Feedback on Ad Farm Post - Part 2

That one statement right there is pure platinum.

It is why these "businesses" aren't really businesses at all, are run by nothing more than amateurs, and why they couldn't operate a real business if their lives depended on it. You can't treat people this way and expect to have a business. However, it goes back to that old "anonymity of the internet" problem. Even when people SHOULD be good neighbors and practice morals and ethics, they instead practice sloth and vice with zeal.

This is ESPECIALLY TRUE in the advertising business, where it is a REQUIREMENT for your reputation to be platinum to start with.

I would ask each and every one of the adfarmers or *cough* "legitimate advertisers" to go take a continuing education course at their local community college on running a business. It is usually pretty cheap, and teaches you some VERY important social, financial, and business skills. I know that most of them aren't really here to actually BE businesses, so I don't expect the suggestion to stick, but at least I brought it up.



Pure platinum.

The simple solution to this would be to ban the sale of plots smaller than 512M. You could still cut the plot into smaller pieces for rental or other purposes, you just could not sell those little cut pieces. Set a deadline for the current owners of smaller than 512 plots to sell them or recombine them, then make the offer to sell <512M a TOS violation after the deadline.

I believe that approach would work for rental operators while making land extortion a whole lot more difficult.

Here is my justification and I am not a land seller by the way.

I like to choose specific areas of land when buying I rarely used the search until i started buying cheap 16's for campaigning.

I will only buy land that is either protected or close to other protected land I hold, no doubt there are other users like me.

The search does not clarify this adequately many list plots as protected that are not really, the only way for me to reliably identify plots is using the map. to target an area and then fly around.

Mainly I fly round the coastlines, I do use the view menu on ocassion to highlight owners and check land for sale but it really is not my preffered option due to the mass colour shown on the screen.

I also use the property lines but mainly to investigate the area after finding a plot.

Yes I agree for sale signs are not fully necessary, but many land purchasers will be new users, who don't know about the settings in the view menu, and some people like myself do like to fly around looking for specific plots.

If the search were improved somewhat with categories of land then perhaps we wouldn't need to fly around looiking for what we want so much.

Right now though I find it frustrating to hit 30 or 40 places found in search and still not find what I am looking for though thats why a little sign can be usefull.

LL, please replace the word "should" with "must" ie. "Ban lines MUST be turned off".

As a side note, I have no problems with ad-farm blight as I have my draw distance reduced to 2 meters. Granted, my avatar walks with a cane and seeing eye dog, however I am pleased as "graphics" are so overrated these days.


Razrcut Brooks
*Apple IIe
*external 300 baud modem
* Okidata dot matrix printer

Ummmmm ..... nope. Once a person in that sim knows about the land being for sale they do not need to be reminded every time they look around them.

Or are you counting on potential customers having that bad a short term memory?

I agree with you, Jack is adamant that the Lindens will take a much more hands on approach to managing the mainland, will expect all users to act in the spirit of their requests.

It just would not be good if they gave out a license to any of the known adfarmers, it really just goes against the whole spirit of what they intend to do.

I really don't see them doing it, which is something to feel good about

once you start giving 'special consideration' to certain signage the list will become never ending, for sale signs ARE ads.

What customers? I'm not in the land business, if that's what you think.

I'm sorry if my reason for land for sale ads isn't good enough for you. It's good enough for me

This is directed toward Jack Linden, and I'm very interested in getting a reply to this particular question. Hopefully it hasn't already been asked out there somewhere.

I'm the Owner at SelfReliant LLC, and am currently looking into significantly ramping up operations in Second Life. I have a project in the works that is directly impacted by Linden's policy on in-world advertising, because it is effectively a 'Clean Ad Farm' program that we believe would sell extremely well in SL. Now that LL is putting these limitations on large-scale advertising, how can SelfReliant get a proposal for this program in front of LL so that we can either be licensed to proceed, get general feedback, or otherwise approved for the operation currently in development?

Please get in touch with me directly at [email]selfreliantllc@yahoo.com[/email] or on this message board (or in-world if you like).

Thanks for your help! By the way, I did look around for an answer to this question and have had a hard time finding information that fits this particular scenario.

