Feedback on the Mainland

That's why we have been arguing for many months now that Zoning is going to do absolutely nothing for the ills of the mainland, let alone cause more.

It looks nice on paper, but that is all it is, really, and will be for many months to years to come... a paper tiger. New regions will be zoned. Wooptido. The FIVE THOUSAND existing regions will stay the same, or rot even more. Existing unzoned mainland will become a rotting, festering ghost town, and will thus become completely unsaleable.

I've seen a few people mention the idea of minimum parcel sizes as a solution to advertising. There are a couple of problems with this approach.

Firstly, without small parcels it can be very hard to max out your tier, which is a limitation that hits all residents not just potential advertisers. In fact, making a change that significant and far reaching just to handle one use of the land is probably not a good move.

Secondly, we have a huge number of residents that already own small parcels for totally legitimate reasons; a change like this would cause all sorts of difficult edge cases. Even some kinds of parcel editing would be impossible if you could not, even briefly, own a parcel below X size.

I'm a plain resident in SL for a year now. And LL is asking if I'll be renewing my paid membership. Currently I am holding two 4096 sqm lands and trying to sell them for around 4,44 per sqm. People were not responding until I seized to sell them with around 30% loss because of the ads and ad stations around. These ad stations are decreasing SIM performance and LL cannot do anything but just pointing them the finger.

I will cancel my paid membership today and will not be renewing until these issues are solved. I'm planning to buy land as a free plain resident from *whateverislands* and pay the weekly rent instead.

Jack, thank you for bringing this issue. In case you'd be in the jury to hire people to point ads to LL, count me in! I wish to help LL about this even as a full time job!

This leaves more questions than it answers(STILL)

If zoning is enforced, will that mean that if the G-Team responds to an AR that they wont misdirect people to a random non-SL site and actually be helpful in telling how to file an appeal?

All the land that I have is on existing mainland. I don't want to see that forgotten about in the rush to zoning new land. If there is no zoning for my regions, will I be allowed to place a panel in front of a giant floating body part on the ad land next to my home? Or will my panel be AR'd and removed forcing me to continue to view that body part? There is ALOT of inconsistentcy regarding panels that are not overhanging.

My home region has a mix of retail, recreation, residential and clubs. It was nearly deserted when I came here in February. It would be nice to see the life that is beginning to come into this region continue. It would also be nice to have some means of controlling the random cut parcel, 16m banlines, and glowing ad signs in the region.

If parcels smaller than 512 have legitimate non advertising uses... can LL PLEAAAAAAASE make a minimum continuous size parcel regulation regarding banlines? There is NO use for a ban line on a 16m that is for sale at a high price except to make the neighbors pay to get rid of it. Why buy a piece of land if you cannot step on it otherwise?

No access lines should not be allowed on land that is for sale. Period.

Advertising has its place and can be done very well and legitimately. Make a standard height and not spinning requirement for ads. Do not allow full-bright, ooze of any color, particles, or ads that change so rapidly that they don't even rez fully. Limit the amount of ads by the same person or network within a region. Limit the amount of advertising along roadsides. (I still find it suspicious that I drove beautifully all over a region till my car DIED in front of a sign for a particular ad network).

Lastly, please, stop telling us this policy is coming and DO IT ALREADY! (Yesterday would have been a good time to start).

Jack, I have 4 suggestions:

1) On plots less than 128 sqm, placement of objects with advertising must be above 300 meters and that includes objects that generate text ad spam, issue landmarks, particles, etc. New Mainland regions could have more stringent covenant requirements.

2) Cap prices of plots less than 128 sqm to 4L per sqm. This will encourage members to re-join parcels and ad plot extortion practices will be severely hampered.

3) Disallow use of the land sales search for anything other the listing of the land. Use of the land sales search to advertise products and services is not only an abuse of the land search, but costs Linden money in terms of lost classified revenue.

4) Allow members to donate a certain percentage of each region to Governor Linden for use as public park land.

