Bye bye adfarmers?

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/02/13/mainland-and-the-ad-farm-problem/

"Using content, particularly advertising, to deliberately and negatively affect another resident’s view so as to sell a parcel for an unreasonable price, will be deemed unacceptable and dealt with as a violation of our community standards. "

Shall we all put on our AR hats now, or later?

Edit: The blog says there will be a knowledge base article coming out tomorrow with advice on the best way to abuse report these - it may be a good idea to wait and see what LL deems is the most effective way to AR them, to bring about the desired result.

Sweet...! Now the ad farmers will be between a rock and hard place.

Yay! About time

Just read that in my blog subscription.

One word: w00t

It definitely will hit the most obvious nuisance adgriefers hard, but I don't think it will do much to the majority of those who cut/buy 16s for inflated resale.

Some will resort to hiding the fact that they will sell at an increased rate in the land description, or in their profiles, stating to "contact them if you are interested in the plot"

Possibly even just waiting for you to contact them.

I was wondering if the plot had to be registered for sale or if they could offer it for sale in the description. What if it's for sale at a reasonable price? What's a reasonable price? Will the ad farmers learn what the price threshold is and just keep buying low and selling at say L$30 per sq. m.?

--Hugsy

I would say, AR it and let the Lindens determine that. Perhaps we'll have more clarification in their knowledgebase post.

Linden Lab resisted doing anything about this for nearly two years. Our outraged cries became too loud so they had to band-aid the situation to quiet the masses. Let's keep pushing for real solutions.

This is a great start.

The rights of the lowest common denominator now no longer trump the rights of everyone else.

This is encouraging news! Yay!

the final push was prolly that adfarm on the corner of 3 auction sims no one would buy wich they couldn`t reclaim without some rulings

blog of the year anyway, maybe now mainland will get some value back

Well, the adfarmers are certainly scurrying around tonight. Got a couple prims returned to me from ad parcels that had been set without autoreturn at least 6 months ago (little phantom transparent things just to keep the parcels from filling with griefer prims). And I see some parcels have been taken off the market.

This will be interesting. I have the feeling the adfarmers still don't quite get how fed-up LL is with them, and how unlikely they'll find much sympathy on appeal. So, we'll see if they get the message before suspensions turn into account closures.

After a few of those, the AR volume will reduce. Some encouragement there, if one were a Liaison.

Lets just give props to the Lindens for such a good move. It may take some time to get the rules worked out, but its a good 1st step.

I'm talking about the situation where the AR fails because while the parcel is priced kinda high, it's not high enough to be deemed extortion. Ad farmers might not go away so much as change their "business" model.

--Hugsy

So that would explain why my extortionist took down his lame builds.

i am hopeful, but not optimistic.

Well, at least it will be better than the way it is now...

Prices that are "kinda high" doesn't sound, IMO, like what Jack is going after.

What price do you think would be an "unreasonable" (using the word the blog uses) one? 2x the going L$/m2 rate? 5x? 10x?

Cross-post of my comment at Massively on the matter:

I agree. I think this policy will make things better. Some ad farms should go away and others should be more affordable to buy out.

--Hugsy

I happy they are doing this.
I guess the Lindens really do listen.
Now how they are going to enforce this not sure.
Now only if they could find a better way to deal with content theft.
With all the creative people here got to be way to advertise on those lots I have always thought in classier, more appealing way that doesn't assault the senses and view

What *I* think is an unreasonable price is irrelevant to the application of the policy. What there has to be, though, is someone at LL to make that determination. It may be in a double top secret document that only LL employees see or it may be an off-the-cuff decision made by the Linden responding to an AR. Somewhere there's going to be a line (perhaps a moving one) and the ad farmers may (probably will?) try to figure out where that is.

--Hugsy

it`s a start

we`ll have to see how it`s implemented and where the line will be set but atleast the ball is *finally* started to roll on this issue

time will tell but anything better then how it is now...