How landcutters are still hurting the mainland

That's just a variant of "affiliate spam". Since "100 messages" is too low a number to be profitable, to make it practical and effective they'd have to create thousands of alts, and LL already has rules in place for people who create "armies of bots".
The limit wouldn't be "100 ARs", it would be "100 messages". That's why I was talking about when I said "I hope they looked at the logs". And that's not "100 messages per incident", that's "100 messages, ever" (or "100 messages per year", or some other limit that's high enough that normal people aren't likely to run into it, and low enough that there's no profit to spammers staying under the radar).
Where did you get the idea that I was suggesting that? I'm simply describing how spam should be defined. I did at one point note that it *might* be worthwhile to carve out some kind of exception for him, in passing, but that's not what I'm writing about here.

If I was suggesting something like "1000 messages a month" or "10,000 messages a year" I could see spammers "flying under the radar", but a dozen messages a month or 100 messages a year is SO low that the number of situations where it would be practical to fly under the radar (like the example of Microsoft sending a total of 35 messages inviting people they considered influential to a conference) is small enough that it'll never scale up into a problem.

And I don't have any love affair with "100 messages", it's a number that's been considered practical for email in the past, but that doesn't mean that the point where you start calling IM's "bulk" or "broadcast" needs to be the same. The point I'm getting at is that it's not difficult to come up with a rate that's high enough that it's unlikely to cause a problem for normal use, but far too low to make it useful for spammers.

Peace!

You misunderstand me I think.
I'm simply raising general points and playing with ideas. I'm not out to pin you down or beat you down.

There's a problem with setting limits on IMs in SL.

Unsolicited IMs are a normal part of socialising in SL. Imagine a chat window with 20 avatars checking each other out in open chat.
How can the shy avatar say hi to that attractive avatar without risking the ridicule of the assembled masses?
Annnnnnnd......How the hell could anyone be sneakily unfaithful to the partner standing beside them fergoodnesssakes?

IMs are a form of whispering/murmering.
The LL response the Elanthius quoted was pure idiocy in this regard. Taken literally, it would outlaw the most common communications in clubs (for instance).

If there were a limit of 100 (just an arbitrary figure now!) per month. It's probable that very many avatars in the club scene would breach that early in the month. That's just counting the initial IMs to a given avatar of course, and not the total sent. Maybe 1000/month would be too low for some people.
That level of outgoing unsolicited emails in RL pure social use would be unusual.



The situation as it stands is best I think. Spam is counter to the TOS. Detection is based on ARs and "know it when you see it".

Anyone can AR an IM as 'spam'. LL can look at the logs and see if the IM was part of a bulk send. Even then they would have no way of telling if this was a result of an opt-in process or simply unsolicited. In RL, people do scream spam at emails that they have actually signed up for.
In the case of Elan's botted IMs it is probable that the content of the IMs signalled that these were not opted into. It was still open to Elan to appeal - which he did. The decision was unchanged. We have to assume that if he could have shown that the IMs were opted into, then the decision would have been reversed.


What should anyone do if they were the abuse desk processing an AR for 'spam'?
They would check if it fitted a SL spam profile.
Check the logs for volume sent. Was this a single IM or sent to a number of accounts?
Check the content. Is the content clearly in the financial/political interest of the sender?

By Linden definition, anything unsolicited is therefore spam. They didn't say anything about content or existing relationship. So even if Elan uses a noob CSR to send the message, he could still be AR'd for it, because it's unsolicited. Even though his neighbors may be interested parties to the potential ownership of the land, it doesn't matter - they have just discouraged the act of contacting your neighbors first before setting land for sale. And with the "one for sale sign in a sim" rule, he has no choice but to just put the land out on the open market.

Just wonderful.

I'm talking about more than just bulk. All three factors that I have listed in many previous messages have to be present before it's spam. Please keep that in mind.

We're talking about substantively identical messages, to people you have no relationship with, in large quantities. That is, context and content matter... not that some content is OK, but that a few thousand repetitions of the same message is different from conversation.

If nothing else... if you're talking to someone, the conversation itself is a relationship.

And if you're using the same opening line to hundreds of people a month? Ye gods, man, no wonder it's not working.
The same thing they'd do if they were at an ISP. And, yes, ISPs can and will sanction accounts for non-commercial spam. There was a famous incident where a "performance artist" decided to send an "artistic spam" and got all hot under the collar when his account was suspended.

The "Linden definition" is thoughtless nonsense. Trust them (or rather one of them) to say something certain to raise confusion and drama.


Separately -

I think that they might have determined that Elan's unsolicited IMs were part of a systematic business process.
That is entirely different from someone selling up a parcel they no longer have a need for and giving a heads-up to the neighbours.
Elan doesn't have neighbours. He has people who own land in a sim in which he selling land.

