Feedback on Ad Farm post

Is there an echo in here?
Right. See ya. Can I have your stuff?

It's a free market in-world. Try offering the service of microparcel extortion to the non-Linden Estate owners--if it's a good value-added service, it should do well in the free market. Or open your own sims--they're available for a nominal fee, by capitalist standards.

Have fun with that.

Actually, Qie is spot on. Perhaps you missed this part of Jack's message:



In case you can't seem to comprehend what he is referring to here, it includes the practice of MICROPLOT EXTORTION, an "activity that clearly goes against our commitment to improve the mainland".

Revenues coming from small plots, eh? How do you figure that, pray tell?

Totalitarianism doesn't equal Communism. Also, a capitalist society does have regulation. That's why my fine pack of cigarettes carries a label letting me know it's probably killing me.

And I like freedom as much as the next gal, but I am glad to hear that after October, I will never have to worry again about people walking through one of my museums and being handed a note card and a landmark for a bondage gear shop by the advertising micro plot next door with the aggressive panhandling dysfunction that passes out unasked for note cards and LMs right through the wall.

Which is something that actually was happening at my first museum.

Granted, maybe I wouldn't have gotten the plot for 900L if it didn't have a bondage-ad machine encroaching, which might have something to do with that "declining land value" caused by ad farms thing that Jack Linden was referring to.

I mean, yeah... that place was a Virtual Red Light District...

I am not sure what objecting to eye-and-ear sores that lower land values and discourage tier-paying customers, and getting rid of urban blight, has to do with communism.. it seems to me to have a lot more to do with capitalism.

Yes do save your breath Talarus as this known parasite is clearly unrepentant.

Not going to listen to any form of common sense, and made action by LL necessary in the first place, along with some of his other friends, by being far to greedy!


LOL


Mr Termagant if you and similar folk, practicing this exploitive form of business, had not been overly greedy then probably LL would never have got involved because more people would have bought your plots and the mainland wouldn't be such a mess now.

So I wish to thank you personally for helping to force the Lindens hand


P.S.

I hope this fact dawns on you and makes you feel responsible, if the Lindens do treat you in the manner that I and many others wish them to

basically the presence of an add should result of an agreement with all the concerned neighbours (who have the add in sight from their land). Only exception, the entrance of a shop, should be kept reasonable in size and aspect. This means that it must be in the style of the region or neighbouring. For instance no fluo or "modern" add in a nature setting.

I think you did not read Jack Lindens post on page 11 properly.

Where he states



I may be wrong here but I am very hopeful this means the Lindens will be targeting all forms of extortion, abuse and harassment, that goes on across the mainland.
Whether it complies with some loophole they didn't quite manage to stitch up or not.

Look at this statement again closely



This sounds very promising and shows a clear intent by the Lindens to respond to future unreasonable activities as they take place, by using judgment rather than applying a set rule

Kara - you can still join your plots even though they aren't physically connected. I've done this before. Exact same situation - lots of small lots with adlots in between.

Go into Edit>Preferences>Graphics and increase your draw distance, then fly up high above the sim and select one piece of your land and drag the box across the sim to your other land, and join it. It doesn't matter if there are adlots in between your parcels, it'll join your land (as long as it's in the same sim and the same owner).

Regardless of whether you join it or not, you still have the same prim allotment. I don't agree with putting restrictions on small lots since there are valid uses for them (discussed elsewhere so I won't repeat here). But combining the land together makes it easier to keep track of, so I thought I'd tell you how since you are concerned.

Mr. Termagant, thou dost protest too much, methinks.

I also think it is just time to stop feeding the troll.

LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Let's see ....

Driving away customers who, on the balance, have much more land .... often completely abandoning it so it creates no revenue.

Losing valuable content, whether the driven-off customers abandon their land or sell it.

Making the grid as a whole less attractive to the corps they want to attract. Yes, they would want their private islands,but they want to know LL is a responsible company to partner with too.

Lag-producers (particle streams and such) causing more problems for their servers.

Need I go on? In a cost analysis, you are bad business to them.

Thanks for the tip! Enjoying seeing the area is 512 on my 'about land' now!

The surprising thing is it took this long for LL to see it and act.

[Notice: translated using Google]

Another possibility would be to allow other companies servers secondlife staying in their facilities, which could result in companies like Geocities offering free land in exchange for banners.

He HAD to pay for the junker... it was parked in a small parcel at the end of his driveway.

If all advertising would be of the kind shown in your picture we certainly didn't have this discussion here . It's small, it's not destracting and it's well integrated into your architecture.

