Group IM Spam

Hi all,

I've been noticing an increasing trend of group IM spam in the seller's group.

Stuff like:
"Please come advertise on my radio station cheap!"
"Does anyone have a script that does XYZ"

.. and just now,

"Anybody selling any land with alot of prim???"

What if we restrict the group IM to only issues related to the seller's group, that are not advertisements?

Am I the only one that feels this way?

The two most common things I hear on the Sellers' Guild group IM channel are :
1) reports of griefings in progress.
2) reports of scams in progress.

As to #1, I'd urge anyone who owns a place with more than 5000 traffic in total to check out BanLink, a security system which can help deal with these problems. IMHO, if many of the people from the SG who own high-traffic land choose to use BanLink and share lists of known griefers using it, it would cut down on group IM chat, it would result in better security for everyone, and it would in the long term require less effort to maintain then manually adding each person. Plus it would result in much better tracking of who reported what, and would mean that landowners who are not online much can still get the benefit of information sharing. So yeah, BanLink seems to me at least to be a good way to make this sort of information sharing more effective.

As to #2, I'm not sure what to suggest. How do sellers deal with scams? What other methods are there apart from pulling your products off the market, and/or ARing the person running the scam?

This group was founded, I believe, in response to content theft and scamming. As such, anything to do with those two topics should be our main issues.

However, if not in this group, then in some group, I think other avenues of information sharing is desirable, at least for me:

I'm busy. We're all busy. I suddenly need product X (item, script, sound, clothing, whatever). I can waste hours scouring sl, SLX, SLB, etc, or I can ask a diversified seller's group, one of whom either sells product X, knows who does, or can whip one up faster than I can search for it.

I need advice. I have such and thus problem. Have you ever run into it, how do you deal with it? Or... I need to advertise, what works for you? Or... whatever.

Most of this isn't rocket science and I wouldn't expect anyone to give up 'trade secrets' but an avenue for informational exchange is good.

For the most part, the extraneous questions that shouldn't be on the channel aren't nearly as annoying as the ten people who immediately jump down the person's throat. If it doesn't pertain to you or if its truly spam, maybe just close the IM?

Once someone asked where a good place to rent was and was really slammed hard. I told her to IM me offlist because I felt bad for the person. I didn't want to use the list to grab business and initially remained silent, but since most of the other responses were very negative I went with it. I got a good tenant out of it. Can't say I minded the question.

So, I guess the long and short of what I'm saying is: If we limit this to content theft and scamming, maybe another group is needed for all the other myriad issues and questions that sellers might be able to talk to each other about and don't want to wait for someone to actually wander to a forum somewhere to ask it.

Char

We have just created a group that specifically helps people with quick questions about creating and selling. I also have tried to search the forums and have often spent hours and still not found what I needed. This group, Merchants Help Guild, will hopefully help out in that area.

Products Wanted

also "Fashion Emergency" group in world, created for this very purpose. Fashion is mostly in name, the group deals with all sorts of product lookups.

Content Creation