-Mavrick Aero

Yeah, I'm afraid not. I have another neighbor with a 512sqm lot that he wants 10,000$L for. Which wouldn't affect me but part of that 512 sqm is 2 16M squares in the middle of the ad farm that I have 95% reclaimed., And around that 512sqm is a nest of maybe 8 more 16m lots just waiting to block and extort the next poor fool who buys that parcel.

My RL husband will do exactly the same thing with our land though to, which is more of a reason why common sense has to prevail, because SL is important to me and I don't want to loose it

OK, if I wanted to have more than the fifty, full-bright, 8 m high towers that Jack's new proposed policy permits me, it would be easy to do with out even bending the rules or asking special permission. I could join 100 groups, each with different avis as members and founders, and poof! each group could erect 50 of the towers. And nothing would stop me from putting a tower from each of my 100 groups in the same sim. The rules prevent one person's alts from holding more than 50 towers altogether, but they don't prevent people from *joining* more than one tower-owning group, do they?

Of course, I might not even bother, since I know residents can neither count my towers or trace my alts, but what the heck. Maybe I'd enjoy having 500 legal towers jammed into 50 sims.

Thoughts, Jack?

(Not that I own any ad towers, this is hypothetical...)

Likewise, the 512m2 parcel near my home that is for sale for L$70,000. Not cut and no other 4x4 plots near it. Just full of miscellaneous assorted junk.

Mind telling us how you will do that since there is a 25 group limit?




Taken from the blog post:
" * We will allow no more than 50 advertising locations owned by a single individual, whether personally owned or via groups in which you are a member, unless you have written permission from Linden Lab to exceed this limit.Use of Alt accounts/groups to circumvent this restriction will be considered a violation."

Checking that sort of thing does take a _lot_ of effort though, that is the problem - particularly when we start to consider people being hired to advertise as affiliates or subsidiaries or more likely, undeclared associates.

OK, 25 groups then.

So, residents will need to scroll down the membership lists of all the groups to check for one common name? and not all groups display the members' names...

Unfortunately yes. Which is why the war against ad farmers is not over yet but now we have better tools to fight it.

Quite. These regulations are certainly a good step beyond the existing situation, but the important part is that they _not be abandoned_ - that we do not have LL thinking "right the rules are set and they work and now we can just forget about them", which is just a recipe for gaming.

I really don't think we have to worry about this, yes they can get round the rules, not with 100 groups, I don't think thats possible but there will always be a new loophole found, there would have been with licenses and I am sure there will be now.

But remember




Everyones been told what the plan is, and they have also been told the Lindens will act on anything they see as necessary, from 1st October onwards, the frameworks in place and if people choose to ignore it where a problem occurs the lindens will act.

The question is not how certain people will cheat, swindle and continue work outside of this framework, that is expected.

The real question is how focused are the Lindens on catching the culprits and stopping them?
This time I think they are very focused and we about to witness some radical changes

And my point, still, is that the change from licensing to these proposed rules is such to make it almost impossible for residents to find out if the ad towers by their property are compliant or non-compliant in any way other than content.

Since LL will still be dependant on ARs to alert them to violations, the proposal of rules that make gathering the information necessary to AR a violator speaks much louder than the claim that this change is not back pedeling.

Not being an adfarmer or an extortionist, I don't know whether the extortion model works without advertising, but I suspect it does. In which case, why wouldn't the 40m ad towers be replaced with, say, 40m red, glowing, pulsating penises spurting multicolor, long-lasting particles, and emitting noises I will leave to your imagination? "Waddya mean, ugly?! That's ART, baby, and it's worth the extra L$1000 I'm charging for my 16s.m. ARTISTIC STATEMENT!

And that's before the extortion set starts getting really imaginative.

Methinks more work will be needed on this policy.

Better still, if people would stop being wussies and just flatly refuse to buy from these extortionists, ever.

QFT

One of the most notorious "ad farmers" tried the art trick before, I don't think he's around anynore.

Yeah I do refuse, but I still have several script, object entry and flying dead zones in the middle of my property that I can't block or build over without violating TOS myself.