Son of Ad Farms: The Comprehensive Plan

This is a blatant repost from JIRA, with a catch.

The aim of this thread is the formation of a comprehensive plan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_planning) to curtail the abuse of small parcels.


----

Currently, several problems exist with small parcels that make "land cutting", "ad farming", and "extortion" economically viable activities.


These include:

1) The perception that parcels, when bought in bulk, may be resold at marginally greater value in smaller sizes (ie, wholesaler profit; land cutting).

2) Squatting of specific tiny parcels in an otherwise continuous region, when combined with banlines, encroachment, and other abusive practices, may result in the sale of land at vastly inflated prices (extortion).

3) Purchase of smaller parcels spread over a greater area, explicitly or justified as ad networks and mass marketing (spam).

4) Specific combinations of the first three.



These activities are all economically viable, because it is relatively inexpensive to create a whole lot of these smaller parcels.

A single, base tier, premium account can create anywhere from 32 - 36 of these plots for only $7 per month.

An owner of a single sim's worth of tier (65536 + base 512) can create anywhere from 4,128 (ungrouped) to a whopping 4,746 parcels using group land.


This says nothing for the economics of land cutting, where there is a high demand for relatively small parcels, by a small but growing group of people.

----

As is obvious to anyone with a brain, 16m parcels on their own are practically unusable for anything other than griefing at the margins. Indeed, unlinked to other parcels, this has become their *sole* use in nearly every area of the mainland.

Let's forget about private islands for a moment. Not because they're insignificant, but rather, because they're mostly immune to this problem. Let's talk about the paradigm that is the main grid.



Here's the challenge:

How does one preserve the rights of legitimate, mainland landowners and business' rights to advertise, while completely removing the value of "griefer" [16m] parcels?

Suppose you were Linden Lab. What would you do?


Here is one such proposal:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1365

What's yours?

Neither of us have any statistical data showing how folks use their 16m parcels. Since abusers draw attention, and responsible users are likely invisible, I'm not surprised this conclusion is drawn. However - there are legitimate uses for 16m parcels, such as running in-world lsl servers.

I own a single 16m parcel for exactly that purpose. It runs an email check every 60 seconds, and is in place for redundancy reasons. Everything on the parcel is phantom/invisible, so that it doesn't interfere with the surrounding landscape.



Why not simply make it so parcels under a particular size cannot be sold for more than L$1? That'd remove any incentive at all to extort.

I do understand people's pain about this when it comes to spam ad-farming. And I do have my own views on this, which concur with the sentiment expressed by most people.

But ... always a but yes =) ... there are exceptions to this that do benefit people enormously, as people who visit my land can attest. As can others who shop at places that provide rezz plates to their customers, for boxed goodies. Until LL allow the return of other peoples objects via scripts there will continue to be at least this one benefit to tiny parcels.

Should LL upsize the minimum parcel size on my sim, without a compensating script change, then services like mine (which is free to use btw and I don't sell anything or solicit donations) will disappear, simply because of the very real problems that can occur when parcels open to the public are full-build. While the loss of services like mine, may not mean much to the landed, it does mean alot to many of the landless and friendless, who will be condemned to the public sandboxes and deepsea diving once more.

Retrospective covenanting of existing sims is not a good idea in my opinion if only because of all the very many competing views.

Another example: Suppose I bought up an existing mainland sim and was able to re-covenant it to a minimum 1024m. What price would I be able to set for those parcels? Quite a lot I think. I'd probably make a small fortune. An owner of a private sim, with far higher tier, would be highly miffed at this.

How to fix the problem going forward? As a zillion other people have suggested already; new minimum-sized parcels on new sims as they are introduced to the grid. Sims that would goto public auction, giving everyone a fair shot at acquiring them.

EDIT: The post above shows another benefit. So thats 2 now. Anyone got another one ???

Let's not forget about private islands for a moment! They solved the problem!

Ignoring this fact is sort of like saying: "But other than that Mrs Kennedy, how *was* Dallas?"


While people shake their fists at the sky on the mainland, waiting for salvation, the problem has been solved looooong ago on private estates. Which are, last I checked, 80% of the grid.

For the remaining 20%...

Solution: Have the estate managed by someone willing to make the tough choices and subjective calls like a private estate land baron, and make it known this is the case.


What, subject oneself to oversight!? Well, here are the choices:

a) Anarcho-capitalist mainland in all its adfarmed, banlined, 50m-wall-of-raw-meat-if-you-want glorious freedom.

b) More mainland governance, and probably governance by someone who doesn't particularly favour your build or your business.

c) Rent from, or get your own private estate.


