Feedback on Ad Farm post

Because they have a consistent and sustained history of abusing those rights with wholesale and unmitigated destructive practices to extort money from other residents. It is a sad fact that those who abuse freedoms bring about the destruction of those freedoms for everyone. The manifestations of this truth in RL are too obvious to require enumeration. SL is no different.

This nullifies the thought that changing the free 512 before paying tier would stop the extortionists. Many of the worst who charge 777L or 9999L have between 12000-45000m worth of land.

This is the reason they are removing the Ad Farms.

Awesome database, Zolen! Thanks for making that available to us.

Are you saying no lines should be drawn at all?

I couldn't agree more Itico

Hopefully Jack's statement that they intend to manage the mainland and use common sense to take action against individual abuser's means LL come up with just that a task force of Lindens on hand to stop these people causing trouble.

Exercising their rights as estate managers on the mainland hints that they may exercise their rights to remove trouble makers and respond to all future attempts to harass or extort

I really hope so any way.

I think they they should be removed all together. We have the classified ads area under the profile. and if you really want to draw traffic to your business do an event. IT HELPS more then a small parcel next to someones home.

I have to disagree with this. I think Qie Niangao is right on with his assessment:

If don't think that zoning should be done on existing mainland. Get rid of the ad farms but we don't need the exixting mainland turned into themed sims. The Lindens should create new sims for that. The people who bought the land bought it because it had no covenent.

No, this is what is being created by the removal of ad farms.

They are. It's already been discussed that zoning is only for new sims, and MAYBE specific existing sims where all the sim owners agree to it, but that is not in the current plan yet.

WoW

That must have taken you ages it's great!

I found someone with the surname FOOTMAN has 1276 adfarm plots Total Area: 40496m2 most for sale at around 9999L/sqm

and it took me seconds.

LL must have something similar to this, which says to me it shouldn't be to hard for them to identify the trouble makers quickly and put a stop to this blight once and for all

I would like to suggest :

1) That, blatant extortion is completly unacceptable in any society, therefor nobody practicing this form of "business" should not, at any time, be deemed eligible for a licence. The question is of course, when IS it extortion. I would say definately when it exceeds +100% the current market price per m2.

2) That, all holes in properties are expropriated by LL at the market price and then offered as a compulsory sale to the surrounding parcel, again at the market price. I think that we can assume that nobody intentionally buys a parcel with a hole in it and would be more than willing to accept the offer.

3) That, the total number of stand alone ad's in each sim is limited. How? LL create a pool of billboards assorted standard sizes and shapes (possibly complimentary in style to the sim) and licence these out to approved advertisers for limited but renewable periods.

4) That, there are ## meters open ground from the outside edges of the ad to the perimeter of the parcel. This would totally eradicate AdFarmers use of small cutoffs and in effect render them useless for future (attempted) extortion efforts.

This is why Brian is one our top community leaders. Excellent post.

Brian and I have been dealing with a few notorious extortionists, particularily one in our beloved sim Luo.

Both our "Land for the Landless" (the previous program to First Land) plots are in the region and for more than four years, we have strived to keep the area nice. Sales have been private for the mostpart and we always cared about our community.

Then, a disgruntled de-frocked in-world banker sought to deliberately destroy our community, by random checkerboarding, dumping plots on bots in bits and pieces, who turn around and dump them on extortionists. The saddest part is, despite the very best efforts of the community to manage their regions, extortionists can frustrate any community for spite and greed at the drop of a hat.... and the worst part being....... with absolutely NO recourse, whatsover.

Extortion is not limited to open market land sales. It's also an epidemic in the auctions. In regions where one person is a predominant owner, any griefer can needlessly "inflate" the value of desired parcels, causing the bidder to extend higher than fair market value or perpetuate continued in-world griefing.

I'm no rocket scientist, but I also don't need a ton bricks to fall on my head to know, that an auction of $8500 Lindens for a 2048 to a jump rebid to $14,000 then directly to $25,000... is not bidding in good faith. It's extortion.... period.

LL needs to disclose all bidders.

I think Linden Labs is on the right track. Businesses will never flourish without the ability to promote themselves and therfore advertising/promotion in some form is a necessity. However I have seen firsthand how the current policy has driven off hundreds (likley thousands) of residents who own land and spend money in SL - the very residents businesses here need to be successful, so it is a balancing act.

