Our favorite little adfarmer takes aim at Linden Lab auction Sims

It's important to remember not to lump all the adfarmers into one camp - there are two distinct groups, and neither are good for SL, in my opinion.

The group that gets talked about the most is the people who put up annoying ads and set the land for sale at exhorbitant prices. Their main money-making technique is to sell the land. The second group is the people who put up annoying ads and don't set the land for sale. Their main money-making technique is to rip off naive or new businesses by taking their money for advertising, and they consider themselves legitimate businessmen.

Both groups devalue the surrounding land with their tacky displays. Their methods and motivations for making money are different, but the end result is the same - people flee the mainland because they don't want to see that crap. Prohibiting people from profiting off sales of small lots with artificial price controls will eliminate the first group, but it will cause the second group to grow and thrive. Any solution that is found will have to effectively eliminate both groups.

Whether it worked or not, anyone is welcome to set up "the Wild West" on a private estate and see how it goes. It's absurd to expect LL to run that experiment with their RL investor's money.

By not providing building codes and some semblence of 'law and order' effectively, isn't that exactly the experiment that they are running?

I'm asking for MORE control and enforcement of it - not less.

Clearly the original idea was that residents would be self-regulating. Clearly it has failed dismally, otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion again.

Quite right. I probably should have said it was unrealistic to expect them to *continue* running that experiment. It's all very easy for subscribers to have high L/libertarian principles with their sim or two of entertainment budget at risk (safely at home in a regularly patrolled suburb), but it's not very compelling to invoke those easy principles to argue LL must never adopt a policy that imposes some order in-world, to protect the company's RL investments.

KKK avatars aren't allowed in Second life. Does that mean we're already on the slippery slope to evil dictatorship? We all clearly know what the problem is, and the slippery slope is being terribly exaggerated here.

There is a mountain-sized pile of things you can't do in second life, and none of them have anything to do with censorship by the evil overlords. It all has to do with not breaking US law, and not deliberately ruining the second life of your neighbor. In fact, deliberately griefing your neighbor through extortion, and diminishing his or her SL experience is already banned in Second life. They're just not enforcing it!

Ad farmers are likely to cause all of us to lose some liberties, none of which any decent people will miss. If that pushes us down the slippery slope 2 inches, then T.S. If that causes the very worst avatars of SL to get upset and leave, then hurray!

And by the way, I hate even having to disagree with you, Chris, because I'm an extremely liberal left wing activist type in RL. But if LL wants to keep my patronage of their business, then I have an expectation in return that they will not allow people to deliberately shit all over the grid and ruin other people's lives and businesses.

Your shipment of fail has arrived.

Wow.. It looks like several pallet loads, too.

The Lindens in general are not going to get into making judgments about taste or disputes among Residents - the manpower cost would be prohibitive.

And prohibiting adfarms would not work - the purpose is land-griefing and extortion. The perps would simply find other ways to do the same thing. A better way is needed.

There's too much mindless running around and yelling Ban this! or Ban that! Not enough asking how can Residents be enabled to handle their problems for themselves. Too many people have a secret love of authoritarianism - controlling others or being controlled.

Which is why we keep having this stupid conversation, even though good solutions are readily obvious and easy to implement.

See, LL is willing to write code. A little code enabling landowners to mute neighboring parcels (and the avatars on them) would make uglifying land for extortion obsolete instantly - NO MATTER WHAT FORM THE UGLIFICATION MIGHT TAKE!

And until that code is written and implemented, Residents can use screens. Phantom, transparent on the reverse, really nice looking screens.

Well I totally agree that this is a better solution than banning.

But the conversation isn't stupid, the calls for stopping it aren't "mindless," and I've never in my entire SL existence seen a screen for this purpose that didn't look like shit.

Asking LL to ban adfarms based on what they "LOOK" like is most definitely a slippery slope.

You are basically suggesting they ban Tacky and Ugly.

That encompasses far more that ad farms. In fact there are ad farms that look more subtle than some legitimate SL businesses.

Can I marry you? That is by far the best and most accurate and reasonable post regarding this issue. Thank you for saying it so eloquently!

Muting objects in parcels would appear to be the only rational approach.
It puts the power into the hands of the owner of a parcel.
We filter spam. We should be able to filter whatever.

A parcel should be able to feed a set of filtering boundary coordinates to avatars in the parcel.
The client code could then apply those filters to its rendering.
Strange things would happen to the views . An avatar passing through a set of parcels where different filters are set would notice builds flicking in and out of view!
If the primary use of the filters was to visually mute ad-farms however, things would probably look stable.


There are other considerations.
Are any avatars as well as prims in the parcels to be visually muted? If they are not, then there are situations where the viewable avatars might long for the day when people could only see them by camming in

If the avatars are visually muted, does it open up a griefing avenue? Maybe not a serious one if they were detectable by scan scripts and minimap.



Screens in the meantime?
If ban-lines really are gone/switchable in the new viewer(s) then screens with alpha would be bearable.

The slippery slope argument here just assumes too little ability to use our brains in a given situation. We all know exactly what an adfarmer extortionist is. What does "harrassment" look like, Colette? That is banned and policed and disciplined now, and that is far more slippery and convoluted than an ad farm.

I do want to make it clear though that my anger over this issue is calling for A solution, which does not necessarily need to be banning. I would franky love to see the parcel muting ability render them useless without any need to ban. They just need to freakin do something.

