Is There a Practical Way to "Code Out" AdFarms?

Did they compensate the bankers or gambling syndicates?

It hardly matters, in the scheme of things. It's not like the adfarmers are such huge owners of land. Consider that a single premium membership can use group-owned bonus tier to buy 35 adplots. And consider the revenue that generates for LL: net of stipend, one adplot generates US$0.0084/wk for LL, but destroys the value of everything within rezzing distance.

It is the single most extreme Tragedy of the Commons I've ever seen; it's like peeing in the swimming pool--with plutonium.

I think this is a good idea. It gives the Extortion Lot owners *some* compensation, and it is very likely that other sim owners (or Arbor members) would buy the plots at those prices to join with other land.

I think it would also be relatively easy to code and take up less Sim script time that all the muting suggestions, as it only comes into play if someone is setting land for sale.

If I understand it right (difficult at this time of night!) muting would cause similar issues to us having more than 25 Groups - every time you move into a new parcel, the client has to check if you are in the group, what rights you have, if you're in the ban list, if you're muted...etc etc. Adding potentially hundreds of object mutes into the Draw Distance of your viewer would surely increase Sim script load and therefore Lag?

Would someone with a better understanding of the server code like to comment, seeing as I'm only guessing?

Muting by parcel instead of by owner would be a lot simpler, especially if the mute was parcel to parcel instead of person to parcel. In order to figure out what to draw and what not to draw the client would only need to know the xyz coordinates of the objects and avatar relative to property lines, which it has to know already in order to draw them in the right places and to stream parcel media to avatars. It wouldn't need to be server side at all, or require the client to do anything it doesn't already know how to do. It could be part of the existing culling process.

There could be social problems with muting in this way. Neighbours would be offended to find that you've muted their homes and so they would naturally mute yours. We could then have a situation where almost everything in Second Life would be invisible. haha

I think LL needs to work on lowering mainland sim prices and then people will be more willing to buy full regions on the mainland. At the moment there's just too many rats in the cage and they're starting to bite eachother. We need more space.


OpenGrid will hopefully help to force LL to do the right thing.

lol whats the point in muting stuff. you would keep bumping into invisible things

"Hi there! You've just bumped into the ad advertising Polly's Panties. Visit us at 212.222.234 for the hottest deals in the hottest pants!"

A little off-topic, and rather late, but regarding your Godwin:

I don't condone his actions, but although he died, Mao Tse Tung's death wasn't anything to do with the failure of his ideology. Neither, arguably, was Stalin's.

Excuse my pedantry...

Adfarmers would be well advised to lobby for parcel muting. At least with muting there'd be the option of buying the view, and some neighboring parcels won't mute so the ads might still be visible from somewhere. Other simpler and quicker alternatives are more confiscatory.

lol

I went ahead and wrote this up as a JIRA issue, if anyone wants to add their vote for it - http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-894

i repeat....

lol!!

you have absolutely no chance of this ever happening.

I disagree. Almost every other suggestion either involves a big development effort (parcel muting), a social fallout (muting objects by user), hurts legtimate land use of small parcels (not allowing cutting/sale of small lots), can't be enforced by the billing system (tier based on # of parcels/sims since groups defeat this), or involve the Lindens running around the grid (making ads a TOS offence).

Setting a maximum sales price based on the size of the parcel will clean things up automatically. In fact, the only ones hurt in that very short term is the ad cutters themselves that see their profit base killed and have to run around the grid themselves to recover funds (I love picturing that). My system even gives them an "out" - all they need to do recover a reasonable amount of their investment is to re-combine the lots they have in those sims and sell em.

I think much of the mainland should just stop living in denial, hoist the Blingtardia flag proudly, and rock our world with its culture, vibrancy and life.

And I'll be there, in a white suit dancing and celebrating the mainlanders as "Disco Inferno" plays at the Governor's Mansion in the old FIC sims...

Desmond - please stay on topic.... we GET it. I'm sure its easy to denigrate the mainland because the worse "blingtardia" is made out to be, the better business is for private estates.

I kind of envision Blingtardia as a cross between main drag of Tijuana on a Saturday night and Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras and the Las Vegas strip when the Adult Entertainment Expo is in town.

Who wouldn't want to live there!? Frankly, I think Desmond is hurting his business by even bringing this up.

/me puts on his shades, spiky hair and his blinging fake Roolexx watch and slides all the muscle sliders to the right. L337 7r0u7 Pw0nzors joo alllllllll!!!!

Hey there Isablan, mamma...you lookin' goooood...(snaps his fingers and points)


Bah. I give up. I can't pull off that look. Blingtardia is a silly place.

Will not happen.

Why? Because LL has set an "open market". Buyers set the prices based on supply and demand. These adfarmers can sell these plots at these prices because people are willing to pay the stupid high prices.

