Feedback on the Mainland

There should be no reason to allow ban lines on parcels set for sale.

For example: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Poidor/95/114/152 80sqm for only $14999

This slurl is directly in front of a parcel owned by a a notorious parcel extortionist with the initials of "R. F.". Not only is the public banned from it but many people, including myself, my alt and several members of Arbor Project as specifically banned from it.

This is a prime example of what has to go regarding 16sqm parcels and extortion.

Agreed. You're not the only one to want this:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3661

PS: Jack, if the forum isn't going to support links in text, could they remove the "Automatically parse links in text" option?

I am curious and maybe someone can help me understand... I see a lot of posts by people who want to keep everyone off their land, want banlines kept, etc.

WHY???

What is the purpose of excluding all residents from a parcel?
If you have a temp problem with a resident, you can simply eject them. If you have a problem resident, you can exclude them perminately by banning them, and that makes sense. If you are having a special event, either paid or otherwise, closing a parcel to those not invited, for the period of that event, makes sense well. If you are building and don't want to be disturbed, I can understand that too, though I like to share when I am working. I don't know where I would be if others had not felt that way as well when I was new.

But what is the purpose of keeping everyone off a parcel all the time, even when you are not there? We can not steal from you. We can not litter if you have rez turned off and autoreturn on. It does not get you privacy, I camera into anyplace I want.

The way I see it, it is just an extension of the very immature sentinment that - "This is mine and you can't play with it.."

I own a fairly substantial amount of mainland, in several sims. They are set to public access, objects may pass, no rez, autoreturn at 1 min. I have no problems what so ever with litter, unwanted guests, direct griefing, etc. And I have met quite a few interesting passers by over the years.

Can someone clarify why the ability to keep everyone off a parcel, all the time, is needed?

DRD

I pulled this from my blog from early this year when the new mainland was just being proposed. How much of this has come true?

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The Lindens recently announced plans to deliver a new “mainland” continent to Second Life users. I read this announcement with a huge disappointing sigh. I feel this is the last thing that Second Life needs from Linden Lab right now. While I understand their motivation behind this move (more land owners = more monthly tier payments), the Linden’s hands-off approach and shear inability to effectively manage the existing grid makes this move extremely short-sighted in my opinion. The Lindens should be more focused on making the existing grid more reliable and scalable to better position themselves for long term growth.

To foresee the future with this new continent one only needs to look at the current mainland which is plagued with problems. The high density of mainland sims, many divided into 512 sq. m parcels, contributes to the “used car lot” appearance of most of the sims. Residents then further divide the parcels into smaller chunks, some as small as 16 sq meters and sell them to unwitting newcomers or setup ad farms. With so many parcels crammed into such a small space, conflicts soon arise. Residents push out their builds to the edges of their properties, or onto neighboring parcels. To preserve privacy and boundaries, the residents then build massive walls around their lots and put up red ban lines or build skyboxes with security orbs which litter the skies and blast travelers into oblivion. These practices make it virtually impossible to navigate the mainland and alienate neighbors thereby destroying any sense of community as well.

Without any type of covenant to govern the land, residents have to vie for available sim resources and competing “visions”. One parcel owner running a disproportionate quantity of high-lag scripts soon effects everyone else on the sim. Lag occurs. Avatars stop moving. As soon as one resident completes his dream castle with 100 meter tall towers, a neighbor builds a massive space port and a Death Star. People get annoyed and move off the land leaving a prim dump and a field of revolving For Sale signs. Land sharks move in, buy up the land for cheap, sub-divide it further and sell off the unusable sized pieces.

Free account users, mostly underage users I suspect, come to the mainland and see this unregulated wasteland and assume it is a open invitation to invade houses, abuse other users and cause general havoc with more prim littering. Many new users come in, see the clutter, experience the lag and then never come back. Companies arrive but fail to generate new business because Second Life is failing to attract (and retain) their customer bases and soon close up shop. What customer wants to deal with failed logins, transports and transactions when they can get the products, services and information they need from other easily accessible sources?

Would a covenant help the mainland? In theory, maybe. In practice, no. The Lindens don’t have the staff to effectively enforce a covenant on a million parcels. They can’t even respond to griefers, DMCA or TOS violations. Even the large estate owners are unable to enforce their covenants due to the large number of parcels and limited staff. Those who fled the mainland for a parcel in one of these large estates soon find that it isn’t the dream land they were hoping for.

