Feedback on the Mainland

I sold off my mainlands several months ago when it was obvious that no amount of civility was going to happen there. I recall the ad farmers with their 16sqm parcels who put up tall ad poles in the middle of the SIM despite *everyone* surrounding him telling him they weren't interested. I recall the extortion attempts and I recall the megaprim escalation war it took all the way to the clouds to get that crappy eyesore shielded. Biggest damn waterfall ever, despite the AR threats. Then, in the next SIM, our lovely forests got invaded by the slave traders, always shouting "great pussy here!". Asked them to stop and it only got worse. I sooo wish we had type-chat insulating walls. At least that would have mitigated the problem. Then the other SIM built a bunch of rental units and declared our forest as their park-lands in their ads. Did they comply to cease and desist? No. FInally, ban lines were erected everywhere, and that broke my enjoyment, so I sold my lands and left to a nicely managed place in a private continent.

I would consider buying mainland but only if strong zoning were in place. Yes, I have seen a precious few nice places in the mainlands, but in general, the vast majority of the place is but a nasty and ugly quagmire. Glad to see it's being fixed.

Since when did that ever stop you? LL has been systematically undermining our business for years now, solely for being a "difficult edge case".

I'm tired of slipping between the cracks because of poor policy making, co-option and Linden staff/server errors. I am not some whipping post to the resident base for Linden inaction or wrongful public perception.

Sometimes "sorry" just isn't good enough, Jack.

What about issuing a standard frame that people have to use if they want to advertise in certain areas? (mixed commercial and residential areas for example). The ad would have to fit within the frame and the frame placed on the ground. That way there would still be advertising but it wouldn't be the massive spinning boxes in the sky you see everywhere. That would be sweet,sweet crumpets I think.

I like this, though what I would see is more like this...

Fill the gap in Nova Albion, next to Luna. Make that a historical area, but not SLCC specific (honestly, and apologies, but I was very underwhelmed . More like the SL birthday time capsules. Maybe a representative build or two from the era. Meanwhile, revitalize ther rest of it. Do more to drive people to Luna (which took a hit when the trolley died) and Oak Grove (vehicle sims are in bad shape. Freshen the games at Rizal (anyone even use the stadium there?) do something good at the land that was the Murray infohub, fix the wild west town in Oak Grove and figure out some way to get it and the education stage working again -- or replace them with someting cooler.

As per an earlier post on Jira, I suggest the following regulation to deal with advertising and mainland issues:

1. Require that billboards or advertising content be "attached" to the ground and/or a build itself attached to the ground, unless the build is a "skybox" sitting at a min. altitude of 150m above the ground.

1B. Optionally this could be a mainland regulation for all builds too, to prevent low altitude flying structures often polluting the view.

2. Require that the x,y or z dimensions of advertising boxes or their associated support/build be no greater than the maximum x or z length/size of the parcel it is sitting on. (megaprims included)

In other words, if you only have a 16sqm parcel you are limited to a box on the ground (4m high equivalent to the 4m width of the parcel), if you have a 48 sqm stripe of land, it could allow for a 10-12m billboard on the ground, etc... Such regulation could eliminate instantly most of the existing 4m silly flying ad boxes sitting on 16sqms (notably road corners), yet leaving conscientious advertisers the possibility to place billboards on the ground or on buildings in key locations with an adequate size of land in order to do so.

Additionally to help reduce land pricing abuse, fake land sales polluting the map for advertising purpose, land fragmentation and extortion on small parcels.

3. Set a maximum cap price on the price of land to L$100/sqm when setting a parcel for sale.

This could be debated, but in my view I don't see a case for anyone to spend more, and even if that was the case, the sale can be made from person to person with a pre-written SL or RL notarized contract or an escrow service. If necessary you could allow for more than L$100/sqm only for zoned areas such a Bay City.

This would seem a potential solution, allowing legitimate advertisers (I have my doubts as to how many of these actually exist) to continue, while putting the kibosh on the standard ugly spinning, beaconed box.

This would stop *most* of the most blatant and damaging land extortion in its tracks... since the people who would in the end legitimately *make use* of the land would be the ones who would have the first chance to buy it, putting a little money back in the lindens' pockets rather than some scammer with a fast land bot.

Bigger plots of course could go to auction directly, but i would still rather see a 'closed' auction phase, where people who own land elsewhere in the sim could bid with/against eachother first, before it opened up widely, though that may be asking too much i guess.

