Nothing Divine about it

Well, I have tried some of that concrete stuff you mentioned, Chip, and so have others. You just may not be aware of it. There's a petition on my land you could sign, for instance.

The best ways to do something about it are tiering down, and/or posting on all the publications and websites to spread the word that this is going on, like someone suggested. LL definitely would pay attention then.

But I don't want to take either of such drastic methods that would hurt either me or SL, mainly because I'm pretty convinced the Lindens will, ultimately, stop this guy.

My fear is that they will do it in such a way as to harm all of us, rather than just telling him to cut it out, which would be the sensible thing to do, and all that anyone wants them to do.

coco

I think you're missing the aim of my suggestions, Coco. I'm not talking about trying to get LL to change the rules. I'm talking about educating potential land buyers and people who own parcels next to these signs to not buy land from this guy. He's holding a lot of land and the only reason for it is because people keep buying it from him for outrageous prices enabling him to buy more and more of it. He's only paying the tier on all those parcels because it's profitable. Take away the profit and he'll get tired of paying for nothing more than a political statement.

Human individuality makes getting every single person to follow the same policy fairly improbable.

Perhaps, but LL's already ruled on what they intend to do, so the net benefit from all the complaining is zilch. The people most likely to buy this land are the people who own land next to his parcels. Has anyone contacted any of them and talked to them?

I suggested the sort of actions you mentioned, others might have also.

View controls built into the program might be a better thing to work for.

Linden Labs is probably more concerned with giving potential big money advertisers confidence that their potential ads couldn't be cancelled because of oppostion by other users.

The fact that Linden Labs said one thing yesterday doesn't mean they won't say something different tomorrow. This has been known to occur more than once. So it isn't necessarily true that more squawking is useless.

One way for the organized actions to get started and find members is for the squawkers to contact the other squawkers and start working together. Squawking is a means of finding like minded persons.

----

The Divine Enterprises group does show only one member, but groups have to have 3 members or more to stay in existence, so there must be a members list that doesn't show up.

Or there is way to defeat the group membership requirement, maybe by using some alts to join for a second each day, which might restart the membership countdown, then they could quit and be untraceable.

People wanting to check further could examine each object on the D.E. land and check for ownership, sometimes people using alts slip up.

There's an object in the area owned by D.E. that is owned and created by nimrod Yaffle, for instance, a cruddy looking sign with plain lettering opposing DHMO, which turns out to be water, dihydrogen monoxide, according to a notecard it dispenses with some sataric words inside.

An adjacent parcel is owned by a group with a member called Opal Divine showing only two members, Lazarus Divine and Opal Divine.

That's in it, too, Chip. Prok has come out with a whole kit for this, and it has in it those suggestions on how not to cave to the whole thing. I believe it is that sort of thing exactly which you are talking about - go by my store and pick up one of these kits!

coco

Pillow case.

Six oranges.

Swing vigorously.

Someone has dear Kharmon - if you happen to have a plot next door - as do your neighbours - you use the same TOS skirting tactics back on him.

You legally cover as many sided of his signage as you can manage - if you can do all 4 - that works the very best of all.

Now texture those lovely 4 walls or so to something you find pleasing - a rock feature - a pretty clocktower like big ben.

Now lastly - and this is the MOST IMPORTANT part of all.

Make it phantom.

So long as your prims are on your land and the owner is able to access their land - you are 100% within the TOS.

Now - why do this?

Well I have it on very good authority that he comes a calling with guns (quite literally) a-blazing full of piss and vinegar for all those who own those prims.. With a torrent of abusive language and weaponry and particle fireballs for all.

.... which - under the right circumstances may very well be harrassment, abuse of push guns, disrupting events......


Follow?

Depending on circumstances, Mature language in a PG sim.

That falls under the 'piss and vinegar'

I really gotta stop using my mothers quaint little phrases..

She would no doubt describe the sign camoflauge as 'neat but not gaudy... like an elephants arsehole tied up with a bicycle chain'

(Yes .. blame her.. I get it from her.. it's all her fault)

Cool deal

This is still aimed at making LL look bad in an effort to strong-arm them into changing the policy. I think that's the wrong approach. I'd actually find it somewhat more offensive than the signs, but that's just me.

No Chip, It's not just you.

Expressing one's views outside of SL and the SL forums doesn't screw up the view from a parcel of land in Second Life. There's nothing about that taking place within "the Service" to be offended by.

