Some things die hard… or not at all
Bartholomew Gallacher
Some things in Second Life just die hard or not at all, even if they don’t serve any purpose anymore. For example, this vote box to the left was in former days quite a common sight in Second Life.
It is a scripted device, made by Alberto Linden, and consists of 13 prims. It was used in times before traffic (aka as dwell) was invented to measure the popularity of a parcel. People just voted for it, all boxes where polled once a day and that’s how they got their measures in former times. Parcel owners got some stipends out of it, if it was a popular place (or something/somehow like that). You could just take of a station standing somewhere a copy, so it was really easy to get one.
At least it had a task its existence. But when traffic was introduced, the old mechanism of getting traffic was disabled. So those voting stations don’t serve any real purpose anymore, besided doing some nice sound effects when you touch them and eating away your prims.
Newbies still tend to believe those stations are useful; they are wrong. There are, though, some newer objects around, which mimic the design and look of the old station to a certain degree, but just act as counters, telling the owner which avatar voted for them at which time and date and that’s it, then. But since old habits die hard I expect to see them still for quite long on the grid in many clubs, belonging to owners, which don’t know better or are fond of them.