This is not intended to be a criticism of Elan. It's simply highlighting that he is in the business of selling land for as high a price as he can get, having bought it for as low a price as he can get.


Over the years, as my plans and interests have changed, I've both bought and sold land based on heads-up to and from immediate neighbours.
It's always been between people who share a parcel boundary and usually between people who have already encountered each other in normal sim life.
In some sims where there was no sense of community, I've simply put land on the market when I no longer had a use for it. Sending an IM to every landowner in the sim would feel alien to me, but I'm not in the land business.

We have to hope that some deranged abuse Linden does not pick up the letter of the response to Elan's appeal as gospel. The difference in the situations should be obvious to anyone with a brain and access to the databases.

I don't see anything in the message that indicates what their definition of spam is.

We do not know what basis they have for determining that message was spam. They said they researched it. If that research included going through the logs and determining that many messages were sent, then that would seem to be a correct response.

The speculation that they have some other definition comes form their request that Elanthius' alt send no more such messages. That doesn't mean that they would treat individual messages that were NOT repeated the same way, it just means that they consider the messages he already sent as spam and are warning him not to continue.

Yes. I know all of this, and you'll find that I mention the same three factors over the course of my postings.

My comments on IM conversations were simply in order to highlight the inanity of the text of the Linden response to Elan's appeal.
Anyone with a brain knows the difference between a spam run and a conversation. The letter of the Linden response didn't allow for a difference. Idiots!




Actually, I'm more on the receiving end of opening lines; and you're right, it generally doesn't work for them.
Not bragging here now! I'm an attractive avatar. Just stating facts.


All that aside, I think the only sensible way for LL to stamp on spam is to outlaw it in general terms, wait on ARs and "know it when they see it". That presumes that their abuse droids have been shown a cluestick.

Sorry, I thought you were responding to me because you were responding to my message.
I think you are reading far too much into that message from LL. It doesn't say that a single message is spam, and it doesn't say that bulk is the only definition of spam, in fact it doesn't define spam at all.

From the de facto "authority" on spam, The Spamhaus Project:



Thus, under item (1) of their "Technical Definition of Spam", Elanthius' messages do not fit the definition, since the recipient's personal identity and context ARE relevant, and each message is NOT equally applicable to "many other recipients".

Since Spamhaus is pretty much the main clearinghouse for Spam-related issues (and runs the SBL, which is used by ISPs world-wide to block spammers), I would take their definitions and meanings FAR over and above everyone else's here.

I also note that neither of the CAN-SPAM acts would make his messages illegal in their contexts.

I note further that the communications facilities in SL are not under the jurisdiction of either the government, nor of the "industry", with regards to Spam, as LL can choose to allow or disallow whatever they want within their own sphere of control.

Obviously, they have chosen the worst possible of all situations, meaning that I can AR anyone sending me a single unsolicited IM, for any reason, and they would get warned/suspended over it.

Now you all can invent and/or support whatever definition of spam makes you happy and allows you to sleep at night, as can I, but, the fact of the matter is, not all messages that any one of us thinks of as "spam" necessarily are, nor is LL under any obligation to honor any particular ruleset. As such, they have no less reason to listen and consider my ruleset than yours, or anyone else's, despite anyone else's reasoning or rationale.

Spamhaus definition of Email spam is based on Tim Skirvin's original definition for Usenet spam.

If the messages are *substantively identical* they are spam. And, yes, Spamhaus DOES treat substantively identical messages as spam. There have been plenty of sites sending "customized" messages that have ended up in their RBL.


Edit: I notice that in the paragraph directly above the one you quoted, on the same page, they use that same term: "substantively identical". Elanthius messages are "substantively identical" and qualify as spam according to both Spamhaus and Tim Skirvin's definition.

Incidentally, it's ironic that you're bringing up Spamhaus to argue that I'm too strict about the definition of spam. I've had several exchanges with them on this subject... because I believe their definition is *too strict* in their actual application. The details are not relevant here (for example, they have been known to add unrelated mailing lists to the RBL because some of the samples of a particular spam run had been sent to that list), but if you think I'm too strict you need to try dealing with THAT lot.

Doesn't apply.



Messages in which the substantial content (the parcel information) varies is not "minimally customized" under any stretch of the imagination. We're also not talking "newsgroups" with potentially hundreds to hundreds of thousands of subscribers, we're talking a handful of people who receive the "same" message.



Nope. Wasn't advertising a service, as far as I know.



Nope. Not applicable, regardless of how you interpret "same signature".



Not applicable.

So you say. I don't think so. I maintain that they are "substantially different" enough to NOT be considered spam.



I'm not arguing their application; I'm arguing the application within SL. Their application of their ruleset is irrelevant. I'm using their definitions, which, apparently, aren't nearly as strict as yours.

