Ad Farmers & Extortionists

like I said in an earlier post there are some more reprehensible than others, however it is amussing that one with a 16m parcel in the middle of a large development that evidently laid dormant long enough for the completion of the development before being used cry's foul, their orperations are disrupted but screw the development rofl. All the drama for 16m's? But what the heck, demand demand demand.

Ok, let me set it straight I do believe you own it you do what you want however, that don't make anyone's "want" right. Using resources like other peoples time and energy ( the Lindens) to come protect your right to muddy up someone's creation over 16m's makes zero sense from a honest want to get along perspective. Someone wanted to re-absorb 16m (not saying any action like pushing or over boundary building is acceptable either)another says screw you my processes are being interupted, please. This may not be as atrocious as the model ad farmer but still its disruptive on many levels.
Petition LL for a re-absorbtion program not forced but as the properties come available. With all the intelligent people in this world surely there is a solution and I wont call ya shirley again .

The Lindens is where to direct your energies, to this end.
Its really a shame all the ban lines, all the "my creation is better than yours" so let me construct large walls, build to the upper stratosphere to make certain all have to suffer within view because dammit it's your right!
Take advantage of operations and traffic another has worked for the same reason.
I support the right to buy 16m's and sell them and do what you will with them but I re-iterate a proactive alert and opportunity to re-absorb should be instituted by the Lindens active participation, lets get the ball on the right court anything 125m's or less should not be auctioned untill the Lindens have made the alert not on some blog somewhere but as a courtesy directly to those most affected by such auctions. We pay fees, we build , create, give and play, the Lindens are complicit and IMO could start to set things right.

Our land has never been dormant, ever.

This is a false assumption on your part, completely without merit.

We made some updated changes to our system recently and unauthorized obstructions are troublesome. When, how and what we do on our land is our business and you have zero right to presume otherwise.

We were not the one's behaving in a rogue manner, as we are here to respond to a false claim made against us by someone who violated the TOS under the guise of "crying foul".

As you can read, he was quick to fix the situation, once confronted.

i go to see what they are talking about and it seems they own 16 meters in the middl eof amy 44,000 meter mall and she insisted i remove my prim from her land

i had not know her land was there the mall was built when i purchased it and had never been a problem in the past and she will not sell the land to me to go with the 44,000 meters i have on that sim surrounding her


so my only recourse is to create a 44,000 meter add farm around her tree

yea iknow it sucks but when members of the supposable good side wish to create problems such as this instead of selling the land to me she would rather distrupt the build that is there which includes trees and land scaping

Seems it was dormant enough to escape the attention of someone who would buy 44,000 m's with a mall so much for no merit and when you brought your issue into this thread you opened the door for critics of your approach, you don't like it too bad grow up, I don't like your "postage stamp" approach of buying 16m's regardless of any specious reasoning you want to present. You come off like your a reasonable person but claims your not acting in a rogue manner is better left to someone other than yourself or group and I started this thread with a rant , you think I am happy with the situation, guess again. I have already stated its your land do what you want and I support you in that and that only, it doesnt mean I like what you do or how you do it and false claims is a matter of opinion.

I apologize if you were offended, because your motivation is similar to ours. Please understand our need to constantly defend ourselves from being lumped in with ad cutters and extortionists. We saw a perfect example in this thread and multiply it by 100. Then you might understand how we feel. Our treatment of others, our approachablilty and willingness to help is often cast aside because of ignorance and contempt. That scorn is not generated by us, but as a result of the ad cutters and land extortionists.

We are on the *SAME* side of the issue. SL is about technology and networking, every bit as much as it about roleplaying and creativity. We do not and never will advocate ad-cutters, land extortion or block access to anyone. All we ask is to be treated fairly.

What "regional resources"? I'd be more apt to believe the hidden scripts are for locally reading land for sale for use by land bots, as a way around the land search query timeout implemented by LL. It really does raise suspicions when all statements reguarding what those hidden scripts do are canned statements about what they DON'T do, not what they DO do. Granted, it's 100% your business, but you cant expect people to treat your group without a raised eyebrow when there's so much secretive black hat stuff.

We are not in any way associated with landbots.