5) For plots less than 128 sqm, disallow use of ban lines. After you implemented your first ad farm policy, the ad cutters knew they couldn't extort plot sales with giant ads so they resorted to using highly visible ban lines.

Who is to determine what is a huge, ugly structure?

Personally the thing I would like to have implemented is the very simple step of making ban lines not visible. It would end the new ad cutter's griefing trick. Ban lines are the number one visual blight on the grid, and are not needed for any reason most people need. Perhaps there could be an option "View Ban Lines" for sailors, pilots, astronauts etc...

Public land used to be a 100% fully automated system. As Philip Linden said "These are issues better managed by the residents themselves".

That policy went out the window, when LL decided to get greedy and co-opt the businesses involved in this project. Resident business people bought land and paid tier fees for the right to survey regions for released land. The excuse from LL, that "staff has spent a significant amount of time dealing with abandoned land issues" is a farce. On one hand, all land sales are final (hence rogue bots are untouchable) yet on the other hand, confirming a dialog "Are you sure you want to abandon your land" isn't? Very typical of the multitude of double standards in Linden Lab policies.

In the past when land was abandoned, it passed from one paid tier fee directly into another paid tier fee. LL received a 1/sqm for the transaction without lifting a finger. Now land sits for weeks, months... even years. Plots <512 now need attendance by a Linden staffer to cleanup and set for sale. Most times it's sold to bots for 1/sqm. Clearly a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul, but with the worsening effect of removing businesses who acted ONLY in good faith from the economic chain which not only caused great hardship to those businesses, but undermined any resident involvement in cleaning up communities.

Linden Lab used to aggressively discipline residents long ago for "checkerboarding" public land. Some residents scanning for public land, acted less than responsible for operating excessive scripts and setting land for extorted prices. Linden Lab was unwilling to address either issue when they arose MORE THAN FOUR YEARS AGO.

Most of us remember Lazarus Devine, the notorious "Impeach Bush" guy, who intentionally spammed regions with annoying blue signage and set land for sale at outrageous prices. LL turned a blind eye to his behavior and Lazarus was never banned because of his actions on the land as opposed to incidental behavior. I have no doubt whatsoever, Lazarus is still with us in some other form, still carrying out his nefarious agenda.

Linden Lab sat on it's hands the whole time, so Jack... I'm sorry, but whatever motivation or paragraphs you convey, it's clearly to little, too late. The mass proliferation of blighted landscapes in SL is Linden Lab's fault for allowing extortionists to run roughshod over the mainland while your fellow staffers turned a blind eye.

The Governor is sitting on MILLIONS of square meters of unpaid and unmarketable land. Land which has been destroyed beyond repair solely because of flawed and/or unenforced policies.

It seems absurd to remove a fully automated system for that of a manual one, which requires extensive manpower from Linden staffers, who's time could be better served improving the quality of Second Life, instead of feeding into a vicious circle manual setting, sale to bots, resale to residents, abandoned back to the governor. I have not seen the stats, but the ratio to residents having land set for sale directly to neighboring residents who ticketed purchase requests compared to land in limbo or unsaleable is minor in the extreme.

I am sick and f**cking tired of being cannon fodder for residents who continue to this day to block us from our land, wrongly accuse us of our intentions and make unreasonable demands with regard to our performance and operations. We have been around a long time and never, ever advertise, annoy, spy, sell data or cause disproportionate server usage. We have gone to great lengths to be neighborly by selling surplus plots to nearby residents, to be proactive in preventing ad cutting by donating land to the Arbor Project.

The greatest detriment to our business is Linden Lab themselves for the lack of, or misdirected policies over the past four years. We have been wrongly accused by Linden staff for "ostentatious advertising" when none existed. We have had land unlawfully removed from our landbase without notification.