It's really that simple.

One solution I brought forth at a recent Jack Linden meeting, that did not get much understanding was to charge a fee for land sales of any size that is over the base average for a sqm of land. It is really quite easy to understand...

If the average price for 1 sqm of land is 10$L, then for any price over that amount, LL charges an overhead fee of "X" percent. Just like they charge for group listings, search listings and whatever else.

So, If an Add farmer wants 1000$L for 1 sqm of land, charge them a listing fee of, ohhh, I don't know, 20%? 10%?, something, so they have to PAY IN ADVANCE for their extortionistic price. It will ruin their business model.

At this time, it doesn't cost anything to sell land and it shouldn't.

But, you ask, what about premium land such as Ocean Front or that place called Bay City? Well, if the seller truly intends to sell their land, then they absorb the fee in their sale price (or the buyer pays it - whichever way you want to view it). For the Extortionist Add Farmer, their extreme price per sqm makes it so the Add Farmer pays the listing fee and still nobody will normally buy it.

That is all!

This is a pretty elegant proposal, and has the advantage of being a direct revenue source for LL. As I've said many, many times, LL needs to treat the Mainland as a business, not as some toy "government" to mismanage.

And that's also the solution to the advertising problem: treat advertising as a revenue stream for LL. They don't have to manage the actual ad networks, but they do have to license all advertising (of anything but parcel contents for 512s and above), and get revenue from auctioning off those licenses annually. It's a win-win, really, for serious ad networks and for the surrounding residents: by limiting the number of these things, the ad networks can keep their builds sensibly sized and yet get much, much better click-thru rates.

It's a little like the old banner ads on the web: A website doesn't just allow as many ads as a source can supply, all stacked up and scattered around the page--doing that would be certain to prevent anybody from ever visiting the page. But a site can get banner ad revenue if they manage the ad-placement carefully. LL needs to do the same management of advertising on their Mainland business.

Back on the "listing fee" idea: First, it's not really necessary to calculate "base average" land prices, I think; LL has some target price, around which prices are permitted to drift before they manipulate the supply, so they can just state it, and use that. (If they did, just this little listing fee would provide a bit of hysteresis in that control loop, as an extra benefit.) And most importantly, this must somehow be *retroactive* to parcels already on sale. Measures must be taken to return old Mainland to usably sized parcels where actual residents might get some benefit. So, there will have to be, say, a two-week grace period when landowners can decide whether to lower their prices, remove the land from market, or be ready to pay the fee for land they've already listed. (An alternative might be to charge 2% of the listing price per month--would that work as well?)

I think, however, that this particular approach to the extortion schemes really requires that a good advertising approach be in place at the same time; otherwise all those extortion farmers will try to enter the advertising network market (again), and all the advertisers will escalate their "build absurdity" to try to deal with the increased congestion in the market.

Finally, and just FWIW, I posted a kind of related jira a couple months ago: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1220. Perhaps some of the measures in that proposal would be of value to the "comprehensive plan."

Like a lot of people I've been thinking about this issue quite a bit and taking on board what other people have to say. And in doing so I learn stuff =)

So as part of the discussion I posted it in Meta-Issue: Ad-Farms
as that seemed to be the logical place. My apologies to Jeffrey the OP here =)

You can vote for the JIRA Meta-Issue (which simply means you want something done about ad-farming) and comment there as well if you like. You can vote for Jeffrey's JIRA as well because they're linked, and all the votes do matter.

Anyways at the risk of derailing this thread, here's the text ....

If mainland was to be re-covenanted then I think that prim usage maybe a better way to address the issue.

To put up an adsign you obviously need prims. Suppose that owners holding less than an aggregated parcel minimum (128m or 64m or whatever) on a sim get allocated zero prims. Fallow land it might be called.

When fallow land is aggregated and/or added to an existing aggregation that brings it up to the minimum acreage on a sim then the owner gets to use the prims as they do now.

If fallow land was introduced then it could be grandfathered in. Existing owners of fallow land plots get to continue to use their prim allocation as is their right under the existing covenant. If and when they choose to sell their plots then the buyer is bound by the fallow land covenant.

Some skaddies (owners of tiny little adplots) might shriek at this a little, but I'm sure that they would agree:

1) I did buy the land to build on and enjoy. Something not being taken away from me here.
2) A 3-prim build is worth umm! 3 prims. Unless I'm an exceptionally talented builder, whereupon people are always happy to reward me handsomely.
3) Desirable locations will always fetch a premium.
4) Property is worth whatever someone else is prepared to pay for it.