Setting a limit on sale prices will just open up a new scam option. One where land is placed for sale, but by sign, not system. The "seller" will explain that the land is premium land, so can't be sold under the "inept" LL system (a lie that anyone who has experianced LL's management can see as believable). So to get the land, the buyer will have to gift the "seller" XXXX amount of L$, then the "seller" will set the land to sell to only the buyer at the system price. Of course, after taking the "gift" there is nothing to force the "seller" to sell the land.

Adfarmers are not fair. They set their land highpriced and extort neighboring lands to buy the micro plot by setting annoying signs/scripts/etc. They can do this just as easily by putting out one more sign that says "If you wish to buy this land, contact XXXX via IM. Sale price is XXXX L$."

~Jessy

Excused. My intended message was of course rhetorical, not strictly logical: Totalitarianism as a serious idea for organizing society is or ought to be as dead as its most famous proponents, in both FL and SL.

Unfortunately, it seems to still live a bit, in the hearts of people who want some one in charge to take responsibility for their existence. Even, for some, their SL existence. If everyone would just get over that, soon enough all the "Fearless Leaders" will have died off too and the world will be a happier place. Natural causes are fine by me.

Except for the ad farmers. Drawing and quartering them works for me.

But that's exactly the thing. If we can't put a bullet in their heads, at least let us vote them into oblivion.

Giving people the tools to more effectively manage their own experience, allowing them to have options where previously they had none, has absolutely nothing to do with totalitarianism. Quite the opposite in fact. It's like claiming that having a tuning knob and off button on a radio is somehow totalitarian, or that someone using noise cancelling headphones on an airplane is a fascist.

Nah, they won't obliviate. They'll just find another way to extort: "Waddya mean, take outta my 16 s.m. propitty dat 40-meter high neon-green penis dat toins red when it spurts at da top like dat?! No way! It's ART!!! It's WOITH da L$10,000!

We'd be better off with the ads.

If I had noise cancelling headphones, I'd never take them off. Imagine how peaceful things would be at work. Dealing with the ex-Mrs. Trout Recreant. Screaming babies in restaurants. Annoying music in elevators and other stores. I play live poker. Don't even get me started on the aural abuse there. No more ringing cell phone.

I could just smile and nod when I see people looking at me with their lips moving. The flashing red voice mail light on the phone now means nothing.

This could be perfect. I'm buying some of these today.

Just as a point of clarification, I didn't read Har's posts as advocating that people shouldn't have the ability to control what we see in SL, but that we shouldn't have the ability to dictate what people do on their land. As much as I'd like to see ad-farms disappear for good, it's a slippery slope. What's next? Sex clubs? Then strip clubs? BDSM? Gor? etc... You can't base your decisions on what to restrict on what might offend people. The bans on ageplay and gambling are based on RL statutes that could severely impact LL's ability to do business. But other than that, they have decided it's a completely free market.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't have the right to block them out from your own land with land controls, screens, slider bars or what have you. That's your decision as a neighboring landowner or resident. They can do what you want, and if you don't like it, you would have effective tools to ignore it.

Except they've decided nothing of the sort. There are all kinds of rules in this marketplace, designed to protect LL's interests in the *RL* "free market"--the one that actually matters. Many of them are built in to the software.* I can't hold you up at PopGunpoint and demand that you give me all your L$s or I'll terminate your account forever. That would be dumb, right? A bad design, one that we'd want fixed. Just like adfarms.

I personally prefer muting over the quicker, simpler solutions for a bunch of reasons, but I'd support anything that could make any improvement at all. And I don't think I'm alone.

________
*This is why I find mystifying the popular mantra: "technological solutions can't solve social problems." To the extent SL is "social" it's because of technology decisions somebody engineered; here, a different engineering design is a different society. (The same is true in RL, by the way, or else we've wasted a tremendous lot of money on airport security.)

Point taken. I was trying to say that LL is unlikely to put a lot of restrictions on the way people do business in SL unless RL concerns force them to. That includes land-price fixing, land use/zoning, socio-ethical controls and any number of controls that could be put into effect. It's still largely caveat emptor. I guess the issue is where to draw the line. Trust me, I hate ad-farms and I'm no fan of the ad-farmers. Petty criminals, all of them. Maybe the approach to banning them that LL could take would be that extortion is against the TOS and the practice of ad-farming is extortion. I worry about the slippery slope, though. Today it's something we all hate. Tomorrow its something most of us hate, the next day it's somethin a lot of us hate. Then there's a vocal minority pushing for DisneyLife where everything is happy and sunny and there is no close dancing or hand holding. I like the vice and depravity of the mainland. It's ugly and pornographic and rancid and sublimely awful. I know its a character flaw in me, but I see it is as sort of endearing.

adfarming would be piss easy to take care of.
just make adfarming a violation of the tos. dont apologise for it, dont pretend it is something else, just ban it. ll seems capable of doing this in regards to gambling, banking, and sexual ageplay. they could just as easily do it for adfarming.

philip linden spoke about adfarming this morning and basically said nothing was going to happen about it though, so dont expect any changes within this lifetime.