The Question of Land Cutting

When I wanted to purchase a parcel of land that bumped me over my limit by 16m I had the land owner divide and abandon a 16m lot next to the roadside. Then I purchased the land. Not the solution for everyone I know, but it worked for me.

The complexity of our interaction is very low. We're corresponding, in text, a couple of messages a day. And there's only a couple of dozen message boards total. The number of possible interactions between us is small, the kinds of interactions are simple, and there's no real-time interaction at all. The *bandwidth* between us is small.

And *within the forum*, the effect we can have on each other is small, and whatever effect we have it has to be done manually. I'm not talking about anything that happens outside the forums, I'm talking about what happens within the scope of what a forum moderator would be expected to do. Once you leave that scope then you're not talking about "the forum community" or "the SL community" or "the Habbo community", you're talking about "the internet community", and "the internet community" is beyond the scope of any kind of moderation.

People using IGE or something like that to turn Habbo dollars into real dollars is outside the scope of Habbo Hotel. That's something that happens in "the internet community".

Um, that was precisely my point. IF the company is willing to hire enough people to do it, and that includes whether they can *afford* to hire enough people to do it.

That sounds like something screaming for a technical solution. Why should anyone else be allowed to do something like that in your room if you don't want it?

That sounds like something screaming for a technical solution. Why should they be able to make sounds on your property?

Extortion as an artform?

You know, one of the early Usenet spammers was a performance artist who thought spamming was an interesting artform. He screamed to the press like a stuck pig when his ISP killed his Internet access.

When I bought my first land in second life, I was so happy. But within about a month, suddenly there were a billion spinning advertisements. Each exactly the same. They were huge! Well I spent the next 6 months acquiring those small plots one by one with the exceptions of the one's going for 9K Lindens etc. Eventually they were almost all gone. The lindens reclaimed some also. Finally, one day, everything clear, I was so happy.

But one day one of my next door neighbors moved out, and within a couple of days, the land was divided into 16 and 128 chunks, with huge advertisements. When the no ads rule began, the owners of the land make big giant hills of some of the squares and holes. As it stands now.

I believe in freedom, truly, but I also believe your freedom should not affect my rights to have fun.

Rather than absolute rules, I believe in compromise and working things out. Maybe Lindens can have a mediation service, where they can require parties to bring forth their issues, with pictures and information and with the help of a mediator, try to make a good decision that everyone can live with. Nothing wrong with wanting to make money, but that must be tempered with good decision making. I would say the mediator could have the final say if nothing can be worked out between the parties alone with mediator direction. On a case by case basis, this maybe work better than just another rule

I can confirm that what Kman says here is true. He has always dealt fairly and honestly with me when I have had his parcels in my restoration areas and asked to buy them at a reasonable price. His ethics and those of others who willingly trade 16 m parcels are admirable, and show that it is not the parcels that are the problem, but greedy people who use them to extort and harass. Control the extortionists and excessive land cutting will be gone once and for all.

Now magnify it -- consider the number of interactions that AOL has handled on message boards, chat rooms, IM, user-created uploads, sites hosted for users, etc. I'm not free to discuss too much more about this, though, so I'll just say that most of the moderation was done by people, not software, and now I have to drop this thread of the discussion.

And yet Sulake (Habbo's parent company) has patrolled eBay, for example, to locate virtual items created by them that have been put up for auction, and to pursue action because of it. I would imagine the staffer who does it is a member of the community mangement team.


Why the "um?" Do you think we're arguing? I'm not arguing. I thought we were having a really interesting discussion. That "um" worries me though, so I'll bow out after this post.

There are all sorts of ways to to stretch a company's community management dollar. Really, it's moot, since I don't know how much Linden Lab has budgeted for this, and they're unlikely to plan how to allocate their budget based on what a couple of residents post on the forums.

As for the ability of people to enter your room at Habbo and do things you don't like while you're not around . . . unless you want to close your space to the public (and then how can you show it off?) anyone can come in and talk with other people (or "cyber" with them) and make inventory transfers and sit on your chairs or lie down on your bed. It's the same in SL. Unless you put up the ban lines, anyone can walk onto your parcel and talk and use your things.

The jukebox griefing problem at There was probably solved after I began spending my time in SL. However, there was actually a problem much more similar to the one we're discussing here, where someone would place a PortaZone next to yours (or near your rented house) and purposely make it ugly, or even do something like put up a giant sign with an insulting message. I don't know what solution they finally chose for that, but relative to this discussion it'd be interesting to know. Maybe someone who's currently active there can comment.

Since I have just a few minutes to spend online tonight, I intended to just take a quick scan of this and a couple of other Forums threads, and do actual answering tomorrow.

But you have just committed libel.

Of course I have not done what you have just accused.