Whether intentional or not, LL has systematically erroded the performance of one of the only legitimate microplot businesses in Second Life, while ignoring those who mean to do everyone harm by hacking up new sims, selling at extortionate pricing and polluting the viewshed or landbase with unsolicited and often obscene annoyances.

One or two employees cannot ever in a million years, keep up with the sheer volume of abandoned land by responding to tickets and or auctions, no less the further enrichment of the pervasive landbots who suck the resource pool dry with their multiple bots and invoke trauma and distress upon unsuspecting residents.

Your words are meaningless to me Jack. Action is what's needed.

Jack I read through the comment you put at the start of this forum, and back your new move fully, however while reading through the many posts already logged on this subject I did notice a lot of people are very worried about the advertising on the existing mainland will be handled.
I noticed you spoke about fragmented sims being a major problem, which I assume you are referring to the huge number of 16sqm plots destroying many sims.
To put peoples mind at rest does this mean you are actually going to put an end to that destruction once and for all?
You must know the adverts themselves are not the only problem, for instance Austin Hallard through his Primlands racket has hundreds if not thousands of plots with nothing on them set at ludicrous prices up to 4995L all over the mainland, such plots still fragment and lower the value of mainland. May I ask what will be done about people who exploit in this manner?
Another example is RN Footman no advertising but 16sqm plots set to 9999L with ban lines set on them but no advertising.
All of these so called business's are obviously thinly veiled attempts at extorting money from your hapless users and by their actions destroy the experience of Second Life for many landowning users.
How will these people be dealt with?
Various posts have suggested these people are being given preferential treatment, which I personally doubt very much, as it would not be in Linden Labs long term interest to alienate the majority for a few people operating on the fringe of the TOS to make vast sums of money from what basically amounts to extortion!
No I would think it is much more likely Linden Labs wishes to be fair to all parties, which is a commendable stance to take.
However these people don't play fair they are sneaky and unrelenting in their actions of extortion, knowing full well the threat of huge brightly colored blocks is enough to get many users to pay up.
Jack I look forward to hearing your stance on this problem, and fully believe zoning will help dramatically to prevent this problem occurring in new Sims.
Its just we are worried about the existing mainland sims!

Id love to see LL start talking openly about the land supply issue, Currently I cannot rent an island for $20 over tier, and with linden conversion rates & processing fees for moving usd into a bank account, I'm lucky if theres $5 profit to be had.

Of course, since it hasnt rented in over a month at that price it will take me 15 months just to make up for the lost month of tiers at that rate, much less trying to cover the actualy setup fee. If we dont set our islands for sale at $L 1 no one even visits them any more to look at them.

It would be nice to know if there is any plan to tighten the market back up or if there simply is no plan to support a 3rd party rental market anymore. Since the changes which brought this problem on are the recent policy shifts with regard to land pricing and OS sims and massive new parcels on the mainland, it seems that perhaps the goals of LL no longer coincide with reselling land, if thats the case why not just discuss it openly so we can quit losing our collective arses? The losses are in real dollars. Its affecting some peoples ability to pay for essentials.

Your ever shifting close to the vest approach is actually ruining much of sl as i know it, theres an island for every 2 avatars online at any given time. thats 32768 meters per man woman and bot. How are we supposed to build a community if we cant find each other?

I applaud LL for finally stepping up to the plate. I have been asking for years why the have not segregated or zoned regions. Actually I think they may want to do it on a broader scale. For instance a continent for commercial use only, or a continent for residential use only.

As for current mainland, I dont think they can come back through and change the zonings. If someone has an established business in a 2/3 residential sim, you can't force them to move the business. However they can require that any future purchaser adhere to a zone ordinance.

I also wish they would zone how low a person can place a skybox or building. Maybe not below 350 unless the base is on land. The sky around my region looks like a junk yard. I have several nature parks set up, but as you walk towards you get distracted by all the up in the air clutter. Talk about the sky is falling scenario, lol

Maybe we could have a 200m to 350m free zone. No ban lines, no building, ect.. People could fly freely, use planes ect.. without fear of crashing into something. Oh wouldnt that be so nice.

