Landbot gets a $1L 4096

Doesn't this really come down to accountability?

Say my 16-year-old kid drives into a gas station with my unleaded-fuel vehicle. He pulls up to the Diesel fuel pump, and ignores all the warnings that this isn't the right fuel for my car. He ignores the fact that the sticker says "Unleaded Fuel Only" on my gas cap, and ignores the fact that the pump nozzle wont fit right into my gas tank. He just merrily pumps my tank full of diesel fuel.

When my car experiences $5000 worth of damage because he put the wrong fuel in it, who is responsible or accountable? I'll lay money that an attorney would tell me its the gas station - for failing to make it clear enough to a new driver that Diesel fuel would cause serious damage to my car.

The states of New Jersey and Oregon apparently feel that its ignorance that is the source of all the trouble, and have legislated manditory full-service at all gas stations to prevent the above from ever happening.

Speaking as someone who lives in a self-service state, and thinks paying for full-service is a waste of money, isn't it possible to take things a little too far in the name of protecting consumers from themselves?

I think this is a good idea. I also think that information about landbots should be included in the orientation process for newbies. New residents need to know that landbots exist and what they can do and information about them should be all over the webiste and easy to access. It is not currently.

In my opinion, several posters here have same attitude that many network administrators have toward end users. A complete inability to empathize or see a problem from the perspective of someone not as involved as they are. How can you not know that landbots exist? Well, its not obvious and not intuitive that they *would* exist. I don't think landbots should be banned per se, and of course there is a limit to where hand holding ends and personal responsibility picks up--but if the goal is to get SL to be adopted widely, that means a lot of people of various backgrounds will be in world. The simple matter is they aren't gonna stay if they feel they have been cheated.

or you don't quite understand the meaning of "Anybody"

Why, thank you for your considered response. Yes, I've noticed the information is there at the point of use, that's how I've managed to complete all my land sales (7 so far, I think) without gifting any to landbots. Still, some people are capable of missing it. As we can be talking of thousands of real dollars at stake, another level of safeguard would be helpful.

I think my main point stands: if you want to read up on the process beforehand, LL don't make it easy.

What part of "anybody" don't you understand? hehe

I think they miss the implied "Anybody from across the grid" part.

They think its "Anybody I can see on my minimap"

I think they think it's "anybody I can see from my camera" - most people don't use the minimap, I gather.

So we go from 9 to 10 steps, and will still end up with the same result for people who are not paying attention.

Possibly.

However this is the most persistent error in assumptions about land buying for the 2.5 years Ive been here.

So its obviously human nature.

This conversation is basically 3 seperate issues that intersect. Are landbots unfair and exploitative. Perhaps. Is the information available regarding land sales and transfers in general easily accessable and comprehensive? Perhaps not. Is theACTUAL process of selling or transferring land difficult to understand, error prone and can it be made safer? I don't think it's difficult at all, I don't know what can be done to make it safer without overcomplicating it. This isn't a case of a programmer not having empathy for an end user, I am an end user with little technical background. When I make a land deal I enter each item, make sure it has entered correctly accounting for lag, then enter the next. i double check everything is correct before hitting the OK button. If I had hundreds or thousands hinging on a deal, I would double, triple, quadruple check.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him think.

I think Linden has already solved the problem as much as is reasonable, and putting forth more effort in this endevor will take away prescious resources from other things equally near & dear to the community's heart. As someone who deals with new residents every day, I assure you I feel this way from no lack of empathy.

While none of us like to see the horror stories that come up in these forum threads, I think it'd be interesting if we had *real* data on just how frequently this happens - especially a before & after with the last round of UI changes.

The way the land interface was setup before, I'd completely agree with your sentiments. It was almost an invitation to make a mistake, and there were a limitless supply of people to take advantage of those mistakes.

However, changes were made as a result, and there are many confirmation dialogs to contend with when selling land now. Is it possible for Linden to do more? Absolutely! The question is, are they providing a *reasonable* amount of confirmation validation as it is?

IMHO - It may not be exhaustive, but it is indeed reasonable. An exhaustive solution just seems a bit quixotic to me.

However a couple of the ideas people have tossed around wouldn't change life too much

Or maybe I am missing something. What are the downsides of:

-Putting a 5 minute delay after the final button is pushed on a land sale and having it appear on the land search.

-Making users aware of some FAQ on selling land on the log on messages. In the FAQ include a warning about landbots.

Knowing the current interface only, I'd be interested to see what the old one was like, how it caused confusion. The Land business is big money obviously, part of a pretty complex economy, even if some feel it's stagnant right now. it is either going to be the Free Market Caveat Emptor Capitalism, that yes will result in scams, swindles, and people making costly mistakes, or it can be a coddled , hand holding nanny state, where buying a pair of shoes could take an hour. I prefer the first one myself, i'm an advocate of personal responsibility.

There is nothing wrong with those 2 ideas. And i would add having a real transfer option for a direct person to person transfer.

Dunno on the first idea. That one sounds to me like dev resources would need to be involved in that. It may seem simple on the surface, but consider what might break if they rush a 10-minute change in. If they take their time & do it the right way, now we're back to expending prescious resources.