The only other real concern left is that I bought my land with the intent to sell it later for a profit. But so did most other people so this is a non-issue really. Emotive as it may be at times.

And, balancing this it will bring small parcel pricing more into line with LLs stated intent to manage mainland into the 4-6L range per sqm. Most skaddies will continue to back themselves anyway to make money churning realty, no matter what the covenant is.

Personally I'm not a fan of retrospective covenanting. In an ideal world, fallow land covenants would be introduced in new mainland sims. However, given the problems with spam ad-farming on many of the mainland sims, a grandfathered fallow land covenant based on prim usage maybe a basis on which to move forward.

the only real solution is an outright ban on adfarming/plot griefing. there is no argument as to what an adfarm is or what plot griefing is, so save that one. ll know full well what an adfarm is.
ban it.
take their land
ban the ppl that do this unapologetically and with diligence.

anything else is lip-service.

So you've voted on the JIRA then Nina ??? kool =)

What you've suggested is one of options on the Meta-Issue also. If people vote then change will come.

This is all true, but I think the challenge is to find some step LL has the intestinal fortitude to actually take. The painfully half-assed step they took in the first adfarm "ban" suggests that gumption is not in great supply in Linden Village.

And Des is (as usual) correct about the problem being just as effectively solved by letting a third party manage the Mainland estate. LL could get all the revenue themselves, instead of splitting it with a third party estate manager, but if LL can't bring themselves to run the existing Mainland as a serious for-profit business, I'm pretty sure somebody else could. LL would still get to set SLAs and take the management-auction proceeds, in exchange for handing over the tier to the contracted estate manager. It should be an easy enough contract to draft, really, and everybody wins. Except the scammers, of course.

But they need to be doing something serious quickly. That initial adfarm "ban" bought them some time--which they've squandered, and then some. There was a time they were lulled into complacency by their own statistics, somehow oblivious to the fact that the "ban" was just shifting the scam. Now, by waiting this long, they've already ensured that the change will be hugely disruptive (at least to the ad-runners and extortionists, boo hoo). And the problem seems to be accelerating, making implementation ever more painful the longer they delay.

Oh, it doesn't have to be a third party, I'm sorry if I ever seemed to imply that.

I'd fully expect an "Overlord Linden" to do the job easily - just get a guy from the mailroom who knows what an adfarm is, what extortion is, give him estate powers and turn him loose after a final warning about policy.

If he is unfair or he just plain sucks, get the guy in the cubicle next to him until you got a winner.

Desmond, i would really like to have that job. i'd do it for free. i have 6 more weeks of free time in which to implement it. please nominate me! LOL

That's a lot of excellent responses in the last 12 hours. I'm going to try grouping them for responses. If yours isn't listed, it still has credence; I just don't have a response.

This won't be for the faint of heart: lots of words, incoming!

-----

Meta Issue: Uses of 16m parcels:



I spent several minutes trying to make that quoted piece not sound like a troll. Yes -- 16m parcels have a great deal of use when connected with land in an existing region.

I spent some time yesterday paying respects to Kei Mars' little 16m Jizo Shrine:
http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/01/08/great-builds-a-peaceful-garden/


Regarding statistics, it's important to note that it's difficult, by design, to effectively use a very small parcel (see caveat directly below).


While it is true that the abuse of these parcels is being done on a large scale by a very small group of people, the number of complaints and exploring I do on a regular basis back this line of reasoning.

The vast majority of disconnected 16m parcels that I see are either apparently unused, or used by a small group of people in nefarious ways.

There's also some spider data that backs this, but none that's easily linked.


On the use of servers on 16m parcels: While this is a poor man's proxy and brilliant in theory, I'd argue against this sort of usage, for the following reason:

Script performance should be bound to the amount of land owned in a region. Using a disproportionate amount than what you're paying for is A Bad Thing.

-----

Meta Issue: Private Islands



Private Islands are not a complete solution in the scope of Second Life. The reason for this is obvious: the vast majority of users are unwilling to spend $295 per month to run a shiny 3D webserver.

While it may become true that full sim ownership may be done "on the cheap," things like OpenSim are realistically several years out on their development scope.

Further, they do not provide the service aspect, of which the mainland grid is a major component.


In other words, solvable for a premium, yes. But not a feasible solution for the majority. Hence the discussion of the issue.

