Our favorite little adfarmer takes aim at Linden Lab auction Sims

Don't dataminers just need a space for one prim? Wouldn't a solution for them to be to rent space for a prim from individuals. It might be more of a pain but it's possible.

I don't see data mining as a legitimate reason to keep 16 meter parcels anyhow.

People can be more innovative when they want to spy on me.

Though personally I would be against removing current 16M parcels, Since people did pay for them.

I would instead remove the future ability to subdivide bellow 512.

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You could consolidate CURRENT 16 M parcels owned by one person into 512s if they are contiguous I suppose.

So then the Ad Farms just get bigger.

What is being solved here?

Kills the profit margin by making the tier costs much larger.

so then they start larger groups and pay for peoples unused tier.

Heck, I could start 30 adfarms with the extra tier I have even @ 512.

You should reduce your tier to only what you need.

Decreasing the profitability will reduce adfarms, if only by eliminating the small time farmers.

Also it would cost a lot more to buy 30 512M ad farms to extort/resell than 100 16M ones

I think that a visual-mute element is simply a rectangle in a sim. For example, 4 numbers, being the x,y s of the corners on a diagonal.
A rectangular parcel to be visually muted is a single element.
An irregular parcels is two or more elements.

The client does not render any non-Linden ‘stuff’ inside the visually-muted rectangles. Non-Linden stuff would be anything other than ground and water (and maybe Linden plants). Non-Linden includes avatars and any attachments.

The client is fed the visual-muting elements
- from the parcel that they are inside and
- their own private list of elements.

Compared to the complexity of prim parameter sets and the sheer size of texture files, loading a list of 4-value muting elements would contribute near-zero to lag.

I think that on this basis, parcel muting would be very simple.

Muting by owner or by parcel UUID is too open to alts changing ownership and to bots reconfiguring parcels on the fly. We’re talking of muting determined griefy activity.



I think we’re only talking about visual muting.
I would also say that muting of prims in a parcel should be impossible once inside that parcel.
That leaves prims right on the parcel boundary to consider.
However, we have that sort of effect right now:
1) Try crossing a sim boundary into a banned parcel. It’s the same as crashing into an invisible wall. Ban lines can not be seen across sim boundaries.
2) The latest RC reputedly mutes ban lines, whether by intention or bug. There is pressure to make ban-line visiblity selectable.
So, parcel visual-muting should be a View option. If someone is on the move and is afraid of slamming into visually-muted prims, then turn off muting while travelling. It would be the same as turning on ban-line visibulity while travelling.



Great solution if any avatars in the muted parcel are also visually muted.
They would still be detectable by script scan and on minimap. They are only visually muted by parcel muting, unless they have also been personally muted as in the currently implementation of ‘muting’.




For the terminally insecure, the muting can be turned off and on in View. They can turn it off every 30 minutes or less just to check if McFly is breaking the TOS/CS by targetting them.

Maybe it should just be if you mute a parcel everything in that parcel is just GONE

Including avatars; you just see through to the other side.

Unless you go into the parcel of course then everything should reappear

Yeah, that's pretty much how it has to work, technically, in order for the IDV stuff to mean anything on the Mainland anyway. And it's not a huge jump from this to allowing parcels to mute themselves, solving some privacy concerns. (Des has it right, though, about collisions: when I hit the boundary of a muted parcel, all the prims I didn't see before are there to bump into. And depending how it's implemented, prims from a muted parcel encroaching on an unmuted parcel may well be invisible, too, and probably non-phantom. But then, when the sim is sick, I make some of those myself. )

I've always favored the parcel muting solution for this particular problem, over the "social policy" solution. But I'm way past caring *how* it gets solved now; I just want it solved. Whatever LL bestirs itself to do about this problem, if it can succeed, they have my full support.

Why not simply add $1 monthly tier for each discontinuous parcel over a small limit, say 10?

Someone should point a Linden to this thread. Anyone know a Linden? Seen a Linden? Or are they just a myth?

bigfoot, yeti, linden ...

Tegg pointed this thread out in the comments section of one of the blogs. Now, do the read the blogs is the next question.

Ad farms are really more than one issue. That's why these threads get so hot - people are arguing about several issues all at once, and not separating things out.

I've got a proposal for making the "doughnut" land division strategy much less useful to the price gougers. It doesn't involve taking away anyone's right to use land as they see fit, or forcing anyone else to deal with it.

Take a look at this: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-920

The proposal is simply that LL add a new parcel detail for doughnut parcels. This would appear in the About Land window, and be added to llGetParcelDetails. The first would help inexperienced land buyers avoid doughnuts they don't know to look for, or which might be hidden under builds. The second would allow bots to avoid buying doughnut land.

