How landcutters are still hurting the mainland

My understanding was that Elan's bot-driven IMs encouraged the landowners to take part in reverse auctions.
EDIT: Ok. He confirmed this in post # 373 above while I was typing this./EDIT
The parcels had already been set for sale to Anybody for an initially very hight price that was set to reduce over time.
The "for free" was a recent concept floated a few posts back. "At reasonable fixed price" was a concept that I floated quite a few posts back.


How about if I offer my device for free?
Would it then be OK for me to IM every mainland owner?

Would it be Ok if my free device included advertising in each Im it produced?
Would it be Ok if my free device sent IMs at intervals reminding the lucky owner that it was valiantly watcching their backs and oh by the way.....


Who's this "handful of people, paleface?"
It could be about 100 people in a sim cut into small parcels. In others sims it would be less.
However, that's just one sim of thousands. His bots would be doing the same thing all over the mainland.
Overall, his system could be produing many thousands of IMs per day.
Then others join in with much the same idea.

Well, I made a presumption without facts, and I did qualify it, so false or not, I still stand behind it based on the presumption. When you said you tried what was suggested earlier in the thread, I presumed you meant what I and others mentioned. I said I wouldn't consider such a message as spam then, and I don't consider it spam now. In fact, if you had that notification, I probably wouldn't have had to deal with the shitheads who bought the land for months afterwards.

However, yeah, I think *THE ACTUAL* message qualifies as spam, in my book.

I suspect that LL might have seen offers of microparcels for free as far less worthy of a slap than was the offering of a reverse auction. Although ...... they might at the same time see that the system was producing a volume of Ims that they didn't like the look of.

The problem is that or IMs are a limited resource, particularly when we are offline.

Every unsolicited IM is an intrusion.
Your messages acknowledged that fact. "I apologise for interrupting you ...."

People who were not in the least interested in additional land could well find the IMs to be irritating at the very least. Even if the IMs had been offering the smaller parcels for free, people who could not take advantage of the offers without jumping a tier level might feel particularly taunted




The problem with this branch of the overall thread is that there is a hint from some that unsolicited bulk IMs are not spam if the content is of potential value to the recipient.
So I raised my very useful low-prim wonder as something at least as useful as your offers and asked if that should also be exempt from being classed as spam - even if it were free.
The reality is that only a minority of recipients would have a use for the thing, despite it's undoubted wonderfulness.

That raises the question of other devices and services that could be extremely useful. What other classes of content should therefore be exempt from being deemed as spam?
Just the free ones? Just the ones that could be really, really, really useful?

These are not questions to you, of course. Merely rhetorical they are.



Classification of spam/not-spam by refernce to the potential usefulness of the content to the recipient is unworkable.
I detest people who buy spamvertised products even more than I detest spammers. If nobody bought, the spam flow would dry up.
We might detest the unending deluge of email/comment/whatever spam but somebody somewhere is making it worth the spammers while.
All spam runs could probably be proved as having been "useful/intersting" to some of the recipients. Although -- in the case of 419er spams, this is debatable.

LL is genius at creating double standards for themsleves.

By this definition, every notecard, every unsolicited IM with land for sale in your region and every scripted message within sensor range is spam.

Land ownership, however, is different. It's not the same as thinking that whatever goods anyone sell may be of interest to the recipient. It is a specific interest that could affect an entire neighborhood, among people who could use the extra prims in that sim. It's not like he sent it to people in adjacent or distant sims. Land is a somewhat unique commodity, in that keeping it nice is a challenge and the amount in any given sim is limited. For someone looking to own more land in the sim, I'm sure the gesture was appreciated. For those who didn't... well, you have to be a pretty bitter Betty to not appreciate being given the preference to own the land in the sim.

They were not given a 'preference'.
The land had already been set for sale to Anybody at a high price that would reduce over time. As such, it would be unlikely to be bought for some time.
Anyone monitoring their sim, even if every few days, would see the availability and would have ample time to consider the price - playing chicken with other landowners in the sim and any intersted outsiders. How long should they wait? Should they risk A.N Other buying it while they themselves wait for the price to drop a bit further. Oooooooh!!!
That is definitely NOT preference. That's just trying to maximise attention for the reverse auction. Nobody was getting any favours.



AND....

If my or another's gadget is as least as valuable to land ownership, should IM's calling attention to these really valuable land ownership devices not also be exempt from being deemed as spam?

