Spicy Chick estates (help)

Without checking through the whole document, I think that may be a TOS violation too...

-oh, and I apporove of your ellipses....

I did this accidently a couple of years ago, but the human who purchased it kindly returned the land to me.

FWIW I think LL owes a duty of care to it's residents to prevent this kind of thing happening - as many have mentionned it shouln't be so easy to set land to sale.

Finally with respect to the landbots, why doesn't somebody clever just write a landbot script that makes them gobble each other up or trick them into paying millions of lindens for crummy 16x16s or something.. oh wait somebody just suggested that

Yeah but before the bots there weren't 200 humans scanning Land for sale 24/7 at 1 second intervals.
Unfortunately with the current unlimited unverified alts policy banning any bot that ripped a person off 3 times is useless.

Who knows what we all would try when we didn't know what we were doing?
And on the contrary most landbot owners do care deeply ..............about the "money for nothing" <ching>!

True to a degree, it's the people making mistakes that cause hammering our grid with hundreds of bots teleporting every few seconds to be profitable while stuffing the grid up for the rest of us so some scammers can make money for nothing.

That's right, because before the bots came about 200 humans were scanning Land for sale much much faster than 1 second intervals.

I'll forgive you because you probably weren't paying attention at the time but many, many land barons, several of whom are still trading mainland today got their start by hammering search hundreds of times a minute back when that was possible.

Yeah, bot runners are constantly trying to one up each other. Mostly efforts focus on getting land before the other land bots get there. It's been escalating for some time now with various people gaining and losing the advantage. There have also been some other efforts. One guy wrote a bot that would freeze other bots but I believe that guy got suspended for abuse and subsequently became bitter about the whole ordeal.

Yeah but can those 200 humans do that 24/7?
Who knows how many Landbots are loose on the grid?

Trust me they did, although you'd get a few extra seconds if you were searching in the middle of the night. To be fair, there couldn't have been more than a couple dozen even at peak times.



Well, I pretty much know. It's not actually very many. There's only 3 or 4 operators these days.

It would cost her money if buying your land upped her tier level. These people depend on that higher resale will cover their tier increase when they cash out..

Cruddy business pratice but its how they decide to make their mark on the grid. Chalk this up to a learning experience (we've all had them) and remember to always do a quadruple check over the sell screen.

Do bots communicate? I have had some amazing encounters selling land at the lower end of the scale. I used to flip land, and often would get a crowd of avis show up when I reset price later. I assumed that they were avis as they would engage in chat with me.

I am guessing that some non-bots are still chasing land at the low end for flips like I was. Sometimes you beat the bots.

You think?

You're funny, Connolly.

I imagine this buyer is also laughing at your comment.

You seem to know an awful lot about this. Where were you while this was going on?

It seems like every month we get some unfortionate newbie posting on these forums about how they were ripped off while trying to sell land to their friend due to land swooping.

The system needs better protection, not simply warning boxes, and its not hard to see how to do that protection.

Im a RL computer programmer where due to the sums involved the programs must protect against human errors.
Honestly I would expect to be fired if I wrote a system with such poor validation as we have in SL land sales.

Well I don't think the system is the best if can be, noobs are still being caught and will continue getting caught unless something is improved, these aren't idiots, these are people making mistakes because they aren't informed of the risks involved in a simple land transaction. It's like eating in a park without knowing the local dogs attack people for food or crossing a stream without knowing there are pirahna in it. We keep feeding the scammers by letting the system hide them.

I know myself everytime I transfer land between alts or groups I'm damn paranoid and I have made mistakes luckily no land lost. Carve a 16m out of your mainland, and sell / resell it to yourself, group or alt a dozen times for $1 and tell us you had no fear of losing it and are 100% happy with the system you are paying for.

No matter what system you use, no matter how much information you present to the "noobs", there will still be people taken by this situation. There will always be someone who will blithely ignore all information, warnings, or confirmations presented to them (even written at grammar-school level in their native language), set their land for sale to L$1 to anyone with the intention to transfer it to, get it bought by either a quick land buyer or a bot, and refuse to return the "mistake". They will come to the forums, blogs, etc and complain.

At some point, you have to just say "learn from your mistake and don't repeat it". It sucks, but humans err all the time. One should count oneself lucky if losing US$100 is the worst it gets for them in the error department. Some people make very minute errors in judgment, and it costs them their lives, jobs, or the lives of others. Basically, it is a rather trivial issue in the greater scheme of things.

