The Answer is "NO"

Dakota wins this thread for me. Good reasoning based on what was written in the thread, not making assumptions.

The "it is what it is" attitude masks facts that make a difference at how to look at Dave and Weedy's position. It may have become a donut thanks to aggressive buying by Ewan. That's Ewan's problem, and Ewan's choice, not Dave and Weedy's. That 16m parcel wasn't doing anything to obstruct the view, and as we've seen, they don't even collect avatar information. So it's only a "pain" because of Ewan's hatred of all small parcels, regardless of their usage.

LL didn't come by his land and say, Oh look, Ewan, you should do something about this donut hole! It is because Ewan complained (after treating Weedy badly), and yet another Linden without all the facts stepped into a resident dispute and adjudicated it.

The point is that Ewan is not entitled to own land adjacent to his, especially if the only reason he surrounds Dave's parcel is because he aggressively bought out the land in the sim. This sense of entitlement (and lack of respect) is exactly why BB wouldn't deal, and LL was wrong to appease a bully.

BB is sensitive to the fact and they normally do have consideration. I don't know all the circumstances under which they wouldn't trade, but I don't care - if you want to live peaceably, you have to have a little respect for your neighbors. You can't demand that they give you their land. See, e.g., DWR in this thread.



Yeah, and we know how well that usually works out.

Did you terraform the sim to make the 16M plot look malicious? If you did then that's where the accusations of a false AR are coming from.

When we first purchased the land it was all it maximum, ours was, his was, that's the way guy Linden saw it. And the way it is in the photo that I sent in the notecard requestiing the swap and that I forwarded to Jack with ref number since he had been involved already. So all land was level when i was instructed to AR so it really doesn't matter, that was not the crux of the abuse report.



A few days later the 16 was lowered, I was furious that the land had been lowered but that I hadn't been contacted, someone actually going to the trouble of doing that. The optimal position for the land for me was fully sunk to expose the water on the plot, something we couldn't do when we purchased the land. I mean, if you seriously think any land trader wants to keep land at its maximum height at the expense of showing water on a plot, you need to have a look at land prices.

Before the parcel (16) was traded it was "reverted" by Guy Linden.

Anyway, I should stop posting I know but what we bought, when we bought it even if pushed what we paid or sold it is available, I keep a record of it all. I've only stated facts here, in the face of someone who has claimed that I owned the plot for a year and put content against there plot and that they wouldn't trade to make a stand or some political point. If what i said didn't happen I certainly wouldn't be offering facts and names of people I spoke to regarding this incident.

On the other hand, Dave Herbst described the steps Ewan went through to set up the AR, and Ewan didn't deny them in any of his comprehensive and voluminous rebuttals, so I rather suspect the facts were as Dave described them. If that's the case, it sure seems LL acted on the basis of manufactured evidence.

How does one aggressively buy one parcel? Do you hit the buy one button extra ferociously or something? Maybe taunt the about land window.

Ewan now denies this happened. Do you have any corroborating evidence?

If I was using the terraforming as an excuse to AR why would I use a snapshot showing level ground?



Seems pretty stupid to not show the only reason I had for supposed "fraudulent AR's" no? This plot was seen at least on the 26th, 29th and 31st of March by Guy Linden, the first time he saw it all land was level and told me to AR it if I was ignored. On the 29th he reverted the plot, on the 31st he reclaimed the doughnut hole, reclaimed 16m from me in the corner of the sim that I had set aside, set Daves old plot to sale to me and my old plot for sale (for L$0) to Dave. Sounds like the actions of an effective estate manager to me.

Personally, I think that they both lost. :-/

It's like beating up an old lady; there's no glory in victory, and only ignominy in defeat. The problem is they were both beating up the old lady.

I don't think you have enough evidence to state this as a fact. They may very well indeed have cut the parcel back 4-5 years ago.



This is true, to my knowledge, but said landcutters are a newer phenomenon than BBH's activities, so it is likely that many of their original 16s were actually cut by them. At the time, it wasn't a big deal. More importantly, it isn't the issue.



Unfortunately, this isn't true. Land extortionists, adfarmers, et cetera "merely own" a LOT of parcels. The new policy does not recognize that as a defense anymore. If you own microparcels in the middle of someone else's land, no matter how that came to be, you will be asked to "get rid of it", meaning sell, trade, or abandon. If you don't, then LL will do it for you. That's the whole point of the policy, because the remaining extortionists are falling back to any and all possible defenses to avoid losing their leverage against their neighbors. As such, the new policy was designed to "fix" the problem by putting an end to any/all defenses they can fall back to. Pretty much shining the light of mitigation in all nooks and crannies where the cockroaches try to hide.

