Landbot gets a $1L 4096

Well if anyone follows land bot issues...
http://www.your2ndplace.com/node/688
Basically a girl unaware that landbots even existed lost a 4096 and all contents to a infamous landbot runner for $1L. =(
My resident question? When is LL going to do something to help victims and stop people from taking advantage of others in such a dirty manner.

How about adding a confirmation box like friendship?

"Avatar Name has offered to purchase your land for L$1, do you wish to confirm the sale"

Pop it up in yellow like the debit permissions thing... then there's another level of protection for the seller.

If it's a mistake/landbot you have a further chance to cancel the transaction; if it's correct then you simply hit "Yes" and the sale goes through.

Broccoli

When are people going to start taking heed to LL's advice to learn about land and how it works before starting to buy and sell land? Honestly, I don't feel sorry for people who get rooked like that because I took the time to read the website, and talked to residents for a month and a half before joining premium and buying land. Obviously, if she had it set for $1L, she was selling to someone specific. The land sale window is very clearly laid out, and there are only 3 things to consider... price, to whom the land is being offered, and object inclusion. Personally, I've ran into people who are brand new residents, who have joined premium, and purchased a 1/2 of a sim. They dont know how to rez something, yet they own a huge chunck of land, it's stupid. SL is a complex system, and there's alot to learn on many levels. If you wind up getting burned like that, in my opinion, it's as much your fault as it is the realtor who stole your land.

On s smaller scale, I once purchased 32 sqm of land for L$3500 by mistake when I meant to buy the plot next to it for L$450. I only realised when the final "You have paid XXX L$3500 for a parcel of land" blue pop-down appeared. That only offered an option to confirm, not one to cancel, so I couldn't see any way out.

It's water under the bridge now and I don't intend to make a similar mistake again but, out of interest, is there a way to stop a purchase at that stage?

Because people come here, are excited, and want to buy some land to start building stuff - or practising building stuff. They won't be aware there are lowlife scumsucking parasites here that take advantage of people making simple mistakes, especially when other games that offer the ability to purchase land (such as Sims Online) have much more secure methods.

Broccoli

LL do not give advice about land bots, they don't let people know they exist. Some people have been in SL for a long time and have no idea of their existance, you would really only know if you read forums which only a small percentage do.

Different people have different patience levels, while you may be happy to sit a month reading as much as possible about purchasing land, others will assume it's like any other platform and safe to buy a plot to feel at home.

I wish LL would stand up and admit to the bots being there and put out clear warnings as land is far from cheap and it involves real money.

Whether or not landbots are an eveil scourge, is a diferent story. I've made a couple of land transactions in my time, and my advice is Take your time and READ. The land sale menu is pretty cut and dry. I do think a final cancel option would be a good idea, but how many "are you really sure" boxes can we put in. But it was time to dig up the landbot debate anyway.

Yes, there is a point past which LL can't hold a new person's hand when it comes to selling land. With all the little bells they already have, to add more might actually make it a bigger hassle to sell/buy land than it really needs to be.

We've discussed another 'are you really sure,' but that's only adding another button that people won't read, but will click to make it go away faster.

We've discussed a waiting period, which won't stop the bots and only makes real people wait longer to get things done.

Only thing that might work is education... which many people won't seek or won't know to seek out.

And apparently, getting rid of Landbots seems out of the question as far as LL is concerned. They pay tier and all that, after all.

To see how easy/hard it is to find, I tried navigating through the SL website for any advice on selling land. Starting on the home page:

click on the big "Get Virtual Land" icon
click on "Land Information"
click on "How to Use Land"
Nothing about selling land, so back up
click on "Get Land Now"
Nothing about selling, but there's a link to the "Land FAQ"
...which takes me to the support portal, and I have to log on
click on "Knowledge Base" in sidebar
click on "Land and Linden Dollar"
click next to get article 16 "Selling Land", and click on that


Aha! the nugget of information necessary!

Sell the land to: Specify whether you want to sell the land to anyone, or to a particular Resident.

Note: If you want to sell this parcel to a particular Resident, this is the place to ensure that nobody else but that Resident can buy this parcel!


Complete with a big exclamation mark to show how important it is! 8 clicks and a log in from the homepage, with one backtrack. I was trying to play the fictional "intelligent layperson" doing that, but I probably made assumptions based on my year plus, 30 hour per week SL habit, and many years online. No prizes to the first person to point out how few links you could navigate to get to it, assuming you knew to start in support.

The point being, it might be obvious, but it's not easy information to find. A better place to put it might be on the Land Search menu, or as Broccoli & others suggest, in the land sale process itself.

I bet that person was all giggly inside.

Ok. This is REALLY getting old.

"The selected 4096 m2 land is being set for sale.
Your selling price will be L$1 and will be authorized for sale to
****Anyone.****"

((OK)) - ((Cancel))"

Please, pray tell, HOW does Linden Lab retain any additional responsibility to ensure that a landbot (or anyone else quick enough) will not purchase this land? When the resident is presented with that dialog, and dismisses it by clicking the "OK" button, HOW and WHY are Linden Lab somehow responsible for correcting the error? What MORE do we expect from them? How could it possibly be made any more clear to the resident that they are about to allow -ANYBODY- to purchase the parcel for L$1?

