What is "micro parcel abuse"

Hi everyone

I have seen this term used but do not know exactly what it is referring to. Could someone explain please?

Thanks!

Micro parcels are small parcels where people buy a plot of land, section off a few little bits to sell off out huge prices for their proximity to roads and high traffic areas. You can buy that parcel and put up signs to advertise your area.

There are several types of abuse here - one is the act of selling it for an outrageous amount. I know this was discussed about 6-8 months ago, but since it doesn't affect me, I didn't really follow it and see what the exact rules are.

There is also the type of abuse where you have a very small parcel and and up dominating the lines of sight using megaprims and the like.

And there are also people who will get roadside land, sell you the land one block away from the road and hold onto the land between you and the road (and set it to no entry) thus blocking road/walk-by access to your parcel - and then the kindly offer to sell you the right of way for an outrageous amount of money.

I imagine there are more abusive things that clever people have come up with. But those are the main ones that come to mind.

Micro parcel abuse is a pretty general term that can include ad farming, landcutting (creating a farm of microparcels), and extortion.

There are 2 policies regarding ad farming. The first is that an ad cannot be on a parcel that is also for sale. Lots of ad farmers only did it to put a garish ad on an extremely high priced parcel to annoy a neighbor til they bought the land. The second policy is that there cannot be more than 50 ads per person/group doing the advertising. This is a bit suspect still as there are gobs of purple crystals.

Commercial landcutting is no longer allowed. This would be taking a 512, or a 1024 dividing it into 16s and setting it to sale. Once these were bought they would then be set for sale at even higher prices (like 9999L for a 16... about 624L/m) as well as whatever annoyance possible; extreme terraforming, ban lines etc to try and annoy neighbors into paying to get rid of it.

Extortion is trying to incite the fear that not paying the high price could mean that something worse could come along. Since ads are limited in number it is more worthwhile for advertisers to put them in places where they can get the most out of the space. Things like banlines are no longer allowed on small parcels either.

It would be nice if the Lindens would do something about the cuts where a curb is cut out of the road and set to a high price and the rest dumped to bots. The appeal of Ursula to me is also that maybe people won't hack it up.

Thanks for the responses.

There has been lots of talk about "gaming the search" using traffic enhancers being a TOS violation. There is another way to game the search which is to carve up your land, and then fill your land description up with 1 or 2 keywords and nothing else. So say you sell furniture, you might carve up your region into smaller parts and name all the parts FURNITURE FURNITURE FURNITURE FURNITURE FURNITURE FURNITURE FURNITURE FURNITURE FURNITURE FURNITURE etc. If you couple this with traffic bots you suddenly have all your carved up pieces of land dominating the first page of search and all your competition gets bullied off into the second or third page.

I think this should be considered abusive under the new "no gaming the search" policy. Does anyone know if it already is abuse?

Thanks.