Land Bot Misuse. Disability loses this time around.

I really am sorry if this is the wrong category, because quite honestly I'm not sure where it would go. If You follow landbot use at all, this may be of some interest to You http://www.your2ndplace.com/node/578 In this one a land bot owner takes full advantage of an error made due to a mans disability. Really Classy.

I don't know... they land was set for sale for $1L. Buying/selling land in SL means knowing everything about it, and if she didn't realize bots are out there, then it falls to her. Also, it clearly states that all sales are final, so, the lesson here wasn't how to set land for sale, but the inner workings of bot use, and the fact that land sales are final, and that the new owner (ethical or not) has the right to sell the lot at whatever price they want. Don't get me wrong, I think bots suck, as it makes things unfair, but setting a huge parcel (any parcel for that matter), for sale, to anyone, for $1L is just asking for it. Personally, I dont understand why LL doesn't institute a simple Turing test (you see them all over the web) for land sales. This would defeat bots entirely, and why they don't is completely beyond me.

Sorry, but I don't see the relevance of the man's dyslexia. It was his business partner, who does not appear to suffer from any disability, who set the land to sale for L$1, and presumably set it to sale to anyone. If the chap with dyslexia had made a mistake because he couldn't understand the instructions, I'd have some sympathy, but the actual seller does not seem to me to have any excuse for not realising what she was doing.

LL's view is clearly that landbots are within the TOS. Whether they are ethical is open to debate, my view is that they are a very unpleasant way of doing business. But there is plenty of information around about them, both on these forums and elsewhere, not least the warnings that you have posted. Anyone who bothers to make the effort to do a little research should be aware of the risks of setting land for sale for token amounts. The sale dialog asks you if you are sure you want to set up the sale. If people choose not to research what they are doing, and ignore the warnings in the land sale dialogs, then I have little sympathy for them if they get burned.

You have to question why someone would use $600 worth of land for this purpose. It's like teaching your 15 year old kid how to drive in a Ferrari. It's all very sad and everything but I suspect this sort of stuff will dry up once the new auction site starts working properly.

Stupidty doesn't mean ethics are thrown entirely out the window. And I wouldn't call someone who sets land to L$1 stupid necessarily. If I set land to L$1 it would be stupid. But someone else may not know any better. It's just a game, they set the land to L$1 and expect that their friend would be able to buy it in 30 seconds or whatever.

There is nothing wrong with Landbots BTW. It's how they are used.

Im so against bot use its horrific...... I find the ability to loose large swathes of land and watch it resold right befor eyour eyes is amazing but..................


Sounds to me like the person screwed up, you DONT show somebody how to sell land by putting half a sim up for 1 linden. I think what more thatn likely happened is that they were transfering land ownership and didnt mark it for sale to another AV.... they screwed up and trying to hide behind some disability. Yes I feel that the disability claim is true .... they are STOOOPID if thats classed as a disability. EVERYBODY know NOT to sell land to anybody for zero or L$1 , I note they emphasise that the person was RIGHT THERE next to them.. like that makes some kind of difference.
Land bots and the barons that run them are unscrupulous in my mind they are the low life shit on the bottom of SL's shoes .. but if you choose to give your land away for nothing .. then sorry your an idiot

Gwendolyn...... the person states they run a club ... they have nearly half a sim and have spent MONTHS building it up..... they are an idiot BECASUE they clearly are used to land purchases (with half a sim) they arnt noobs and certainly arnt poor to have half a sim. So this was a totall case of .... "L$1 whats the worse that can happen" Unfortunately betterbusiness or the DTi etc doesnt apply in SL... if a person uses a Bot its becasue they are playing a different game to other players. I cant see any realist use of a land bot ... or camp bot etc ... becasue they are there as part of the libsecondlife tool set and are made to operate outside of normal system use...realisticly no more than our good friend who used the Auction system to squire SIMS for $1, yet in that case ... LL was the looser therefor hes a THIEF .... a scoundrel who should be publicly flogged .... yet land bots do this all the time

On a side note, can landbots operate on a private island. Just that the island I have land on is free, no land sale, no tier to pay, split up into 25 parcels, 3 of which exchange ownership approx. every 2 months, we compete to keep the land.

The exchange of land policy is to offer it to the new person at sale for L$1 which is immediately reimbursed, the person is of course there with me at the site, and I do set it up in their name, however, I'm human and I could go criminally insane while doing this at some point in the future and select 'for anyone' by mistake, so could a landbot swoop in?

PS If I want to make posters aware about available free land in the future, which section do you think I should post that info into, I could post it in this section starting with a question…

…Did you know that…, would that be acceptable?

This problem happens every month and that's the ones we hear about.
In software, its considered poor design if the same mistakes keep on happening by users
It isnt brain surgery how LL could fix this problem:

It should be impossible to set land for sale to everybody for less than 5 L$ per sqm.
You should be able to change the minimum amount per sqm in edit - preferences (the default being 5)
Anything under that amount should only be able to be sold to a specified individual.

your probably right, I hadn't even considered how the new system will effect all of this.

