Dead lifetime land redux

I know that it was just addressed but I had an additional perspective/idea that may seem i don't know, potentially more agreeable?

Obviously this is a 'diminishing' problem from the get go, aka every day that goes by, dead lifetime plots become a smaller percent of SL, and every day that goes by is another chance some lifetime owner could come back to SL after seeing it in the news, and be contacted/sell/trade land.

Over whats getting on nearly three years now, luskwood has managed as a group build, to slowly contact these people and slowly buy back the land that was no longer being used.

There are still however several remaining unreachables and it would be good if there were *some* acceptable policy for addressing them other than leaving what could potentially be a permanent dead plot on the grid...

And again these are just some rough ideas of what may show to be acceptable to the people around the grid..

1) Autoreturn - plots, per request of neighbors, could have auto-return set for them... at least this would stop 'squatters' and 'litterbugs'... perhaps even some how or some way just objects created *AFTER* the last time that person ever logged in, would be affected, as these are clearly laid there without their knowledge. The actual builds made by the lifetimers, would not be affected, but the persistant, permanent, accretion of cruft on them would at least finally be cleaned out and capped, forever... Perhaps even with some small amount of oversight aka obvious structural/build elements could be preserved, and the random objects any sim in SL builds up without return, especially heavily scripted objects, could be removed...

2) Extended contact - Perhaps some form of extended contact attempts could be made, per request of neighbors, If someone has im->email off and hasn logged in for 2 years, there is 0 way a resident has of ever successfully contacting that account... perhaps per request of a resident, LL could attempt to directly contact the email address on file, just with a heads up "hey your land is still here, and could have acrued real value, why not come back to SL and give us another try and find out"... Obviously you wouldn want a way any random person could right click that plot and do it, but if LL was contacted by concerned neighbors, perhaps one of those every few months might not be objectionable...

mabye even automate it, if someone has not logged into SL in X months, say 3, and owns land, a simple retention email is sent out seeing if they are still interested, if they are not, the land could be reverted to the auction system, if they are, hey great mebbe they will come back and either become an active member again, or potentially sell land to their neighbors and use the money to start anew somewhere else.

3) Buyout... Now this would be the most 'controversial' and is kind of just a shot in the dark, but how about a buy out, if #1, and #2 have failed, perhaps it would be possible for someone who has been out of SL for a *TRULY* extended time period, to have their 'lifetime alloted land' bought out... now this isn exactly what it 'sounds' like... this would have to be subject to many many restrictions...

you would not *GET* their account by any means, what you would be doing is paying *THEM* in us dollars, credited with LL, the cost of their lifetime membership, which they would still actually get to *KEEP*... in return, their land would be entered into the *AUCTION* system so you would as the 'buyer' have absolutely *NO RIGHTS* above and beyond anyone else to option that land, you would still have to compete for it at general land auction like everyone else...

It would only ever apply to people who specifically were NOT contactable by LL and had not logged in for a *very* extended period of time, perhaps 6 months, perhaps an entire year... its not the kind of thing you would ever allow to have happen over a weekend to be sure!

perhaps another warning email would/could be sent 'if you do not log into second life, or reply to this email within 3 months, 1 month, 2 weeks, 1 week, etc your land holdings will be subject to buy out by another member of the grid.. or some such thing... just some way there would be some hope that some of the land that is currently unattainable in the older sims, would be freed...


ok so i know #3 is a VERY VERY long shot, and i just put it in there as a kind of long fly ball to left field... but even #1 and #2, which are far far more reasonable, would significantly ease the problem that dead lifetime plots do cause for the people around them... If we could just ensure that bad scripts could not accrue in them, and have some way of *potentially* being able to contact the plots owners, i think that would mostly mitigate any problems with those few parcels we're talking about here... and as to #3 heh, well, a theme build founder can dream, no?

Thanx for sharing, eltee.

#1 is a problem because sometimes, friends leave things with the landowner's permission--no way to know without asking, but hard when the owner's gone--and autoreturning it might really break things. :\ I've also seen cases in which I thought autoreturn might be an easy fix, but then I noticed this was group-owned land contributed to by a Lifetime Resident, and some of his own objects weren't set to group. You can see how it gets very messy.

#2 sounds worth a try if we had the time and resources--not that it's hard, but because it'd still require work. Not sure how high-impact it'd be because concerns about Lifetime account parcel little on the whole are rare, especially as the grid grows. But yes, a continuing problem for the neighbors right next to the situation.

#3 might dovetail, in some tangential way, into how we want to make it easier for mainland land owners to exchange and amass contiguous parcels. But as you stated yourself, it'd definitely be controversial and would be seen as punishing people who put their trust to invest in us in the beginning. It'd also be a violation of that trust.

I think if someone's compiled a list of coordinates of what they consider to be particularly problematic Lifetime parcels and emails them to me (torley@lindenlab.com), I could have a better understanding of the bigger picture here.