gambling games, to increase their numbers. But this didn’t really represent the people coming to the build they had. Torley went on to say, “dwell was a metric used to reward Second Life residents for creating attractions that cause users to gather in a given location. Due to abuse, Linden Labs announced the end of the Dwell bonuses.”
The stations still do one thing; each day they IM the owner with the total number of votes received that day, but by today’s standards, they are looking rather dated and are a tad heavy in primmage.
One merchant told us, “I placed a vote box by my freebies area, since it’s a way of saying “thanks”… it’s nice to see a few people clicked on the vote box after a difficult day. I keep the vote box rezzed, because I can spare the prims, and it’s nice to get a little reminder now and then that people appreciate the freebies.”
Next time you see a VOTE station, go ahead and click it if you enjoyed your stay, it surely will not hurt anything or anyone! Torley concludes, “they no longer give a bonus, though they do still keep count of how many people have voted, they make a sound and turn red, giving off a light when clicked. They also take up a fair amount of prims. This is why they are rarely seen anymore; most people deleted them to save prims.”
A little bit of SL history disappears to save the prims.