Mr Herbst
your right i did fix it and remove my prim but since you want to think it was you that cuased it by confrontation iw ill just run my adds to 760 meters and you can crawl your bot all the way up to the top to get in then and float down

just could not let it go could you

The landing point is set on our parcel. We don't care how high your ads go. You and your customers will be the one's looking at it.

BTW, FYI, bots don't have graphics.

your bots do not concern me at all if they are collecting information about my customers that concerns me as its not your busness who is on my land or for how long they are there


basicly your spying on peopel in sl wonder who the list is sold to

Private Messages!

We don't spy on anyone.

We couldn't care less about who comes to your mall.

Back on topic:

I recently expanded my land holdings on the mainland, and had to deal with a bunch of plots surrounding mine which had been cut up by adfarmers. I paid for the cheapest ones, but some of the morons put really ridiculous prices next to a PRIM road one of my neighbors put in as part of his build. it wasn't a Linden road, and only ran the length of his property. The idiots thought it was a real road!

Anyway, one of the adfarmers had an interesting link in his Picks to a place called the Ad Zoo, created by Timo Daehlie. So I popped over and had a look. Basically, he buys up land surrounding ad farms and makes it into a "zoo" of adfarmers and advocates that people NOT buy from the extortionists.

Well, I was impressed with the idea, so I did just that. Made an exhibit in the middle of my courtyard mall, naming and shaming the extortionists with funny little caricatures and notecards basically castigating them and their "business".

He just started this a couple weeks ago, but it is catching on, and I think it is great. It seems to be the best way to deal with them; don't buy their extortive plots, and publicly humiliate them.

On a side note, the Lindens are very aggressive about removing encroaching adfarm prims. Frontier Linden came by on a request from me for a couple prims and pretty much decimated the 40+ plot adfarm next to me. Needless to say, I was very pleased.

The Ad Zoo already has converted at least one former adfarmer.. Marly Tomsen has seen the light and is now selling off all her ad plot land for around fair market value, but has put all the land into a trust group which allows anyone to use the land in the group, at least until it is sold. There is a L$100 fee to join the group, but it is a neat idea. So, kudos to Marly for seeing the light and passing it on!

And they lived happily ever after....

Just stop being drama queens and sell the damn 16m to the guy surrounding it and buy one elsewhere in the sim, otherwise the next 10 bloody years you will be antagonising every new owner, but then again maybe that's something you enjoy or is the drama worth secretly gathering Avatars ID numbers?
It's just coincidence that other peoples landbots use these convenient 16m lots I suppose?
If you don't want to be blocked in buy road or waterside land perhaps, just move on with your lives and put your tier to something that cheezes people off less perhaps. I'm sure you would enjoy having other peoples 16m inside your land when they refuse to sell too.

At least Umnik gave me L$1 because he liked my Afro

Or, and I don't mean to be pessimistic, she could just be gearing up to get a new alt and start all over again.

I don't believe cutters have a soul nor do they care about anyone else unless you come to them with Lindens in hand. They do what they do for one reason only and as long as we continue to feed them, they'll keep cutting and extorting.

It is possible, but unlikely. Some folks got into the business because of naivety and ignorance, not malice. They were told about some business plan, and bought into it, without realizing the downsides. I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt for now, as it appears that she is doing all the right things to redress grievances, including opening up a dialogue with others who have concerns. Something none of the others really care about doing.

Dave.

I'm sorry if this has been addressed before, but I've read the whole thread and I haven't seen it mentioned.

You portray yourself and your partner as being people who bend over backwards to be accommodating to neighbours, so I have a question for you. Was it really necessary to have the prim removed from the middle of the mall's paving for you and yours to access the 16m? Was it impossible for you to access your items with the paving prim there?

The reason I ask is because, if my visualisation of it is correct, then you could easily access your things with the prim there and, if that's the case, then you are definitely not even trying to be accommodating to your neighbor - quite the opposite, in fact - standing on your rights, rather than trying to do what you do without disrupting things for your neighbours. If my visualisation is correct, then you are not what you portray yourself to be. You may like to think you are, but you are not. That's if my visualisation is correct, of course.

I miss Strife........

OMG it's the FBI

You shouldn't talk about such acts of generosity! People might start to think he has a soul.

Why the heck buy a 16m in the middle of a sim? If someone wanted to buy the full sim, you'd be screwing them royal for what reason?

