Landbot gets a $1L 4096

What if you're offline when the sale is taking place?

Bare in mind I have never bought or sold land IRL, but when you do make a land transaction IRL person to person, does the paperwork on the final transaction not state the actual persons name? I am fairly certain this paperwork will not say "Anyone" under the sold to, so why would anyone do a person to person transaction this way in SL?

Oh yeah usually it goes that way doesn't it. Ok never mind.



Same thing. More often than not when you want to sell land you don't care who buys it you just want, the next time you check, to find that you no longer own it and you now have the money "anyone" paid in your account. You want anyone to be able to buy it while you're sleeping or at rl work.

I believe he/she/it is now using a new alt with a female name (according to SLHerald I think).

Glad am I to see the honourable name of Merlin restored to the Bright Side of The Force...

Incanus MERLIN

Nope we never see News reports like those .

I think I posted something like this the last time these threads cropped up:

"WARNING: Setting your land for sale to *Anyone* will immediately advertise the sale in Land Search, and *anyone* can then immediately come and buy it from anywhere on the grid. If you meant to Transfer your land to someone specific, please cancel this transaction, and select the person's name instead of *Anyone*. Are you sure you want to continue posting your land for sale this way? ((CANCEL)) ((yes))".

That AND put a 5-minute delay in the listing.

Of course, people will STILL get burned, and the torch-and-pitchfork outrage threads will still get posted, so I don't ultimately see the point, but meh.

Me runs out and creates an alt named *Anyone*

You are right. That person is also using two bots, I believe, one who gives back mistakes and one who doesn't. It does not matter as far as us naming names because there is nothing we can do to stop them and no way knowing the name helps the folks who are getting victimized because the bot appears a split second after they set the land for sale so they never see it coming.

That sounds ideal. I'm not into mollycoddling (I'm in the UK, where the "nanny state" is always trying to hold your hand and not in a good way) but I think when there is real money at stake, it's worth being explicit. People will still get burned, but at least they won't be able to say they weren't told.

They are already told now, although it could probably stand a tweak to let people know that automated bots can snap it up instantly. But if people keep the glaze on their eyes as they click OK, it's not going to make a difference. Not saying "they deserve it" but the only person to be mad at is yourself, not LL.

People use programs like Quicken to pay their bills. Suppose through poor design, a mistaken entry could cause you to send an irrevocable payment of US$200 to some random recipient. People would probably sue the pants of Intuit but they wouldn't have to because our banking system is resilient to errors of this sort and there is no such thing as an irrevocable, erroneous payment.

Linden Lab has established a real money economy with no protections, oversight, recourse, or redress. I find it surprising that more people aren't more angry at LL for this brittle, error prone, costly gaffe. I encourage people to be angry at LL in exactly the same proportion as they would be at their banks for similar failures.

I'm not sure if anyone else has noticed this, so i thought i would point it out
The user was trying to sell her land with all objects on it to a friend, who could fix a problem, then sell it back to her.
There is a major problem with this. The land contained a store, right? Presumably the store had vendors. Everyone who runs a store I'm sure has encountered this problem -- you can't transfer a vendor to someone else. Once you do so, it no longer contains full-permission copies of the items it sells, and therefore the vendor is ruined. Next-owner-permissions are applied, and there is no way to undo this. Everyone who has ever done a collaborative project knows this, and they either learned the easy way or the hard way. Landbot aside, the contents of the store are ruined.

I like it.

I don't think that the land sale interface, or SL's general user interface, is all that horrible. It is not poor design here that is the problem. It is operator error. It is the one thing that no program can fully protect against: user ignorance and not paying attention. I got bitten by this once, when latency was an issue - but really, it was my own damned fault and I wasn't going to come here or to any SL press to bitch about it because I had to complete NINE STEPS before making my foobar. If the confirmation couldn't penetrate the glaze on my eyes, nothing would. Fortunately, it wasn't the LM landbot that snagged it, and I got my land back. Lesson learned for me.

Education about landbots is one thing, and LL could stand to do more about that.
Maybe tweaking the confiration to include a warning is another. There is some room for improvement. But it's not as godawful as you like to keep proclaiming, Mal. But ultimately, if "you are selling 4096 square meters of land to anyone, are you sure?" isn't going to make someone pause, nothing will, and there is no design in the world that can compensate for that.

Seems reasonable.

Yeah we will still get people who mess up, but maybe less than we have now.

That is offensive. Land barrons are NOT human land bots. Land barrons are accountable for their actions in a way bots are not. LL can force barrons to return land, not to mention barrons are part of a community that will raise high holy heck if they misuse a seller who made a mistake. Landbots can't be broken by social pressure. Landbots also pick up pricing mistakes en mass. One after another. Truthfully, with all the barrons and babybarrons out there, each far more accountable than a bot or botmaster, land lost to price mistakes were rare with barrons. With bots they are a daily occurance. No system is perfect or will protect everyone, but humans are far easier to control than machines in a virtual world. I'm for any method that will help people catch mistakes before they are made. Anyone who is against people suffering from a mistake of the keyboard should be as well. A bot can't take a stand on this issue.

News to me. When have they EVER done that to ANYONE?

Forced me out of the land business by taking all the profits for one thing. Otherwise they are just peachy.

I really miss the compassion residents once had for each other in SL.

And I miss you...

In a program written for the typical human, those two things are identical (or at least indistinguishable).

Umm. No.

A "land bot" IS a "land baron". The only distinction is what piece of software is used to make the land purchases.

Before landbot clients were developed, there were PLENTY of land barons "swooping" land sale mistakes (do a search on the forums for "swooping" from a year ago), and there was plenty of outcry over it, too.

LL does not make a distinction between the two; nor should anyone else as a result. They also do not interfere unless someone was exploiting a bug in the software.

Sorry, can't put asterisks in names.

There's plenty of compassion to be had. Try dealing more with the *people* involved, and less with just their words, and you will find what you seek.

/me runs over to that JIRA thingy