Prop 348 - confirmation popup for land sales

Hopefully this isn't a dupe proposition, if it is please let me know and I will baleet this one and put my votes toward the original.

My proposition is simply for a popup window when you set land to sale, that reiterates the settings and price, as in "Are you sure you want to set x amount of land for sale to anyone for $x?"

If you click Yes, the settings take place and the land goes up for sale.

If you click No, the land management screen comes back up and you can fix your mistake.

I think this would greatly help the situation of people accidently setting land for sale at the wrong price, or the wrong size, and having the unscrupulous sweep by and grab it. It would also save on Linden time responding to abuse reports for the same.

Link to the proposition: http://secondlife.com/vote/index.php?get_id=348

Suggestions? Feedback? Clarification I should add? Thanks for your time.

I just gave you my votes. Good luck. I think it's a much needed feature.

thats what the check box is for, dont check the check box if you not ready to sell.
there are always people who release land (even though there is a comformation) so
I dont feel adding the same thing to the sales will change much. just use the dang check box- when your ready, click it, if your not DONT CLICK IT!


this comes with good intentions, but would cause extra work for anyone selling and still wouldnt aleviate further errors on the sellers part.

just my view

Thanks Trifen,

I can totally appreciate the don't overcomplicate the UI feeling, and generally I feel the same way.

From my personal experience, when I pulled this particular boner, I had bought and sold land numerous times, and I'm generally very careful with my settings. However I was in a spot of bad lag, and I rushed things a bit and didn't realize when I hit the "sell" tick that I had missed a digit of my sale price. Yep, should have checked it, but literally 30 seconds later someone came up and bought it, and I didn't realize until I saw "So and so paid you $300 for a plot of land".

If the extra confirmation screen was there, I could have easily caught the mistake.

This can be an EXTREMELY costly mistake for people, and an extra "are you really sure?" screen can ensure that even first-time sellers can get it right even with some guesswork. Might even take some panic out of dealing with land.

Just my thought process on it. I can imagine it will be an annoyance to those who are confident with working with the existing UI, but I'm seeing benefits to a large majority of people, liasions included.

From this thread.

Following the UI design school of thought to Always Make Stuff Optional, this opt-out choice would give the experienced (or brave) land seller the ability to turn off the pop-up confirmation. Thanks to Nathan for bringing up this point - Trifan, I'm interested to know if this would be an acceptable workaround for your concerns? Anshe, I'd also be interested to hear what you have to say.

Yes, slow down is one issue if you have to move such insane volume everyday like some land barons.

My suggestion is to only bring warning popup under certain condition, such as when the land parcel is very large or when the entered per sqm price is very low. Or one could make it configurable so that people can turn it off. Personally, I would like to be warned by the system though when (maybe due to some lag issue!) the land sale price is suddenly not 7 L$ per sqm but 0.7 L$ per sqm etc. I indeed had these nasty things when I entered correct price but two minutes later one digit was missing because the system reverted back to some earlier state. So, yes, some intelligent warning system would not only benefit newbie but also people like me.

Thank you very much for your input, Anshe. It is reassuring to know that even the most experienced land seller in SL sometimes falls victim to bad lag and bad circumstances.

I fully understand how even one extra screen can add up to a lot of extra time for those large-volume land dealers...Make It Optional strikes again.

I agree with Anshe. I'm sure the code could be intelligent enough to recognize obvioius input errors. I bet if we did a poll, we'd find that almost everyone who deals in land on a regular basis has a horror story to tell.

At first I thought about suggesting a popup only when the price was "low". Trouble is, "low" in one place isn't in another. Market prices range from $4 per m2 or lower for cloudy PG snow to $8 for green mature shoreline. So to define how low is too low is hard.

I think having the ability to turn off tha nag popup is a great idea. Or better yet, set your own cutoff in preferences for what price to nag at. (i.e., if the price is less than X per m2, nag me).

Even just having it claculate the price per m2 in the UI would be a big help.

Buster

Yes i liked this idea, the proposition basically came around because a 30,200m2 piece of land went on sale for 0.28L$ per sqm and was obviously purchased quickly, before the seller was able to rectify the problem and the buyer wont return the land, lindenlabs at the moment wont even get involved and think this is quite fair and legal. even after admitting the interface is confusing and needs fixing.

I have personally set all my spare votes to this proposition.

To add, i know they dont like cofusing matters with settings for settings, so i guess by looking at whats for sale now, that the lowest price land is 2$ which seems abit low, 3-4 seems to be a very rare price to see, so maybe something like 3.9L$ per sqm or if you want an automatic system then say 75% of the median land price, which would make it 3.89L$ at the moment. and then this would follow market economy.

Either way, it's a slowdown issue for the db's. (you have to perform a logic into them whatever you wanna filter out as a positive case for a popup). So my view on this is, people should be more careful on setting things out on sale, it's too often i see people messup themself in rush to sell, the classic example is: set price first then join land and end up in omg i sold at 0,5/m2. We want a faster market, not a slower one.

I agree some improvement might be helpful. I think that the L$/m is the significant thing to trigger alarms in your head. If its a permanent warning, it should say perhaps
"Do you really want to sell this land for xL$/m ?"

If its a conditional warning, it should be triggered at a settable L$/m.
Could choose between the two, but the more optional switches, the more possibility of introducing more confusion and new errors.

I would like to suggest one thing more. The color of the land in "view land owners". The only person who doesnt see a color difference when yr land is set for sale is you, the owner. In some ways the person who needs to know most.

We already have two fairly similar greeny colors for own land, depending on whether group or not. Perhaps we need two more for when its on sale.

