Son of Ad Farms: The Comprehensive Plan

I agree, Desmond. Having LL take a more active part in policing the mainland would not be unwelcome.

For all the forums talk about how LL doesn't care about residents rights, it's sorta like they're stuck on certain points, unable/unwilling to be bastards when they need to be for fear of stepping over some line..

edit: there does seem to be a faction at LL that also wants more enforcement. At Andrews office hour last week, we were talking about traffic &c and ideas on to deal with the abuse of it. I suggested "hire some rabid dogs for the gteam?" Andrew said that this had been "mentioned internally" but that he was looking for a technical solutions. So.. Maybe it will happen some day..

Andrew rocks. I'd get a ringside seat if he decided to clean up the Wild West...

I wonder if it could possibly be exactly the opposite. I can't remember that scammer's name now: Brody? Brady? The one who got a court to rule that some ToS provision wasn't enforceable and that he'd stolen his land fair and square. Anyway, could it be that LL somehow is just afraid of changing the rules for their own benefit, lest they get sued for "taking" something of value that somebody "bought"?

I mean, there's one particular extortionist who has a *lot* of little parcels on inventory now. Suppose LL just shuts him down and takes them all back to auction off or whatever. Are they afraid he'd have grounds to sue them?

And what about that pre-ban Shylock-impersonator with the anti-Semitic yellow smiley faces? Suppose he sued?

Could the ToS really be so legally weak that they have to worry about this?

Do you necessarily need a bot for parcel ownership data? A script could get at least part of that information..

You'd be bidding against me for those seats!


A bot probably be better.. It can move about the grid more easily and get at the information _a lot_ faster than a script can. It can also just dump all the parcel data to your local disk directly without having to muck around with web servers and such.

edit: that doesn't sound too hard.. Maybe I'll give writing a bot like that a try.. Without meaning to derail this thread too far, what would people do with all this data? Like, what kinda graphs would you want?

how were the little smilies possibly anti-semitic?

How about this...

Any parcel smaller than 256 (or whatever arbitrary figure) sqm is billed as if it were actually 256 sqm. That would make proliferation of tiny parcels very uneconomic, and I have yet to see a legitimate mainland use for having more than 2-3 of them at most.

A weekly snapshot of the sim please.

1) Parcel ownership mapped by 16m square.
2) Parcel pricing if for sale

A change map, like a weather map, with an extrapolated summary noting the changes from week to week would be great.

EDIT: oops!

3) Object on parcel. So we can know if the land is fallow or not.

The whole act was playing on the Shylock/greed stereotype. If you check old snaps, the little smilies weren't regular little smilies: they had a Star of David as one eye.

Re: bots vs scripts for data collection: I don't think one can get parcel pricing with a script. Ownership and primcount are easy, of course.

Re: bots vs scripts for data collection: I don't think one can get parcel pricing with a script. Ownership and primcount are easy, of course.

we are talking about umnik, yeah?
i always assumed he was a german jew.

I always assumed he was *portraying* a Jew, for purposes of defamation. If he really were Jewish, would he flaunt that in such a way, when he was universally loathed specifically for (the old stereotypical) greed? I suppose it's possible, but it would require a degree of insensitivity that I find very hard to imagine. Anyway... I'm sorry I mentioned it, actually, because it's really not germane to the topic. My fault.

More precisely, they can't get sued over it the way things currently are.

I would agree that given the right, wrong kind of changes, they could put themselves in a nice legal pickle.

you are probably right.

I think you've solved it! All they need to do is modify the service terms with plenty enough warning, thus making a nice lunch snack out of that legal pickle.

Legal could look the following over and give it a pass, couldn't they?




TOS Update

1 Sept 2008

"...In the eventuality that your small parcel is deemed adfarmish, extortionist, tacky, noobish, or just plain suffers from too much bling, the Company now Reserves the Right to swap your (16m, 32m, 64m, oh-whatever-we-want) parcel for an equivalent amount of land in a different area.*


Please check the box signifying your acceptance or otherwise prior to login.

(_) agree

(_) agree anyway with anguish and despair, in a frothy rage





* Alternate area designate is the new continent Blingtardia

ooo! Blingtardia I like it. I definitely want a 16m there so I could put a tree on it. Although I'd probably get AR'd for not being tacky enough

Desmond wins Teh Forumses!

I opt for compulsory firing into the sun, myself.

Well. I can dream.

Was the last boss hard?