Looking for Help to Formulate a Jira Proposal to Get Rid of Ad Farms

Central planning is central planning, it is always immoral. I did have some neighbors buy a plot next to mine and put up an eyesore. I did the moral thing, I bought the surrounding land and screened them off from view. When an adjoining plot was cut into ads, I bought it up as well. If you don't like what they are doing on their land, Move, Hide the problem or buy them out. Don't call for more restrictions and big government.

And I hate to tell you, your land has always only had the value that the market would pay. The Lindens have done more to destroy land values in the past two weeks then all the ad cutters have in the past year.

And I vote NO on any land restrictions. I don't want zoning and land restrictions in RL, I moved to the area I am in just for that reason, so why in the hell would I want them in SL.

That would be wonderful indeed; but what is that social solution?

(Just in passing, though, I don't think I understand the premise. Seems to me that, once something has a technical solution, it's no longer thought to have been a social problem. Like polio, for example. Or that social scourge, the heresy of heliocentrism. But I'm pretty sure I'm just missing the point.)

Most people would probably disagree with you.

Broccoli

Most people are sheep who choose security over liberty. I choose not to be a sheep.

Somebody make a 10x10 sign/wall (modifiable) with the large words "DO NOT SUPPORT AD FARMS!" on it and give that out for free. Maybe a social movement could be that anybody living next to ad farms can pick one of these signs/walls up and erect it against the ad farm. As long as the sign/wall is on the owners property, it isn't ARable by the ad farm owner, right? It will really decrease the value of ad farms if everybody started doing this.

........

The better solution is to stop buying "mainland" from Linden Labs. Linden Labs offers no convenants, no security, and their land sells at premium prices. This I do not understand. Before trying a rules solution, try a capitalist solution. Buy the best product available.

Most people can't afford to own private islands. And many people don't like renting (from island owners or otherwise). Ownership of land is the best product available, which is ONLY available on the mainland if you don't have much to spend.

That "best product" is fraught with different kinds of risks - namely fraud, or the sim owner selling the island and leaving the game. Which leaves you SOL if you "bought" that plot.

One thing I do is IM the offending avatars and let them know how much I dislike their way of making money in SL. It's an antisocial solution, but at least it plants a seed that residents aren't just sitting back silently while they mutilate the landscape. Sometimes I get a newbie who actually thinks about stopping the madness.

I don't like those Boycott adfarms signs. Two ugly signs don't make a pretty view.

As far as blocks of ad farms go; I don't know that it's not fair to regulate who/where/when/how people can build ad farms (say, on a 512 block cut into chunks.) Like Chris says, people can always buy them up. What I do have a problem with is the long strips of spinning adverts all along the SL roadways. It's a nightmare to peer down what would be a lovely lane, and see only spinning shit for as far as the eye could see.

I don't see that removing 128 or below from Search/Land would actually stop people from making ad farms.

I'd be more inclined to go with the parcel division proposal, only because I honestly can't see any good reason to slice a parcel down to 16 m. People argue that "the ad farmers will just put ads on 512s" but I really doubt it. The ad farmers know exactly what they're doing. If you go and price out all those 16 m lots, they range anywhere in price from $L104 to sky high L$10,000 a piece. At ONLY the very lowest price (L$104) those parcels are selling for market value of land (L$6.5/m last I checked). Many are priced around L$330 to L$1000; this means that the ad farmers are getting at least THREE TIMES the market value. They know this. They could give a fig about the adverts themselves. They want to sell those lots to pissed off people like us.

Just one girl's opinion.

BTW, you don't have to just pick one of those choices in JIRA. You can vote for all three.

I am totally agains the ad farms. I'd like to see it so you can't *sell* anything smaller than 256 or 512, but...

For my Mall sim, I have a 16m2 parcel cut for each shop in the mall so they can have a direct landing point, a place to hang a classified ad with a direct landing point and an included search-places listing. If I had to try to cust 256 or 512 parcels in a manner so that each store had such a landing point, I'd never manage it, not and keep the same flavor the mall has now.

Further, if this restriction extended to estate sims, goodbye sidewalks and so forth on my standard prim sims as I use 16m2 'anchor' plots that are set to the group that are small cut outs from the resident lots to sit root prims on, holding the sidewalks, trees, streetlamps and so forth.

There are very legitimate uses of 16m2 parcel cuts, but the ad farms... well, when you see a that much advertising jumbled together, you just don't see it, you just see noise. I'm not quite certain why the advertisers don't get that. You need your product, your image, your voice, to stand alone and shine, so the ad farms are designed by the greedy and populated by the ignorant.

Every now and then I go find a small one that hasn't got insane prices and spend the five to ten usd it costs to buy it up with the spare change mainland tier I have leftover from my mall group bonus. Doesn't amount to much in the grand scheme of things, but hopefully I've made a few people's view a little better (at the expense of lining some ad farmer's pocket, but I can't win both directions at this time).


Char

"Getting rid of Ad Farms" by limiting how we all can use our land isn't the answer. By limiting the use of 16m parcels, you will solve one issue and create a host of others. As has been said above - there are some legitimate uses for 16m parcels.

