Son of Ad Farms: The Comprehensive Plan

I like the idea of no ban lines on parcels set for sale. For what legitimate reason would there be to do so? The only interesting thing these 16sqm parcels have with ban lines is the "Ban Line Bouncing" sport where you go up and down on the top of the ban line.

As for zoning the mainland, I don't think it would work and for some reason, most, if not all of the add farmers are pro-mainland zoning. 'Old Diaper Bag' especially and that makes it very fishy! I think their reason is that it would take forever for LL to implement and in the end, the add-farmers would find ways to bend the rules to continue their pollution just like they have now since the change by LL was done earlier this year.

Yes, there are anti-add-farmers that are pro-mainland zoning as well.

New rules shouldn't be made that could cause inconvenience to the majority because of a minority group of scammers.

Where does one draw the line at making a profit and extortion? Say for example, I already own 8192 total square meters in 2 different parcels. If I happen to notice that the same entity is snatching up all for sale parcels in that sim, I can safely assume their ultimate goal is to acquire the entire sim, or most of it. Where does one draw the line? If someone is willing to pay double or triple market value to obtain the land, then how is it considered extortion? Now, if someone abuses a neighbor just to get them to buy the lot, that's different, but I see a pretty slippery slope when it comes to calling an overpriced lot extortion.


http://www.secondscripter.com

Well, would you pay 4,096,000$L for that 8192 sqm parcel? That is 500$L/sqm which is what some add-farmers are selling at...

There is a big difference between paying double or triple the average price /sqm and paying 80 times the average price / sqm!

there arent any sane definitions, policy or enforcement on the ageply and gamblings bans. why does adfarming require one?
getting caught up in legalese minutiae is exactly what will stop anything from ever happening. adfarmers know what adfarming is. extortionists know when they are extorting. we know adfarming and plot extortion when we see it. these things are already expressly prohibited in the tos. now ll just needs to shift out of neutral and ban them.
it really is that simple.

this thing has been jira's and blogged before and ll are disinterested. i wont waste my time and instead will wait for a sl-alternative to migrate to.
the idea that the community must jira for ll to take note of community sentiment is is not something i understand.

Well, let's use a page from the land extortionist's handbook that will illustrate the difference. Let's say you are Adam Landowner, and I am Malodorous Extortionist. You own or have recently acquired land in a sim, and have started building something which looks like you may need to acquire more land at some point. There's a nice, empty, quiet 512sqm sitting next to your current holdings that is for sale, and I speculate that you may someday want to buy it. In fact, I am going to do something to make SURE you buy it. I buy the 512, cut it up into 32 16sqm tracts, set all but the corners for sale for cheap, and link all four corners together, setting them for sale for, oh, let's say L$14995. Oh, and just for icing on the cake, I disable ALL access to the corners, so the banlines show up. Minutes later, my fellow extortionist and adfarm chums come along, getting my IMs about fresh cut extortion/adland, and they proceed to buy a couple holes here and there, setting them for sale for L$1995-L$4995, "just in case your neighbor needs some more spare prims, Mal *wink-wink nudge-nudge* ". The adfarmers immediately buy up choice spots and erect their towers, EVEN IF they are in the ass end of nowhere where NObody will see them. So, now, you essentially have this ruined plot next to you which IMMEDIATELY devalues your land. Your options are:

1) The "give in" solution: Buy out the ones you can, at EXTREME expense, and try to trade more choice spots in the sim with the ones you can't (probably also at extreme expense).
2) The "run away as fast as you can" solution: Move to another sim that we haven't spoiled yet (operative word: "yet".
3) The "let them eat tier" solution: Buy up all you can of our budding adfarm before it gets too far out of hand (Draco help you if you come in on long-established ones, like I have), wall up the ad towers from your view, surround our extortion plots with little cages containing infocard givers and signs warning people of the banlines and the scam that is present in those plots, then batten down the hatches and wait us out.

This doesn't even touch on the corner-scam, or the donut-hole scam; those are different pages from the same playbook.