On a side note, I would think Lindens would texture either according to the regions enviroment to keep in theme, or have a hard fast rule that all roads look like the Atoll roads, cobblestone like. The roads in the Atoll continent are very pleasing and should blend well in almost any theme. I do not like asphalt. If I wanna see that I can look out my window RL.

Thanks or letting me put in my 2L.

I think solution is combination of a good inworld search engine with zoning.

Zoning provides people to walk/fly and search more at specific zones for what ever they are looking for commercially or otherwise. Zoning should also be closely monitored and sub-zones created for use. Not just "PG" or "Adult" but more in detail...

Second Life today look like the internet we had before the semi-intelligent search engines like Google. A good search engine which proves to be REALLY useful will attract advertisers and they will also feel better for not paying people to have them listed in their pics or invest in lands which they probably won't be able to sell later. I think LL could also partner with many of the search engines about this, or let open-source developers or web APIs do it. The already proven models are available for anyone to see.

This is the typical problem of e-marketing. Anyone can buy how many domains ever they want and register them to many search engines with lots of fake words to be crawled. But as the search engines feel the need to monitor those closer so do the governments'. It was obvious that some 'body' in SL was going to have to do it too.

On the other hand, I have a 512 plot in the middle of nowhere that is at $ 2500 or so and drifting down. In a couple of weeks I will abandon it altogether. Just seeing if a plot surrounded by an ad, a Linden road and a deliberately ugly mall wall can sell at any price...

Glad to see forward motion on new rules. Hopefully they won't favor the extortionists like the previous rule change did. I got ARd just today because I put up a screen in front of an ad pole, whose owner then threatened to AR me if I didn't pay him to move.

Ads are not the problem. EXTORTION is the problem. Ad parcels are not about advertising, they are about extortion. When Jack Linden says that there's a problem with advertising, it makes it abundantly clear that he's totally missing the point. If the SL ad industry were legitimate, there would be no problem. But because it's really a ruse for extortion practices, there's a huge problem.

There are two changes which can kick the extortion problem in the teeth:

1) Minimum size for general-listing parcel sales at 128m2. Smaller parcels can only be sold between avatars, but not on the open market. This ups the ante in terms of tier per extortion farmer, and encourages sane cutting of land, while allowing congenial neighbors to swap however they want to.

2) Zoning. Slow rollout of zoning rules across all of mainland, with intelligent, evenly-distributed pattern of altenating General Use and Business sims, perhaps starting by switching PG sims to General Use. 'General Use' means residental, in effect, but terminology is important; 'residence' in second life isn't nearly as meaningful a concept as one might think. Business would be malls, stores, ads, downtowns like Nova Albion. Business sims would hold the lag of textures and a million vendor scripts, while General Use would be a more lightweight proposition, gathering places for groups, sandboxes. Any zoning definition is tricky to implement, especially retroactively.

I hope some form of these changes end up in the new policy, and hope the Land crew can enhance the profitability of LL while also enhancing the experience for residents already paying tier and trying to do their thing on SL mainland. Good luck and thank you!

This is some of the best news i have heard in a long time, the ad farm problem has gone way too far, and the ad farmers ARing land owners for cover up ugly ads, when did thier right to build become less in the eyes of SL, why can you not put up your walls anywhere you want on your land, but ad farmers can? I would like to AR the Linden that enforced that.

I pay 598 per month mainland and I also own private, and let me tell you I have been griefed more times that I can count on mainland and most of the time by griefers using builds with indecent items and builds made to distract, it took 8 month for them to be taken down, and then it was because the griefer group ARed me with thier 220 member base (most are alts) because I build a wall to cover thier wall, they tore most of thiers down and tried to trick Lindens, lucky I had everything documented and was asked nicely to remove my walls after Lindens had deleted the griefer build... 30 minutes later the griefers build again, I took my mountain home down and left and later paid almost 30L per SQM to buy the land off them.