So where does that leave the future of the grid? Will it continue to grow into a massive prim dump and wasteland? Will Linden Lab continue to alienate the small private estate owners with their dramatically fluctuating prices and unresponsive attitudes? Will Second Life be replaced by something more open source and community managed? Will virtual governments emerge to legislate and govern these lands?

In my opinion, Linden Lab should focus on what they do best…developing the server software and clients and provide that software to a variety of companies that are better able to host and manage smaller “chunks” of the grid. All future land development should be left to individuals and estate owners who would be in turn be better suited to managing their small pieces of the grid. Only through distribution of ownership and oversight will the grid ever be manageable.

Ban Lines are annoying, I agree. However, that doe not negate the need for them. I do not believe that ban lines should be removed, and that access to property be modified if the owner is online or not.

Many people have Alt characters, in fact this is an Alt to my main account, and my main account is the land owner. Hence, if I used this alt account to log into SL (for whatever reason I choose) and go the land which my alt owns, then that land would be open for anyone to violate the property. Any security that I wish to derive from the property would be gone if we switched to ban lines that are active only at owner login.

How about other options for those? I heard Red Blocks on a map or mini map! How about a faint, pulsing line at ground level, and at the top of the ban area (where you can fly over it), that lets people know they're next to access limited/access restricted property?

Please don't take my ban lines away from me, or at least, don't take the ability to keep people off my land even when my 'owner account' isn't there. Beautify, enhance the view, find a different way to show it as access limited/access restricted, but don't take it away.

Garry Meredith

Banlines don't need to be visible and people should have an easy option to turn them off, that's an easy fix on banline extortion.

Residents shouldn't be having their items removed because they put up privacy screens on their own plot to block out ad farms when the ad farms themselves block access the other sides by banning everyone.

I'm concerned about this so called professional advertising idea, just what is this going to entail? There is no need to take a big hammer to deal with the issues of plot extortion and ad farms, the existing TOS deals with those issues, it just takes some common sense and someone actually taking action.

Zoning on new mainland is fine, old mainland should be left alone unless there's a situation such as unanimous agreement amongst existing sim owners. If plot extortion and Ad farms are dealt with there will be a lot less calls for zoning anyway.

and limits flying around if u crach into them.

anyone with a good grafix card can view in your house from the other side of the sim.
with no problem @ all.

i think ban lines should be canceled.
like if your hiding a ton of (you know what)

@Argent Stonecutter

i know, but many of the peoples opions are pretty simular to rl wishes and pretty shocking.

for example, i got banned by a dude i was talking too and i gave him a landmark from my shop.
there so many people that act like chickens without a head in pure panic.
he said i spammed in his shop, having over 1400 members in my own group.

Garry Meredith says - "Ban Lines are annoying, I agree. However, that doe not negate the need for them. I do not believe that ban lines should be removed, and that access to property be modified if the owner is online or not."


Why? Again - why is closing a property to all residents other than a specific few needed?

Well, I don't have the problem with SEEING them, as I never really see them until I am about to run into them. Any problem I have with them is due to the blocking travel issue, especially on extortionist plots where, in some sims, they have a long strip of them along the road, and they have banlines turned on on all of them, completely blocking travel to plots on the other side.



Aye, I don't think LL needs to get into the in-world advertising business, but they absolutely do need to take a sledgehammer to the majority of the existing ones. Yes, the ToS *should* deal with it, because spam is against the ToS. Maybe, hopefully, that's what they have planned.

Because people don't want others walking onto their plot without invitation.

At least with some RP environments, it's nice to limit the access to only those actively playing a part in the area or event.

Its a great idea, in principle, to zone areas, but already, us fans of the Mainland already base our land purchases on a rough theory that SIMs are zoned.
For example, the 1536m parcel that I consider to be my 'home' is on land that was already part-residential and part commercial with very little adfarming apparent when I purchased it. Months down the line, it remains the same, and the people who have bought adjacent plots to my own, have followed suit, keeping our half of the SIM residential.
Our Second Life is not very different from our 1st Life, in that commonsense needs to be followed more than anything.
If Linden really want to improve the Second Life experience for its residents, it needs to talk less and act more. For instance, do something about all the abandoned land that is everywhere. And if adfarms are truly an issue, then make it impossible to split land into anything smaller than a 512m plot.
I was absolutely appalled to read Mitzy Shino's comments at how some ad farmer had put in an AR against her, because she covered his adfarm. It should never be a crime to want to live in a pretty and pleasant environment.
I will admit to recently committing the ultimate 'crime' of splitting a 512m I had for sale at Stingray SIM into smaller parcels. It was either that or abandon the land, because the land was just wrong for me, and I could not bring myself to just abandon the land, needing really to recoup my losses. Much of this SIM is abandoned land, derelict-looking buildings with broken windows abound... its urban gone too far, apart froma really lovely black and white mall right by the side of my land (which is what attracted me to buy in the SIM in the first place). Also, what had attracted me was when I used "property lines" and could see clearly the foundations of a Linden Road cutting right alongside my land... but where is that road??? Look at the world map, there are a lot of these potential roads, but this is an area, I feel, neglected by Linden. Another one of those "great ideas" like zoning seems to be today, that never come to fruition.