You see, this is why you find most advertisers and land extortionists together in the same cut-up land plots. They operate SYNERGISTICALLY. One supports the other. Adfarmers love the diced plots made by the extortionists, because they don't have to do the cutting, or get (directly) involved in the extortion. Extortionists love the adfarmers' efforts, because they make the neighbors even more induced to buy them out. I also have no doubts that many of the adfarmers/extortionists are the same people, just using alts to try and keep the Lindens off the scent trail.

The big difference is that a normal/large (512sqm+), yet overpriced, plot WILL eventually sell at a reasonable price, because larger plots cost more tier, and as long as it doesn't sell, it is costing the seller more than it will ever sell for the longer it sits there. Microplots, on the other hand, don't have that same problem, because the HUGE profit margin pretty much guarantees they could own the plot for YEARS, and still make money, even paying tier on it for so long, if it sells for that outrageous price.

Where does one draw the line? There are no hard-and-fast rules for it, just like there aren't ones in RL. In RL, we have laws, ordinances, and eminent domain statutes which work both on prevention AND cleanup of such problems. People who try to use land in a noxious way against their neighbors can quickly lose their land, sometimes with the neighbors getting said land for free or for a small filing fee. The Lindens are facing the same problems we face every day; they have to make judgment calls based on all available evidence. Some cases will be cut-and-dried. Others will be firmly entrenched in the grey area. The goal of any policy change which is remotely effective is to minimize the grey area as much as possible, or at least minimize the collateral damage from any judgment calls on issues within it.

Because they can't get sued over this one.

This is more in line with the removal of telehubs: only sane arguments and pressure from the residents will fix the issue.

Echo that. I don't see how anyone shoud be able to use a temp-rezzer to create a visually-permanent structure that exceeds the prim allocation of the parcel.

Incidentally, please come to Jack Linden's Office Hour meeting regarding "Any issues relating to Customer Relations/Support or concerning Land in general (mainland, islands, estates, auctions and grid management) or specifically about high level support programs such as Concierge or Enterprise level tier" on Wednesdays at 1PM SLT. LAST WEEK, we were not allowed to talk about add farms and even though Jack showed up 45 minutes late, everyone kept to his request. THIS WEEK, I expect more heated discussion. Add Farmers do participate with this meetings and I roughly estimate that it is 40% add farmers and 50% anti-add farmers and 10%? I don't know. You don't need to be a multi-sim owner, concierge level customer or anything like that to participate! Come with your ideas.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Linden%20Estate%20Services/213/107/49?title=Jack's%20Office

It is only by getting LL's attention that this problem will ever be resolved and it really is up to the residents to come up with a feasible solution that LL is capable of implementing.

Some sort of minimum plot total in a sim like 128m would be interesting to see how that stuffed their business model.
Sorry I don't subscribe to the "I want a 16m in every sim to jump spybots" plan, a resident owns every other metre in a sim and they refuse to sell ever? It's got to be for spybotting. And if you want a backup server in another sim, why not find a friend who will let you put it on his land.

Yep. I mean, it's handy to use one's own 16 for those backup servers; I did it myself back when I didn't have much land. But surely nobody thinks that one has to own land anywhere to be able to have an SLX or OnRez server box, or one's own product update servers (or whatever).

And the stamp collecting thing... honestly, I don't know what to think about those anymore. I thought they were simple bot-hopping-off and scanner-launching spots, with maybe a name2key data collector script. A few days ago, I made an offer to two of the larger such data networks. I happen to own a corner of a Mainland sim that I know has no parcel owned by either of those networks. They've both been good "neighbors" in another sim where my land surrounds theirs, so I offered to let them rez a prim on my group-owned land there, and/or guarantee bot access to that corner. No reply from either of them. Not even a "thanks but won't work because we need to own the land for some reason we're not talking about" response. So, whatever is going on there to somehow amuse or turn a profit is more than ever a mystery to me.

