How bad would it be to have CAPTCHAS surrounding both sides of land transference?

Would having captchas both for putting land for sale and for buying land, as well as for accepting a purchase (the current owner accepting their land was bought), be prejudicial, directly or indirectly, to regular people (not land barons/land speculators/whatever) ?

I actually like this idea, but i doubt it would be popular...At least not with land barons.

It would be annoying.

Some people do rely on land bots when they want to quickly offload some tier and don't want to just abandon the land.

*sigh* Right now, with the adult land issue, I'd have to say, no thank you to the CAPTCHAs. We're gonna need the bots to buy up the bargain prices and land barons to sit on the tier for a bit.

Otherwise, during "normal" Linden Business hours, I'd say, yes, for the buying only. I don't see the need for one for putting it up for sale, nor do I see the need for it as confirmation.

Google this

Some time later this year land sales are supposed to move over to the web, and we're also supposed to get the ability to auction off our own land as a part of that. It would be nice to see how the new interface will look, so we can see if the same pitfalls will even be there, or if there will be new and improved pitfalls.

I think this could work well if it was optional - the seller chooses whether to use it or not depending on how quickly they want to offload land. I'm not sure I see the point of the seller doing a CAPTCHA ... what am I missing?

I'd also like the option of setting land for sale to anybody (so it shows yellow on the map and comes up in search) but require potential buyers to IM the seller to arrange the sale. That would give sellers more control over who bought the land (you could advertise for, say, educational users or residential only, or whatever) without having to set it for sale to one specific resident. This could help some sort of zoning and community building happen in an organic way.

Of course, if either of these were made compulsory, they would be a right PITA.

Just curious...is it really sad that I had to Google "CAPTCHA"??

Right. A very minor nit, maybe: I don't think all land sales will *move* to the web; last we heard from Jack, they were trying to do something that was both in-world and web based, although I have no idea what, nor for what kind of sales. (I can imagine a pretty cool in-world+web land auction thing, but it would take some work.) I'm really eager for auctions of resident-owned land; if they get that right, it could change that business a lot.

To the point of the thread, though, I'm not clear on the objective here. Just to screen out the less sophisticated landbot runners? I mean, this would be no barrier to the big guys, one of whom has publicly stated his contingency plan for an in-world "mechanical turk" to crack CAPTCHAs if they were to be used. (I mean, he's a nice guy and all, but do we really want to give him a monopoly?)

would there really be enough people to manually fill captchas outside of SL for that guy's landbot to work with the required speed?

The idea as I understand it was to use SL people to do it, kinda like a cross between camping and Amazon's Mechanical Turk. It would likely require visiting an external website (I would suppose, anyway), so probably some URL-delivering HUD or something.

[EDIT: Wait, what "required speed?" This isn't to steal land out from under people screwing up transfers because they can't be bothered to read the scary instructions; it's just to buy land at a rate competitive with everybody else's bots. Which would presumably be quite a bit quicker than the seller having to wait around until some human stumbled on the listing in Land For Sale.]

One of Jack's claims is that "by the end of 2009 Land Bots will cease to work as far as buying up parcels is concerned" so it's not clear if something like captcha would even be desired or not. If the revised interface makes if easy to sell land to the highest bidder, and if sales to specific avatars turn out to be less error-prone, then there may not be a real problem for captchas to address. Would it really be a problem if automated buyers kept buying up land, if there was also some kind of assurance it was deliberately dumped by the sellers?

My thoughts are that if they were to introduce a way of transferring land in and out of groups along with the associated tier without needing to resort to the land sale mechanism then there would be no need for any more protections on land purchasing.
It is way better than it used to be, way better.

What specific problems are people still experiencing that a CATCHPA would solve?

a while back it wasn't rare I see someone comenting how people loose land to landbots even with all warnings, I'm not sure if nowadays there are still people that have that happen to them

one of the things that motivated me to create this thread was some more recent comments about the impact on land prices for non-landbaron people that landbots have, from what I understood, without landbots (or any other automated land "purchase"/"sale" systems) the land market would be more profitable for people in general

With land as low as it is now, doesn't it really show that the impact is minor? After all wouldn't the prices be held much higher if land barons had a choice?

I don't remember the exact words, and even though it sounded like it made sense I didn't really understood 100% of the underlying gears of the idea, but the impression that stayed on me was that people that understand complex economic interactions believed that it would be more profitable for regular people, they didn't focused on land prices in average, but on people not-landbarons making money in the market much more easily



I'm not saying that would or wouldn't be the case, I'm just mentioning the random bits of fuzzy info that inpired me to come and see if people could foresee any negative impacts trying to restrict land transfers to only live humans

There are (at least) two different objectives here, then. One is to (further) reduce the temptation to mistakenly give away one's land to bots during an arranged transfer. At least that objective doesn't have a downside, but CAPTCHAs seem overkill for that--just a five minute (or so) delay in pushing the listing to Search would keep the bots away.

The other objective, of returning to humans the process of buying at the very bottom of the land market, I really think is anachronistic. It just removes a (not all that advanced) bit of automation from the process. We could remove point-to-point teleporting, too, and everything would slow down, but it wouldn't change the market. (It would reward those with the best flying skills, and that might be amusing, but it doesn't do the ultimate buyer or seller any favors.)

There are plenty of opportunities for botless humans to make L$s in the land market by finding land that has more value than the bots can recognize, priced below market. But it takes more work than scanning the cheapest crap on the Search listings, and requires more smarts than a bot.

I hate CAPTCHAS with a passion unmatched. My bloody eyes are too weak to see the stupid things, so I always stumble over them. I weep, weep at the mere idea.

I am not a land baron, nor a land speculator. I might be a whatever, as that appears to be poorly defined.

for CAPTCHAs that come up in Firefox, I use the Image Zoom extension ( http://ImageZoom.yellowgorilla.net/ ), with my own vision difficulties that is usually enough

No.
It was not very long ago when I had to.
It's not like it is a household word after all.