I think one way to clean up and keep the new areas clean would be to make all land Autoreturn no exceptions and give land owners the tools to easily allow residents who are allowed to build on thier land, something like the allow and ban functions.

Zoning and Linden roads: Why are most of the Linden roads curved? why not stretched of straight roads that disrupt the flow of parcel cutting and make for ugly unwanted plots?
How about 20sqm wide rivers dividing sims or even running through some, with reduces prims on the boardering plots as not to effect the Lindens bussines model. How about ads can only be placed upto 5 SQM above ground, and allowing residents to cover the side not facing the road. I would love to see adds allowed only on lots bigger than 244 SQM, and no builds allowed on anything smaller than 64 SQM.

I am sure some will agree and some will disagree, these are only ideas, I'm not asking for these to be implemented, and again I aplaud Lindens for taking this bold step forward.

Edit to ad a PS.

PS

One quick way to resolve the falling land value is to give premium residents 1024 tier free land, because lets face it a 512 piece of land is way to small to be any value in todays Virtual worlds.

I can answer this for you:

No.

Sorry.

Which means that the value of the land is so low at that point, that it costs LL manpower money to deal with the abandoned parcel, and revenue in tier not paid on that parcel. It makes perfect sense for LL to make this problem go away from every angle.

I like some of these ideas. The minimum height for hovering objects or skyboxes for instance.

Besides the visible ban line issue, two other things come to mind that irk me.

1. Shouting. What purpose does it serve? I have a neighbor that has a shouting object directed at his campers, who are all in a small area anyway (and afk as well )

2. Along with ban lines, hovering text can be visible through many textures some distance in from property lines. I once had a house that my neighbor's vendor spammed this way in one of the rooms. Perhaps a set back distance for such objects?

The problem of course is enforcement. How many of you have someone's tree or other object spilling over your parcel boundry? This is a common occurrence in world, despite the fact it is already against the existing rules. If the neighbor is not nice enough to respond positively to polite suggestion, the only recourse is an ar.

With lots of new restrictions, I would imagine ar's will sky rocket, and LL will have a difficult time keeping up.

I'd like to see some answers and updates on private regions. is there something coming up in near future LL ? don't care about mainland tho.

I should mention that I don't have a problem with ads as such, in fact in my "home" sim (slurl below) there is a rather nice set of billboards along the road, I kinda like them, they remind me of RL a little.

It's the 16sqm plots with 3 large prims and empty plots for sale at 20L+ per metre that are the problem.

Cinco, I'm not sure about that... That would pretty much destroy us, and the model we've had since 2003. We hold 99% of Lusk, Perry and Clara, all PG. 99% of -that- is open space and residence that we manage. We've got a few vendors centrally where we sell our avatars, (not others mind you, its not a mall) and that keeps us alive.

I think there are a lot of presumptions made as to what is done with PG sims and mainland sims, and what's already out there (or isn't)...

Though I do also realize that there's little way of LL doing this without 'rocking the boat'. I just hope it doesn't mean that we've got to leave the mainland.

I use it constantly while hosting events.

No, it means that you can still build whatever you want, but if someone ARs you for building your strip club in the middle of a residential-zoned sim, the Lindens will waltz through and happily delete it.

WARNING: wall of text ahead. Prepare for major tl;dr.

Wow, I have to admit I'm pleased after reading the post, when I went into with great apprehension. As someone who has owned land on the mainland for almost 5 years, and never on an island, it is good to see some proactive steps being taken. Off the top of my head, some ideas:

(1) For plots 512sqm or less, give all neighboring residents an exclusive one-week grace period to purchase the land before non-neighboring residents can. Or, perhaps, allow neighbors three days; then allow anyone in the sim an additional four. Keep it in the family, if possible. This will minimize a lot of the current problems with land extortion - the current M.O. of the bad guys seems to be: buy, mark-up, put up ugliness, never visit the simulator again (except perhaps to extort by putting up more ugliness).