I think this is an example for "good" advertising as Jack mentioned it in his blog:

Greetings active Ad Farm Fighters..


As we all might have heard or read : Ad Farming will not be allowed after the 1st of October

Due to this new upcoming policy about ad farms/land extortion our weekly Ad Zoo meeting will be replaced by a special one (involving several land protecting groups like The Arbor Project, DALR & The Ad Zoo) about how to coorporate in the most efficient way in this futures post Ad Farm period. If you feel involved and want to join in our clean up activities in the future then feel free to come over and share your thoughts/ideas.

See the list below of this week issues :


- Forum Thread of Jack Linden
- Recycling small plots
- Advertisement Licenses
- Mass AR's
- Celebration Party
- End of the Ad Zoo
- Space for your issue


Your Hosts :

Talarus Luan
Xerses Goff
Timo Daehlie


Time 2pm slt - Sunday 7th of September


Slurl below teleports you directly to the Ad Zoos Meeting Area

http://secondlife/Zap20%Cannon/88/214/103

Is that for or against ad farming?

It's against ad farming of course!

but the thing I dont get..
If I rent mainland, I pay for it.
So basicly I can do whatever I want, right?
So who cares if I place big ads.
I mean, if you dont like it, you avoid the sim xd

EDIT:
Want to state clearly that I AM neutral.
Dont want to have issues with LL.

Get on track and give Jack the feedback he was asking for rather than your view of what you think are communist, etc. HOW DO YOU WANT THIS IMPROVED!

Do the people who rant here about freedoms being taken,pay teirs over 1000USD per month? A lot of us do and want this crap to stop.

One of the reasons that there is a concern here whether you realize it or not is because people are abusing freedom of speech to a point where I and many are loosing investments in mainland properties.

I don't think that the idea of protected roadside parcels was to cut out small sections of roadside parcels in front of others and then ALLOW THESE OTHERS TO HIJACK YOUR VIEW. Many times I have been told by these ad farm people and I quote Ancient Shriner " In Second Life you pay for the land, not the view". That is their business ethic and their business model. It is not mine. They are free to do what ever they choose. If their RL advertisers ever got wind as to how their products are getting represented in world, law suits can develop. That is a risk they take. That is a risk Linden Labs has been taking. LOOK AT WHAT HAPPENED TO COLDWELL BANKER. WHY ARE THEY NO LONGER IN SL?

I have watched this happen over and over again and it basically ruins the sim's original design.

The hardest thing to prevent is your neighbor dumping property. The parcel extorters act quick. Grab a parcel for L$4 per meter cut out road sections and dump the remaining to the land bots which currently bite at about 3.5 Lindens. Sit on the rest for little investment and sell at high extorted levels to buy back the view. Put up ban lines on these parcels to harass. Sell some at cheaper prices to known ad farmers to create more mayhem.

Most of the time its new land buyers that get hurt here. Most experianced people know better. The problem is even if you are experianced you neighbor may not be and your sim gets trashed anyway.

Limit the height of signs and signs should not spam entire sims.

Limit signs to one texture per panel. Not 4 rotating textures per panel. Current signs that have multiple textures on 4 ad blocks WITH THE SAME MULTIPLE TEXTURE ARE VIOLATING THE CURRENT AD FARM POLICY. Since you can escentially have 4 signs on one sim display the same texture YOU ARE SPAMMING.

Limit to SINGLE panel signs per sim. Not ad blocks. Use extra prims to landscape and enchance the build.

I was thinking about where one actually sees billboard advertising in RL, and realized: really, the Bay City sims are the most natural setting for such things. So, whatever the count of ads permitted in Bay City, no other sims should have more. There are lots and lots of sims where ads just don't make sense in the Linden-designed environment--and that includes many with roads and that currently have lots of ads.

I'm really convinced that no network ad should appear anywhere that LDPW doesn't choose for it to be, and that the urban sims are where most of those ads belong. If there shouldn't be network ads in Bay City, there shouldn't be network ads in Second Life.

If you read these posts and the thread previous to this one that Jack started, you would clearly see that many, many people care a lot about the appearance and quality of the mainland. Ad towers and land cutting have ruined it and now finally we can reclaim this land and make it beautiful again.