Just like in RL, the greater the value of a thing (to the owner), the more care should be taken when managing it.



I always have trepidation whenever I buy/sell/transfer land around. I've done it quite a lot in the last 7 months. Every time, though, I double/triple-check my entries to make sure I give myself the best chance to avoid screwing up. It still may happen to me someday, too, if I get careless, but then I will kick myself over it, take my lumps, and move on.

I agree that a "transfer" function would be useful even though the functionality already exists by selling for 0L to a specific person. The sad thing is, even if LL put 1L as a price that must be sold to a specific person, people would just enter the next lowest number and sell to anyone. It's insane. I don't worry about land transfers so long as I see my own name in the sell to field.

They need to have it default to sell to an individual. Would save a lot of headaches. When I sell land I take forever to complete it in fear i messed up on price or wrong features.

Also if land is deeded to group then the money gets split with principles in the group....I learned this too late.

Again this is something that needs to be visible in the interface. With the right info people wont get into such problems

Maybe something Profile based like the "Pay" option. Pull up their profile and enter the amount and Pay.

Some people in this thread have asked why anyone would see an option to sell to a specific user and not wonder why it was there. The obvious answer for someone that doesn't know about land bots is to sell to someone that isn't there right now. If you don't know about land bots and how instantaneously they work, there's no reason to believe that someone else will be able to read about the sale in search, teleport, rez, and buy before your intended buyer that is standing right next to you and the only other person visible within several sims.

What they really need for people who don't know Landbots exist is a big font red, yellow and black warning just in the normal buy window that says quite clearly that land priced for $1 and no specific user may be grabbed by landbots, but then that would be interfereing with Landbot runners business model so they could sue LL.

The warning is in black text on a yellow background. I see it all the time when I set land for sale to anyone. It does not mention 'bots' specifically, but it does state that by setting land for sale to 'anyone', your land could be purchased by anyone in second life even if they are not around. I don't remember the exact wording but it's a huge yellow warning thing, similar to the debit permissions one. The first time I saw it I was quite shocked thinking something, somewhere was asking debit permissions!

I do agree that the land sales tools in SL need a big overhaul, I don't believe more checks, warnings, or hoops will stop these mistakes. They could add four wizzards, 12 warnings, and Phil Linden talking you through the process on the telephone, and people will still ignore all the warnings and sell cheap land to 'anyone' by mistake.

The only thing I do think ought to be changed is to have the 'sell to' automatically pop up the people chooser thing. Then if you want 'anyone' you have to dismiss that. It would be a PITA but right now I think that's why people click 'anyone' -- it's one simple click, whereas going to a specific person you have to use the people chooser thing which frankly has a very sucky interface.

-Atashi

Spicy Chicks now own the land just south of me in Juliet. I dont know when "Mister Sky Casino" (not his name) left, but I could have taken half of that instead of running amock for two weeks looking for more land.

Hmmm - their group profile description tries to convey they're out to help people with low priced land in SL, but this piece of 4096 is not for sale. I hope they don't break it up into 16s anywhere. We're tower-free right now in that area.

I still can't see what the problem would be in adding a small delay (say 5 minutes) between setting the land for sale and the land appearing in search. Most mistakes of this kind are either typing the wrong place (and the person immediately realising and caught out whilst trying to cancel the sale) or transfering to someone already with them.

A variation on this would be that their is a five minute embargo time after setting the land for sale during which only those present on the sim at the time the land is set for sale can buy, after that anyone can buy.

There is still the possibility that a bot might be present on the sim, but in the vast majority of cases it would provide a useful safety net, and I can't see how such a delay would negatively impact legitimate land buyers and sellers.

Over a year ago, I create a jira on this - see http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-376. I also ran a forum poll - over 100 responses with about 80% in favour as I recall.

Matthew

Well, after reading this whole thing here, I'll put in my two bits.

Buying land was something I didn't know squat about when I first arrived, like everyone else. As soon as I discovered there was a difference between islands and mainland for land ownership, I figured I better bone up on the facts before I start spending hard-earned Lindens. I now have 1536 in mainland property, may look to get more for commercial purposes, and have no fears of getting ripped off whatsoever.

I feel bad for the OP, I really do - but it seems like theres another sad sack every week getting ripped off becuase they didn't know how the system worked, or what's in the environment around them.

LL should simply disallow residents under a certain age, say three months, from buying land at all. Aquiring, renting and buying land on islands or mainland can be a complex process, especially for a new resident. Give people time to do the homework before they rush out to make the same stupid mistakes we see all the time.