Feedback on Ad Farm Post - Part 2

Wuz, they've made it clear that if you have a large piece of land, anything you do which does not adversely affect the experience of your neighbors - for example my long-buried example of large mall with ad tower rentals in the middle of the fountain in a thoroughfare at the center - is your affair.

As for your investing in tasteless methods to promote yourself: once again we are shown that there is a big difference between class and just throwing a lot of money around.

Maybe you want to reevaluate your direction since the one you take - while easy and lazy - is not favored. You know, that in itself would prompt a good promoter on their own to reconsider their habits and adjust.

At my new location I ARed a huge cluster of garish ads going up into the sky across from me. In hours it was gone along with a spinning cluster of ads beside it. Someone did replace theirs ahead of time with a single stationary short tower with a tasteful design, and kudos to them.

I never realized I had a water view available to me in the new place - those freakin ads blocked it!



RATS Timo - I missed it!! Gonna have a remix on the weekend?

You absolutely can--just not on the Mainland. You can buy an island or rent from any Estate owner who's willing, and have any kind of signage you want. But the Mainland has to be shared, so there are rules. It's less than 20% of the total SL landmass, so it's just one tiny slice of the market anyway.

I don't mean that in jest. The cost of renting your very own OpenSpace sim from an Estate really isn't that much higher, and it can be really standalone and totally under your control. There may even be a big market for the kind of environment you want, and then you can set up your own Estate empire--adtowers and all--to rival LL's Mainland.

It would be an interesting experiment. LL tried it, and it didn't work (failed auctions, etc.), but maybe you'd have better luck.

Well, they are working through the ARs. They have not even hit the really blatant one next to me I submitted 24 hours ago.

The oversized Adverts seem to be coming down very quickly, the mainland is looking much better.

I would like to say thanks to all the Lindens involved.

But what about the extortion plots they still cause a great problem by just being there.

Advertising has never been the main issue for me, as most small plots stopped being used for those purposes months ago, when they could not be placed on sale with the adverts.

The real problem is not advertising and never has been, it has always been the deliberate attempt of a very small number to gain easy money, by forcing sale of these so called micro parcels.

What is Linden Labs aiming to do about the extortionists?

Are you just going to ignore them and hope they give up now they have lost most of their abilities to Harass?

I want to know because I refuse to pay 40usd for 16sqm of land and also refuse to sit waiting for the owner to find a new way to harass, We have had to endure fake ad towers and banlines already, thankfully Jack has stopped those being used now.
Now I want rid of the bas*ard who has been upsetting my wife and forced me to enter this game.

Ignoring the jumble of the Queen's English for a minute. The residents of SL have decided what is acceptable and what is not and the Lindens have agreed. If you have a problem take it up with LL. Just know beforehand that they will do whatever is in their financial interest. A platform only a few will use (because the mainland is a mess) does not attract business partners nor does it show their being professional about how they do things.


Note your own qualifier. In SL there *is* no effective 'miles outside of town' that is not in someone else's backyard. If you want to advertise in SL notice that the most effective campaigns have used original content: product placement via viral objects, whole islands with games, and such.


You mean there is a Barrister who would take the case? Oh, right.

This really is a sticky problem. And yeah, I've been expecting LL to cling to their historical faith in the magic wand of market forces wielded by that Invisible Hand. It's such a cozy mythology, it's very hard for them to give it up, despite having themselves stacked this particular deck such that market magic always turns up the wrong card.

And for a few weeks or months, there will be all these rosy statistics, "proving" that the market forces are working. Until eventually somebody forces them to notice that the extortion microparcels are actually on the rise again--perhaps with slightly lower pricetags, or carved from the landscape in some newly nefarious way, and median Mainland parcel size is falling again.

Then the sticky problem will have to be addressed: How to tell, for an individual microparcel, whether it's extortion or opportunism? And how to deal with it? Price caps? Minimum tier per parcel? Special restrictions on what's possible with smaller parcels? Even minimum parcel size?

All anti-extortion options are unappealing for existing microparcels, in one way or another. This is what comes from years of neglect: Difficult choices. But choosing to do nothing is really just wishful thinking. Magical thinking.

The mainland looks better already I can breath again...

But what came out of this forum? Any rules? any new laws?
I can't see any anywhere and there is nothing new in the Knowledge Base.

Somewhere I saw a rule specifying a max hight on 8m for roadside ads. It looks like many of the remaining ads are much higher. (10m, 16m and more)

Interesting. I didn't get a chance to log in yesterday. But this morning, I discovered that the Lindens have conveniently removed my Arbor Project signs for me. I had two of them left - one in my store in Lilypad and another at my campfire at Disl, free to copy. Both are gone today - neither were returned to my inventory, they've just vanished. Anyone else have that experience?

By the way, for those who aren't familiar with these signs, they are very small one prim signs promoting the Arbor Project - much smaller than the advertising limit - and are planted directly into the ground. They also contain a script to populate your parcel ban list with known land cutters. Apparently they are forbidden now, because I received a takedown notice for them last month, and the Lindens must be eyeing Arbor members more closely than the adfarmers, because it is Oct. 2 and they have been removed for me.

