Ad Farmers & Extortionists

Posting logs is not allowed, but his first reaction was "No, I will not remove it" Then he went into a long tirade about ad cutters, extortionists and hatred for the Arbor Project. He accused Weedy of recently buying the land with the sole intent of griefing/extorting him. Little does he know, the land was owned by our group 8 months longer than he's owned his. On one hand he claims not knowing it was there and on the other claiming we refused offers to sell. Which one is it?

He then went into agressive mode, pushing Weedy around with his avatar. Several times, she had to get back to our land to avoid being frozen, bounced or teleported. She was forced to ban him from our land.

This issue could have been entirely avoided, had he requested a trade as per our group charter, which is clearly displayed on our group profile or by removing the obstruction. Instead, he chose to lump us into something for which we do not support or have anything to do with, which are ad-cutters and land extrotionists. I resent his open hatred toward the Arbor Project, which has done excellent work in their projects.

The Arbor Project name wasn't on the land or on your profile so I don't see where their involved.

It's not on the land. It is on the top of Weedy's profile. It was Weedy who attended the incident yesterday, although I was watching her screen.

I don't see where they are involved either, which was another reason to AR his rude behavior. He made several derrogatory statements about them in the sim and has done it here also, to the point of "hating" them more than the ad cutters themselves.

Drama aside,exactly what do you use a 16m block for in the middle of a sim by itself, and is the value of a 16m worth all the drama you create for the next 20 owners too?
Sell it to him for a reasonable market price and move on with life for goodness sakes, get a life and make some friends, dam leeching drama queens.............
Tired of these land baroning control freaks crap, I just went through this with a guy who owns 4096m enclosed within my land, he's had it empty with bannlines for 18 months and refused to swap it for well over 4096 more land I offered him next to his mall. he just said he's never selling that land, just doesn't want me to own a sim corner I suspect even though he would end up with the same from the deal. So I will just wait him out I guess, I hadn'd spoken to this guy in 18 month I lived there or blocked access to him, was half tempted to use the land next to his to return the karma, but not that sort of person.

At least when SL starts spiralling into closure many people will have great looking sims to remember, others will just have 100,000m of spinning lame shit.

Your charter does say that you will trade locations in a sim.
You say that three times in this thread to date.

The reality is different in my experience.

For example: Hengill sim
After the sim was auctioned, a number of 1536m parcels were cut along the Linden canal that runs along the western edge of the sim.
A 'well-known' resident with the initials G.M. bought one of those and cut off a 256 for ad plots on the Linden canal. Up went ugly!
GM put some of the ad plots on sale. Your group bought two 16m plots.

My group bought up all but one of the ad plots *including one 16m plot that you had immediately put back on the market for L$200*
All that remained of the ad plots was a 16m plot owned by your group, right at the 'front' (Linden water) side of the original plot.
Some time later bought out the remainder (1280m) of the original 1536 parcel as the then owner was cutting it in a way sure to attract more adfarmers.


So yes, I read your charter, but your charter appears to be just some text.
I did make more than one polite attempt to contact both Weedy and yourself with a view to swapping the position of the 16m plot within the sim.
Your group's position is that you are happy with things they way they are.

If your intentions for these isolated 16m plots are what you say they are, I don't understand why you need this one to be right on the Linden canal.
It certainly would make a very in-your-face location for a spinning ad.

This is a little puzzling to me, too. There are a couple of these "non-advertising" 16s inside the Temple of Adfarming, one owned by a poster on this thread, and another that claims: "The dream is to hold a parcel in every sim and allow scripters and bot runners to use those parcels freely." Both contain a single, full alpha object holding a single script each, the latter being a "Name2Key Collector" referencing www.sl-paws.tk (which didn't do much to heighten my understanding).

I suppose there may still be uses for independent data collection for Name2Key (identities that have opted-out of web search? historical records for defunct identities? reliability when web search is b0rked-as-usual? I dunno--something). Anyway, as a scripter, I can imagine applications for a scripted-prim network that really had 100% coverage--but for the uses I have in mind, even a single missing sim would make the whole thing not worth the trouble, and covering only the Mainland would be missing 80% at best, so... dunno. The bot thing completely mystifies me, especially in sims with Linden infrastructure where a bot would surely be able to rez with scripts enabled.