I just think, TOS or not theres a clear right and wrong in taking a piece of land not rightfully Yours thats clearly mis priced at 1L. I don't know how people can defend that pro bot or not. A year ago in sl, residents wouldn't put up with that, now its the greedy norm. I can see how people take the land, there greed outweighs there ethics, I just don't understand how people can back up this behavior so willingly. It's like driving by a fatal car crash and laughing at the Mother and her 2 kids that just got killed because she was stupid and turned without paying attention and the guy coming at her decided not to stop because, hey it was his right of way. Ah well she broke the law, she's stupid and got what she deserved. People in sl just lack the compassion they once had.

I personally dont like bots sara, its not competitive... its hiding, the fact that the lindens wont do anything about it is becasue land doesnt hold ANY value for them outside tier and they dont care WHERE the tier comes from as long as its paid hense why they dont like to get involved.

But .... as we cannot seem to do anything about the bot issue all we can do is be vigilent with HOW we process things like land sales and try to make sure we dont make these mistakes, of course not everyone might have the ethics that you do and thats a shame .. but like so many things in SL ... people leave manners, ethics etc at the door and greed, obnoxious behavour takes over. Maybe the new land auction system that LL seems to be working on MIGHT change the way land is traded so that land has to be auctioned rather than sold to anybody for a dollar. Ifhowever this systems end up with people complaining that thier 16m parcel didnt sell at 35k then its gonna go terribly wrong. I should imagine it would make land bots almost obsolete as they would no longer be able to "jump the system" making fair competition viable once more. Maybe its LL's fault for allowing ... maybe its LibSL fault for coding it ... maybe its the sellers fault for doing what they did ... certainly I am not heartless or unsympathetic but I personally believe that trying to pull the heart strings etc saying the guy was disabled and had some sort of problem tell the differenc between a 1 and what ..... 100,000 - 150,000 ????. This was USER error or a lapse in judgment which was VERY unfortunate... I have personally lost land through a bot and I was sold it back at the price paid.. so not all bot controllers are the devil but on the other hand ... do we REALLLY need bots in game about social interaction

I'm with you Sarah, it doesn't have to be a dog eat dog world and it is immoral to take advantage of and expoilt the naive. People like that are unethical souless leeches.

I find it somewhat immoral to make a play of the guy's disability when it was not him who made the stupid mistake.

In Sarah's carcrash example a better analogy would be how much sympathy do you have for the guy who drives into the ditch because he's talking on his mobile and not paying attention to the road? If the seller in the OP had been reasonably careful, it wouldn't have happened.

I don't like landbots and would be quite happy to see them banned. But I'm not going to waste sympathy on people who lose their land to them by not taking simple precautions.

Why don't one of you run your own landbot called "GetYourLandBack <foo>"? It's only purpose would be to buy up $1 plots and hold them in the event the seller made a mistake.

Simple. Cheap. Effective.

You have invented the DoGooder Bot, Coyote! Blessings be upon your house.

They can but they don't. They only purchase land another resident can't revoke from them.

Truth told I didn't follow the link, bottom line is same, it is an ugly way to make a living... I don't need to read another sad story to know how smarmy and unethical the bot people are.

Not sure about that, but I do know that LL could not give a crap about people who get ripped off. Or if they care, they don't do anything about it. Be careful setting land out there, folks.

did u read it?



and then:



bots suck but we knew that along time ago, this has nothing to do with disabilities but with some one who set it to "everyone"

Fine totally take the guy out of the mix, A bot took advantage of an obvious mistake. Know one sets land at 1L to sell on the market. 1l sales are always for grouping and selling to a friend, and some people still aren't aware that bots can get it quicker than the friend next to them. YEa expensive lesson, but it doesn't make it right on the bots end. They prey on error. Another comparison would be bots are like quick change artists. They make a profit from human error and confusion. Just saying people really lack compassion like they used to in this game. Last I checked my ethics were not determined by the TOS.

fully agreed but they have been at it for god knows how long and the same issue comes back again and again, if every one ingame knew the forums, we`d need a seperate forum for landbot ripoffs

with the countless times it has happend, nothing is done ingame with an extra warning on the buy screen that their land can be bought in miliseconds by bots

Perhaps the relevance of the dyslexia is that if the guy hadn't had trouble grasping how the whole land sale business works, the person trying to teach him wouldn't have had to actually demonstrate to get their point across? They may have been trying to avoid mistakes by having a practice run first?

I don't know, but I think that people's responses here have been a tad harsh. It's a rotten thing to happen to someone, even if they were naive or even stupid. And at least those of us who are only beginning to dip our toes into the minefield of land ownership won't make the same mistake now.

the problem is that it has been discussed to death, if u do a search for landbot, u`ll endup with more threads then the number of residents and every time the only thing that can be said is that it sucks as we can`t do anything about it and LL are to lazy to add a simple and clear warning on the land buy interface to warn of this problem but even then we`ll see it still happen

most of them have the morals of a bot wich is none but nothing we can do about it either

the best solution so far offerd was atleast an 5 minute timer on land being listed so if a mistake happens, u have the time to correct it

Get used to it LL LOVES the landbots and will NEVER do a darned thing about them until someone important gets burned. Its only a matter of time until it happens.

This is pure speculation and I have no empirical proof, but it will NOT surprise me if Lindens or some of their close friends are involved in it.

Sooz