Our favorite little adfarmer takes aim at Linden Lab auction Sims

Here it is:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/atashiyue/2245648564/

I do agree with Raymond. Originally we thought we only needed one sim -- Necros. But we ended up doing everything we could to preserve the view and ended up buying much of the surrounding region. And it's so worth it!

Because a bot sets the land for sale at a high price initially to give us time to do returns in case it was sold in error. It then decreases the price every few hours.

Wow. Amazing. And likely to backfire sooner than later. I don't believe any business would allow such practises to continue indefinitely.

Good lord. Well, okay, I was afraid it would come to this.

So, just how much of an inconvenience would it be if it were made impossible to combine disjoint plots (those that don't share a border) into a single parcel?

In addition to preventing this new scam, such a prohibition would make more effective the proposals specific to parcel size, notably the price caps by size proposal.

I've sometimes used this ability to join disjoint plots as a minor shortcut for managing parcel permissions, blacklist bans, etc., but at least in my limited usage, it wouldn't be a big deal to have to do it on separate parcels. (Has no effect on prim count limits, of course.) Would it be a big problem for anybody else?

Yup - I use the Arbor Project's probe to populate my ban list and if I couldn't join plots that weren't adjacent, I would have to deploy a separate one on every single little parcel I own in Disl, using up the prim count that I bought the land for in the first place.

Edit:
One more thing, if you want to look at joining larger non-adjacent lots. At the store in Lilypad, we own some non-adjacent land for prims and a workshop but joined it to the store so we can apply the traffic from our workshop to our store traffic.

Of course, I could be the only person who does these sorts of things.

Riback 216,165,117

That's standing on the roof of the remains of one of the villas built over the Hax ransom 16m plots.
Ownership has changed, and parts of both villas have disappeared.
The parts that have not disappeared are the ones covering the ransom plots.

But - things have got curiouser!

Last night, when you stood over the ransom plot, About Land showed that you were on a 16m parcel.
Tonight, it tells you that you are on a 512m parcel.
Step away a bit (out of the 16m plot) and it still says that you are on a 512 parcel.

That's REALLY sneaky/coincidental!
The only clue (apart from turning of Simple in rendering types and seeing the Property Lines in View) is that the Land Description changes in your title bar.

"Someone" has joined that 16m plot with some other 16m plots into a 512m plot.
The result of that is that it has become more difficult to detect the ransom plot.


Does anyone know of a connection between the current owner of the 16m ransom plot (of a 512m overall parcel) and the current owner of the 512-16 plot (of a 512m overall parcel) that surrounds it?


I wonder if this 4096 in Riback is the most egregious example of the works of the dregs of SL?

This is like... evil genius.

And as such, we probably haven't hit bottom yet.

The flaw I see is that these practises are so provocative, they will bring about their own end. A lower level of antagonism would make the whole 16m parcel extortion thing last longer. So I don't think profit is the motive here.

It's almost like a Bond movie - the villain's flaw is clearly in the flaunting of newer and greater schemes, at the ultimate expense of winning overall.

This one individual is likely to substantially influence the way that over 20% of the grid is run. A dangerous game. Virtual world service providers are almost universally known for using sledgehammers, when a jeweler's screwdriver is the proper tool to solve a social problem. We may land in a dictatorship by virtue of trying to cure anarchy.

For the sake of clarity..

It isn't Hax who is disguising the ransom plots. When he set them up, they were in plain physical view - well, they were if one had Property Lines on in View.

Someone else (go see yourselves for the name) has built over the ransom plots.
Someone else ( ditto) has joined a series of separate ransom plots into a 512 parcel in a way that makes it more difficult to detect the still-existing ransom plots that they now own.
It's enough to make me voom-it.

Hax's exploit has spawned a new cancer and others appear to be piggy-backing on it. This might be because they want others to be the end victims of their own mistakes, or it might be that they see profit in Hax's creation.

ANy way you look at it, it's evil, and it appears to be infectious evil.