So, I'm not convinced they're sinister or anything, but your guess is as good as mine as to the actual utility of these non-advertising parcels.

You're referring here to my group Universal Network. Sometimes it's an open group that anyone can join and use the parcels for whatever they want but to be honest I go back and forth on public and private access. The keyscanner fills out my personal database of key-name pairs. I use it for some offline stuff with my bots and land database. It's possibly less useful now that we have the online search but I guess it's still the only way to pre-emptively find new avatars. Also I like contributing to the w-hat key db, it appeals to my sense of giving to the community.

To be honest the whole collection is little more than a folly of mine and Skye's. We enjoy trying to collect a 16 in every sim it's like collecting stamps or something. We are ALWAYS open to swapping parcels around although requests do tend to get pushed down the priority queue pretty rapidly.

I don't think it's particularly malicious or something to get worked up over but then people can get upset about anything.

Nice dream, except when people sink money in to but all the land in a sim as it becomes available then find a single 16m block that refuses to sell at any price there for negating them from becoming an estate owner of the sim. i seen similar happen twice now, one was a concert tower think built spanning the corners of 4 sims therefore forever denying any body to own them completely and of course they never replied to an IM, we suspect they were life members that had left SL too leaving their land behind forever empty.

Yeah, I can't say as I've lost a lot of sleep over that parcel. I hardly think it's responsible for my current receipt of redundant pre-Easter scriptural greetings--any more than I blame one of Khamon's Mardi Gras trees that I happened to rez just before it started. I do feel a little bad about catching both of those non-advertising parcels in the Temple of Adfarming, though, because they're really not part of the blight at all. But it was hard enough to encase the rest of the mess in a reasonable number of prims, especially after the island scammer decided clouds were no barrier to her greed. (Dammit.)

One reason why a 16m owner can sit unnoticed in a large area is kinda smart from their point of veiw. See they can buy these small plots in undeveloped land wait till someome with a vision and some skill comes along and starts to develop. Once the developement is in full swing comes "oh my 16m is now in a position to disrupt, extort ". This bs of buying up 16m "as trading stamps" is just that! Waiting till it is now profitable to either sell, or post ads, or keep land values low so the Land Barons can coerce sales or wait till the creator leaves fed up wiith their tactics. This anti-social behavior is partly an estention of total greed and a way to exact a childish behavior of control from an unacheiver.
Funny that someone could have a property 8 months longer non developed "not a priority" till it can be used as leverage.

Again:
Either do not auction any under 125m , (especially if locked within another parcel), till that larger parcel owner has been notified and given opportunity to buy thus re-absorbing these small plots and circumventing opportunists or the Lindens buy all our land at the same 16,000L per meter sale price they created by selling at auction small parcels (and we have about 32,000m's) .

Then, I'd have enough cash to buy Islands where I can have peace....oooh could that be the incentive for Lindens to keep a blind eye to such a simple solution?

This of course will not effect those already out there but it's a start and if implemented years ago the problem would not be so aggravated.

I'm not sure what you're talking about here. I don't think this applies to mainland. It's surely not possible to convert a mainland sim into an estate.

As for Ray Musketeer: A) Lindens will give you small parcels that your land surrounds if you simply ask them. B) That laundry list of nefarious deeds would be even more scary if it was in any way based in reality.

Hmm do you have those small plots on the edge of Nakji? The ones I see are like 16m possibly 32m for 10k?
I would buy them for my friend but I just can't see myself spending 10k on them.
If they don't bother you I guess you haven't ever tried to do photos, build, texture in area where signs get in the way, Nor I guess have you been had to deal with high lagging resource stealing script or object that is sitting on 16m plot.
I am not suggesting you use the 16m for grieving though but what if your members did?

Never, at any location in many years, have we used "spinning ads" or any annoyance.

I spoke with Weedy about this issue. Yes, you contacted her. However, your inquiry was more of a demand than a request. By your own admission, she explained to you, trading a plot which has two neighbors (one of them Governor Linden) was more preferred than having 4 different neighbors and the probabilty of being asked to trade again in the future. We inspect every plot prior to trading lately, because we have experienced excessive lag in some areas and trade requests by people scamming roadside plots for inferior land, when they don't even own the ajoining land. We currently trade about 5 plots per day and have met and traded cards with a lot of new and interesting friends.