Though clearly you've chosen to post lies as an attempt to retaliate for the many times I've demonstrated your failings of logic and reason in these Forums, and are not really worth replying to, it's also true that libel is a nasty phenomenon and shouldn't pass without some sort of justice being served. It's rare for me to post in so direct a fashion but:


You are, of course, a liar.

Post the name of the sim in which you allege this happened.

You can't--because you are, of course, a liar.

It's not only rare--it's a First for me to bring a post to the attention of a moderator. But you have posted a blatant lie that is an ugly one.

We'll see if justice prevails---let's hope that even though LL says it doesn't intervene in Resident disputes, they WILL choose not to let libel pass.

This is what I was trying to get at with my suggestion of tying the maximum price of microparcels to the prevailing market rate.

There are legitimate reasons to sell (and buy!) microparcels. And if people won't behave responsibly willingly, it would be reasonable to make rules similar to the RL rules against price gouging that prevail in many civilized parts of the world.

Personally, I could offer a list of many people who've taken advantage of my policy (a policy I've mentioned elsewhere in these Forums, long before this thread began) of not putting microparcels (necessitated by making tier-level parcels) up for sale, but instead putting a message in the About Land window offering to sell them for either the same per-meter price the person paid, or less.

By contrast, there is no one who can truthfully claim to have paid me more than the per-meter price of their main parcel. (And many who can truthfully claim to have paid me L5/m.)

edit: grammar

You know, if that's something that can actually be scripted (I wasn't sure if you were reporting an actual functionality or just speculating), then you have succeeded where no one else has!

Yes, if that scripting is possible, you have answered my question. (I'm not sure what the prize is, but you do have my respect!)

Answers To The Questions In This Order:

No

No

No

==========================
Reading the first eight pages of this thread looks like a frenzy of some sort. Land Cutting.
Whose land? If its mine, and I own it, then isn't it "My World"? And if I cut it up into micro squares and put a ridiculous price on each isn't it "My Imagination"? that 99.999%..no everyone on this forum knows is ridiculous, am I or anyone doing such a thing putting a gun to your head to buy it? Enter another ( No ). I don't own on the mainland, but this all boils down to more regulations/enforcements of something that is the right of the owner to do if they see fit. You have "CHOICES" so exercise them. I don't have to pay 20cents more for gasoline if there's a gas station 2 blocks away thats 20cents cheaper. Instead of complaining what the sim owner is doing with the land they bought and pay LL for, DON'T BUY THE LITTLE LOTS. No one is putting a gun to your head to buy anything. If you want a more pleasing aesthetic looking neighborhood or area and you want more land for your own personal use, don't smash down on the sim owner because they have a or many cut up lots for sale. Thats their perogative, and you have the choice of staying or leaving. No one should be told how to manage their land, sell their land, or price their land if re-selling. And so what if its for a profit. Isn't that the LL way? It's not Extortion. LL should speak to those land owners that have gotten the attn of LL and try to come to a mutual agreement if the land cutting is effecting performance, or compromising safety for instance. But to just throw down the hammer and say it should be illegal makes no sense IMO. "Your World, Your Imagination"..hmmmmm.

Basically I totally agree that land cutting for profit reasons should be banned. I also think that in the future 256 sqm should be the minimum size of sellable land. BUT: under no circumstances forbit cutting of 16 sqm parcels. I often need that for teleport points in my lands. Of course I would join that back to the mainparcel before I sell, so the cutting should be allowed, the selling not.

I think limiting the size of land for sale would solve the problem.

No, it has nothing to do with past history. I have SEEN the plots, as have others, and I simply want to know why you did it.



No, I'm telling the truth; I saw the plots myself after they were reported, and they were still owned by you in October.



Bleaberry Tarn, Northeast corner. I just checked and the corners are still not part of the rectangular plots, but you apparently sold them to a common plot which is a strip along the west side of the other two.



I just did, and I am not a liar.



It's not a lie. Another Ad Zoo member reported it back in October (I have the chat logs), and I witnessed your ownership of the plots personally then, and in December when I had the occasion to check on other plots in that region, they were still showing as owned by you.



It's not libel if it is true.

AT ANY RATE, I am not trying to discredit you; I simply want to know why you would cut 16sqm corners out of rectangular plots, and how you think other people would feel about it.

People; please don't bring drama to this very important matter. Even if paid to.. i would find it hard to filter any decent & worthy suggestions from the flurry of responses & sub-conversations to this thread.

*We need the ability to cut up land into any size we want.
*We need to ban the "sale" of parcels below a certain size.
*We need a system in place to monitor large scale scams!.

Do not judge a book by its cover.

You can upload stuff on AOL into sites hosted by other users, and they can't delete it? You can upload an image onto a user-created chat room and it stays there no matter what the user who runs the chat room has to say about it?