If that is too confusing, maybe the group/nongroup color distinction is unnecessary.

With a colorchange, and view landowners on, you could SEE when the stuff went on sale.

I'm not saying no extra dialog is needed, but if we had the color change, and switched on the colors automatically when editing land, then everyone would have a good clean unmistakeable indication of danger in the corner of their eye.

Im not too sure the logic would need to be done in the database, as you open the window its already making numerous database calls for land name, description, size, so another for median price should be little more costly to the system, further logic can be worked out in the software by taking the info recieved from the database and making no more calls, the low limit would be transparent to you unless you breached it, and the warning dialogue for sale, would again have the info fromt he database it has already recieved, with a confirm yes/no button. with the option not to have the dialogue shown again except for low price level warnings.

Just a small bump with an update from Robin Linden....

I PMed her a few days ago and asked if I should dissolve Prop 348, since she had stated that a change was in the queue addressing this problem.

Her reply: while it is in the queue, there is no ETA at this point for completion....

...and she followed up by saying if we'd like to see this sooner, then keep getting support for the proposition.


So - if we'd like to see this in, say 1.7 rather than 2.0, vote for Prop 348!!!


Thanks to all who have supported this proposition so far.


Ellie: good idea on the color change issue. That's something that has never crossed my mind, and yes, the person selling the land SHOULD be the first one to see that its been logged as "for sale".


Patryk: While I can understand concerns about too many queries to the database, in this case I think one extra query would save massive amounts of time and hassle, just by virtue of the fact that there will be FAR fewer resident disputes to settle. I'm not sure the extra second and a half will be such a dealbreaker...especially if the option can be toggled off if you don't want it.

Sigh this isnt something i thought would be like 2 versions away, its something that much cause such grief for the people involved as well as lots of wasted time for LL thats if they do ever get involved. Its something they are clearly aware of and have been for a while, and being a preview tester i know how fast they can make changes if they wanted to, remember check boxes get added in point releases, like the mute on minimize, Im sure it cant be that hard to code a pop up.

But in the mean time whatever system you think is right in the details vote for the prop, LL will work out the fine details in the end, we just need support to show this is a major issue here, so please vote.

Yes, this obvious flaw in the interface is has been causing all sorts of trouble for quite a while. Some people make honest mistakes, while other people are using it as an exploit to take advantage of that precious few seconds before the land owner catches his mistake. Even when everyone plays nice and tries to fix up a goof sale, a Linden has to get involved to prevent the buyer from getting hit with tier costs.

Not only have I set all my votes to this prop, but I've gone to my parcels, made sure of the "unchecked" status of the sell box, and set the price for my parcels at 999999999 each. If I accidentally click that box now, either no one will snag it, or I won't be terribly worried about the land being gone.


Gydeon.

the game i came from had a large scale abuse of single screen confirmations

many people were scammed badly

one of the good moves they made was a first trade screen where all the prices are set and can be changed. after everything was completed, you moved on to the 2nd screen

the second screen you couldnt edit, but all of the information on the sale was excplicitly spelled out and you were then given final confirmation where u accepted or declined the terms

for the few extra seconds i feel its worth it to put a fail safe double check into place and a second screen to prevent honest mistakes from harming good players

jus my $.02L

Gydeon: Thanks for your input. The preventative measures you talked about - set the price as high as it will go, and if I could also suggest setting the Sell To: box to yourself - are currently the only way we really have to defend against land sale accidents. However, its obviously not good enough, as has been reiterated numerous times. Thanks for your votes for the proposition


Mulch: thanks for your input as well, especially from the standpoint of one who has seen this type of confirmation screen in use and can testify to its usefulness and importance. I envision something exactly like what you described for land sales in SL.

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Hey brother can you spare a smile?

If you know of the helping friendly book (of which only one copy exsists in the universe as we all know) and are a part of a large community that now endlessly wanders the earth selling grilled cheese and kind veggie burritos in mall parking lots, then add me in game. As soon as I am able to gain an understanding of how to create and manipulate things In game, I have a rather ambitious plans for a place for us heads to congregate in. WOuld love collaborators =)

Yes...its a great idea for a popup window confirming the sell of your land. I am the one that just lost 30,208 for 8960 L$... and am still waiting to be helped from LL ! What I dont understand is...if they have known of this problem for 2 years now?...whyyyy have they not made a change aleady? It sounds to me like there is something in this for them....strange how they defend the land thiefs with little or NO help for the person accidently setting the land for sale. I know alot of people that are renting now because they have heard so many horror stories about owning land. We get more protection unpacking our clothes in here....window pops up stating item could be harmed...do you want to continue (or something like). They do not protect us...their paying members from losing large sums of money...which is WRONG!!! Until they make the change LL should be held responsible for these kind of mistakes...and make sure we get our land back!!!

I don't know, Sasi... of course you're upset about what happened to you, but I'm not sure that this is left alone on purpose by LL. It may be something like the sim crossing problem for vehicles that never seems to get fixed.

It's easily possible that this is a way for LL to charge tier twice in one month for the same land, but it's also possible that they're just being lazy about fixing the problem. Or maybe it's not as easily solved than we think... a programmer would know more than I would about that aspect. In any case, this should have been worked out long ago.

It seems like an easy problem to avoid if you've been warned or if it's happened to you before, but some people have even lost land because lag prevented them from getting things done properly. And what if 1.6 crashes you while you're working on your land?

It will be better for everyone when this problem is solved.

Hey, thanks! I'll put my name in there tonight!


Gydeon.

Gydeon....I'm sure if LL was losing money due to this problem....it would be fixed ASAP.