Sadly, it does come with some side effects; namely, this situation. However, the gains versus the losses are very acceptable, in my opinion. Unless Dave would like to explain otherwise, there is no technical disadvantage to complying with the policy regarding his plots.



Honestly, I don't know what happened, and there is enough immaturity on both sides that the "3 sides to every story" rule should be observed by anyone and everyone. No one involved in the dispute has acted professionally, as one would expect of a "business". As such, any and all claims by either side against the other are suspect. There is plenty of blame to go around, including responsibility for misunderstandings and miscommunications.



It may not have been their "fault", but it wasn't a matter of "fault", it was a matter of new rules and compliance. Just like in RL, where laws change; you have to keep yourself apprised of the changes and comply accordingly. Otherwise, you get ganked for it. One of the core rules of running a business is keeping oneself knowledgeable about the law, and any changes that affect it. According to the government, it isn't their responsibility to go out of their way to notify you; they make the law and publish it for all to see. At that point, ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Asshatery or no, following the law is necessary. If an asshat is in the right, it doesn't matter; he/she is still right.



When it comes to "resident disputes" involving policy compliance, they have every right to intervene. The new rules were put in place to stop microparcel owners, regardless of stated intent or purpose, to not obstruct or otherwise degrade the usefulness of larger land holders. LL decided, after a long, arduous debate and discussion spanning more than a year, to implement a policy which solves this particular problem for all parties involved when they can't come to an agreement themselves.

Thus, according to LL's stated policy, they acted in the best interests of everyone involved, including LL itself, even if all parties don't agree for whatever reason.

I'm in a similar situation with BBH myself. However, I have a pre-arranged deal with Weedy to swap parcels once I have the parcel I want to swap with her. However, if that changes, and I can't swap out the hole in my land with another (which is a much better location for them) because of posturing, then I will be forced to go the AR route with LL as well. I certainly don't want to go that route, and I have no attitude or other issues with Dave/Weedy/BBH to want to make me go that route. To me, it is a simple matter of sensibility. I'm not going to send them any kind of "hate mail" over it. Just ask for the swap and, failing that (after all reasonable attempts have been made), I'll take the option of last resort.

That is why this whole posturing thing is silly. BBH wasn't really harmed at all, and throwing it back on everyone else isn't doing them or anyone else any good. It is like closing your store because you had a customer go bad. Well, that's business. Some businesses attract bad customers more than others; it's a fact of life.

No, because you can own one in 32 sims and cause the 32x the level of disruption for the same price. As you pay more tier, the cost drops to a far less amount as well.

That's the difference.

Ewan never asked Weedy, ever.

Several months prior (as Ewan alluded to here) He sent a demand letter to Weedy.

That note was arrogant and offensive. Ewan was 100% unflexible and was verbally abusive when Weedy explained our policy as she always does. Ewan would have nothing of it.

The abuse and harassment never stopped, for months.

Then a few days ago, Ewan drops a note on me. The one you read here.

I'm aware of his attacks on her, so I put him on mute too, then went to the land to inspect.

Weedy went there and investigated the land after Ewan's savage attack and note handouts in the Arbor Group and the land was level, when she saw the extreme lowered land on my screen, both of us thought the same thing,

Afterall, someone who purports to be so concerned about the appearance of their land, why would they extremely lower their land to give our parcel the appearance of a spire?

Ewan uses the "blockage" of his land in Shark as an excuse, to fabricate an abuse report and he used terraform in another sim, in an unrelated incident.

I levelled the land to match his terraform.

Then a day later, why would he raise the land to the extreme height?

He did it to give the appearance of a hole. Nothing more.

He did it to frame us with false AR's, nothing more.

First:

Now:

Dave, old bean, I don't quite follow. Are you talking about two incidents or one now?

At this stage, why do you even care?

All that matters really is what LL did, and frankly, I can't really see the problem with their actions. It's not like they displaced someone's home.

Much ado about nothing.

This is not the first time Ewan has done this.

He did it in another sim, months ago .... Alexsandr is his second go-round.

Did you make the terraforming changes he claims you made or not? I'm not asking whether it was terraformed back to normal when Guy came by or when you took the snapshot, or whether it would be stupid, just... did you do it?

I also don't see the building he said you claimed was blocked in that photo, either. Did it ever exist or not?

Oh by the way, the first time he pulled this scam, it was with a roadside plot, so there was no donut, he just felt entitled to our land for no other reason.

Looks like nobody scores here.

Ok, I've been trolling this thread and have heard enough crap here.

