Peopel shouldn't post events that aren't events.

I hope this is less "offensive" than my previous post.

I suppose however there is little to be done about the offensive event listings in game. I will continue to wade through them for real event content.

I kinda liked the old title

I agree with you, Neehai. The Lindens declared a moratorium on yard sales a while back, it would appear that it's enforced sporadically. How about store sales, though? Are those considered events? I can't see much difference between a yard sale and a store sale posing as an event; both look more like free advertising than an event, to me.

Here, from the rules for event posting, the applicable points (bolding mine):

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An event is defined as a special group activity that is led by a host on land owned either by the host or by a group the host belongs to. Examples include discussions, group meetings, hosted dances, classes, tours, and competitions.
An event is framed by a beginning and an end time. Thus '24hr Sales' and 'Non-Stop Casinos' are not events.

The 'Commercial' category was created for the purpose of grand openings, demonstrations, product launches etc. Each of these types of events should have a clear beginning and end time attached. Otherwise, they belong in the Second Life Classifieds, not the Events calendar. Posting events that are simply advertisements will not be acceptable.

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As you can see, there is no law against yard sales per se.

coco

Most yard sales that I have been to have been non-hosted and/or non-stop.

Since the "Commercial" category specifically states "grand openings, demos, product launches and a time frame (which most "yard sales" do not) they do belong in the classifieds and not on the events calendars.

That is correct. They are supposed to have a beginning and ending and a host present throughout.

coco

and since most yardsales do not have a beginning, ending or host, those do not belong on the events calendar

Those that don't don't belong on the Events calendar.

coco

yup

I suppose it would be too much to ask for an events calendar filter which would allow anyone who wishes to ignore any sort of sales event. That, it would seem, would solve everybody's problem.

Lindens?

I wouldn't mind seeing a real yard sale or two in events. If they are going to still allow it, why not limit the number of times a particular person can post that type of event in a month? I know, alts will be used to get around the limit, but whatever.

Also, I think limited TIME store sales would be great in events. I don't use classifieds ever. But if the store was having a 4 hour sale or something, why not? Of course they would need to be present the whole time.


Just my two cents.

A Yardsale that at least says it is a Yardsale while clearly not being an event, isn't so bad.

But when an event is posted as an Educational event (as one was today) in an area that is guaranteed quite a few attendees, then turns out to be nothing more than a Yardsale, with no host present, that is really scraping the bottom of the barrel in misleading event posting.

Why can't we have "Event Calendar Moderators"?

It's clearly possible to be able to remove 'bad events' because Lindens can do it - so all that needs to happen is for that permission to be separated from Linden admin level and transferred to a specially selected, trained group of calendar monitors who can check the calendar then flag up events that are 'non events', for Linden review.

Put a limit on it, say 3 removed events within a week, and you lose calendar privileges for a month.

Then, most importantly, ENFORCE IT!

Yes, I am volunteering. It's about time those of us who run real events took back the calendar from those that abuse it.

Lewis

I'm ambivalent on having resident moderators police the event calendar primarily because many of us (albeit with noble intentions) have differing definitions on what an event is. The official rules themselves are still subjective enough to leave a wide berth for interpretation - possibly part of the reason we're in our current predicament.

If someone needs to make a judgement call in regards to the Event TOS, the resulting complaints will be fast & furious if those calls aren't done impartially.

Possibly a button added to the UI for "Report Event" that would flag an event for review by Linden might be useful.

Or, maybe a way to acheive impartiality with resident event calendar moderators would be to only allow resident moderation after an event has reached a certain threshold of unique event complaints using the complaint button as described above.

That was partly why I suggested it should be like the forums, things merely flagged for "Linden Review".

The rules aren't ambiguous at all - if it doesn't have a specific start and finish, and someone live hosting it, then it shouldn't be there.

Just looking at the calendar right now, today we have:

- two entries of virtually identical 3 hour long back-to-back 'money chairs'

- five 3 hour long back-to-back "Freebie give away"

- twelve 3 hour long back-to-back "Greedy 500"

- four 3 hour long back-to-back "Treasure Hunt" (oh by the way we rent homes and have a mall)

- five 3 hour long back-to-back "Fishing and boating"

- five 3 hour long back-to-back "Tringo"

- several more five 3 hour long back-to-back "Tringo" with slightly different titles but the same location - by several different people

Out of 186 events on the calendar, I see perhaps 12 that aren't multiples (I didn't count the TeaZers events because they are all different classes so are legitimately on there), and one that looks worth going along to.

I did go to part of the U2 concert last night - which I did enjoy - but today's is sadly a bit late for me.

Lewis

And Kant said in 1875 that people shouldn't be dicks; see how effective that was?

SL Boutique has a nice events listing:

http://www.slboutique.com/events/

They only list interesting stuff there, where "interesting" is deliberately not defined Enjoy!

See here:

/108/20/84710/1.html

Thanks for noticing! I'd actually like to see more posted. We're actively policing our list against "non-events", as we call them, to keep it short, clean, and as you said... interesting!

A couple of more features we offer that I found lacking from SL's events list:

(1) If the person who creates the event has an SLBoutique account, they can log in, and edit their events after creating them; they can also set them to be recurring, as weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. So, if you host trivia every week, add it once, and forget about it!

(2) Notifications. If you choose to be notified of an event, it will IM you in world ever if you're offline. Notifications are done 30 minutes in advance. If you forward your IMs to your email from SL's Preferences, it will go straight through to your email. I get event notifications on my Blackberry!

(3) Notify by sim / host. Tired of spam conference IMs? So was I. If you create an event here, anyone with an SLBoutique account can select to be notiifed of "All events in this sim" or "All events hosted by this avatar." That way, you can have your regular attendees opt-in to be notified each time you run an event, or your sim does, and not have to spam to garner a regular attendance. Its much more like an opt-in mailing list than spam, and people can always choose to stop receiving the notifications.

Regards,

-Flip

Seems to me it would be nice to have a persnal list of avatar names that would serve as a filter for the event list. We would, if we wished, see only events on land owned by people on the list or with a host who is on the list.

Yes, well, that was ambiguous and just plain wrong. He asked for thoughts on the issue, then suddenly said, "ok all gone...no more yard sales on the calendar..."

It was not all gone; all that happened was wording was added to the events posting page that said you had to have a start and end time, and a host present.

Yard sales themselves were not banned, as well they shouldn't be.

Actually enforcing the rules about hosts present and start and end times is a whole nother matter.

Another difficulty is that a yard sale person can hold his yard sale, have it between specific hours, and be there in person throughout, but there is no rule saying he has to actually pick up the stuff and put it away after those hours are over.

And it would be counter-everything Linden to make such a rule.

coco