On the second idea - I'm sure the login pages would be simple to change, so it sounds like there would be little harm in it. But where do we stop? What if people find a new way to exploit without landbots... will we have a login message for that too?

My understanding that its the support pages that folks should be relying upon for this kind of thing, not the login messages. And (I could be mistaken on this one) - I thought all the support pages were Wiki's? If so, that means any one of us could go in & update the information contained there - and put in the warnings about Land Bots everyone is talking about. We don't need to wait for Linden to do it.

hmmm, I see the difficulty.

But do you see how someone who hasn't visited this forum to read the advice on Transferring Land might not be aware that you are immediately making the land available to anyone anywhere (bot or human)? I've seen a few suggestions in this thread that would sort that out quite quickly. I particularly like the Transfer button suggestion.

Well, yes. Warning people about exploiters and scammers is part of good customer service.

The problem is that people who are running landbots are specifically preying on those mistakes so they'll try to exploit whatever new measure gets put into place as well.

Delaying every land sale by a few minutes would likely just make it even more profitable to run a landbot because you have a 5 minute window to snatch up good deals before any human would see it.

The problem of finding land that isn't listed yet is solved just by throwing more and more bots at it. As bot owners compete to find those parcels the fastest we'd end up with the same situation as today: you wouldn't have more than a second .

No I don't mean delay the sale. I mean delay the listing. The bots use the listing to find land. Thus there would be a window where bots wouldn't "know" the land was for sale.

I will disengage by just again advising, if you do the 3 steps properly, take your time, and READ before clicking, you won't get wooped. All the other points about access to information and education are worthy of further discussion.

If you go to about-land, that first basic window that pops up? That was the land-sales interface before, and nothing else. There was no big popup window that explained what was about to happen, and make you confirm things.

You just checked the boxes on the about-land window, and that's it. Things took effect immediately, with zero warning. That's what changed.

Still, not everyone felt that those changes were sufficient at the time:
/108/8c/132300/1.html



Agreed. So maybe they should add a warning about it in the login messages. We just can't depend on that either, though. Someone very knowledgable about the land-sales process should add their knowledge to the collective wiki.

That's what I was referring to: drop 10 bots on every mainland continent and simply let them tp/roam from sim to sim looking for the unlisted bargains/mistakes. If you used 50 bots you'd find them even faster, 100 would be even better, etc. Bots are very lightweight: you could run dozens of them on a single puter and it still wouldn't compare to the drain of running the regular viewer once.

It wouldn't take a bot more than a few seconds to scan an entire sim for parcels set for sale and move on to the next one .

Think of it as a sheepbot for unlisted land sales.

There's little to nothing wrong with the way land is sold now. The information is there for anyone to see (and, yes, Colette, they have put up land sales info as the MOTD that I have seen several times). As demonstrated, it is not particularly difficult to find. More confirmations won't help. Period. The problem isn't with the interface

"But I've been God's Own Programmer in RL for 4,000 years, and I could program it perfectly so no one would EVER get burned!!". Any real programmer who is past his 200-level coursework KNOWS that there is NO code solution for the PEBKAC problem. None. You can't code the ape out of the equation in cases like these, and no matter how hard you try, some freak of nature WILL bypass every safeguard you throw at them (or throw their hands up in frustration, and bitch and moan if you throw too many, defeating the purpose), get burned, and then all the BHL villagers will rally around, decrying the whole debacle as a failure of everyone and everything EXCEPT the fault of the "victim".

I can't imagine someone who has used the land search to buy the land they are about to sell in the first place wouldn't understand the obvious "Is this real-time data?" situation. People here are so quick to demonize landbots, but you don't have to be a landbot to swoop land; before landbots, real people did it, and they did it almost as quickly and easily as a landbot. The only thing landbots added to the equation was a tiny bit of extra speed, and the ability to not have to be present doing all the boring work.

The information IS there, it is not obscured or particularly difficult to find, there are plenty of people around to ASK about the process who can tell you clearly that you shouldn't sell your land to "anyone" for a few dollars.

About the only thing I think I would change is the same thing already mentioned that I suggested a while back, and that is what Colette said: add a 5-minute delay to the posting of the land sale in search. It STILL won't stop land swooping by someone who happens by at the right time, or if the buyer and seller get mysteriously booted by SL and can't get back in before the 5-minute period is up. That is why even this solution isn't a perfect one; all it will do is move a few more people from the BHL camp to the TPR camp.

PS-The land sales dialog already has a "transfer ownership" setting; it is called "set for sale to specific avatar". Yet another "transfer ownership" option would be redundant.

PPS-BHL is "bleeding heart liberal (little L)" and TPR is "take personal responsibility". Neither are meant to be political terms, just contrasts in personality types that we see in any discussion concerning "people getting screwed".

Now, I think both of these are rather reasonable.. the later one definitely so. LL could take that nice "How to transfer land" sticky at the top and put it in the Land FAQ, while making the login MOTD reflect that once in a while.

Hehe - I'm a bleeding heart liberal that believes strongly in taking personal responsibility.

Is there such a thing as a Liberal Libertarian? Cause I think I am one