It just sickens me to think of what i would have to go through and pay for, to get a couple of random 16-96 sqm blocks, mostly just because someone else thinks they 'deserve' to pocket whatever the land is 'worth' to me because they can have a land-bot buy it 3 minutes faster than it takes me to log in and get it myself.

It doesn't really address the problem.

*I* don't want to see it. Period.
My neighbors don't want to see it. Period.
I don't want it in the middle of my land on a donut hole microplot.

So, signage limitations don't have any effect on the problem for me and my neighbors.

Sure it would help.

Vote for http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-1224 !!!

but surely banlines keep off the bots.

I would like to see it become impossible to advertise areas less than 512 on land search.

And make it optional for land above that.

or maybe the lindens should rethink it being a free service a 10 linden a week charge to advertise on land search would do a lot to change market dynamics.

and talking about the market anrnt we due a statement on land releases?

How about muting them from being viewed?

No, not really at all. I'd still block it, and war with the advertiser to get it gone from my region.

If I can mute them for myself and everyone who comes to my home by default, then sure.

mkay.

A substantive problem that needs to be gauged is this: how much land is used for commercial purposes? You can't really attack the problem of zoning without knowing how the land is being used. People take large tracts of land and open up clubs all the time, and then those clubs close in a month or two because they're not making any money. How do you provision land in light of this kind of economic activity?

Clubs do not make great neighbors to residential areas. And yet, most come and go so quickly, either by growing and moving or by failing. I think you need to get a better idea of how much land is being used for commercial ventures so that you can zone appropriately, and then insert some buffer zones of Linden protected land to separate pure commercial zones from the residences. Mixed use zones with small shops and plazas are generally not problematic, but big malls and clubs need some space.

Then a land (owned by the victim) muting another land's object is the solution for everyone to solve this problem... any ideas on why it wouldn't ?

Neither too long and I read it all.

Excellent proactive solutions.

Sadly, this forum will likely take it's usual downward spiral and your wisdom will be for not.

Shades of Project Open Letter.

In my opinion "zoning" is one way to get rid of this kind of problems - especially unexpected drastic changes, ads, etc - but not the best. Normally restrictions tend to fix a problem and create a new one, maybe worse (Think about alcoholism that's more diffuse where there are restrictions on alcohol sales) .
In my opinion the SL world as is is missing some basic "natural" restrictions that are part of our real life, and that actually create automatically this kind of needed zoning in a more natural way that just forcing it by law - a bit more like living in Europe, where there is no need to create a "zoning" by law like in North America, just because the structure of the cities has not been planned in advance, but is the result of centuries of history. Basically, every element of the world should not only look like the real world counterpart, but should even act in the same way, and have the same use. This would fix all the problems and avoid the need of zoning.
Said that, I think that the only way for SL to survive in the near future is giving a "value" to the "distance to cover" , or "space to go through". This would give the right definition to the "roads", but some world rules need to be changed. Now roads are just an option to play with our cars, but if we need to go somewhere we can just TP, or fly. Roads are totally useless at the moment in SL.

Lt's imagine for a moment SL without possibility to fly or TP:
This would give value to the space, or distances to cover. More far, more time you need, so people would tend to concentrate more "near" the places, or friends, or communities where they like to belong to.
In a short while we'd see real communities, and small towns taking place in an automatic and spontaneous way. The center of cities would start to be filled with commercial activities, and the land value would go up (not in an artificial way, but because there are more people and more potential customers). And between towns, there will be country. Lower land price, but maybe you have to walk a few minutes to the town, or pay for public transportation or for TP. And at this point it would make sense creating stores and commercial activities along the roads because there will be people walking. Again, not artificially, but because along roads is where people would really have more chance to see stores, because they would be more likely walking than TP'ing or flying.

All this would give some meaning (and then some value) to public transportation and to private vehicles. As fast as you go (bus, plane, tp) as much as you pay - like in real life. A faster and more reliable vehicle would be more expensive. But a vehicle wouldn't be just a "toy", but would act s a real vehicle because it would take you from A to B quickly and it would be worth its value.