-----

Meta Issue: Fees and price adjustments of 16m parcels



This is a great idea in theory, but happens to be blue sky.

The reason is obvious: the cost will be passed on to the consumer, LL will not receive any real income (just a L$ sink), and in the worst case, the land market will circumvent the current system.

As for hardcoded limits on L$ sale value, the system would be easily gamed by hovering slightly above the limitation when cutting land, and the problem would continue.


That's part of the beauty of playing with prims and not L$: while it can be gamed in a sense, it raises the price of larger parcels in relation to smaller ones. It also adds a psychological element that provokes people to buy larger pieces without cutting.


-----

Meta Issue: LL-sponsored advertisements



I agree! Any form of offering advertisers legitimate channels that work without spamming the average resident would be A Good Thing.


-----

Meta Issue: Prim Allocation and Fallow Land



Fiddling with prims on smaller parcels would be an excellent solution. Furthermore, I am all for beta testing the proposal in specific new regions before a full rollout, a la Bay City.

Anything that gets away from the Linden cutover strategy is also A Good Thing.


-----

Meta Issue: Banning of "Griefing"



The problem with an outright ban is it needs to be backed with sane definitions, policy, and enforcement.

Just saying that we're banning "griefing" is like trying to pass legislation to "reduce crime" without a strategy or a proposal.


That "solution" is exactly what the residents that care about this issue, want. The question I've posed, is how?


-----

And finally, a requisite troll by me:



Mmm. Resmods.

Cutting down the heavy use of scripts and Temp Rezzers would also be a good thing. Many 16M plots use a huge amount of resources way out of line with the size of the land.

With all respect, I disagree on just about every count.


1) Obvious solution to not paying 295 USD/mo for an entire island: "rent just part of one from someone else"

The vast majority of users *do* either pay for their own region, or rent. It's only the remaining 20% of regions - the service provider's own estate - that has the issues you speak of.



2) Service aspect - the reality is, gently put, *quite* the reverse.

A land baron is not that far from concierge level support - even for nonpremium users. In short order a land baron sees and hears every imaginable ridiculous thing, until they could practically work the concierge desk themselves - and in addition provide services concierge couldn't dream of. Design of custom regions for communities, alternate payment programs, landswap identity protection programs for SL romances gone sour.

Usually we can show up and solve things all in one go - contrast that kind of service (typical for private estates) to 'filing a support ticket'.



3) Resmods - straw man argument. I specifically do *not* recommend resident management of a service provider estate.

A service provider employee needs to take care of mainland, precisely so he/she *can* be held accountable.

Afraid of personalities managing mainland? But they already do! It's just simply far too permissive now.


* * * * *

Cost and scaling solutions.

Let me put it this way. 2.5 million square meters of Caledon generates roughly as much income after tier as the average United States household. And generates 85,000+ USD annually for our service provider. So with roughly 1/4 billion (250,000,000!) square meters of mainland, they cannot afford to manage it? Of course not.

Even more beautifully, management is a scaling solution.

More mainland, more revenue, add a land manager. Each continent could afford management with ease, and just a wee pinch of adfarm and extortion removal would boost the land value of the continent considerably. Problem with a manager? Like any other employee, they come up for review.

* * * * *

It's really handy to code up solutions and move on; I clearly see the appeal. There just isn't a coded solution when it comes to extortion or visual blight.

In a world where land supply wasn't remotely meeting demand and one could make a million dollars simply by dropping Dreamland on the map, your concerns are quite sensible.

But now? It's a very different world - a world where rolling out more mainland had to be shut down so as not to damage the economy.



Jeffrey, I respect you as an individual capable of considering differing ideas without taking anything personally - it is certainly not personal - if I thought otherwise, I'd never state what I think so plainly.

The cost would be passed on to the consumer only if the listing price of a parcel is outside a set range, for example if the current average price per sqm of land was $L10/sqm, and the allowable range is twice that ($L20/sqm), then any price less than $L20/sqm DOES NOT REQUIRE A LISTING FEE. Any price over that amount, regardless of how much, is charged a listing fee. A listing fee can be a percentage or a set amount, but I think percentages would work better against the add-farmers. For example, those "4 CORNER" 16sqm x 4 parcels that are listed for 9999$L are over 200$L/sqm, or 10 times the going rate, so, charge them a 5% listing fee of almost 500$L.

When non-add-farm land that is premium is up for sale, it has a higher price of course, but rarely is it priced 10 times the going rate so the listing fee would not be so hard to swallow. The Seller pays the listing fee and it's up to them to try and absorb that cost based on their sale price, but in the end, they are controlled by the market value of the parcel.