My quoted post wasn't supporting changing policy, it's to get the program code changed to enable some useful form of texture blocking put into effect. That what I meant by "view control", blocking textures by the parcel they are located on, their maker, blocking specific textures, something along that line.

From a practical selfish point of view people taking their gripes out of the forums means we wouldn't have to look at them here.

Iif you don't like someone's use of the right to free expression here in the forums, you can mute them, which helps a lot to reduce your exposure to them . There is no such remedy inworld.

Siggy's suggestion of covering them with phantom walls doesn't work real well unless 4 people own the land surrounding and all block the view of the sign. A scripted version of the sign could check for adjacent blocking objects and move up or down to thwart that.
Plus you can't necessarily block the top or the bottom of the signs very well.

Oh, here's another way to make some money on driving people out of SL by making it intolerable to them.

OH?!?! *raise eyebrow*
Well he doesnt have any sign next to any of my land but if you are a land owner and would like to block his signs but are afraid of him "calling" on you please allow me to come and I'll make a nice to your taste wall to block the signs I will even put a note card dispenser in the wall telling him where he can "call" on me and I'll even turn the land unsafe where I'm at errrrr I guess I might have to post this in the classifieds

In Monti at least the neighbours all talk, have discussed the issue, have distributed the previously mentioned kit, have signed petitions, aren't buying the land, have updated our ban lists, used prims to block and and pretty much acted on all of the excellent suggestions in this thread. And I for one, have tiered up and am defensively buying up the tiny scraps of land that come up for sale around me and my neighbours so we don't end up with more.

Anna Nicole Smith from hell


or in her 60s?

The dog kind of reminds me of Paris Hilton's Tinkerbell. Only, it's not a Chihuahua.

It's Divine!

Chosen for irony!

What about this as a sign?

Too bad they cant just force him to take the "for sale" tag off his lands. Hes just using that to get attention.

They could.

coco

Do the Lindens force a certain price range on other peoples land? No....

If the land is too much, your best bet is to not buy it. If the signs are that horrible, perhaps you can take a vacation to a nice private sim with no signage to get away from it all. Or..um..look the other direction. Or maybe even ignore them?

You beat me to it. After my initial frustration, I came up with the same solution.

The thing that makes divine's signs and plots so annoying and so destructive is also its own weakness: most of these lots are usually in the middle of larger lots that can be had for reasonable prices because lets face it most of these stricken lots are for sale right now.

So I bought around all the signs in my sim and built up a cover wall consisting of perfectly aligned 1x10x10 blocks stacked 120 meters high. This seems like an ugly intrusive solution? Read on.

Here are some best practices:
1-make sure that the blocks are set to phantom
2-don't put any scripts on them
3-set color to black or any other color --such as the color of the sky or a light blue green
4-set reflectiveness to full reflection under textures
5-make sure that the blocks don't overlap so that there arent any dancing artefacts when someone flies by it. It is easier to do a good job of this, if you set your x,y,z coordinates to full numbers like 10.0,20.0,10.0 instead of 10.869,20.111,10.450
6-First build a nice perimeter around the lot at ground level. make sure that your pieces are all in your land. Align everything, check for gaps, fix them. Once you're satisfied you can build your tower by selecting each piece and duplicating it and moving it 10 meters higher than the original. (or you can get all scripty and write a duplicator for yourself to put up a wall to a certain height by duplicating the original piece. Your call.)


Finally, here is my current take on the matter for those affected:
Do not lower your land prices, instead bite the bullet with the rest of us and actually keep them high at what you think your land is worth. If you decrease the price of your land to get rid of it, you're just playing into his game.

Talk to your neighbors, raise their awareness. Don't let anyone buy/sell land from this group. Boycott their land, their products, and any other source of income they might have ingame.

I did not know there were petitions until today. I am definitely going to go and sign it later today when I can sign into the game. Everyone should sign these petitions and we must make it clear to the Lindens that some creative lawmaking is obviously in order (maybe something to the effect of, you can not have a tiny subdivision surrounded by a large plot of land. Even if you do, the two have to go together when they're sold.)

If Lindens don't do anything about it, then the residents have to setup ordinances in their sims. We kind of have a similar thing in my other sim. We have a group dedicated to the residents of the sim. We communicate, we exchange ideas and rarely we warn each other about potentially offensive, intrusive, ugly builds.

We all want the same thing here, a positive, cooperative, lucrative and fun environment. Let's not let this bad apple ruin it for us all. He's just one person, we're many.

Troy