Half-baked adfarm idea

This is something that just popped into my head, and has not been thought out thoroughly...

What would happen to the 16sqm (adfarm) market if 16s weren't listed in the land search? I am guessing sale of 16s would fall off to almost nothing, and adfarms would become 32sqm plots. If you wanted to buy a 16sqm plot, you'd have to fly around looking for them, or use the map. You'd buy them where you saw them.

So, why not list only land 64+ or 128+ or whatever arbitrary size the community deemed appropriate? 256sqm? That'd at least be an investment if you wanted your land up on the search.

This wouldn't affect anyone's ability to own, buy or sell 16 plots. It just makes them invisible in the land search, and thus take away the marketplace for them.

I realize this will not get rid of adfarms. I am merely hoping it will decrease the proliferation of adfarms.

I'll open it as a JIRA ticket if others think this idea might have some merit. If you poke a bunch of holes in it, I'll just hide in shame. So... what does everyone else think?

Skye

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JIRA ticket created:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-434

If you like the idea, please vote

i never realized how bad the 16sqm plots were till i went looking for land today and couldnt find decent plots that were not surrounded by them its very sad

i am now thinking plots should only be sold at 512sqm and up in size

I doubt that would put much of a dent in ad farms, but since 512 is really kind of the bare minimum plot size in order to be useful for building, it probably wouldn't impact a whole lot of people too negatively.

i cant see people spending the money they do on ad famrs if you couldnt get land that was less then 512sqm

i dont think people search for 16's to buy. more often then not the 16 is right outside your door, and its the only 16 you might be tempted to buy. unless you were after primland, but youd scout for that by eye anyway.

Perhaps a "NO SCRIPT" rule for land under 128m could work well. It may not be sightly but at least they are not spinning. I can always lower my Draw Distance too. But mainly the spinning ads are what make me nauseous.

The key piece of information transmitted within a marketplace is price. It's the indicator which tells the buyer how much something is. Purchases tell the seller their price is right. If this information can't be relayed then, yes, it does affect the buying and selling of the merchandise. As no one knows it's in the marketplace.

Note that the problem is not the parcel itself, but what's on the parcel.

The obvious fix is the ability to exclude the objects of other individuals from our view. The problem is we could do it on an object by object basis, or all of an individuals objects, but very hard to find middle ground unless all of a particular object share an identical name.

[And, yes, it's way less fun than burning down everyone else's house along with the ad farm.]

Here's a problem though: Bob and Sally have a falling out with each other. Sally is a designer. She owns a design store. Bob takes to the forums and warns us about the terrible ad farm Sally is running. Bob insists that we exclude all objects owned by Sally from our fields of vision. And people do. And Sally isn't running an ad farm.

Okay... the exclusion of objects solely on the basis of ownership is suddenly not such a great idea. One thing we want is an outcome which doesn't hurt (nor can potentially hurt) anyone in an ancilliary way.

It's hard to find middle ground as individual objects and textures get new UUIDs as they're rezzed. (Every prim is unique).

So... we have to exclude objects from our field of view on a case by case basis.

This is perfectly acceptable. The offending object can be right-clicked and selected and basically muted from our field of vision. Anyone else encountering the object can make their own choice as to whether or not they wish to visually mute the object.

Personal liberties remain intact. They get to show their ads or their pink unicorns. We get to decline to see them. No land is seized. And everyone gets to cultivate their own land in their own way.

And there's most likely a zillion JIRA proposals regarding this (I vaguely remember Kitty pointing at one).

I think we should avoid seizing the land of other residents, who have done nothing wrong, solely on the basis of parcel size simply because a specific class of enterprise has decided to use it. We don't get to draw subjective (nor collective) conclusions on how minimally negative the impact will be on someone as their land is being taken away. Why? Because it's their land.

There's also a JIRA proposal to factor in "number of parcels owned" to tier price - basically adding a tax if you cross some m2/parcel-count threshold.

I'd vote for that solution before I voted for a muting-type solution. It might not be as effective but it's far less complex and doesn't require users to do anything.

JIRA ticket created:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-434

If you like the idea, please vote

The no script idea is the best one yet!
No spinning, no passing out landmarks, notecards, web links or sURLs.

That would make them just Billboards and decrease there effectiveness.

perhaps the 128sq m limit is a bit too high though, there are valid builds on several 96 sqm lots.

one problem is that someone may use a 16sqm plot to place a vendor or a server. I have also seen them used as landing points that pass out info.

As ugly as they are and as much as i despise ads, its still their land to do with as the owner pleases


two words on fighting Ad farms - Arbor Project

I'm with Elex on this one. I don't actually think it would be that complex, as the client already has the ability to hide various types of things (in the Client menu). In fact, it even has the ability to hide individual objects that you have selected. Extending this to hiding individual objects you have specified in some other way, and leaving them hidden, should not be difficult at all. (Naturally there should also be a menu option to temporarily show the hidden prims and un-hide them, in case you accidentally hide the wrong one.)

Elex, if you do find a JIRA proposal for this, please let me know. I will definitely vote for it.

What about malls that divide their land into small per-shop parcels?

Aren't you against protecting people from stupidity?