Remember too that the IM's would have been generated by bots in each and every sim in which the Ninjas were selling land. Overall, that could have been in thousands of sims.
THose bots are really busy. Each individual parcel they bought would have triggered perhaps 100 IMs.
Overall, the volume of IMs might be greater than someone harvesting landownernames and IMing about some really really useful land-ownership device/service in a wave that gradually traversed the grid.

Quantity is just as subjective as quality. "No more than 50!" OK, so he sends 50. Next?



My IMs aren't limited; they go to my email when I am offline. My email inbox isn't limited, either.



Yup, and if I send you an unsolicited IM saying something like "I like your profile", that's an intrusion, too. Intrusiveness can't be the only litmus, either.



I would agree with this if it happened repeatedly. However, any particular land owner, on average, would see one, maybe two of these messages a month. Hardly anything to complain about. Make offering an opt-out a requirement, and they can always put the sender on ignore.



I think the difference lies in the the use of the facility to provide a bona fide public service at no cost to the user. Not in terms of sales or generating sales ("Just for you, Talarus Luan, a one-time discount on a new widget!" doesn't fly), but in genuinely offering something of value to correct a widely-known issue within the service itself.

There's no indication that ANYone would want your widget. However, there is PLENTY of indication that people want to get rid of annoying microparcels, and would appreciate the notification, if they don't have time to scan their surrounding parcels every moment of the day.



If you're looking to define it, I would say that anything done in the interests of the "public good", with the primary beneficiary being the recipient, should be exempted, especially if the info is highly specific to that person and not just a general notice.

It may even defy definition. Maybe LL needs to be petitioned for license to sanction it in specific cases.



Maybe not, but classifying it by the actual usefulness would be. Can ANYone here really give me a rational reason why such a message would not be useful or desired, even from an informational point of view? Taunting? Come on.. that's REALLY reaching.



So do I. However, there's not going to be a bevy of people interested in solely (and actually) serving the public good constantly sending out reams of IMs or emails.

I can't speak for Cristalle, but I think that she is referring to the hypothetical that I have posited, not the actual that Elanthius did.



Oh come on. If I had waited days to get the microparcel donut holes in my mall and nearby properties, I would have lost more of them to the extortionists than I already did from waiting even a few hours. Being notified would probably have saved me from having to deal with those idiots for several months until LL finally moved them the hell away from me.

To me, it's a no-brainer just how important such notifications would be, and I would ALWAYS appreciate getting them, unsolicited OR solicited, even if I wasn't interested.

Well let's put it this way. Elanthius told them about his policy for pricing land. It's done that way because most of the land he picks up is from bots, and as we all know, people make mistakes when setting their land for sale. He is not unscrupulous like some other people, who would take the land and then set it for sale at a price that would be at or below market and thus risking the complete loss of the land - he gives time for the owner to attempt to correct the mistake.

So if his bot picked up this new land, and told people how his bots work, that they slowly lower the price over time. They can shorten the process if they want and contact him directly. Elanthius has always been fair. They wouldn't be getting any favors, but it would be nicer to know it was for sale versus finding out the hard way by something ugly cropping up on it.

So how about a device that notified you the moment one of those microparcels got set for sale?
No waiting for the Ninja bot to find it, buy it and IM *all* the landowners about the reverse auction!! Why you might even get in there before the bots and nab it at the lower-than-market price that the bots are set to buy at - even though you would have been prepared to pay over the odds in a reverse auction.

What if I limited my unsolicited IMs to the landowners in those sims in which there were more than x microparcels and offered the device for free.
Would that be spamming?

It would be a far better deal than the actual deal IMed by the bots.

Actually, I'm building a HUD thingy that does this. You go around and "subscribe" to sims and then it alerts you when anything changes in that sim.

Yes I know why he sets the price high to begin with. It's easier to do it that way rather than wait for a confirmation from the seller before setting it for resale.

At the same time, the reverse auction gives him a crack at the highest possible selling price. Perhaps he would take a pragmatic view and sell quickly rather than wait a bit for a possible higher reverse auction price.


Yes, I know that he's fair. I've witnessed him being fair to a neighbour who made a boo-boo. That neighbour was extemenely fortunate that the Ninja bot was the first of a veritiable cloud of bots to arrive over an ultra-ultra cheap 8192 of beachfront.

I've had dealings with him and I rent tier from him.
During the the initial decimation of the ad farms, the Ninja bot in the next sim beat me to the click for some microparcels that a Linden standing beside me was setting for sale (and I'm not saying that she wa s giving me a count-down now!!). Elanthius donated two of the 16s to a free boat-rezzing parcel I was setting up, giving enough prims to rezz a 30-prim vehicle beside the basic dock.