Every peice of virtual land has at one point been paid for tier, land fees, the lindens that bought the land until its abandoned or sold. The only time its not making money for them is when it has been abandoned or the owner quits paying.
That why Lindens are auctioning more abandon land.

Connery as Bond: "I apologize, Goldfinger; it's an inspired plan!"



This is absolutely where it's going, in my opinion. Although, I really can't think of many babies we're going to miss when they throw out this bathwater. The innocent should have very little to worry about here.

I agree. We'll get the usual LL is taking too much control and "The sky is falling" threads but in the end it would have very little impact on the average citizen except in a good way.

I have looked carefully and made a map of this phenomenon. In fact there are two kinds of "secret 16s". The ones next to the multi-16 parcels have an isolated 16m in the middle, but are extended to make them 512 by joining with one of the 16s in the multi-16 block. These four are bad enough, but ... the other six are arranged so that each apparent 512 has a 16 inside which is not part of it, but belongs to a different apparent 512. They are arranged in two cycles so that the 16 in the middl;e of the last is connected with the outer 496 of the first. The result that the about land says 512 whether you are on the "secret 16" or not. This is a bit garbled. I have a map, but I don't know how to make it available.

PS. actually its is one cycle of the six plots, not two.

It's worth noting that when Hax set up the scam, the internal 16s were stand-alone 16s for sale at 2000 each.
The linking of those internal 16s has been done by others, who bought the plots from Hax

At least if you click on About Land to see the boundaries you can also see the 16m doughnut hole. Main thing is to find ways to caveat the emptors.

The sad thing is we know who primarily buys 512's. No wonder so many noobs don't stay around long.

Maybe they could make a change so that disjointed plots could not be sold. You could still join your disjointed plots for land management purposes, but you'd have to separate them when you wanted to sell them. Does anyone see the loophole in that?

Hhmm. Just might work.

This sounds good to me, too. I referenced this post in a comment on http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-894.

Sammy?

That would work for me, since I join physically separated plots for land management and the traffic.

Only thing with having to separate them to sell would be, if someone was trying to save land that was cobbled together from former adlots from being used for evil again, their work would be for naught if they wanted to sell it. There are people who would be interested in buying lots cobbled together in this fashion, namely current landowners in the sim who just want the extra prims. But if they have to separate it to sell, here come the adfarmers to each get their piece.

Even with price limits imposed for the small lots, I think there are some out there who would gladly eat the tier just to piss off other residents. And the advertising network owners get money from the suckers who think that people actually look at their ads, so they don't even have to sell the land to keep getting money from it.

why make it so hard?
just ban adcutting. we know what adcutting is just like we know what sexual ageplay and gambling are.
just ban it and be done with it.

How do you define it Nina? What if someone cuts out the 16m plots and posts giant spinning textures of the SL hand? No advertising, just annoying. Will that be considered ad cutting? If they can't use a 16m plot, how do you stop them from using a 512m plot? If you start censoring those plots...........where do you draw the line? The girl who creates "modern art"? The guy who wants a boundary to boundary sized castle with neon stained glass windows? What if the 16m plot is used to post signs critical of grid stability? Do we ban that? Some would find that annoying.

We all know what ad-farming is. Grief-builds are perhaps more open to question, but we all know what it is when there's a 16m plot with spinning porn on it. It's not like we're talking about banning furries.

I use to think along the same lines, Chris. Worried about the old slippery slope. I've changed my mind. It wouldn't be difficult for Lindens, maybe even with a task force made up of residents (if they really cared) to come up with a pretty cut and dry description of an ad farm. Perhaps there would be a way for ad farmers to get around that but we might be better off. It could only get better.

Cities come up with definitions of what is and is not allowed in their laws. Why do we think it's not possible in this situation?

That's because cities are run by people who get paid to make laws. If they don't make lots of new laws then they get voted out as failures. Plus every new law they make means taxes have to go up and their income gets larger. SecondLife is run by people who /lose/ money if they make new laws because they can't just make you pay more taxes and that's why they avoid doing it as much as possible.