Small SL businesses will need some form of affordable access to this resource. If it is primarily sold to RL companies (to compete with the google adsense or similar revenue streams), it will alleniate residents and hurt the SL businesses. In the US media communities, stations hold back a siginifcant portion of inventory for local advertisers, even though those commercials sell for lower rates, because that is necessary to make the end product relevent to the viewer/listener. The same thing is necessary here.

The locations need to make sense relative to the surroundings and have some aestetic value. I have a beautiful lake with one 32m stack of ad cubes in the middle and an owner that refused to move it or trade out for another parcel. I would have less trouble with an ad site that complemented the surroundings by the road in the sim, instead of the middle of the lake. I hope this type of consideration is included in the liscencing process.

A minimum footprint (64m or 128m), maximum height and setback from the parcel edge should all be included in the requirments to help ensure that it does not butt-up to or encroach upon a neighboring parcel.

Many of those who will be applying for these lisences currently have small parcels holding . I hope that a past history of not working with area residents in regards to small parcels will be taken into consideration when granting lisences.

All in all however, I appreciate that LL has finally taken meaningful action on this difficult subject.

Also remember as we work to recycle some small parcels that all small parces held by Arbor Project are available for free to adjoining landowners who will join them to their plots. So far in just over two years, we have given away over 2 sims worth of land to be rejoined and are excitied to lend our groups support and land holdings to the effort to rebuild areas of the mainland. If you would like to join an Arbor Plot to your land, just drop me or Timo Daehlie a notecard.

.. but they are not all there... however... excellent!

It's even an even sadder fact that those same abusers cry about said "freedom" while they have and do encroach on the freedom of others - for years.

I don't know what's funnier, crying slippery slope on this issue, or the scads of one post alts in this thread who are against this move by LL.

If there is a slippery slope here, it's that ad farmers will surely try and circumvent this rule, due to the fact that LL has, once again, chosen terribly ambiguous language to describe it.

Jack,

We need to know what "networked" means exactly.

We need to hear that this isn't just another placatory move, pushed to the back burner at LL, like the parcel extortion "ban".

I am aware that the lindens said that zoning will be only in new sims (as it should be) but what bothers me is the posters that want to have a totally zoned mainland. One great feature of the mainland is the varity of builds.

Not all of them... you missed Noonkkot at least.

They've switched from blog comments to point people to the forums. One-post accounts are less suspicious than they used to be...

Two years, here.

Then I'm not sure why you're arguing with me. My point was that limiting plot size was going to break legitimate techniques, and that virtually all of the problems caused by small 'not quite ad farm' parcels would be better addressed by parcel muting.

I am not sure whether billboards should be placed inside the boundaries of Linden roads or not, I don't think it really matters whether they are inside the protected perimeter or on a small plot along side.

The important thing for me is that a maximum size and type of design for bill boards is adhered to under the terms of the license that these also blend in to the surrounding area if possible and allowed content is of a non sexually explicit nature.

We have to be mindful that adfarming and advertising are to completely separate issues.

ADFARMING for me refers to the EXTORTION PLOT practices and is so termed as perpetrators of this used to use dummy adverts to apply pressure to neighbors.

ADVERTISING is hopefully referring to legitimate adverts that are often thoughtlessly placed on high up floating and spinning boxes, again upsetting neighbors but hopefully without the express desire to force a land sale.

I say hopefully because I prefer to think that some of the ADVERTISERS might actually not be villains but just a little bit thoughtless instead

I think the licensing of ADVERTISING is a great step and will prevent people who wish to follow this line of virtual business from annoying other users intentionally or otherwise.

I do not think this will directly have any effect on ADFARMING whatsoever.

However Jack Linden has promised to tackle that problem also, by LL intervening directly as Estate Managers, using a common sense approach to wheedle out all current forms of abuse and any future ones as they are thought up

I am aware of the blog>forum push (which is weird, because they pushed us the OTHER direction a couple of years ago), and the access restriction changes. I just think it's a bit odd that almost all of the people posting against this move by LL have about 1 or 2 posts. Then again, maybe it's not so odd, considering that many of these ad farmers have literally dozens of alts?

Also, I read that bit you quoted from Jack. I don't understand why the term "networked" even needs to be used then, hence my confusion.

Then let Linden Labs *buy* new land for this. NOT turn protected land into spam land.

Zero is a limited number, and a fair number of licenses for "network ads".