So, no problem with Elanthius's fairness. He's all that.


It's just that in the particular case of the actual IMs generated, he made a mistake, which he freely accepts.

I don't need a device of dubious value; it consumes far more resources than Elan's bot, and I couldn't tell if there were any ulterior motives programmed into it. An IM is an IM is an IM. There's nothing hidden or resource-intensive about it; it's just info.



Never said anything about reverse-auctions. Always have been talking about a public service which gave away acquired microplots for free, notifying the handful of people affected by IM on a per-parcel basis. Unlikely I would get there before the bots, even if I was standing right there when it was set for sale. I've seen the speed at which bots work; I have no illusions as to what I could do and couldn't do regarding land sales with them around.



What if you compared apples to apples instead of kumquats? That would be just peachy!



Frankly, I just don't see it. *shrug*

A few pages have been added here since I last posted, and I don't want to read them all, but I do want to say something...

People have discussed/argued what is and isn't spam for many years, and people go away from those discussions with differing views - generally the views they started with - so I'm not going to argue it in detail. There is no globally accepted definition of what spam is. If some people wants to think that any unsolicited electronic message is spam, it's up to them, and some vehemently argue that view. If some people want to think that targetted 'quantity' email is spam, e.g. the new range of ballpens and ballpen retailers, it's their choice, and some people do think that. My view is that targetted 'quantity', but unsolicited, electronic messages is not spam and never will be - e.g. those ballpens again.

Sliing. I didn't say that an opt-out causes it not to be spam. I said that unsolicted email must include an opt-out. The original message isn't spam unless it's untargetted, regardless of the quantity that is sent out. Viagra and such are good examples of spam emails because they are sent to every email address that can be found - untargetted. An email about the new range of ballpens that is sent, unsolicited, to thousands of ballpen retailers is not spam because it is tightly targetted.

FWIW, I'll subscribe to that service.

Frankly, I think a future version of this has the potential to be a bigger money-maker (from ads and paid listings) than the margin on buying and selling land itself, especially if bots can inform it to satisfy search/filtering criteria such as "protected Linden waterfront", sim time dilation, sim land fragmentation, terrain characteristics*, actual parcel dimensions, etc.

In a sense, the market opportunity is to compete with Linden land sales search, which leaves a huge window of opportunity, but because it's in-world (where the land is), it's infinitely preferable to the web land sales alternative.

When you add the Mainland Rental Search feature, you'll *own* this grid! (Well, at least until LL GOMs you, but for that to happen somebody would have to actually develop something, so I think it should be safe for a long, long time.)

It's almost exciting enough to motivate me to design a db schema. Almost.

___
* Hmm. Totally OT question: Are the Mainland RAW files available anywhere? It would be a win to somehow depict the fully reverted terrain for Mainland parcels for sale, but I know of no way to do it for parcels owned by others.

Argent. I'm not in the slightest bit interested in reading any the listings for that search. I said what I had to say. I also said that different people hold different views, and the fact that some consider that targeted emails can be spam is irrelevant - not in the sense that I was talking about anyway. There is such a thing as targeted spam, of course. If I had your email address and sent you an email that I have no indication you might be interested in, it would be spam - even if you are the only one I sent it to. You need to get away from following what other people write, and think for yourself, using your own common sense rather than, if someone outside writes it, it must be true.

Um, no, it wouldn't. It might be unwanted email, but not all unwanted email is spam.
You have cause and effect backwards. Completely backwards.

um... yes it would - most deifinitely.
That didn't make any sense, but your idea of what is and isn't spam does seem to be somewhat out of line with reality.

The spam conversation is getting kinda boring, let's talk about this now.

I have the height of the center of every 16sqm chunk of mainland so we could get pretty close. I wish it was possible to automatically create sculpties based on that data but I've never quite understood how to make sculpty images.

It means that rather than my idea of "what spam is" being the result of believing what you read on the web, the opposite is true. I'm one of the people who came up with the formal definition of spam that you read on the web.
It's the same as the one that every other authority on spam uses.

Uchi Desmoulins was showing off the results of a program that did that last year. I'll find out what he used and let you know.

Apparently, not Spamhaus.

..or do you not consider them an "authority"?

It's the same one that Spamhaus uses, except they don't care about pre-existing relationships that I think they should care about, so they will consider some messages at spam that I wouldn't.

According to their technical definition, they also would not consider some messages spam that you would.

Unless they don't follow their own technical definition, that is....