Sure it is. You're mixing up two terms here. "substantial" and "substantive" are not synonyms, and there was a LOT of discussion about the correct term to use in the definition. Substantive was chosen because it covers cases like real estate and jobs ads, which were ALREADY at the time, back in the '90s, a huge problem but were advertising different pieces of land or openings. The substance (this is an ad for a piece of land) of the messages is identical, it is merely customized. The same terminology is used by Spamhaus for the same reason.It absolutely is advertising the same service... virtual real estate.

Elanthius messages are PRECISELY parallel to the messages that led to this specific wording.

They're stricter. They don't list the "existing relationship" cutout, but are otherwise identical.

If it is a matter of quantity, I don't have the messages to compare, but I find the "quantity of similar text" argument specious without a specific, QUANTITATIVE example for metric purposes. That leaves the qualitative, and I find MORE than ample evidence the messages are SUBSTANTIALLY and SUBSTANTIVELY different in a qualitative sense. However, qualitative measures are often subjectively applied. *shrug* Pick your poison.



I don't see a correlation to real estate ads or job ads. Sorry. No real estate ad EVER was targeted to specific, adjacent neighbors, offering them FREE land. Job ads aren't even in the same ballpark, as far as I am concerned.



It wasn't advertising a service. It was an OFFER of a highly-specific nature, no different than if I, as an adjoining landowner to one of your parcels, offered it to you and the other adjoining landowners.

I wish I would be so F*CKING lucky as to have only similarly highly-relevant and surgically-targeted emails in my inbox. Instead, I have SPAM. Hundreds of thousands of messages a month that I have to manually sort through.



Believe it if you want; I don't see it that way in the least.

Go ask Tim Skirvin or Seth Briedbart, quote the dictionary at them. In the context of email, the distinction is real and deliberate, and the definition was chosen as a direct response to messages that were similar to Elanthius'. Messages that were identical except for the specific targeted component. If you can write a template for it, with only a customized section changed, it's substantively identical.

Anyone who has been dealing with spam at the ISP or corporate mailserver level, or whas been part of the conversation over how to deal with spam for the past decade and a half, would have the same reaction. Elanthius messages, if accepted as "not being spam", would open up the floodgates to all kinds of abuse.

* Hi! Would you like to buy a custom sculpty in the shape of your name "Talarus Luan"?

* We're offering a special deal to people in the Luan family!
We're talking about real estate ads targeting specific people selecting pieces of land that they would theoretically be interested in.

And if you think you'd be happier getting targeted spam instead of the generic kind that's easily filtered, all I can say is I hope you're never in a position to deal with it. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.

On the point of wording / LL definition of spam

The sentence in the LL respose to the appeal was:
"Please do not send unwanted or unrequested messages to other residents as this will be deemed as spam. "

Not "could be" or "might be", but "will be".

Now I don't for one moment believe that LL will deem a single or even a number of unwanted or unsolicited IM as spam. It was proably just a very careless way of telling him that the particular activity in question was deemed as spam, even after review.

The moral of the story is that things that are said by some Linden *- even in the course of a documented formal exchange -* can not be taken as defining LL policy.
/me takes out the traffic gaming threads and looks at the bits where someone said that some Linden had said that something was not contrary to the TOS / was acceptable.

So Christalle posts in #353 of this thread:
"By Linden definition, anything unsolicited is therefore spam....."
If the text of the Linden response is taken literally, she is quite correct.

With a few more words, the response could have made the particulars of the transgression crystal clear, but it seems not unusual for LL communications to be economical with the meat.

For that particular case, yes, but that's referring to someone who has already been labeled a spammer. That doesn't mean it was intended to generalize to just anyone.

The recipients' personal identities were not relevant. They received the IMs purely because they happened to own land in the sims.
The context was that they owned land in the sims.

Potentially, in a sim largely cut into 512's, about 100 landowners in the sim would have been sent an unsolicited IM promoting Elan's business.


This 'relevance' thing is mostly in the eye of the sender.

*IF* we accept that timely notification of land being put on the market is something of value and relevance to landowners in a sim, and that therefore Elan's IMs were not spam, then I say that this logically follows:

I produce my one-prim scripted wonder that IMs the user when a parcel in the sim comes on the market.
We already accept that this information is valuable and relevant to landowners.
I would say that my device would be even more valuable to landowners as it has the potential to allow the landowner to get there before Elan's bots can pick it up and increase the price.
So......
It's OK for me to send unsolicited IMs promoting my device to every mainland landowner as my IM would be very relevant to them.

It's OK???
Is it F@@@!!