I've had dealings in the past with Ewan, and I am not impressed with his business ethics.

Last year when I was developing my landbot software, Ewan gave me a code snippet of a very basic landbot that he found. He gave me this in a notecard which I still have.

The code snippet he gave me was old, outdated and unusable.

Now, last week, I noticed that he was selling a "barron in a box", which included source code for an advanced landbot.

But, what he was selling was code that I had written!

When I confronted Ewan about this, he said that HE gave ME the code! NOT TRUE!

Well, what he was selling was NOT even close to the borked code snippet he gave me.

I programmed my landbot software from scratch and it looks nothing like the code he gave me....but he was insisting that the code he was selling was code that HE developed. I'm sorry Ewan, but you couldn't code your way out of a paper bag.

How did he get my source code? Well, I gave copies of my landbot source code to a few people who bought licenses to my software. I gave my source to selected individuals to show my integrity by allowing people to examine my script for malicious code and to allow my users to tweak the code if necessary.

So, Ewan got his hands on my source code, and was selling it, and was telling people that HE coded it.

He then had the nerve to write in his product discussion that I was a "Griefing Competitor".

I spoke to someone who purchased his "barron in a box" and she was very upset when she found out that Ewan wasn't the developer of this software.

Ewan's "Barron in a Box" is no longer available on SLX...I suspect that the person who bought it AR'd him for it. She was pretty upset that he was selling a product that he didn't develop.

So Ewan, don't act like you're a saint or anything. You can't fool everyone....I told you right from the start that "shit was going to hit the fan" over this. I asked you to stop selling my code and what did you do? You muted me and then called me a greifing competitor.

Now your running around like a chicken head spewing garbage about "clicking the search button"....lol. BUSTED!

So, all in all, I'll have to side with Dave and Weedy on this one. Good luck with your future endeavors Ewan.

zg

That's the sad part Argent.

We warned LL many years ago about the threat of ad cutters. A few years back, Lazarus reared his ugly head. We all know these warnings were unheeded and the inevitable resulting mess.

Fortunately for LL, Lazarus was his own worst enemy, and managed to meltdown on his own after a year or so of terror. That meant LL was off the hook and continued to turn a blind eye our warnings.

Well again, we all know what the result was. The ROBOs, Umniks et all proliferated. This is years after we started our operation.

From the get-go, we never had any need to cut land. We bought reasonably cheap land available to us on the land list. It was never our our intention mess with anyone's experience. In fact, we make every effort keep the lowest possible profile on the grid. Unlike the ad cutters who's "in your face" extortion tactics persist in other forms to this day.

Most people Weedy has dealt with in the past have been very nice. For the longest time, Weedy actually really enjoyed doing this, because it got her out of her shop and into the world to meet new people and see new things. The same applies to her radio business. She very much enjoys attending to their support needs.

The situation with Ewan did not stem from nothing, he has a long unfavorable history with her.

This thread has become a case of he said/he said. Dave and Ewan, it's obvious that no agreement can happen here, so why continue to make yourselves miserable?

Dave I understand your frustration on the actions of LL. But for your own peace of mind, you might consider calling it a loss with Ewan, collect your moved parcel and move forward. THERE is life after this.

If all else fails.. turn off the computer and get some sun. Clears the mind and then you can return refreshed.


Good luck everyone.

I wish that was so.

As I've said before, Ewan was only a last straw to an issue that's been building.

The result of this, is going to be bad for us for a few reasons. First of all, it targets us for more of the same.

We have no way to protect ourselves from those who will knowingly agressively buy large amounts of land. Ewan used this tactic as a means to an end to create a complaint against us. We didn't create the donut, he did.

Donuts are not new to us, we've fixed hundreds, possibly thousands. Next to the Arbor Project, I seriously doubt that any other group in SL has been more procative fixing the mainland than ours.

It's patently wrong, that residents should exploit the AR system to threaten us.

It's patently wrong, that LL intervene in disputes between residents and take our land without the decency of notice.

Never once has Linden Lab acknowledged our efforts to fix the mainland.

You wrote libsl from scratch?

Anyway yeah I'm evil, you found me out guys. It was all me.

This should clarify a few things below.

We had a go-round with Jack over this matter.

In his first support ticket response, we found this part objectionable and appealed it.



There were no resolution attempts for months, only demands. To even begin to suggest, that we must not mute abusers and comply with their demands was unacceptable, especially where no rules have been broken.

In his follow up, Jack removed this accusation.

This was Jack latest:



We are exonerated of any wrongdoing.

In this response, for anyone to suggest "we must have done something wrong, because they took action" ought to watch what they say about our group from now on.