The land our group currently owns in your sim Sling, is under water and is the greatest distance possible from building and border conflicts. I'm sorry Sling, but it's one of the very rare exceptions to our trade policy. Weedy is instructed to trade protected land, for protected land only. Please understand, it requires a considerable amount of time on a daily basis to manage these plots. Would you rather we abandon our policy all together and simply ignore everyone? Would you rather we forget the requests to unblock us and file abuse reports on each case, without attempting resolution? It's not our choice to escalate anything, as we would rather conduct our business in a peaceful manner and move along. Escalated incidents are the result of intransigence, abuse and continued violations of the TOS. Trading plots is a privilege and a goodwill gesture, because we do care about our neighbors. It's not an expectation to be taken for granted upon demand, though. Again, please accept our apology for slipping between the cracks of an imperfect situation. We do our very best to be good neighbors, but the right of refusal is ours and our's alone. On our last inventory run, nearly 10% of our land was blocked or encroached upon. Can you imagine being needlessly blocked from 10% of your land? I'm quite sure you would not be impressed. Requesting access to our own group land is time consuming, and makes an already lengthy task, more prolonged. It makes it difficult to proceed with inventory management and further burdens labor intensity.

It is against the TOS to block anyone from their land. Period. There is no excuse for it.

There is nothing on our land which warrants being blocked from it. We not restrict others from transiting through our land with ban lines or security scripts. We have owned alot of our plots for as much as four years, yet not a single plot has been used for ads or annoyances, nor have any been resold at exortionate prices. Our scripts have been inspected by LL staff on numerous occasions and we have always enjoyed a clean bill of health in our perfomance and resource usage. Never in four years have we been warned, banned or advised to change anything in our codebase or land usage.

We allow builds atop our land by request not by expectation or defiance of the TOS, provided we can still access it and don't get orbitted by landing in the middle of a prim on teleport. Each request is noted in our records and cross referenced when it's discovered as blocked.

We are a global data network, capable of many projects for business, education and research. In a rapidly changing world, we need to access our land to make changes, adjustments or queries. We continue to grow at a regular rate, because we realize the value of our land base, are adaptable to changing times and entertain new and innovative ideas or proposals. We go to great length to operate in an ethical and respectful manner and wish to continue as such. We pay tier like anyone else and are the rare exception to the legitimacy of 16 meter plots, where dependancy on a land base is essential. Apart from tier fees, we have invested huge amounts of time and effort in being agreeable with the neighborhood and contributing to community in positive ways.

Simply put, it's not right to treat us like ad cutters or land extortionists. Please trust me when I tell all of you, they are a bane to our existance and we would rather see them eliminated, but as long as Linden Lab refuses to address them, we will continue to be blocked, accused, threatened and otherwise needlessly griefed as a result of them, in conducting our business.

So you are what ? Data Miners? Not sure I like the sound of that either, glad I live on private islands now.

I think that most people would find that hard to swallow.
I quote my own notecard that I dropped on her:
=======================================
Hello,
Will you swap position of a 16m plot in the Hengill sim, please?

Your plot was one of a number of plots cut from a 256 section of an original 1536 plot. I bought all the ad plots apart from yours a while back and have just now bought the remainder of the original plot.

Will you swap positions with a 16m plot that I’ve cut at the back (NE corner) of my plot?
That’s at about (61,125,x)

Regards,

Sling Trebuchet
========================================

"More of a demand than a request" ????
Boy is she sensitive or what??

I started with "Will you swap position of a 16m plot in the Hengill sim, please?"
Maybe a few more "please"s are required? If so how many?
If people are communicating with group as a result of an implicit request to do so from your group charter, then I think it would be in the best interests of everybody if the number of "please"s required in order to avoid being misinterpreted as demanding should be specified in your charter.


All I got back was a message to the effect that
- she did not know the location of the plot that I was offering to swap. (Eh? See above, and how many 16m plots do you have in Hengill close to (61,125,x) that might have been a source of confusion?)
- she would not swap without inspecting the land (sounds reasonable to me)
- the "current location is suitable for us. Thank you"

I responded with
================================================
Your plot in Hengill is from an original 1536 plot that was cut up by an ad farmer. I have reassembled the original plot by buying six separate plots. Your plot is in the South West corner of the original plot. The 16m plot I am suggesting for swap is diagonally opposite in the NE corner. It is cut and labelled for your inspection. From the swap - you have your 16m plot in the sim - I would have a more rational plot. Thank you for your response
=================================================

Silence ensued.

