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

Well when LL say they are doing nothing perhaps it should be in the residents hands to do something, we could either just keep ARing every Ad farm in sight, or fencing them in and keep telling new people it's the normal thing to do. The Lindens would get sick of all the AR's eventually of 10,000 odd residents and maybe do something. They are swamped already with AR's, I heard nothing back on most AR's I've sent in over the last 12 months.
we just stand up in numbers and say we not going to take the crap anylonger and maybe they will listen when we keep breaking their rules continually.

There are many ways to code out ad farmers.
I think the best 2 (which should be used together) are:

1. muting seeing a persons prims.

2. no-one on your land should see the prims of someone banned from your land
This makes your customers not have to see the ad farm next door.

bauty. i can 'prim ban' the homes of everyone around me then watch all the complaints of people claiming they have no privacy. there are a few sims that i own so much land on pretty much EVERYONE would never see your house at all.

And you believed him?

Seriously, where was this? Hard to imagine where Philip would find himself in the company of anyone alert enough to ask about adfarming. I tried a google search and didn't find anything relevant (yet?). (Although it did turn up speculation about one notoriously despicable adfarmer having an alt adfarmer into temp-rezzed Amerindian artifacts. I think it's incorrect though; the two have quite different ways of making English sound like gibberish.)

I think that will happen after the private estate renters raise *their* flag with the goatse (not safe for work if you have to google it) guy on it representing their willingness to take one up the pooper as the land they just paid L$62,000 for gets yanked from them for no good reason and no recourse.


--Hugsy

The problem is that defining what an ad farm is versus legitimate advertising and doing it in a way that isn't (or is minimally) subjective is very difficult. I think a policy like this would probably help some, but it wouldn't be enough. The ad farmers will make things just good enough to skirt the rules.

--Hugsy



without (or in a way that minimizes)

I take it that your point here is this: if I 'prim ban' a parcel, all the objects will go away, but the avatars on the parcel will be displayed.

Two things:

One, object mutes could happen in various ways. One is by parcel. If this is the case then you raise a good point. So therefore, if the parcel is muted then not only should everything, but everyone (as in, the sight of) should be muted too.

Two, if the mute is by a person's objects such that their objects don't get display but everyone and everything else does, then I ask "so what?". Worst case is that you see them, but not their objects which isn't much different then just camming through their house anyway.

--Hugsy

QFT

Phillip spoke the general idea of sign farms in an audio interview (around the 11:00 mark) you can hear at:
http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/01/25/interview-with-philip-rosedale/ .

"I think there are still a few cases where people do sometimes take advantage of the system to ... push the rules beyond reasonable boundaries."

"And the thing that's interesting there is that the way we respond to that is not with policy or policing....We respond to it by changing the code so that things work better."

Thank you! That's a very interesting bit of corporate-speak, and in context it sounds like Philip is pretty squarely in the "Code Out" camp.

We probably should be thinking more seriously about the particulars of how exactly this should work.

he said it in-world the other day:
http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/showthread.php?p=118114
supposedly 'the market' will take care of adfarms. in other words, if you dont like the ads then buy the land and return them?

we have asked for something similar for ages and have been led to believe it isnt technically feasible. we have been asking for parcels with group only access to be 'void parcels', wholely invisible. we have even asked what good age verification does if one can simply stand on the parcel next door and interact as usual. if ll can create invisible parcels for the above examples what makes you think they would do it on account of adfarms? particularly considering that they have never seemed to care much about the blight of adfarms.

same case could be made for 'age-play' or the gambling ban. but the reality is that most reasonable people know where the line has been crossed.
in any case ll arent writing penal code. they have always used personal judgement when dealing with ARs and such.
just ban the fucking adfarms already.

Actually, that sluiverse post refers to the same Davos interview as the Reuters audio clip. And I just hear it differently. It came hard on the heels of a question about how freedoms were being restricted (e.g., gambling, banks...) and so Philip was primed for a response avoiding "policy" intervention. The "market forces" bit lead into discussion of how, instead of creating policy, they prefer to adjust the software to deal with problems. I took this all to say (in corporate-speak) that those "market forces" would right the world after they change the software to make adfarms irrelevant.

Limit maximum sale price based on land parcel size, to combat ad farms / extortion / land griefing

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-894


If this were implemented...

The low-level dorks that buy nice roadside 512m lots and cut them up into marked-up 16m lots (so ad farmers with very little spare tier and scared residents buy them) are out of business. Overnight.

Ad farms -themselves- would be forced to return to all those parcels and probably have to cooperate with each other to even earn back what they bought them for, by combining them so that they can get a reasonable $/m amount. Don't you just love this image - the ad farmers cleaning it up for us? No Linden involvement, no need for residents to do a thing.

It still allows for in-world advertising... someone can still buy a larger parcel and cut a 16m lot out of it, reselling the rest. The difference here is that they know they will incure a loss ... probably only amounting to L$100 or so per parcel. A legitmate advertising network would probably call that a fair deal. Legitmate ad networks will also benefit from this change initially in being able to probably work out a wholesale agreement to buy out the extortionist types.

What a wonderful world. Simple code change, self-cleaning.

I think I like the idea of buying up land around the ad farms, then putting Huge prims with an opaque texture on them right on the border. Makes the ads and the adfarm land absolutly worthless. Let 'em pay the tier fee forever on worthless land.

You mean, like how you are paying and tiering for that extra land yourself ?

Blocking is the best short-term solution... it isn't a fix. And nothing is working under the current system. Something has to change in the system

Im not saying I go out and buy land next to them intentionally, but if I happen to have land next to them (wich surpisingly I don't anymore)...... Or an agreeable land owner that doesnt mind the use of 3 or 4 prims extra. I'll do some "decorative enhancments" to the area. (mix pink and brown and thow in a very fast texture rotation script on the adfarm side, or two prims with different textures in the same location so you get that very "beautiful" texture switching effect, or transparent prims that cant be flown or clicked through) Of course, I would be willing to take them down, if said ad farmer were to 'make it worth my while', to quote one adfarmers profile about land sale offers. And if they didnt think to turn off the building permissions on their land, well golly gee, I sometimes get confused and disoriented, I just dont know how that prim that obfuscates your entire ad got on your land.....
I'm just sayin....

On a personal note, I think it's worth a buck or two to annoy adfarmers for entertainment value. They are the lowest of the low, one step below the people that re-sell freebie stuff. Zero creativity and imagination. Sure they have the freedom to do what they want, regardles of their intelect, just as I have the freedom to put prims as close to that border as possible.
I have no idea for sure, but my opinion of SL is that its intent is/was for a showcase of creativity. I don't care if what someone made is ugly, beautiful, hideous or breathtaking. Just be creative.
The moral of the story is Ad farms work because stupid people click on them, just like the 60% interest SL banks (and if you fell for that, I have a friend with millions of dollars locked up that needs an access fee.....), just like the SL stip clubs (just how is a simulated 3d wire frame model with a .png wrapped around it erotic anyway?), Just like people that buy land at $30 per square meter (I have a bridge for you!). So please, just do your part to make it that much harder for stupid people to click on them.

footnote:
although it may seem that I am discourtious to my neighbors, I really am not. I will work with a neighbor to blend builds toogether to make a seamless trasnistion and integrate both builds into a bigger environment. Unless they are "poo poo head" in which case, I can make some pretty ugly color combinations.