If someone is willing to believe a claim without proof then that's a valid choice they should be allowed to make.

The only way mute visibility would work is to do it based by owner as well, there are far too many bugs that result in prims getting a new UUID and by name is far too easily circumvented. It's then up to the individual whether they hate the ad so much that they want to hide everything else that person might have up in world.

You can currently mute an object by name, or you can just mute the owner and it'll mute every object owned by that person. There's no need to limit mute visibility to case-by-case.

If land owners have the absolute right to do with their land as they please as long as it doesn't violate the TOS/CS then there's really no reason why that shouldn't include the ability to hide content from neighbouring parcels.

It's not really up to you to decide what visitors on my land should and should not be able to see. If they are desperate to see ads, they can always leave.

Able Whitman's visibility muting project: http://forums.secondcitizen.com/showthread.php?t=15873

(Jira link: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1017)

Wow, all I have to do is ask! There is a post about the latest patch version of the open source client in the Resident-Run Websites forum. I checked out the linked-to SL wiki page for it...

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Source_Viewer

... and saw one of the patches is Mute Visibility!

It is in response to this JIRA proposal:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/vwr-1017

Download it from here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=191214

Sadly, it is only for Windows, but at least there is hope that it could be eventually added to the main client.

I personally don't feel any of us have any right to interfere with what others do with their own parcels (excluding the usual litany of possible Tos or CS violations).

If 1-percent of all micro-parcels are ad farms I don't feel the other 99-percent of micro-parcel owners should have their land taken back, or their prims derezzed, or their scripts turned off solely because one or more people have a problem with the class of enterprise on those 1-percent of all micro-parcels. I don't care if the proportions are reversed. It's not my land.

It has nothing to do with the size of the parcel. It concerns an object on the parcel which has broken no rules.

However, a lot of people want the objects to go away. For whatever reasons, they can't turn their heads. And for whatever reasons, they have a jammed Impatience Gear, and are unwilling to wait for the horrible horrible thing to go away.

So... I want people to have the ability to visually mute anything they wish so they can spend their days merrily gadding about turning off the things they don't wish to look at anymore.

Because it will give them something to do other than interfere in all of our lives while they're busy being mad at a single object, or single business, or single person.

I was actually referring to that .

If there's an ad-plot on the sim, adding that person to the ban list would cause everyone visiting that parcel to not see prims owned by that person (or they'd show translucent, transparent/hidden would be a user configurable setting).

The ad plot owner can then gaze at his/her ad all he/she likes (on their own plot), but everyone else gets the option of whether anyone on their land will see it or not.

It's unlikely I would ever ban someone from my parcel because they've erected on object that I dislike over their own land.

Errr... call me old fashioned... those times when I don't want to see my neighbors and they don't want to see me we put up walls... and those times when we don't mind looking at the hideous eyesores we've become we take the walls down.

Our land is our own land.

Yes, it's up to the individuals listening to Bob's disinformitive story regarding Sally's non-existant ad farm to make their own decisions. However, Sally and her enterprise, have no say in any of it nor any protection from Bob's smear campaign [this is the fundamental problem with warning threads]. Thus, we don't wish to create a loophole within visual muting that allows a person to visually mute Sally's objects prior to ever encountering them.

I like the idea of muting something visualy. You could go 1 further than prim by prim basis. You could right click the parcel and make everything on that parcel invisable to you. This way you could get back that seaview that someone has obscured with their skyscraper.

Domaiv, I like this idea best of all. If the muting also extends to people who are on your land, it would be even better, so that people who teleport in can see the mood you built for.

After all, the right to build what one pleases doesn't imply a right to force me to look at it.

This seems perfect. It *creates* a property right, instead of restricting one. It also sounds fairly difficult to implement--but I think worthwhile, for a solution that raises everyone's enjoyment of their land and every parcel they'd visit.

The problem with muting an object is all objects rezzed ahve their own unique UUID (ID number). So if you mute one object, and the owner takes it and then rezzes it again, you'd have to mute it all over again.

I'd prefer a tier/sim system myself.

That is: Within any one sim, the land you own will cost you the basic 512m tier from 1m-512m.

So a 16m plot in a sim will cost the same as a 512m plot in tier (which it already does), but will cost that same amount per each sim. If Person A owns 10 16m plots in 10 different sims, the tier is 5USD per sim minus the Premium allotement of the tier-free 512m. So 5*10-5=45USD.

This would not impact those buying land for use as ~most~ is within one sim.

Basically it is a 5USD fee, per sim, for owning land in more than one sim.

Land Barons and Land Rental Barons may baulk at this at first, but when you stop and think about the amount of land and money they deal with, the price really isn't that great and can be passed on to the customers without any ill effect.

Ad Farmers could still put up ads, but it would behove them to purchase a full 512m plot. Not only for more prim resources when they are going to pay for the land anyway, but also for the resale value.

Only the true miscreante (the Land Extortionist) loses here.

~Jessy

Oh, indeed, it's a trivial script to just keep re-rezzing new objects on a regular basis. Per-object muting would be completely pointless, but per-owner and/or per-parcel seem like they could work.

So.... Would people be able to visually mute my prim skirt under this scenario?

Just wondering.