Given that the response I got appeared to be strongly at variance with the policy outlined in your charter, I did follow up 2 weeks later with a notecard to yourself Dave .
There was no response to that.






I *now* understand what your policy is.
However, it was never explained until your latest post in this thread. All I got was "current location is suitable for (us) "

"By your own admission, she explained to you,.."
You have to be careful Dave, of getting so defensive that you begin to invent things.
Your assertions about the nature of my communication and the response that I got are clearly mistaken.


You should keep records and consult them before making any assertions in a public forum that give a totally false impression of the communication that I now quote above in full for truth.

As for Ray Musketeer: A) Lindens will give you small parcels that your land surrounds if you simply ask them. B) That laundry list of nefarious deeds would be even more scary if it was in any way based in reality.

It would help if commenting that you read all the posts in the thread, I already addessed the contacting Lindens. Nefarious deeds are in fACT true and I know this since one individual that was once a Officer in Fhelzgud (in the very beggining) was in fact caught and had openly admitted his designs at one point when directed at another property owner while still part of the group, which of course lead to his eventual exclusion. That any would naively suggest I am talking out of a fantasy a simple read of all the shennanigans pulled by many would erase any doubt that these practices are employed.

Makes me wonder what would promt one to be so uninformed. Btw, own the entire sim you may not have the same tools an Island owner does but in essence you can control what goes in or out of the sim -residential, biz, combo whtever and to that end would be an estate manager or insert term you feel is more appropriate.


When we first began there were Islands but the explosion of islands ( a definate cash cow) shouldn't be ignored. Their appeal obvious, you can have the environment you demand. If the mainland owners had the same tools as an island hmmm ( if I could only rid the fog permenently instead of having at every log in turn it off), oh you must be right the Lindens don't need to show any difference for those to want to buy islands lol.

The main point is that all or much of this could be minimized, when live help was available the were many lindens accessible, questions & concerns were generally fairly quickly answered and it would seem that with a small effort on the Lindens part they could eliminate a lot of this by proactively contacting owners of upcoming auctions in their area's as I have already mentioned (hell, hire me or rather one of the forum junkies with the 4 million posts, with so many in sl wanting to make $ I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to employ one that could handle the job). To ignore this simple gesture is reckless the proof can be read all over these forums.

Whats the difference?

Ahhh great, you contribute AV keys to W-hat (for those new to SL a big griefer co-op)

You collect AV keys from your neighbors.

And you own 16M parcels in a ad farmer manner.

Why the hell do you need to pre-emptively find new avatars?

Landbots weren't enough for you?

i will post the log since you do not want to post it
[2008/02/03 11:52] W***y H****st: (Saved Sun Feb 03 14:51:23 200 Please unblock access to out group land at Aragonese: <237.90620, 114.51128, 77.59470>
[2008/02/03 11:52] W**y H***st: (Saved Sun Feb 03 14:51:40 200 our*
[2008/02/03 11:52] Dragger Allen: excuse me
[2008/02/03 11:53] W** H****st: your objects are blocking our land plot
[2008/02/03 11:53] Dragger Allen: please tp me
[2008/02/03 11:53] W**dy H****st: Im not there now, I TP'd away
[2008/02/03 11:53] W****y H****st: Aragonese: <237.90620, 114.51128, 77.59470>
[2008/02/03 11:56] Dragger Allen: solet me see if i got this correct
[2008/02/03 11:56] Dragger Allen: you want me to move items from my mall for some reason
[2008/02/03 11:57] W***dy H***8st: Im just asking you to remove blockage from our groups land, so we can access it
[2008/02/03 11:57] Dragger Allen: what groups land
[2008/02/03 11:57] Dragger Allen: this is sun valley mall owned by me
[2008/02/03 11:57] W**8dy H****st: we own a plot there
[2008/02/03 11:58] W***y H***8st: at the co-ordinates I gave you
[2008/02/03 11:58] Dragger Allen: and when dod you buy this plot
[2008/02/03 11:58] W**dy He***st: look at the date on the land
[2008/02/03 11:58] W***dy H***st: a long time ago
[2008/02/03 11:58] Dragger Allen: you own 16 meters here
[2008/02/03 11:58] Dragger Allen: i will not move it
[2008/02/03 11:59] Dragger Allen: so good day
[2008/02/03 11:59] W***dy H****st: I will have a Linden remove it then
[2008/02/03 11:59] Dragger Allen: please do
[2008/02/03 11:59] W***y H***st: so you refuse to unblock my pland?
[2008/02/03 12:00] Dragger Allen: i refuse to communicate with you
[2008/02/03 12:00] W***y H***st: ok I will send a Linden from the concierge to remove it
[2008/02/03 12:00] W***y H****st: and it will likely refelct on your permanent record
[2008/02/03 12:00] Dragger Allen: that is fine
[2008/02/03 12:00] W***y H****st: we own 2000 plots
[2008/02/03 12:00] Dragger Allen: all 16 meters
[2008/02/03 12:00] Dragger Allen: i own much more then that
[2008/02/03 12:00] W****y H****st: and they will remove anything that blocks us
[2008/02/03 12:01] Dragger Allen: that is fine
[2008/02/03 12:01] W****y H***8st: you have no right to block my land
[2008/02/03 12:01] Dragger Allen: good day
[2008/02/03 12:01] W***y H***8st: and I will paste this with my report