Yeah, I'm really trying to understand, but at the moment, there doesn't seem to be any better a reason than there is for the ad farmers.

In this case, the prim was causing anyone teleporting there to be thrust into the air and locked into a falling animation while continuously rising into oblivion.

Weedy is tasked with preparing our sites to be consistently accessible and performing other tasks such as terraforming holes or peaks to be more fitting with the surroundings, set landing points, access permissions, stream url and a general inspection of the condition of the plot. The visit each of our sites, it takes a few hours just to get through each letter of the alphabet. A and B took a full day. To complete the inventory will take more than two weeks.

The reason for this "manual" inspection, is to prepare the land for an automated system, so we can greatly reduce the time it takes to update our nodes.

When land is blocked, we contact the owner and request they clear the obstruction. Nearly everyone is happy to comply with our request. With an already burdened workload, it is simply not practical to be expected to negotiate alternatives, wait for IM's to be returned or our work would never get done. A simple one line IM, as we did in this case, is usually enough for others to understand we wish our land to be unobstructed. Our group charter is plainly displayed and the greater part of our requests are happily complied with and the surrounding landowners normally prepare a site for trade before responding to us. On occasion, we encounter those who no matter what we do, say or behave, choose to dispute us. We have no reason in the world to create or exacerbate situations which only burden our workload further. That said, we also will not stand for escalated violations of the TOS and refuse to pussyfoot around with those who have no respect for the rules or our rights to use our land base as we choose. You can see for yourself, that Dragger continues to attempt to threaten and intimidate us, where it would have been much simpler to allow us access and offer a trade. In fact, if he was to request a trade, we would be happy to oblige him. Instead, he choses to bite off his nose to spite his face to make a moot point, which only damages his own land and clientel.

It's his land and we are not in the business of telling him what he needs to do with it. We expect the same in return. If Dragger chooses to uglify his own land, we have absolutely no say in the matter, so long as we are not affected.

In this instance, we were affected by his build, unable to move the prim ourselves and it left us with two alternatives. The first being, to IM the owner and request the obstruction be removed. Secondly to abuse report. We prefer to resolve these matters amicably, without Linden involvement. If an adjacent owner is dissatisfied with our presence, it is their burden of responsibility to contact us and present an alternative solution. We are not mind readers, so we have no idea who does and who doesn't care.

It's simply not required nor practical to survey and poll each and every land owner who borders our land, which could be up to 4 per sim. Having 2000 properties, I'm sure you can understand the absurdity in that. This is why we clearly explain our policy in our group's charter.

Despite the abuses, we do not hide our group from view and maintain our policy by continuing to respond to others with trades for other land plots within the same region.

We have made several hundred, if not thousands of trades in the past without a hitch.

We do not feel the need to suffer fools, who choose to ignore the rules to make trouble.

apology accepted

This has been an informative and very entertaining read these past few days.

Interestingly, as I was shopping for houses I saw a guy who sold a Kiosk type structure that could be placed on a 16sqm parcel.

So couldn't somebody legitimately set aside a 16sqm parcel (or 256 of them across Lindon) to place as small info-booth passing out Landmarks to their main shop? Technically it's an ad, and since they would own 256 spread out across Linden, it could also be construed as 'ad farming'. But would this be morally, ethically and intellectually wrong?

It'd be cheaper to list these 256 plots per week than what it costs to place some these classifieds, which if you ask me are also morally, ethically and intellectually challenged in their current state.

And if 16sqm is preventing someone from controlling a whole SIM, can't the same also be said for the person with the sole 512sqm parcel on the SIM?

Don't get me wrong. I don't like ad farmers. And I'm not defending them.

In fact, many months ago I bought some land next to several 16sqm plots. Which I then bought and combined to my plot. So I've made a small contribution to squashing them out.

But I'd hate to see legitimate uses of 16sqm of land go away just because of an over reaction to the current situation. Let the pendulam swing, but don't let it swing so far to the left that we start pulling a 'Hugo Chavez' and grabbing 'corporate' property in the name of the people.

Instead of banning them, it'd be better if they set a height/width limit on them so that they were no longer useful tools for advertising. Although then the guy who cut a few of them out of his mall to have multiple ads in the search going to the TP point, would also suffer.