As has been seen, Elan's bot has probably sent only one message to each person in which he had land for sale in their sim. It is not as if Elan's bot is sending 6 messages to a person, it's sending one. And yet this one message is enough to prompt ire, despite the fact that the tactic of letting your neighbors know about your land was supposedly a preferred method.

As such, why should any of us contact our neighbors if we are selling land now? It could get you a successful AR by some hyper-sensitive person.

Brilliant.

People use words with their own made-up meanings all the time, for whatever reason suits them, regardless if anyone else understands it or not. So, what IS the supposed "difference" in the terms, if it isn't what I have already pointed out (and dismissed)?



I've been an ISP (webhosting) for more than a decade now, and I have also been part of a team selecting and rolling out the messaging infrastructure for a Fortune 100 company prior to that. I am KEENLY FUCKING AWARE of the spam issue, thanks.

Again, I don't know the specific content of Elanthius' messages that got his bot suspended, but if they are anything like:

"Greetings! As a public service in an attempt to heal the mainland from the disastrous effects of landcutting, adfarming, and extortion using microparcels, have come into the possession of one or more of microparcels adjacent to your land and wish to offer them to you and your neighbors adjacent to them at no cost on a first-come first-serve basis.

The parcels are at the following locations:
Z sqm at <X,Y> in Region

Simply reply to this message, and if you are the first to do so, we will set the parcel for sale to you at L$0. After X time, if there is no interest, the parcel(s) will be set for sale to anyone, per our normal pricing procedures, though we will still honor any requests under this offer from adjacent landowners after that time. We are simply offering this window of opportunity to you and your neighbors in the region in an attempt to prevent the land from continuing to be used in a harassing manner.

If you do not wish to receive any further communications of this kind from us, simply reply with a single word: "remove". We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this message may cause. Our only intent in sending it is to help you have a better and more enjoyable Second Life."

..and are only sent ONCE to the adjacent parcel owners, I can't see how anyone could reasonably and rationally object to such a communication on the grounds of it being "spam", because it surely isn't.



I really don't see the correlation. Just having "real estate" in the mix doesn't necessarily make the messages the same.



Too late. "The generic kind that is easily filtered" isn't, and I sort all my mail manually because I have yet to find an automatic filtering process that doesn't have false positives which hasn't cost me hundreds to thousands of dollars in lost business and customer goodwill. They Simply Do Not Work. My current answer is using dedicated email accounts for my customers (and other significant entities), which are unique to each one. Given that I am my own ISP and have my own domains, that's not an issue, but it's not an answer for everyone.

As for targeted, I am talking about things like Elanthius' situation. Stuff that is EXTREMELY relevant and helpful, as opposed to the crap in your examples.

Spam sucks. Never claimed otherwise. But not all spam is "bad", nor is what you consider "spam", I consider "spam".

I don't see the analogy or logic "following" at all.

You say "send unsolicited IMs promoting my device (presumably for sale) to every mainland landowner", as opposed to Elanthius sending unsolicited IMs to a handful of people about a particular parcel or group of parcels adjacent to them being offered to them for free as a public service. How does that correlate?

I'm not sure if it really matters in the case of this mostly hypothetical discussion but here's an example of the messages I sent.

"Hi, this is an automated message please send replies/complaints to Elanthius Flagstaff.
I apologise for interrupting you but I wanted to let you know that we have recently acquired some land in Clanis.Since you are the founder of the group 'A1 R.E. SALES-N-RENTALS' that owns land in this sim you may be interested in purchasing it.
The location(s) are: secondlife://Clanis/168/156/0 - 144sqm, secondlife://Clanis/192/148/0 - 1024sqm, secondlife://Clanis/144/148/0 - 1024sqm, secondlife://Clanis/128/116/0 - 2048sqm, secondlife://Clanis/118/86/0 - 1232sqm,
The price may be high right now but it will slowly go down over time until someone buys it. Please check them out if you are interested in purchasing or contact Elanthius Flagstaff with questions."

It might be worth noting that Talarus is sadly defending the messages as non-spam based on the totally false idea that I was offering land to neighbours for free. Of course, now I think about it I totally would have happily built that into the bot but of course now I know that would probably be classed as spam by a number of people and would also be banned.

If two messages are the same except for a small part that is customized for the recipient, if they're created by a boilerplate, the substance of the message is the same, only details are different. That's the definition that Spamhaus uses, that's the definition that the Briedbart Index uses, and that's the definition that everyone involved in fighting spam uses.
Spamhaus would see it as spam. Seth Briedbart would see it as spam. J D Falk would see it as spam. Tim Skirvin would see it as spam. Go ahead, send that boilerplate to any well known spamfighter, ask them if thousands of messages of that format to total strangers who hadn't asked for it would not be spam because they're "relevant" to the target. They'll say "if you can create such a boilerplate, at all, you're spamming".