Now, for sure people won't be happy to be charged to fly or to TP or to move fast, but moving limitations (that mean value to go through space) can be accomplished in different way than just paying. For example, residents might receive weekly for free a limited, amount of non-renewable non-transferable "transportation credits", at least to cover the average travel needs. If they need to travel more, they would pay.
IMHO this, or a similar solution, would give anyway a meaning to terms like "space", "roads", "towns", "zones", and even to meaning of "close", "far", etc, that do not make any sense currently in a free TP environment.
We won't see anymore beautiful desert cities (maybe we'll see desert, cheap land deserts, but this makes sense) and is the only way to guarantee future SL survival.

This might be a lot easier to manage if the really big & ugly topics got split into separate threads. Even just starting with a separate thread for ad farms would make this thread a lot easier to keep up with.

Zoning will work on new sims. The only way it would work on exisiting sims is if 100% of the owners agreed to opt in to a zoning solution.

Extortion plots should be dealt with by existing terms of service, this means governing existing mainland but not zoning it. There should be no ban lines on plots for sale, this is quite an easy fix. Those who engage in the practice of setting 16M parcels for sale for L$9999 and putting up ban lines are griefing, reclaim their plots.

Nothing that hasn't been said since I started writing it, but to add my support....

Talarus' very real point notwithstanding, I will allow my self a tiny glimpse of cautious optimism here. Let us hope the determined statements about advertising are not just hot air. However, there is a danger in defining the major problem just as advertising. It is not advertising per se, but its use for harassment that is the real problem. While with some practitioners, advertising and harassment have been closely associated, they are not synonymous. Since the earlier policy changes, land harassment has continued unabated, using many forms and many disguises in addition to advertising. Please keep the focus on land harassment of all kinds. Don't let yourself be satisfied with narrowly solving that subset of harassment that is advertising-related.

One of the most egregious methods, whose use is expanding, is the use of banlines on 16m, 32m and longer strips, deliberately causing obstruction with parcels at extortionate prices, sometimes even cutting of all access from Linden roads. ARs of these seem to be ignored although I can think of no conceivable reason* other than harassment for having banlines on an empty 16m parcel which can be protected by normal option settings. This could be solved at a stroke by setting all banlines back 4m from parcel boundaries.

*of course I stand to be corrected if anyone can advance one.

I think there are 3 issues...
1) Policies which clearly define fair and unfair usage.
2) What action to take action when usage is unfair.
3) How to resource / implement that action efficiently and fairly.

I would like to see the community itself be empowered to solve it's own problems. If nothing else the person with the problem is most motivated to sort it out. LL has to pay someone and that really means that I have to contribute to those costs.

So...
1) Can we setup a form of collective decision making where people can propose, discuss draft, edit and ultimately vote on proposed rules? LL role would be in defining the structure that this was done within and possibly providing some moderation. Something similar to Wikipedia defining how the community moderates the content without actually moderating the content itself.

2/3) Can we leverage the community + technology to help with enforcement? For example I think that issues with objects that blight the world should be reported in-world, selecting the problem objects so they are identified in the problem management process. There are then two ways this could be handled...

LL involvement - A LL moderator can simply teleport, eyeball the problem objects, accept the proposal to delete and confirm the result is as intended.

Semi-automated - The owner is notified and if they confirm or don't respond after x ammount of time the deletion is automatic. If they object it is passed to LL for a decision. If they object after the deletion but within period y the objects are restored immediately and it is passed to LL for a decision.

You could perhaps use a mixture of above by considering how many previous reports were upheld. Residents with a good track record could be more automated than those with no or negative track records. This would probably result in a small number of prolific residents having a dramatic impact on cleaning up the world.

There are lots of folks who_just_do_not_like spam advertising, and outdoor advertising IS visual spam. Period. There's really no other way to define it, since you cannot opt-out of it (except to block it, or convince the advertiser to leave), and there is no rational way to opt-in to it.

RL advertising companies understand that spam-in-the-face generates NEGATIVE sales, meaning inducing a propensity for people to AVOID purchasing their client's product more than the expected result. They will pull ads from those places, and place them elsewhere where they are more welcome. The amateurs in SL don't have a clue about these things, if they even care to begin with, since the vast majority of them aren't making money selling ads, they are making money doing land transactions, mostly in trading extortion microplots or some other nefarious gaming of the land system.

I just tore down my last (of four) very fine home, reverted my land and was planning to sell....ALL because of a single meterXmeter advert right square in the best part of my properties view. Please make it go away!!!