Why the heck do they need to key for every avatar on the grid?

And why do bots need access to every sim on the mainland?

How can you block land these days ?

You can just use the "My land" and/or "Group Land" functions to find the plots and P2P teleport to them.

You're right. I don't /need/ any of those things. But I do it anyway, like I said, it's a folly.

That sounds "More of a demand than a request"
Only one "please"!

Or, was that the problem with my message to Weedy?
One "please" is sufficient, but it has to be at the *start* of the sentence and not the end?

"Please" at start of sentence = Request
"Please" at end of sentence = Demand
hmmmmmmmm...

Oh these social niceties! It's like walking on eggshells here.

Blocking a view is quite different from blocking access.

The only thing "blocking" prims do is prevent viewing. Yes, they can prevent avatars from walking across land borders, but so can ban lines and security systems. Old, worn out argument used by ad-cutters and extortionists. True landowners can not be bothered by such.

Then again, true landowners don't just own a 16m postage stamp parcel.

These scammers can bs all they want, they are still scammers. I don't agree with putting prims over the lands, but then again, there's no reason to own land in the middle of somone else's parcel. That the land was even cut up to be there in the first place is the mark of a scammer/extortionist.

True advertisers would want to make their ads appealing to the community for better impressions. Buying plots that would hsow their ads, but not infringe on others in any way. Talking with those in the area for ideas/suggestions on how to display the ads to add to the appearance of the area.

~Jessy

I'm really not trying to give you a hard time here, Dave, but, well, "huh?" I mean, yeah, when a bot TPs to the parcel to do an update, it would be good to know what height above llGround it should land, but it's a *big* sky up there; I should think 99% of the time a sensor scan from the seed prim on the ground should find an unambiguously clear altitude within 96m AGL, and maybe 1% of the time it would need to send up a temp sensor prim. So, maybe the current process is more laborious than it really needs to be? I mean... can we help simplify this for you?I'm of a mind to believe this, and on that assumption, you're right to be upset with what adfarmers do to make things difficult for you. I think you understand how terrified and defensive a Mainlander becomes at sight of a 16sq.m. parcel. So I hope you'll actively and vocally support the several initiatives, public and private,* to render the abuses a quaint footnote in SL history.

As for the Name2Key thing: it's not like any of it is really private, and the ability of scripts to get this information from a web service can make many useful things easier and faster. It would be preferable to use only the web profiles for avatars that haven't opted out of Search, but only if the LL web search were less b0rked, and if they'd quit raising doubts about whether it will be accessible, and quit claiming privacy violations for in-world scripts that use stuff that's available on the web to everyone on the planet. (Grrrr!) So, yeah, it's still kinda w-hat to the rescue, I'm afraid.
_________
* [Edit: I didn't mean to be snarky about the Arbor Project here. There are a lot of initiatives underway right now to end this problem for once and for all, and widespread support for all of them is better than selective support for the "best" one, whichever any of us guess it may be.]