The item name of the one I had up is CTN-SIGN-FOREST+VENDOR. The sign has trees on it, and the text is "This land protected against AD farms - The Clocktower Network".

I had to rez a new one to get the text off it, and it was deleted within seconds of rezzing. There must be some automated system to not allow this object to exist in world (or at least on my parcels) anymore.

Would love to have some feedback from Jack on this.

Wuz, I think the best form of advertising (and this is my opinion) is to have quality products/clubs etc. Personally I, and I know many others who feel the same way, move on quickly past a shop/club with flashing rotating, particle emitting advertising, and I won't buy from places who advertise in that manner.

I have always wondered about the effectiveness of ad-farms or "put on your sunglasses" advertising as I have always found shops or services through the search function or through word of mouth.

Maybe what you sell is very good but I will never know because I would have flown past it if I've come across it.

And Vegas works cause its Vegas. Maybe SL needs a Vegas Sim (if it doesn't have one already) for all of those that like flashing, rotating, glowing signs.

Yes. There is an eyesore near my new home which was overlooked. I'll have to AR that one.

Near my beachy pool shop n snackbar there are rotating monster sale signs everywhere. I figure they just didnt get to them yet. It's another continent.

We don't know how many Lindenites are being asked to take on this project.

I hope that's just accidental friendly fire (or possibly deliberately misdirected by the adfarmers) that will be resolved. I sure hope Linden Labs is being real careful about how they populate this object ban list.

Have you filed a support request on this?

Why not published the rules in Italian language? it is difficult for us to understand the rules because even if we use google translate, many words can change and have another meaning. You can have the laws in Italian? so we are all happy

Puppet, Xerses Goff (the current leader of the Arbor Project and maintainer of the banlist system) has disabled the Clocktower network, and I think that it prevents rezzing new ones. It may also cause existing ones to self-delete, so I don't think LL had anything to do with it.

I would suggest IMing Xerses and asking him if what you are experiencing is due to the shutdown of the system.

If you have signs over the height limit or more than one sign per region they are gone. Doesn't matter who you are or what they are for. Read the rules.

Maria Cristina, I am Italian and took the liberty of translating the community standards for friends and compatriots (I am not a LL employee). I did not translate the TOS because it is quite too long but I can send a light on parts you do not understand if you contact me inworld and I can also give you a copy of the community standards in Italian.

As for the Ad farms, no new rules were introduced in the TOS but abuse report is possible starting now. Again, if you contact me inworld I can help you go through the process.

The same goes for other Italians.

Sandor

It really does look *phenomenally* better! I've had lots of IMs from folks astonished at the improvement. One can't help but suppose, down deep, even a few adfarmers must be a little awe-struck at how great the Mainland can look.

The Lindens pruned a couple of trees from my land... went to the spot whence they were returned and not real sure on what they encroached--possibly Linden railroad right-of-way (A bunch of their trees overhang my land from there, but I've always just built around them.) I remember trying to be careful not to encroach on any of the adjacent ad parcels, but I can only judge that at a low LoD, so I suppose it could have been one of those, too. Anyway, looks fine without them, wherever they were.

Found and AR'd a few stragglers, and still have land in a few more sims that I haven't checked yet, but so far: lookin' good. *Really* good.

For anybody who goes to this today, can you ask Jack if there's any chance his office hour transcripts can make it to the SL wiki? There are a number of office hours I'd really like to be able to go to, Jack's being one of them, but RL still pays the bills and I'm usually at work.

Yes, please ask him someone. His hours are normally impossible for me to get to as well without taking some of my paid leave, and his changing them this week made it even more so today.

I think that all of them can be made available.

I've got most of them for the last 6 months.

I don't see the extortion angle with having an empty plot that you weren't using next to your parcel. No banlines, no adtower, no hassle.

Well, you can't extort yourself, to be sure.

However, if it is someone else's microparcel that is a donut hole or corner out of your otherwise rectangular plot, that's definitely an opportunity for extortion and harassment, even by its very existence.

That's how you bought the land. If LL want to rollback sales when a purchaser has been misled then that's one thing but to say any 16M plot can only be sold for x amount in case the neighbour wants to expand is going too far.

Many times the land will be severely terraforrmed to be much lower than the surroundings and then a no fly zone so if you accidentally fall into it it takes forever to get back out. Multiply that by 4 or more similar holes in an area set for 265L/m and extortion and harassment become a big problem.

Even when you are not allowed to fly you can still tele port out of the mess

I know, I know: Market forces. Color me skeptical. That magic was supposed to fix everything back with the very first adfarm ban. That didn't work, and I don't think it will work this time either.

If one only thinks about existing microparcels, one misses the real market dynamics. As long as microparcels can be created and set for arbitrary prices, parcels will keep getting diced, and that will keep Mainland from being the profit center that LL wants it to be: auctions will keep going for less than they should, and the market will saturate sooner than it should, forcing premature suspension of Mainland auctions, reducing growth, reducing tier revenue.

The underlying reason is that the microparcel has vastly too much market power for its cost in tier. That's true even if it can now only host an 8m tall ad, and would be true even if it couldn't hold a prim at all.