I don't think it's that easily dismissed. First, the cost can't be passed on to the consumer if the land doesn't sell. While buyers are already discouraged by the high price and sometimes willing to wait-out bankruptcy of the tier-paying extortionist, just enough don't do that and pay the ransom to more than make up the cost of maintaining inventory. What's suggested is to raise that inventory cost dramatically--several orders of magnitude higher than tier--and scaled by the degree of extortion involved. The extortionists will simply not be able to afford the practice anymore: "the power to tax is the power to kill."

Second, a L$ sink *is* a revenue stream for LL. They've even spoken of allowing tier and estate fee payment in L$s. When L$s go out of circulation to a sink, Supply gets to sell on the LindeX for real US$s to meet the resulting demand. (Equivalently, the more L$s paid to a sink, the less overall "selling pressure" for cashing-out of L$s into US$s. I don't think Supply ever actually has to buy L$s, but she's in that same market, so the less cashing out, the less "competition" for her L$ sales.) Granted, LL's linguistic legerdemain around "the L$ is not a currency" tries to obscure this (for quite unrelated reasons), but a market is a market.

The final point about land sales circumventing the current system is a valid concern, but I think an easy one to treat with enforcement. I honestly don't know if any of that was tried at the time the current toothless adfarm "ban" was implemented, with adfarmers trying to continue to sell the same old plots "off the books" somehow. But it would have been extraordinarily risky business--a good way to lose the whole business with one transaction. That same level of enforcement could apply to attempts to escape the listing fee: A "buyer" captures a chat-log of extortionist "offering" (wink wink nudge nudge) not-for-sale land, submits the log to LL in an AR; LL confirms with internal logs, permabans the extortionist and all alts and IPs, and auctions off all the inventory.

I'm not saying that this is a necessary component of a comprehensive plan, but I think it is a viable one.

No banlines allowed on 16M Parcels.

No parcels solely for advertising purposes if you own less than 528M in that sim.

No banlines on parcels set for sale.

No adverts other than for sale type adverts on parcels set for sale.

With equal respect given, a reply.


Let's not confuse apples and oranges here.

While it is a correct statistic that the actual land volume is now 20% mainland, 80% private island, I would be VERY interested in a statistic regarding the number of actual people that own land in either area.

Reason being, there are a lot of corporate islands that are deeded to one user, versus the average mainland sim that has anywhere from a handful to several dozen residents. There are also a great deal of rental covenants in both regions to account for.


And even if the mainland accounts for a shrinking volume of the sims available, that's still a great deal of land: roughly 4,000 sims at last tally, or over 262.144 million meters of land.

Make no mistake: I think island estates are a good thing, and that they serve a very large niche, empirically larger than the mainland.


However, that niche does not marginalize the problem apparent: improving the service aspect of Linden sims. Sims which serve the same niche as affordable housing: a baseline.


If you'd prefer a discussion of private regions in deprecating the mainland grid, that's reasonable. But it's deliberately not on topic, because those have come and gone.



Mileage varies.

I hear good things about your management of Caledon, so I would agree in that specific instance. However, rental covenants add an additional layer of abstraction. I have in the past rented land, and in many cases had to move because the *sim* owner was giving up on the sim.


Similar to my comments above, the mainland does serve a service niche as a baseline. And empirically, some of our oldest builds and brightest newcomers exist there, both for the lower tier as for the feeling that they somehow "own" the land.

I know that personally, unless I felt the need to pony up $295 per month, that I won't be doing any further renting any time soon. But for me, that is a question of stability and freedom from certain types of drama.


Granted, in trade for others. But then, I'm addressing the problem because I find it interesting, not because I'm as personally affected by it.




It was, I am well aware, and I couldn't resist. It's just what came to mind.




I often state that the reason mainland support problems exist are that they've rolled out hardware faster than they've rolled out employees to handle the social aspects of those sims.

I am all for having more Lindens in the meat grinder to manage the problem, assuming it's cost-effective.





If you've read my proposal linked in the first post, you'd see I echo precisely this sentiment. Technical solutions are the worst remedy to solve a social problem.

However, there are a few changes that are "low hanging fruit" with large social implications, such as the ability to ignore rendering of plots or curtail some of the more obvious abuses. This should be seen as more codification of a social change, and less of a technical fix to a social problem.

I also think that to fix the problem, there *MUST* be improvements in actual support, and social changes such as the outright ban of more obvious forms of abuse (such as signs blaring malware links). The more of these we can get that are clearly defined and actionable, the better.