The problem here is that the "victim" was screwed just as much by her own lack of common sense as by the landbot operator. It was her land. She was setting it for sale to a friend. It was her responsibility, and hers alone, to understand what she was doing, and how she was doing it. The dialogs involved in the process of selling land are presented in plain, easy to understand English.

Matthew's response to her was absolutely correct and proper.

Rubbish. It's right in front of your face when you go through the process of setting the land for sale. All you have to do is pay attention.

"Sell the land to:
-Choose whether to sell to anyone or a particular buyer-
--select one--"

I didn't find that in any knowledge base, or any other Howto or tutorial. It is right smack in the middle of the "Sell Land" dialog.

Good friggin grief.

It's because people think in real life terms, your in a plot of land, just the two of you, in RL that's safe, you believe a 30 second transaction isn't going to be interrupted by anyone else, because no one else is there. People don't know that landbots are like a 'code', not a real person, they don't know that a landbot can swoop in within seconds, they have no warning that could happen.

Best Idea!

If you take your time and follow the directions, the landbot CAN'T swoop in and buy the land.

Here we go again - An innocent person gets ripped off due to the unsafe interface with virtually no validation and people blame them for not studying harder when simple validation checks would have prevented the problem.
Im a programmer in financial software and I would expect to be fired if I put in such poor field validation checking.

If LL made it impossible to sell land for 10 L$ or less to "everyone" like they have done with 0L$ it would protect most people in this situation.

The usual argument against this is if you put an amount, there will always be some people who set it to slightly higher. However, since the usual amount people get caught out is 1 L$ just blocking that will prevent most of these cases.

The best solution (this takes a little more programming from LL but not much) is to make it impossible to sell land to "everyone" for less that 5 L$ per square meter, with the threshold per square meter being somehting you can set in edit - preferences (the dafault being 5)

Maybe the directions are too complicated or badly organized.

For example if they said in Bold letters as the first sentence-

"WARNING: read this before putting your land up for sale"

-they might catch a couple of people.

One problem is people learn to fiddle with computer programs to learn how to do something rather than read the directions for everything.

I wonder for example, how most people learned to use Excel?

I don't care for landbots either, but there are limits to how much I think its reasonable or logical to coddle new residents.

In the beginning, it was painfully easy to mismark your land and have a land-swooper snatch it up. After many complaints from the community, Linden significantly overhauled the land user interface, and made it much, much, much more difficult to accidentally mismark one's land compared to how it used to be.

Now, those changes aren't enough. Sadly, they'll never be enough, and there will always be users that will make mistakes regardless of how many changes are made. This is a type of human error that no amount of 'code' will work around.

The reason why landbots exist, is because there is some land data that can only be mined if you have a certain amount of scripting kung-fu. If Linden made sure that Joe Consumer had access to the exact same realtime information Landbotters have, I think it would solve a lot of issues that are currently trying to be band-aided by changing the UI.

that sux. but oh well, move on.

Lets hope you never have an accidental slip while typing then....

of course it would NEVER happen to someone so SMART as you

Um. The only reason I don't like landbots is because of the resource usage (constant refreshing of search), but if LL is ok with that, then I guess they know the real impact.

Long before there were automated landbots, there were people that would just do the same thing manually. And plenty of people that still didn't read the dialogs. Whether its a landbot swooping, or one of hundreds of humans refreshing search, that $1 land can and will likely be taken.

In managing my own land, I sometimes buy and sell group parcels to myself - and the worry of mispricing something is there every time. It simply requires care.

One tip: If you set sale price to $0 (not $1) it will put up a flag and warn you about selling the land to Anyone, and points you to the people chooser to pick a specific avatar.

I think a minimum of 5L$ per square meter (changable in edit preferences) would be enough to prevent most human error.

Other ideas:
1. Land sales arnt listed in the search for at least an hour after being put up for sale. This will help prevent land swooping.

However, I have seen no evidence LL has made an effort to make the majority of Residents aware of the fact that Automated Land Buying Programs exist.

Often people are obviously unaware landbots exist, or thought because no one was around, it was ok. If they knew that it didn't matter if no one was around that they could see, its very likely they would be more cautious.

I'm not a programmer, a computer whiz, I wouldn't know a linux if it fell on me. I'm not even a gamer. I just set up a land sale yesterday. It is not rocket science. You set the asking price, you set whether it's to be sold to anybody or to an individual. You give the confirmation. Honestly, what is the difficulty? it's unfortunate that people's mistakes are being exploited, but how many steps can be added to the process?

it's really not the responsibility of LL to do all the thinking for the residents of SL. it's a game. learn the rules or get chumped. it sux. but oh well, it can't/won't be undone. just move on.