(2) Min / Maximum building height configurable by sim - if you have a flat sim at water level, and set a + / - build height based on the water level, you could preserve views automatically, and provide the popular "beach front / suburban" options without having to play police.

(3) On advertising: this is much trickier. I hate the "Impeach Bush" ad-farm problem as much as the next, yet I've been involved in legit advertising in the past. I always tried to keep it road-side, to fit in with the decor, in the SLBoutique days, and would always sell to a neighbor at my cost, upon request (in fact, I made some good friends that way). I also provide value in advertising with my free Gogomodo Trivia game; it is free for anyone to use, but I cover the bandwidth and server costs by driving revenue by advertising. It is quite popular with over 200 locations, but with many of them going 24/7, the bandwidth adds up. The revenue driven by our sponsors offsets this and provides a free game a lot of people enjoy. Our sort of implied ToS is, "Show our sponsors, and you get a fun communal game to play."

(4) Better controls for the mainland. I'm not going to touch "shared ban lists" as this is too controversial, but how about ability to change textures on a land plot? Or a whole sim, by vote of residents by square meter ownership? Philip's argument against this was that the mainland would look too much like patchwork - but honestly, ever flown in a place? That's how RL looks, especially over the farmland of the United Kingdom! If you want to encourage the mainland to be a place of themes and collaboration (I'll echo eltee here), giving self-organized communities the ability to vote themselves to develop the neighborhood in new and interesting ways in an automated fashion would be huge.

(5) Better ability to route people to continents where they speak the language. This is already underway, but perhaps tagging each region on each continent on the map with a predominant language spoken would help new residents find their target destinations. Sorry, but the newbie HUD doesn't cut it.

(6) Build a historical area around Morris / Ahern / etc. Ben's is dead. So is Luna's. A lot of that space is completely unused now. There was talk of building an SLCC museum in the area, with memories of each year. The same could be done for major events, like one for birthday celebrations (perhaps details new features added that year, and pictures from the event). Giving people a sense of how SL evolved over the years... and a reminder of just how much it has improved... would be a good used for that space.

Just a few ideas. I'm sure I'll share more later.

Regards,

-Flip

Is there a way to restrict it to parcel boundries?

Yes many of the best builds are mixed use. the model of entertainment to draw in shoppers to pay for the entertainment is common.

as are residential areas to pay for landscaped or roleplay areas. or education or any number of variations on these themes

sim or multi sim wide swathes of mall or stepford wives style housing are not something i want to see. mixed use sims should and can work.

I agree that water and coastal sims are areas that fail to work far to often. consider restrictions on raislng land and builds at water level that cover more than say a third of a parcel.

Jack,

I am pleased that LL is trying to address the issue.

If you truly intend to go further to fix the problem on existing mainland, then that is a great thing.

However, without continuing to eliminate ad farm extortion on existing mainlaind, this zoning idea is BULL. This will do nothing but turn existing mainland into even worse garbage, since no one would buy it and no one would live in it. You are essentially abandoning all existing mainland customers by zoning future land.

I've spent the past year and literally 1,000s of US dollars, not including tier, attempting to turn 5 sims worth of mainland around the grid into pleasant communities. Much of the purchases I made were to "buy the view," since LL has refused to deal with the ad farm issue as promised. The challenge and therefore the value in holding mainland has been long established as to whether it lacks blight and ad farms. Now I find out that all of these these continents are all about to turn into the abandoned and forgotten armpits of SL. I am pissed beyond measure. In one posting, I find that all my mainland business strategies and expenditure have been a folly.

I think that you need to deal with the ad farm issue as your current customers are demanding. We're not all just going to pack up and abandon our land and move. Putting the screws to existing landholders by simply rolling better land off the presses elsewhere is going to lose you a lot of money and a lot of customers.

--Avion Raymaker