Travel is an altogether different issue, that horse has bolted but maybe some concepts of right of way can be considered in the future. Living next to ban lines can be a pain.



Exactly, spam and griefing are already against the TOS. The Lindens must know that when they return items next to ad farm and extortion plots to the owner who is obviously trying to protect their view, that the villain of the peace isn't the person they're sending the warning to. You have to ask, why does this continue to happen?

I read through a lot of these posts and it seems this is a complicated issue no matter how one looks at it. I agree on the ad farms, I see no reason to have them. But I have to wonder how LL would manage all of this? Recently, there was the big push for the 'Bay City' project by Linden Labs, and it now seems to have just gone on the way side. There isn't much going on there and still a lot of land for sale. LL had established conditions for Bay City, no ad farms, no joining parcels, more prims, etc, in the hopes of establishing a community there. I was under the impression that LL would stay active in building Bay City and keep people interested, and that doesn't seem to be the case. The land was bought by real estate people (and others) in hopes of making a fast buck, and many did. Bay City seems to be forgotten now and there is not much going on, despite the hype it caused. I haven't seen any mention by LL (as of late) to keep any interest going in the Bay City project.

My point is this, if LL makes changes and all of us (as land owners) have to comply with new regulations set by LL, will LL stay active and maintain those new conditions? To date, I'm sorry to say that I am not overly impressed. No offense to Linden labs, but if changes are made, will LL be there for us if any problems occur? While all of these issues are important, I would like to know if the support will be there from Linden Labs. Many of us are paying LL a fair amount of 'real' money to be here, and I have a concern that this might cause us to have to pay more in tiers or monthly dues. I don't own much land, but this could be a big concern for anyone who owns a sim or island.

Just a thought...

I've always thought that the banning issue would be better addressed by changing the effects of banning. Specifically, than when you fly into a banned parcel, you don't bounce off, but instead your controls are locked until you fly out at the other side. You can't speak in open chat, click anything, or do anything at all during that period - but you _can_ access anything on the other side of the parcel.

Ad farming I think is a problem, but it should be distinguished from "land griefing" which is probably a more relevant term. Having an ugly structure placed next to neighbours with intent to disrupt the view is bad, whether or not the structure in question is an ad. The problem is finding a way to identify this without getting into motives (which are far too easy to lie about). If a person and their group of friends decide to set up a small role-playing area across from you; they are not talented artists, so it's just a bunch of ugly badly textured cubes; but _they_ are happy playing there - what can be done?

Jack if you are really going to clean up the Mainland you need a big Shovel and a base ball bat!

Why you ask?

The bat to batter the living daylights out of the people who use tiny plots to grief people, before kicking their sorry butts out.

Then the shovel to dig out all of the crap they leave behind.

Without severe action the mainlands had it

I was thinking about the problem of apparently but not officially abandoned parcels... you know, the ones where the owner has been AWOL for a coon's age but somehow their credit cards are still coughing up the cash for membership and/or tier. And it reminded me of something I've always kinda wanted for SL: A "wayback machine" that I could browse, to see what life was like before I was born, etc. Kinda the SL equivalent of www.archive.org.

The thing is, for the very limited purpose of checkpointing an absent landowner's complete parcel state on the off-chance s/he may one day return... how hard can that be? I mean... we know the parcel extents, we know all the objects on the parcel and the ground surface topography. So freeze that somewhere along with a flag on the account, should the resident ever login again, that they need to contact support to get their land back to however they had it. And in the meantime, return all prims from the parcel and revert the land.

Admittedly, there are still questions of how long must the owner be absent before this checkpointing occurs, how long does the (checkpointed) land remain in the dormant account before everything is closed out permanently, and should neighbors be able to request that the parcel *not* be returned/reverted. But at least with the checkpoint scheme, things would be reversible, softening the impact of not getting these policy parameters "exactly right" on the first try.