Instead of dictating to folks what they can or can't do with their land, I think it would be more productive to vote for Jira proposals that deal with the effects.

One suggestion: Parcel Mute. If there's an ad farm in your neighborhood, we should be able to mute it - causing all *objects* on that parcel to fail to render. Bonus points if you had the ability to customize the experience for anyone that visits your land.

A Jira proposal very similar to this is VWR-1017:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1017

That's the ticket!

My group bought 240 of a 256 plot that had been carved of right on a Linden 'canal' joining two Linden water sims. The other 16 seems to belong to a group that don't use the plots for advertising.
The person who bought 'for cheep' remainder of the original larger plot had put up a dirty great wall to hide the ads from his view.
At the time of buying, the ads had gone.
64 m for L$2950 - initials GM
160m for L$1600 - initials RS
16m for L$200 - initials WH

Thee are adjacent plots of the same characteristics as the original uncut on for sale. I suppose the same thing will go on in those. Hi Nina!

It is extortion. It is ugly and sickening.



WHAT TO DO?
1) Penalise people with a very high ratio of 16m plots to the total area owned??
- NO, ad-farmers will standardise to 32m plots. It's easy to run two spinners in one plot.
2) Move the goalpost to 32m plots?
- NO, ad-farmers move with that. Where their current 16m plots are fragmented in larger farms, they cooperate to swap around to make the plots above the limit.
3) Rinse and repeat

Meanwhile, people who have small plots for non-advertising, non-extortion will get hit.

I don't believe that action against holders of small plots will have the desired effect. Al that happens is that complexity and bugs get introduced - and the wrong people get hit.



I think the only practical solution is to activate 'the community'.

= Help people to use their land to block off ad farms from view as far as possible.
Have a free kit with documentation
Have mentors available to help people build the screens
Recruit artists to create attractive or interesting screens
Have competitions and prizes for the best-looking screens. Make it a game. Have fun.

= Campaign against merchants who advertise via ad farms
Mass gatherings at merchants premises.
Have dirty great spinners as attachments. Just stand there catching up on IMs and organising inventory. Have hundreds of avatars standing by for when the merchant bans the people already there. Keep rolling them in.

I agree. Parcel mute would be a great idea.

I got into a pissing contest with an ad plot owner when I, who owned the land around the entire plot, chose to block it out with huge phantom prims. They seem to forget that the same way they don't like their view is the same way I don't like their view. They summarily spammed with particles, "Blocking other people's land isn't pretty." I have three words for that. The first one is "Go" and the last one is "yourself." LL eventually removed the particle generator, except for the one spewing straight upwards.

this would create a whole new form of griefing. image the fun some ppl would have if they could determine what your viewer rendered. and me visually blocking adfarms from my viewer does nothing to address the issue of land devaluation. thats a catch-22.

Not what I mean...

What I'm saying is: If someone visits *your* parcel, *you* decide what is rendered around your visitors when they are visiting your parcel.

Right now - we can parcel mute text. If I land-ban someone from my parcel, their shouts from outside my parcel are automatically muted for all visitors currently on *my* parcel.

That same behavior should extend to the rendering of objects. If it did, it would significantly address the whole issue of land devaluation - because you could control the experience *for your visitors*.

I disagree. What you can't see, can't hurt you. If you can mute the object, so can the person buying your plot.

yeah, i understand this. and i also realise that people will use this to annoy people. its bad enough that people can cam into my home. i dont really want my neighbours to be able to make my walls full on invisible for everyone that crosses their parcel.

so would you pay the same $ for a parcel next to an adfarm then? esp knowing everyone that tp's from the landsale search will be greeted by the adfarm nextdoor?

I do agree with Strife and Travis that this is a social issue and therefore not be truly regulated... as a registered Libertarian, I'm all for non-interference by ruling parties. This side of me likes the parcel mute option.

On the other hand, the "I just wanna enjoy the freakin view and not watch my land devalue" side of me wants to eliminate the means and ways of creating ad farms altogether.

It's a tough coin to flip. The only possible moral way that I can see to end this (apart from riding the ad farmers out of town on a rail) is to start a massive letter writing campaign to all the RL companies who advertise on the farms. Chances are probably pretty high that the dumb ass in the RL marketing firm has been to SL once and thinks that ad farms are a great idea.

Once the funding for the spinners themselves dry up, maybe the ad farmers won't be as keen to slice and dice... Just a thought.

Well, I'm voting for all jira items that stand a ghost of a chance of making the slightest difference. If they're confiscatory to the adfarmers, gosh, what a shame. I just can't be bothered anymore by the lame crypto-anarchist arguments about the inalienable right to virtual private property.Please.

Oh, besides ARing any adfarm prim that looks like it might have anything to do with gambling, the other "social" solution I know is to make sure every parcel has a Clocktower Network probe--residential or commercial, Mainland or island. Yeah, the slimelords will use alts, but having them slither about under false pretenses is only fitting.

Good points, both. There is no easy answer. I hear estate owners rejoicing somewhere.

What exactly does a Clocktower probe DO? I've seen them around...

It automatically updates the ban list on your land to ban known ad farmers.

The Arbor Project does a good job of making sure the names on the list are known repeat offenders. They don't just add anyone who has an ad plot.