Is it time to close SL Businesses?

Business continue to bid against each other, pouring millions of L$ into LL's pockets each week. Why would LL change this model?

I refuse to search for anything via the Classifieds. If I can't find it in Search/Places, I'll live without it. I'm not going to be a part of the problem by USING the Classifieds. My business has a cheap Classified taken out so we at least show up SOMEWHERE on the lists, but I'm not bidding against other clubs. No way.

Well one problem might be that the TP in the OP's Picks doesn't end up near the store at all. In fact the TP point, which is 83m from where I landed, is the entrance to a private house and the store is some way beyond that. With a 64m draw distance, I would never have seen the store at all and assumed it had gone.

I understand that the store has expanded and moved and the Classified ad landing point, which is different, is no doubt correct but it might be an idea to update your Picks as well As a few others have posted, I often check the owner's Picks for more details after finding somewhere in classifieds, and then tp direct from there.

I'm running a classified ad, but at the minimum price. I only find it good because it's woefully difficult to fit a decent amount of information in a parcel description, meaning we're basically forced to keyword spam. Currently my classified comes up for a fairly restricted set of words, so people searching specifically for things I sell tend to get my ad in their results at a reasonable position since there are few others.

Much better would be if we just had an intelligent system of tagging parcels with keywords. Give us a few free ones per parcel then charge for more. Then the description field can be expanded to the same size as a classified and used as nothing more than a description (no keyword parsing necessary since tags would do that).

It would be so much better, and easier to search, and LL could still make money from it/sink L$ with it by just charging more and more for more and more keywords (e.g an exponential keyword price model, just so long as it gives an estimate of the cost!).


Then classifieds can go back to being just for offers, or individual items you want to sell more aggressively. But this again could be migrated to the exact same tagged system to make it better used and more focused rather than keyword and L$ spam.

Tagging has the main advantage of forcing users to keep their tags relevant and well-thought out, rather than just throwing as many in as possible. People would then have to actually think about their target audience and what they might search for, and having clearly defined tags can be much easier for that as well since the popularity of words and phrases you're thinking of can be checked.

I have a JIRA issue about tagged searches which mentions abuse control as well:
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-172


For ordinary use however, I find classifieds pretty useless. I never find what I want, so I don't search them. I just uses places and look around. Even then there are plots of land incorrectly key-worded which just makes me annoyed at the land-owner as all I want is to find what I want, not browse their completely unrelated stuff.

{;ease pass all your stuff to the nearest noob on the way out so it's doesn't help bloat the servers till the year 2500