Echo that. If I owned an advertising network and was able to legitimise my activities by having land zoned for me in the covenant I'd be happy as. (legitimise in the context that illegitimate and illegal are not the same thing)

This suggestion gives me a simple idea. What if the client were simply coded so that prims on tiny parcels (under 512 maybe) only render to the owner of said prims. This way all the legitimate uses of tiny plots would still be doable (slx box, rez spot for customers, etc.) while the visual clutter is eliminated.

I suppose extortionists would adapt by doing their dirty deeds with 512 parcels, but at least this would eliminate the problem of random ugly splinters along the road. Plus, come to think of it the griefers could simply switch their tactics from overt visual clutter to subtler script overuse. hm...

If Jack declares that ad farms is not a subject he wants to hear about, it's likely because residents haven't come up with anything new lately.

I've been to his office hour a few times and this subject tends to eat the entire meeting, giving other people no chance to air their non-ad-farm topics. People go on and on (and on and on) about it without really bringing much new information to the table.

Start by realizing that he's a director at LL and that he's already heard, both in internal discussions and from residents, just about every idea that people have had so far. Like talking to any executive anywhere, if you do get a chance to talk to him about this subject, you're better off NOT spending ANY time on various tweaks to plans he's heard 100 times before. If you can take only a minute or 2 of his time and show him that you've done something new, you have a better chance of getting his attention. Maybe start a blog/wiki that summarizes the pros & cons of small parcels. Maybe get a bot together that walks the mainland and makes charts about land distribution vs parcel sale price. Do something, anything, new.

Best of luck - I'm no fan of ad farms - but scanning thru this thread, I really don't see anything new.

Well, the problem is that there is more than enough "old" that we have given to him to prompt some kind of official response on the matter, even if it is nothing more than simple acknowledgment that what we are telling him IS a problem for which LL needs to work on a solution. We haven't even gotten this.



Then you haven't been to very many meetings. I've been to them every week for 3 months now. On average, the subject takes less than half the meeting time (there have been meetings where it was not brought up at all); most of the time, those of us who regularly bring it up WAIT until all other current topics HAVE time to be aired, only bringing it up when no other topics are offered, or when prompted by Jack himself; and just about every week people bring up new evidence, offer another good suggestion, or otherwise add to the issue.



I can't speak for anyone else, but we only ever give him new evidence and new proposals. I know I have never given him anything twice. As for giving him something that someone else hasn't already given him, how am I (or anyone, really) supposed to know that?



Getting his attention is not the problem. He makes his attention available to anyone and everyone every week for ~1 hour. That's the whole point of Office Hours.



Done that. http://etakeh-oh.net/adless/



Done that.



All the time, that's what we do.



Likely that is because there are a lot of common and obvious solutions to the problem, and everyone is going to suggest things that they think are original. It is why we started the War movement; to coordinate and focus our efforts. I think we've more than amply demonstrated the problem, and it is WAY past time for LL to step up to the plate and do something about it. Failing that, we'll just fall back on the education and "spread the word" grass-roots efforts, which ARE having a measurable effect.

Yes. Being GMT-5 makes it hard to attend Jacks office hour and I have only been a few times. RL still pays the bills.. :\

The last time I was there, you were talking about this movement. Maybe my memory is going, I think I wrote a note to myself about my memory.. it's somewhere around here, but my take-away from that meeting was that you talked an awful lot about it, to the point that whatever it is I went to talk about had a hard time making it into the conversation. I'm not trying to give you a hard time - this is just the impression that I got. Please don't take it as anything more than honest feedback.

And, if you do have charts and stats and stuff, responding to Travis' post, the very first reply in this thread, that says "Neither of us have any statistical data showing how folks use their 16m parcels" will get you a much better return than arguing with me - he's WAY more FICcy than I am...