People would still be able to divide their parcels or sell parcels that aren't contiguous. It's just that the buyer would know about it.

It is obvious to me that the doughnut strategy was designed primarily to sell hollow land to bots, then force the buyer to pay for the embedded parcel. If the bots don't buy, it doesn't work. Noobies don't constitute a large enough market to make the doughnut strategy worthwhile if the bots aren't buying.

This is essentially similar to the full-disclosure laws that many RL jurisdictions have for real estate. Here, it is simply coded into the system.

This won't stop the ad farms. It isn't designed to. It's designed to stop a particular form of price-gouging. When they come up with a different way to price-gouge, we just need to come up with a different way to solve it.

I added my map of the Riback setup to the jira.

This is just amazing and outrageous. Not the work you're doing, Senga, but just the fact that there is now a type of person in SL that is so despicable and destructive, that now we're figuring out ways to protect landbots from them. It literally nauseates me.

So this is perfectly legal, but sending someone on a hilarious ride in a cage is AR-able and punishable. I'm living in the cuckoo's nest.

Thank you, Drongle. That map really explains what's going on. I'm not sure my pictures are clear enough.

First of all, the power to mute Resident objects and avatars already exists - but only on your OWN property. Hit CTL-ALT-SHIFT-! and CTL-ALT-SHIFT-4. The first makes all Resident made objects disappear; the secpnd makes all avatars including your own disappear, though the name tags remain. It should be technically duck soup to combine the two and make it possible to toggle both of those on and off for any designated parcel as part of your land powers - meaning it takes effect only on your parcel.

Remember, this is almost all client side; the only thing the LL server needs to worry about is whether you or your visitors are on your parcel and it needs to send send the mute signal; the client does the rest. So pretty much all the server-side physics, etc. is a non-issue. Kinda like Force Noon or Force Midnight: Only affects you, not the server. Same with the existing commands above.

It would be essential to make both Resident objects AND avatars disappear from sight (though not from the map or minimap) for just the sort of privacy questions you raise. And probably also desirable to tie it to land powers and therefore to parcels visible from your land.

Since you would be able to toggle it on or off, or to fly across your parcel boundary at any time (neighbors' banlines permitting), you should have no problem discovering "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 would only have to see them when you want to see them, like for AR purposes.

I can see your point. But protecting the landbots is just a way to make the doughnut deception harder to pull off. Otherwise, the original offender gets to make his sales, and we now have unsellable 512m plots with smiley towers parked in the middle.

Now, if you want to ban landbots....

For those finding possible solutions to the issues I posed: Great!

The more solutions we can find, the better we can back a solution.


I honestly don't think 'code as law' will work.

But if there is a 60% solution there that could make the remaining 40% manageable by policy, let's recommend the blend.


I think it's kind of important to think like a griefer or a criminal in these situations (think, not act!) because we don't want something like poorly crafted gun laws. I.e. laws that take guns out of the hands of good guys while criminals will ignore it and still have the guns anyway.

If we take away a capability from "the good guys" such as 16m parceling, it darn well better solve the problem or we've just punished only ourselves. Doh.

EXACTLY!

Which is one good reason why I favor looking for solutions that add to Residents' capabilities and try to avoid "solutions" that take away capabilities.

I don't know what the deal is.. but the OP owns two 16m lots right next to my property. They aren't for sale either. It was a 512 plot that has been ad cut. So far I have been able to purchase two of the 16m lotsand combine them back into the original lot.

I did manage to build a wall around one of the ad cubes:

I'm guessing those particular plots don't have any ads on them. There's another thread plumbing the mysteries of "data network 16s"; the OP of this thread was mentioned in post /327/2c/239233/2.html#post1861575, so I suppose the 16s you've captured are like the ones discussed there.

I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about bots. Bots shouldn't be buying the parcel unless it is worth the cost even with the hole in. I saw that 512 I bought with the 16 cut out of the middle and I honestly wish I could buy 100 of those a day at the price they were being sold for.

Some would view the buying of 16 plots from ad-farmers as an evil practice that encourages even more ad-farming.

Logically, the buying of those cheap 512s-with-the-hole plots or indeed any of the normal 512s would be even more evil.
Those plots were U.M.'s creation and they did two very valuable things for him
1) He had to sell off most of each 4096 he had to buy in the new sims. He started by simply cutting 512 and selling low
2) He "improved" on that in Riback by entrapping the bots to buy 512s-with-a-hole. The 16m holes were sold for 2000L a pop. That brought the effective price above market levels.

The result of anybody buying *any* of his 512s (whether with a hole or not) was to be of immense help to U.M.
If nobody bought, he would have been stuck with 4096m in each sim.