The short answer is that the only reason is "because I can and I'm going to do it until I'm stopped (stomps my feet on the ground like a spoiled child)." How about if everyone who insists they absolutely HAVE to have ban lines get moved into a "ban line friendly" sim together? That way they can all enjoy their ban lines together!

We all know anyone can look in anyway, but sometimes they just dont want avatars in their home on their couches and beds unless it's friends and lovers.

I spoke with a neighbor of mine. She takes them down when she isnt on, but her reasoning is a sense of protection from certain people.

I like the idea to have an option to not have to see them.

However it would be nice to have the derez of vehicles issue addressed. Once in my many adventures I wanted to fly across two continents to Linden Village. I crashed into more of these than you can imagine, not to mention banned parcels, but one in particular was on both sides of protected road. One can't always fly with precision to avoid these things - or I can't anyway.

If its not broken why fix it..yes some people are anoying but there is cure for them but why change system because of them they will always find a way to anoy us is like giving up to terror.
My place is my home and shop i dont care for advertisments around my home as i dont even go to other people land if im not welcome there.I dont bother neighbours with my store as i always make huge wall around my place wich from outside blends with surounding(right now is castle) ...ok you have problems with 16sq plots with advertisments on them then yust make it that owner of land cant sell land smaller then 512sq and cant ban people thats it problem solved

Improved controls for this would be good too, though, as otherwise it makes many of these environments look cliquey.

In an earlier post I considered the needs of RP areas, special events, or for those who wanted some privacy while they were on their parcel. I believe what I suggested would cover those quite well, while leaving a parcel open as the default and when the owner was absent. I am posting that section again and requesting feedback if you would be so kind.

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Banlines
They need to go as well. The ability to block a parcel to all other residents or objects for extended periods of time simply has no purpose. It goes against the whole idea of what mainland should be. The ability to block access to specific residents is important. I would like to suggest that the ability to block the movement of objects across a parcel be eliminated completely. The ability to block all residents, or those not in a specific group, be changed so that it can only be set for a limited time, say 4 hours. It would also have a delay of 10 seconds before ejection from the parcel, and an annoucement window to warn the target of impending ejection. A warning to the parcel owner of impending experation would be helpful as well. The resident who sets it can renew it as needed, even immediately. Using a bot or scripted object to continually renew this would be a TOS violation. Eliminate the use of any "security" device that does not conform to this standard. This would completely eliminate the need for the banlines textures and would also make travel across the mainland much easier and more enjoyable.
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Thanks
DRD

My main concern on the mainland when owning property is the fact that if you try to be residential with your land you get all the spam,lag and non access from clubs. I like the idea represented in the main post about setting different regions for different things. But that poses a problem as well. What if my land i use for residential ends up being chosen to be commerical...am I screwed....do i have to sell off my land AGAIN . Selling off my original land i held in Mullien was hard to do but because of a club in that region sucking up all the avatar space i was unable to even tp home or log in at home so i ended up selling that land and getting land elsewhere.
With these proposed changes are they going to increase the amount of avatars per sim allowed. That was always a deep seeded concern to me.
I was also concerned about the roadways as well. I understand that fear of some about the road going through their property. Are they reinbursed for the intrusion or do they just have to deal with it. Many concerns about changes but glad some things are being looked into and changed.
YAY on teh advertisnig thing...that was always something that annoyed me . Having a beautiful view out across my land only to have it obstructed by ugly flashy adboards. Yeah that will be a welcome site. Maybe giant billboards on the roadside for multiple advertisers....and not the mile high towers and floating/rotating obstacles that deter the landscape.
Great Ideas for changes...lets just hope it all comes to pass and everyone can be reasonably happy about them.

DRD you're not taking into account that some people like to play "house" and they simply don't want others in what they consider to be their home.

I guess where I am trying to go with the above is this... there are now some several hundred posts and we have all more or less had a chance to express our feelings on the mainland issues. We seem to have narrowed it down to several major problem areas, ad farms, walls and view blocking, banlines and zoning. At this point it might be a good idea to propose a solution, such as I have above, and then see if we can tweak it into something workable we can more or less agree on.

This way, we are actually giving LL a workable solution to start from rather than just dumping it on them to come up with one. I have no idea if we can do this, or if LL will pay any attention if we do, but what the heck, it can't hurt.

So, to that end, lets take my banlines suggested solution above. Post any responces or tweaks you might have with it, and I will try to coalesce that into a final proposed solution later today.

Does this approach make any sense to the rest of you?

DRD