Jack Linden's way-overdue announcement that Linden Lab is finally getting rid of ad-farms feels to me like the flu -- one of those persistent 6-week cases of sickness when antibiotics don't work, and you had to spend way too much time in bed alternating Day-quil with Ny-quil, and while you might be glad when it's over, you are weakened, and that may set you up for another bout. Everybody is writing about it -- Hamlet nee Linden is going to supposedly keep a "watch" on it and is skeptical; he's even interviewed Broken Children's Lum Lumley, now an SL expert. who pointed out the obvious: if the Lindens don't enforce this the way they failed to enforce their past policy on extortion, they will further undermine their already tattered credibility.

Excuse me if I didn't race out of the blocks to blog about this, but having blogged on this issue for about 3 years now, putting up numerous JIRAs, suffering deliberate backlash from the most notorious ad-farmers, and meeting with profound Linden indifference, well, I'm not getting out the party blowers. I take a jaundiced, high-white-blood-cell count view of all this, having "seen it all before".

So Job One is to lobby the Lindens to prevent licensing to the ratify any existing destructive ad-networks such as run by Cytherrea, Kalyrra, ROBOMarx, Austin of Primlands and of course Chrischun Fassbinder and Ancient Shriner of Code4. I'm thinking that the former four will roll up their uglies because they don't really advertise -- they don't really succeed in selling actual advertising space but just extort and blight now with their own ridiculous "businesses" which are merely about pretending to sell ad space. Of course Chrischun's towers don't contain many ads for anything but Code4 and his own retarded Mr. Lee Internet junk, but he's always been about positioning himself to cash in when the time was ripe. The Lindens should NOT be rewarding these people with microparcel empires with new networking licenses that they will use on their existing land. That's the chief problem in this entire set-up -- all the ugly towers on all the parcels may get the price tags off them, which is what ostensibly the previous policy earlier this year was about, and they might get some marginal concesssion to some Linden rule, like "no spinning," but they will still be big, bad, ugly and unwanted.

So the simple proposal here is: all new licensed ad networks have to be on new sims. Period. Full stop. No sim put out before October 1, 2008 can have any new licensed ad networks. If you want a licensed ad network, put it on new sims under the new rules. I think that is the only way to have any hope of compliance with any rules, and to ensure that those who blighted and devalued our land value for three years don't get to endlessly gloat and cash in on their continued harassment, only now with a Linden license. Such a policy will force all the empires to fold by setting them all to sale for normal prices where neighbours can buy them, and no ad farms will be able to, as they aren't allowed (in theory), and no networkers will buy them. I think it's a reasonable policy. New zoned sims, new networked advertising in the proper places on those new zoned sims -- end of story.

By the same token - if you own RL property, you can do what you want with it. If, however, you do activities which do not comply with the law, you can face legal action. You can also have to deal with zoning and other regulations.

You're right, you DO pay for it, but so do your neighbors. Do you want them to do LITERALLY *anything* they want next to your land?

Your parcel on the mainland is not an isolated, private island. Thus, things you can do on your parcel can positively OR negatively impact what your neighbors can do on theirs. If they put up giant pink, glowing, particle-emitting spam walls adjacent to your land, would you like that? Even if you say "yes" or "I don't care", the majority of people here have said "no" and "I do care".

The same goes for advertisements. Let's say you make and sell widgets. You make a nice store that invites residents from all over the grid to come buy your widgets. Suddenly, overnight, one of your adjacent neighbors sells his land cheap, and a land cutter buys it. He chops it into 16sqm parcels ("checkerboarding", sets some choice pieces (like the corners, and one or two right up against your border) at L$10000 each, then dumps the rest to the land bots and his adfarmer buddies, who immediately show up, erect 50m high obelisks advertising, you guessed it, their own widget store. So people come to your store after seeing your ad in the Classifieds that you paid good money for, see that you have that eyesore next to your store (detracting from your efforts to make a nice place), and they see the giant advertisement for another widget store. They decide to delay buying your widgets until they go see what the other place sells them for. So, essentially, you have labored and paid through the nose to have a nice business in SL, and some parasites have come along to completely ruin it for you, all because "they can do whatever they want on their land".

Now, if you are one of those people who would do that to someone else, then I wouldn't expect you to understand why it is wrong. It kinda goes along with the concept of being a good neighbor, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, competing using fair and ethical business practices, etc. Those who practice this form of parasitism do not understand these things, or think that they don't apply to them, or don't apply to SL versus the real world. It's a level of cognitive dissonance that really cannot be reasoned with, and is why we have to turn to LL to "explain" it to them, using the business end of the banhammer, if necessary.

Note that you said you were renting, assumedly you mean a small parcel, so why should people avoid the entire sim because of you?