Look - where do you draw the line between spinning porn ads meant to be ad farmer extortion

And spinning porn signs that are part of an escort club build?

Heck they are practically the same thing on the surface.

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How about a "I hate George Bush" Sign intended to extort land prices?

How is that different from some Political based build that just happens to hate George Bush on the surface?

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Thus banning based on looks is definitely a slippery slope

Besides the rules will end up hurting "honest" people more than ad farmers -

The Ad farmer will just adhere to the "letter" of the law and still make annoying areas to extort money.

Visit my shop in-world if you want to see some nice screens. And I'm not the only one.

All very good points, Colette.

I agree that banning should be the last resort and is probably an unnecessary evil.

But this is a very serious problem with severe economic impacts, and people aren't just acting on their alleged Mussolini complexes by calling for LL action to stop it.

That is a nice store! I actually just bought one.

I hope an ad farm solution doesn't turn you into the Maytag repairman. But the screens are nice for a lot of uses besides just blocking other people's things.

I agree on the screens. I always used Linden Ponderosa pines instead. Screens were too claustrobic for me.

Technically, just muting prims isn't so simple.


1) Somewhere, a record of that muting will have to be done.

Would you store it in your cache, by avatar name? Then we'll get tons of alt bots spamming. A new day, a new avatar placing the prim. Better have 10,000+ names store-able. And be patient to wait for the check of each linkset against your list before it rezzes.

Will the prim gain a characteristic? Hello, loading lag.

Will the prim still be accessible by prim param control of LSL? Welcome back, prim.

Would regions accumulate prim muting records like moss? Hello server lag.




2) Okay, so you've made all the prims invisible.

Making the airborne hedge maze of collision planes one of the most bizarre traps you have ever known.

No collision plane, you say? Well, why bother with doors when you can mute the side of someone's, anyone's house and walk right in!



3) Alright, so Johnny Cool and Barbie Bustie are having a tender moment in 'private'... Barry White is playing on the audio stream, when unbeknownst to them:

...someone comes along, mutes the house prims and films machanima of the whole thing, posting it on YouTube. It looks just like they are doin' it on the front lawn, plastic flamingos, terrier in the yard and all.

Yey, great solution?



4) So you mute all the prims made by Griefer Mcfly and go on happily.

What you DON'T see is all the "If you think I'm a dork, say hello" signs that 99.9% of the SL population sees surrounding your yard, but you don't.

You smile and wave at all the passersby... gee... thanks folks! Thanks, you are so kind, come by again sometime!



Something to think about. I'm not opposed to 'code as law' IF it can be made to work.

But honestly, I'm seeing griefing comedy gold here.

I don't expect LL to experiment with current investors money on the current mainland. But if people want their wild west on the current mainland then fine. Let them have it. Let's have LL set standards and restrict ad farming and possibly even zoning on any new mainland that comes out. Then people will have their choice.

I understand that someone had done a viewer with visual muting, although I'm not sure how they configured it, i.e. by owner or location or whatever. I don't think it made stuff 100% invisible, if I remember right, it just made stuff 90% invisible so you could see faint outlines, and therefore know what not to walk into.

One thought I had was to mute by parcel -- each parcel has a UUID and I don't think that changes unless you do the subdivide/join thing. If the muting was done by parcel and the list of muted UUIDs was held in your settings on your own computer, then all the viewer has to do is check the UUID of a given parcel before it knows to render the prims there.

Right now muting an avatar goes by storing a UUID in your mute list, I don't know if mute object does too but I imagine it would. So maybe all you need is to add another category for visual muting, add the UUID of a parcel in there. Or for that matter, a checkbox so that if you mute an avatar, that hides everything they own...

I am sure that any method will have flaws and imperfections... but if folks want to wait for the perfect solution, they probably shouldn't be using SL in the first place

-Atashi

just lower the 'view distance' to 0 meters and you wont see much of anything.

The biggest cause of ad farming is pretty simple.

The Land extortion works.

being able to ignore content in a specific parcel might be the most practical solution.

the BEST solution would be to get people to stop paying off the ad-farmers.

But thats not going to happen, because people are idiots.

You can use the viewer to not rez item types now, so how would this be any different? Not render the house, but leave the trees, ground, and avis... then film away.

Visually muting objects would be a land option, so it would work on your land only (not some random someone) - Just tell it to mute all objects on property owned by an individual or group, mute all objects not on your property, or mute objects that you have added to your mute list.

Damn Desmond, where can one follow your griefing class for professionals?

Colette made some good points about how difficult it is to define an obnoxious addfarm. It pretty well comes down to a matter of taste, which is a wrong decision maker.

Desmond gave some excellent arguments against muting objects, making that suggestion less and less desirable with every word he typed...

Leaves us with a minimum parcel size. Which would make it very hard for addfarmers, as they can never have as many parcels of 512 as they have of 16m2. Of course it would make it harder for people wanting to datamine as well, but in this case I see the needs of many more important as the needs of 2. No solution will be perfect to everybody.

Setting max prices are not a solution in my opinion, as anyone should be entitled to ask as much as they want for a place they own. Up to the buyer to either pay or not. As soon as someone is going to dictate what people can ask for their property, in my eyes they go wrong. Somehow I think Chris will agree with me on this one

Really, I hope LL reads topics like this, because they are full of usefull information. It's not about right or wrong, it is about finding the best solution to a problem concering each and every resident.

Greetings, Marcel