No, each of these is a situation where a single malefactor has to personally post each message, and continually spend their own time doing it. I'll bet that AOL doesn't take action over a single message, either, the way LL would have to take action over each and every single parcel.

They must make a substantial amount of money from maintaining their monopoly on sales.

And yet people doing that isn't a major problem in SL. Is that a significant problem in Habbo? Why?

Or maybe it's NOT a significant problem in Habbo, after all?

And they could do this to 500 people at once and get There.com to help them extort money out of them in the process?
No, I think you're confusing me.

No, there's been several dozen other uses that are not land extortion. The fact that you think these uses aren't legitimate is beside the point, all I'm saying is that these are uses that are completely unrelated to land extortion... all the way down to 16sm.

Mainland is only about 20%, I think, give or take OpenSpace consolidation. But dealing with the extortion is a customer service matter: responding to the longstanding pleas of the overwhelming majority of Mainland landowners--and more importantly, *prospective* Mainland landowners, currently in self-imposed exile on Estates. And it's well known that some Estate owners have abused and harassed with microparcels for the openly expressed purpose of driving people from the Mainland. So the proportion of SL that's currently Estate-owned is an argument in favor of this response by LL.

That scripting is a doddle.
llGetParcelDetails() and a few lines of code.

I did circulated a minor version of it at a time when a server bug was cloning land details from one parcel to another. My script could be stuck in a prim and IMed the owner if anything changed. It could just have easily looked at adjacent parcels.
The thing IMed me a number of times while the bug remained unfixed.

As I don't run a bot, I had to go the the parcel and resett eh land details myself.
If I was in the business of running specialist bot(s), I'd have had the thing IM the bot and have it do the work - just like the current land-bots set land for sale.

I agree with this post.
I would not say K-Man is what you call an extortionist, however someone like self confessed Tanika most certainly is. There's a world of difference between the 2 of them and their beliefs & practices!

This illustrates one of the reasons why the very dangerous route of trying to build rules into the servers is not appropriate.

It's BEHAVIOUR that is the problem.
Whack the perps.
90% of the issue is caused by a small group of people.

Why on earth would we want to screw with server and database development (and the usual) simply to automate the prevention of bad behaviour by a few people?
The issue is the attempt to sell small parcels at extortionate prices.

There- you confirmed my points of view!
.
Don't waste time with beaucracy by hard coding the prices of small plots or banning the sale of certain sizes.....just go after the main culprits (e.g Tanika) and kicked them into touch.....then all the "little Tanikas" will fall into line too.

I, too, have had fair dealings with K-Group. And thinking about that, yeah: While a sensible price cap wouldn't necessarily break that business, my previous suggestion about a low nominal cap would be inappropriately punative. So I retract that, at least during a transition period.

That's the thing: it really would be just a transition. If there were no cutting and gouging, there really would be no raw material with which an outfit like K-Group could operate its current business. I'm not sure how much it really wants to continue with that particular business, but it operates by making a trade in the by-product of a damaging practice, so it's vulnerable to that practice being stopped.

I think that's when one has to "embrace change." We don't stop trying to cure disease because cures hurt the business of perfectly honest undertakers.

If you want YOUR world, then get yourself a private island or set up your own OpenSim.
That way, it will be YOUR World. What you do won't affect others.

On the Mainland, it's OUR World.
We share Our World with others.

I am so glad you are working towards some kind of resolution. I do think people should be able to do whatever they want on their land, and I would hate to be in a situation similar to the homeowners fiasco where I am in RL. That being said, I think some kind of formal control is needed in order to have an acceptable level of civility in any social environment. I know when I was looking for my land, I was so put off in some areas by the huge number of for sale signs on tiny plots, it ruined the landscape. I have been lucky so far where I am in that no one has done that, but I really feel sorry for someone who ends up in such an ugly location.

Your still missing the point and exhibiting what many in this thread have, that because you can't have YOUR way with MY land I'm at fault..( if I were doing these things that have upset so many ). It IS the landowners right to do as they see fit. I bring the word to you again "CHOICES". Meet with a few of your friends or neighbors that feel the same as you and "get yourself a private island or set up your own OpenSim". No one needs to be regulated on this platform how they are to use what they've paid for and OWN, how to price, and when or if they can re-sell. *If there is a performance, safety, harassment issue then LL should deal with those individuals. On the Mainland, its OUR World when its your plot that you've rented from the Sim Owner and you can share YOUR World with who ever you like. Forums has a land thread why not spend time there and maybe find a place you'd like. If everyone thought like you Second Life might as well be First Life..and thats the reason many are on Second Life.

United States v. Causby, U.S. 328 (1946).