I dunno. We DO try to let others have time to air their concerns as well, but we don't always start the topic. When it does come up, whether I do it, or someone else does, it will be talked about, because there is often a lot to say. I also can't help that the "problem children" whom the issue centers around" also show up and monopolize the meeting on their own volition. It's one of those things about having a limited resource and trying to use it wisely. It shows the difference between us and them. We're willing (and trying) to be good neighbors, and they show up and monopolize from the get-go. Most of the time, all I ask for is status updates, and to offer any new information and evidence that we have recently acquired.

As for the land ownership data, we've given some of it to Jack, but due to agreements with the source, we have not and can not really publicize it without their permission. If Travis wants to contact me or Timo, we can see about getting permission to share the data with him.

Both sides are making representations to Linden Lab, Jack said he'd be happy to attend a debate away from his office hour if it was arranged, but he was pretty much at a loss to see how the debate had been progressing.

Robin said that Jack and herself had been discussing the issue.

As I have said before, I don't think there is anything really to debate about, the "three" sides of the issue have tried to come to terms with one another already several times, and there is simply no middle ground. Any compromise more or less ends with one or more sides having to give up their position wholesale. Extortionists are not going to stop strategically cutting and pricing parcels, adfarmers aren't going to stop putting up eyesores on microplots outside your front door or bedroom window, and the rest of us aren't going to stop until something is done to put an end to both.



Good. Hopefully, we will see some movement on this issue in the next month or so. Meanwhile, we will keep the issue in the forefront of their minds by our continued presence, as well as growing the grass-roots efforts at home.

Maybe offer a bounty for bot source code that does allow you to publish the data. I'd contribute some L$ to that and I'm sure others would, too. Get a quote from somebody serious and let us know how much you need to raise.

Right now, from the viewpoint of most people who haven't seen the data, Travis' statement is (as is usual for him) true.

I suppose having incontrovertible data to substantiate the problems scope and scale would be a bit helpful; some managers would plunge headlong over cliffs without pie charts showing the pitfalls of, well, pitfalls.

Not sure whether this supports or refutes the necessity of statistics: For an astonishingly long time after the "ban" was put in place, LL maintained that "the numbers showed" that it was being very effective, with the corollary that everyone should just wait till "market forces" pulled everything to a happy equilibrium. And hearing about those "numbers" for a couple of months, I held my tongue as I saw sims around me getting diced-up, seemingly faster than before. But it's now obvious to anybody with a passing glance at the Mainland that those numbers--whatever the hell they were--were not relevant to what was actually happening on the Grid.

Yep, well after 2 years of submissions from residents, we are out of ideas, nothing suggested has been attempted, so therefore we must conlude with that many people and LL on the problem, it's unfixable and we best continue to do do nothing at all or there really isn't a problem with the whole mainland being diced up into 16m plots.

It really doesn't matter what he is at LL, what is important is that We, The Customers, are heard and LL does something about it, since we obviously cannot without LL's intervention. SL should be a fun place and Add Farmers ruin that everywhere they go.

This all kind of reminds me of the 'hugs' issue at there.com. Users want it, they don't care if it doesn't quite work, or the avatars are different heights or whatever, but there is just absolutely. no. movement. on management's part and the issue is dead.

Ironically avatars hugging in SL suffers from all of the predicted faulty horrors that the there.com management use as an excuse not to, but never once has a complaint about avatar hugging imperfection ever graced these forums that I know of. It's just kinda how it is. In Star Wars Galaxies also, avatar body parts and items lean right through each other all the time. Nobody even thinks twice about it. Yet the same issue is a showstopper at a different company.


Same deal here - all this talk, but the solution is really just painfully simple. Purge the ad farmer extortionists, keep it up unapologetically. Rapidly, land valuation goes up and losers leave.

This is how it works on private estates, too - nobody even *dreams* of ad farming in my estate because I'd wipe any attempt without a second thought or warning.

Why does estate management have to be any different on the Company's own estate?

Time and money can't be the argument here; inaction and property value collapse is already the expensive option. Set a precedent, stick to it, and adfarmers won't even bother - believe me, it's a pretty low maintenance option.