This may well be true, but the tune of the problem is the exact same it has been for years.




Don't worry about hurting my feelings -- this is a discussion at least approaching the adult level, not some posts on LiveJournal about losing a house.

I appreciate the sentiment, but please don't patronize me. It's bad for geek cred.

It is when select on-topic Lindens have already stated that this won't happen.

Further, such a "tax" is meaningless in the face of circumvention. After all, the Cayman Islands do pretty well for themselves these days...


But let's play Devil's Advocate for a moment and continue:


It's important to note where this appears on the balance sheet. Removing L$ from circulation lowers the demand for USD from Linden Lab, and impacts the amount in circulation regarding inflation of currency.

However, it is unreasonable to think that this is such a significant sink that the cost is not passed on to the consumer. Indeed, extortionist plots already price far outside the market.

The remainder of this topic (on L$ economics) would be conjecture, so I'm going to cap my piece of it there.



The problem with this is it would hose select, "legitimate" land sales held outside of the market, such as SLX's. And why would we want to clamp down on the number of consenting transactions between third parties, anyway?

Besides. If we had enforcement already, this wouldn't be a problem.



It could be. But I see it as a very hard sell.

Well said comments.

At the end of the day, trying my best to 'think like an adfarmer' - I suspect they would resort to two things.

First, I'd think they would resort to putting their stuff out on parcels without autoreturn - no owner permission asked. This stuff is ridiculously difficult to abuse report if the owner is away.

You'll have an oldbie with a small parcel somewhere that hasn't logged in for two years, and 30 prims free. What can anyone do? The email addy is long forgotten, he's vaguely aware he's got some secondlife land but it's barely a blip on his credit card. "Oh I'll get back to that someday..." ... and the fellow is now into microbrewery or something as a hobby. Everyone's stuck.

Second, I think the mainland is ripe for land extortion at much larger scales. Take a few 512m parcels and put out gigantic ugly towers, wait a while. Buy out the region cheap, pretty it up, sell high (unless of course, someone else manages to ugly it up). This isn't new - I've heard lurid accounts of it dating back to 2004.

This is why I tend to favour human management. It short-circuits just about all of this behaviour right from the start, across the board, at all levels.

My biggest question is: why *don't* they manage more strictly... and I suspect that perhaps there may be legal ramifications.

Okay, well that trumps all aces. I mean, the whole point of this exercise it to find *something* LL can bestir itself to do, beyond waving the Magical Mystical Zoning wand at continents that glimmer in some possible future.

If they don't want to do this, I sure wish they'd leak some clue of what direction they're leaning, so we can keep them from toppling over flat on their faces again.

The legitimate business issue has been raised by Lindens at office hours, this is the problem with some of the one size fits all solutions being suggested.

Management basically equals zoning, zoning is hard to enforce retrospectively. Many of us who have 16M parcels with banlines next to our plots or hideous ad towers are not considering some of the legitimate uses for smaller parcels, servers, slx boxes, onrez boxes, delivery systems yadda yadda yadda, these would only come to light in the light of a ban, then we'll see how many dolphins are caught in the nets and it may not be a pretty sight.

However it's about time there was real debate over this issue, the time for puyssyfooting is long past.

Yes, yes and yes. Applying restrictions to parcels set for sale is a perfect solution.

And, I'd add, the maximum height of any prim on any parcel set for sale is equal to the length in metres of the smallest side of that parcel. eg on a 4x8m parcel the height of the for sale ad can't be more than 4m above ground.

The only one I disagre with is this one -



The extortionists will easily circumvent this by simply buying more 16m squares, thus making the situation even worse.

The simple answer of course, is that ad-farming and land extortion of this sort is against the TOS, and LLs in this blog post http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/02/13/mainland-and-the-ad-farm-problem/ stated that very clearly. So what SHOULD happen is that residents AR every ad-farm parcel they find, and LLs act on those ARs and confiscate the land, ban the account-holders.

How about this for a possible solution to the issue of legitimate use for 16m parcels? Enforce a restriction on parcels of under a certain size that all prims must be buried underground, or totally transparent, or above cloud level. Or be a maximum of a certain size. And that any breach of these rules would be considered a clear breach of TOS under the clause of Harrassment, so there is no hesitation on whether to AR for it.

This way, users will be able to place their scripted boxes but the restrictions on them will mean that such objects will not become an eyesore and therefore no longer tempt people to pay over the odds to buy the land.