Abuse of events posting is out of control

Well there are now more permanent 24/7 yardsales in the events calendar than ever before. People attempting to save a buck and not posting in the classifieds I guess.

I recall a bit back being told that if that type of event posting abuse continued we would face the very real possibility of having to pay to post an event, and were encouraged to AR this type of 'event'. I think people (or at least I) just gave up and now will end up paying for it, literally.


As quoted from the event posting policy guidelines:
An event is framed by a beginning and an end time. Thus '24hr Sales' and 'Non-Stop Casinos' are not events.

The 'Commercial' category was created for the purpose of grand openings, demonstrations, product launches etc. Each of these types of events should have a clear beginning and end time attached. Otherwise, they belong in the Second Life Classifieds, not the Events calendar. Posting events that are simply advertisements will not be acceptable.

I totally agree, and this is why I never browse "all" or "commercial" in the events listing. Yard sale and casino spam has ruined it for everyone else.

On the other hand, browsing other areas reveals quite a lot of interesting events.

I would say AR the junk when it comes up, but let's not encourage LL to dump the events listings - it's one of the few things left that keeps the Grid connected.

If the events listings are ever dumped, I would likely leave SL. Live Music is 90% of the reason I log on.

I wouldn't be surprised if that or paid listings comes. Given the goal of being the 3D net I can't see the practicality of providing a free list of what's going on on the whole net that anyone can add to free and unfiltered.

Prokofy Neva wrote about the future of the Event List recently:

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2006/08/events_calendar.html

When setting up my new forum I left the calendaring features of vBulletin active and am creating categories for each of the Event types. At the same location, however, I'm asking for feedback in terms of features people would want in a web-based Events listing. Like I have implemented Parcel Browsing at SLHandbook I would be happy to create a rival system to the Event creation web process on the secndlife.com. Though it would not be in-world, many other features such as e-mail reminders, group invites, recurring events, all day events and more are possible. Outlook style calendar views, muting of certain event types or event hosts. I could keep listing options, but am hoping for feedback.

Like with the possibility of a web-based Popular Places similar in functionality to web Topsites lists, I'd love to hear people's wants in other interfaces. Perhaps by implementing them out-world Linden Lab will look to them to fix problems in-world. Or with the advent of an in-world web browsing interface they could stay relevant without integration. Please feel free to discuss those things here, in another thread, or on my forums:

http://forums.slhomepage.com

I would love to see the ability to mute casinos in pretty much every "all" search. They dominate the results, and it makes it appear that SL is nothing but gambling. It's very difficult to find anything that is not a casino when you are randomly looking for something new to see.

Kinda reminds me of a live concert bootleg forum I used to visit - it gave you the option of muting Phish and Grateful Dead threads. Not that there is anything wrong with these bands (I like Phish a lot!), but they did take up about 99% of the listings, totally burying anything else.

Yes hard to find a descent event because YARD SALE is written all over.

I only use the people/places in the Search now. What really sucks is that I was looking for hair.. and all I found were camping chairs! I should check to see if the "" works for specifics.

I don't even bother with the events right now. As others have said, it's spammed with Yardsales and Casinos, neither of which hold my interest anymore, nor do camping chairs. I want to find exactly what I'm looking for, be it Goth day at blah-blah, not a yardsale that might have one article of goth clothing or a casino with a Gothic theme.

I'd probably visit the Events list, but I'd rather not spend all day writing ARs on the spam.

I'm sorry to hear your legitimate event was buried beneath the sea of crap and fakes.

So uhmm if the issue is with too many 24/7 yardsale and casino ads, maybe create respective event 'type' for both of them, and then they can advertise as much as they want while allowing people not interested in this sort of activity to filter them out? o.O

i mean, if there's anything 'wrong' with in-world classifieds/even calendar thing then it's the woeful lack of ways to sort/filter them so one can actually find things they're interested in. Would be much nicer if there was also some sort of detailed yellow pages equivalent, where one can actually register the kind of business they have (with options to see these on the map and such) ... without having to compete for attention with twenty thousand other people all piled together into single 'commercial' category o.o;

I am Ray Musketeer of Fhelzgud Group. I hold events for my yard sale. That being said I post a beggining and end time as well. I also have part of my yard sale set as a free Public Yard Sale for anyone to sell their creations, builds, art (in other words with 30 padsI give up 600 prims so others can have the opportunity to get their businesses a step up). We have built a small berg of Fachwerk houses and a water mill with a nice Medium sized Mall. I ran classifieds and saw maybe 10 people in a week on a 1,000 ad. I run events (which I am present for) and we try to personally greet each visitor we have. We also have some free boxes for the fresh newbies and we help as many as we can. I see now 15 -50 people in a 3 hour event. I have had many thank me, for giving them a place to sell from and I am happy to know that there are a few who have given us credit for getting them going not to mention finally starting to make a little money without selling sex, or depending on gambling or camping chairs. We do give our shoppers incentive with a raffle ball. We have good quality builds, & designs and the place looks good. If no-one came to your event its easier to blame being buried as the reason, I understand. I look at events everyday and while there may be a few 24 hr yard sales there aren't enough to bury anyones event. I consider all this supporting content creators of secondlife, I never knew or had any idea what I mindless monster I have become.

It would be nice to have the ability to have a filtered events list like this one.

Perhaps a version of this could be modified to be displayed in the mozilla browser.