Ad Farmer Suspensions Have Started. :)

So who got the 50,000$?


Or was it like in the movies when a theif gets their haul blwon up and money comes raining down on the crowd?

In general, they don't put every incident on the roster. I doubt it's even near the majority. Don't now about incident reports on ad farms though.

The alternative is to have all laws which are very specific and well defined. Here's a few problems with that:

1. It takes a long time to develop the text of the law and the specific parameters. In the real world, maybe this isn't always bad. In SL and the case of the ad farm/extortion rule, I think it's far from trivial to come up with a complete set of guidelines that exactly describe what is and isn't extortion. That's assuming it's not actually impossible to define "too ugly". Ultimately, LL probably wouldn't do anything if they *had* to be so detailed about their rules.

2. If number one isn't done well, people will find ways to still do bad things that are just outside the parameters. Or, people will do bad things, get caught, go through court (RL)/review (SL), and get off on a technicality. Ad farmers will just price their land just under the threshold, or use ban lines instead, or use prims that are just pretty enough, or whatever else they can think of.

3. In order to avoid the problems of one and two, the law will be too simple and too broad such that it covers almost everyone, even people not doing anything "wrong". Then it's a matter of how strict the law is actually enforced. They'll outlaw all ads, all prims with colors that contrast each other too much, and all land priced over L$20 per sq. m. Now what encourages tyranny?

The answer is not to purposefully make laws too vague or too specifc, but to balance the two and do what makes sense. If you can come up with specifics that should be outlawed no matter what, then do it. If you want to outlaw something, but find it difficult/impossible to nail down specifics, then outlaw it the best way you can. And in all cases, monitor the enforcement of the rules.

--Hugsy

How can a law be too simple?

Criminal law could be boiled down into two laws, 10 words.

Do not cause physical harm an innocent.

Do not steal.

Pretty cut and dried.

My number three refers to laws that attempt to provide specifics but do so in a broad way in order to make sure it covers everything. If people don't like "Don't use your land to try to extort money from other residents", then LL might be compelled to make the rules listed above. That's not good.

So what did LL do? They basically came out with the simple rule "Don't use your land to try to extort money from other residents". I definately agree that the gray area that comes out of this is not so good. I don't like the fact that someone at LL has to make value judgements about what looks good enough (or bad enough to be considered extortion). But, it's better than nothing.

Let's not forget that Linden Lab is a private company who makes the rules, not a government.

It will be interesting to see if anyone ever starts a thread complaining that they got busted for extortion, as well as, provide pictures of their land and the selling price. And then see if there's a debate of whether or not it really was extortion or just a case of an over inflated sense of building abilities and build/land quality.

--Hugsy

There are a LOT of them out there, and they can only do so much at once. I think we need to give them a fair amount of time to get to them all before making this type of accusation.

I hope you didn't personally abuse report them daily. I would consider that an abuse of the system, only bogging it down more. In fact, sending the same AR repeatedly might flag it as SPAM. And if I were a Linden and got the same AR multiple times before I had a chance to do something, I'd be tempted to shove it to the bottom of the pile, especially if it got beligerent or accusatory. I'm only human.

I expect her 7 or 10 ARS would have got lost next to Poopmaster's 1100

LOL, yes I had Poopy in mind when I posted that.

Although, in his defense, I gathered that he claimed to be ARing individual violations separately. If they weren't bogus ARs, (yeah that's a BIG IF) then I wouldn't see anything wrong with that.

I expect they got flooded with ARs and are still investigating the ARS from day 1 yet.

Especially since as th adfarmers changed their parcels around it would slow down how fast the Lindens can "resolve" each one.

I agree.

And imagine how often a single adfarm gets ligitimately AR'ed by many different people. What a mess. I hope the Lindens have a big San Francisco War Room with pegs on the map ticking off the cleanups.

The Lindens decided to turn the community on itself and enlist us all as snitches instead of just using the technology at hand and generate a list of 16M plots set for sale over a certain price. I think 7 days is ample time to get to one of the first Adfarmer ARs sent in.

You may have a point.

They might have wanted a trial run for when the real fun starts - Age Verification and voluntary sex censoring.

If that's the case then I have no sympathy for them. It means their system sucks. The most basic database would sort through duplicate AR's and such. There was no need for everyone's concern regarding this taking so much extra of LL's time unless LL made it that way.

I guess I assumed only the most primitive customer service organization.

They certainly haven't done a good job giving any other impression in my 3 years here.

Well, you do have a point there. I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. Can't say they deserve it, but I was trying.

I volunteer for the sex sens-o-ring.



Oh, sex censoring. Nevermind.

The ARs probably got dumped into Excel or Access and are sorted in a basic way.

The Support ticket change was likely their first real attempt at improving their system.

I figure they were and largely still are struggling to make a system that was set up when there were less than 5000 concurrent users work in a world of 60,000.

I think the estate level governance idea, and the self-policing content is more in line with their philosophy. They don't want to be policing the grid.

I guess a well organized, well run, sophisticated system to allow them to police it that would seem strange given those motivations.

I do think they must have a good system for protecting against grid attacks though, All the grey goo incidences and crashes probably led to a lot of work in this area.

That is one of the most twisted posts I've ever seen of yours. Funny, but twisted.

I think I'd feel better knowing that a pair of eyes looked over every AR to look for duplicates, appropriateness, etc. I trust human judgment much more than a computer program. I think it's a case where you can have good service, fast service, or cheap service. You can usually pick any two of those, but you rarely if ever get all three (Anywhere in life, not just from LL)

You are funny!

coco

Duplicates shouldn't take a human eye, though. That should be very easy to sort out and eliminate a lot of time. They also should be able to sort out how many AR's for the same individuals. For instance, are they bothering to send each and every one to U.H. or are they just keeping it simple and telling him that they've received #### many and he needs to resolve his parcels? I would think the latter is all they need to do for now.

I was trying to imagine how catching duplicate ARs would work, Bradley, especially since I don't have SL access here on my lunch hour and can't try it. I'm picturing that it would be pretty difficult for a machine to match them. I suppose it could go by sim name and then try to match up close coordinates, but I still don't know if I'd want to trust it. 12 different people could AR the same thing, but none of them would likely be standing at exactly the same coordinates, and none of them would use the same language in the report.

Yes, that would be smart to do a bulk-notify on a heavy offender like Umnik. I suppose that even a scumsucker like him deserves time to get his parcels in order. So what does a person like him do for a living now? I think it would be hilarious to catch him on a camping pad.

I just tested it at my store. When you abuse report it doesn't take your coordinates it takes the coordinates of the item you click on so it should be easy to sort multiple AR's. Even though the height might be different depending on what cube people click on, the X and the Y axis should be the same.

As for wording. The knowledge base states that everyone should put Ad Farm in the Summary Field. Now we know not everyone will do so, but I think if they get multiple AR's for the same objects they'll have a pretty good idea for sorting before having to go and read the details later.

They may just sort by offender, giving them a few days to cleanup or else followed by further checks on AR's against them. They also may have just desided to kick the crap out of the top offenders to scare the smaller ones in line.

You give them waaaaaaaay too much credit.