Watch out for "land bots" ban this, ban this, ban this!

I never heard of this before. Now I am severely pissed off but there is nothing I can do about it.
I was going to sell a little plot of land to a girl I met for 1$L to help her out. I set the price, but did not set any specific buyer because her name is a bit unusual and SL is not very good for copy and paste.
Within 5 seconds of doing this it was sold-- but not to the girl. Some people appeared from out of nowhere, and I was stunned. The new owner offered the following words: "Land Bot". I got f***** out of my land AND lost a friend to boot.
So lesson learned: If you give away (or sell very cheaply) a piece of land to a specific person make sure that you sell it on the land profile to that specific person no matter how tough their name is to spell. GRRRRRRRR! I never heard of these "land bots" but you can bet I will research this.

That's why they give you all those pop-up warnings. Land bots are not "illegal" nor are they unethical. They exist to get land at cheap prices. There's nothing to research. You might contact the new owner of the plot and explain what happened; you might be able to get the plot back. Next time, READ THE WARNINGS.

I'm sorry this happened to you.

I've had lots of problems with lots of aspects of SL, but never with cut-and-paste, which I actually use quite frequently in SL. Can you explain what problems you've had with it?

Just so you know, you only have to type the first three letters of the first and last names to be able to search for them in the name picker. For example, if you were setting land for sale specifically to me, you'd type: "wil wal" in the picker then click Find. Then you'd see a list of all names matching that pattern, and you could pick the correct one from the list.

Anyway, landbot swooping has been such a common issue for the past 3 or 4 years that LL even made it so that if you attempt to sell a parcel for L$0, you HAVE to specify a resident to sell it to. Some people have argued that they should do this for L$1 sales as well, but personally, I think the people who are just dead-set against typing somebody's name would just sell their land for L$2 if that happened.

Finally, though, many of the landbotters will give the land back if you find out who owns them, and give them the date, time, and coordinates of the land.

Oryx well I won't do that again, but as far as I am concerned it should be banned. I did not even have time for warning windows, it was so fast. I would make these people do their own searching. Gee that is what I do; that is how I found my land, only I paid equitable prices for my land.
Petronilla well to be able to copy text it has to be selected. It was more impatience than anything.
Wildfire I will try your little tip when I get the chance. Thanks.

When doing anything involving land sales and real money, impatience is your worst enemy. You've learned the same hard lesson many here have, unfortunately.

But you did. There are no seperate windows - it's all in the setting land for sale window. I'm sorry it happened to you, and I hope you get it back from the landbot owner, but the warning was in the box you clicked in, before you clicked the final button.

Landbots are something that LL said would not be worthwhile running by the end of last year. We're still waiting. Landbots shouldn't be banned because they do have their uses. Some people want a quick/instant sale, so they set the price to just under the lowest price listed in search, and a bot picks up the land almost instantaneously.

Art,

We're sorry this happened to you. But really, you get PLENTY of warning saying "Do you really, really want to do this?" Next time, pay attention!

The only thing you can do now is to IM the owner of the landbot, preferably before he re-sells the land to someone else. If you politely explain what you were trying to do, he MAY sell the land back to you.

Note that he is not REQUIRED to do so. What happened is completely legitimate, and you are throwing yourself on his mercy. Fortunately, this often works.

I now belong to a small group of anti-landbot people. They are called the anti- landbot coalition or something similar-- about 7 or 8 members including myself. I may take some time off from SL. There are things to do around the house.

I already gave notice to the new owner. I have to move on however; I have no more time to deal with it. For now I can make do but I will have to re-arrange things a bit.

Hm. No wonder you have problems, you don't pay attention.

First, it's "Lindal" with only one terminal L. Not Linda, not Lindall...Lindal.

Second, giving the new owner "notice" sounds like you gave him a piece of your mind. That is not what I suggested. I suggested a POLITE message or notecard explaining what had happened and ASKING them if they would be so kind as to return your land.

Why would you "just move on" if you are so upset as to create a (useless and ineffective) group against landbots?

You are taking the wrong actions to resolve the problem, Art. Forget the group, forget the rants, forget submitting an AR and demanding that the Lindens "do something".

Deal calmly and rationally and politely with the bot runner. It's the only way.

Here, I'll even write it for you.

Dear Landbot Owner,

On (date) at (SL time), I was setting a land parcel at (coordinates and sim name) for sale to my friend. Because she has a difficult name to remember, I set the land to sell to "anyone" at $L1. Before my friend could buy the land, one of your landbots (insert bot name here if you have it) snagged the parcel.

My intent was to give this parcel to my friend, and I was surprised and dismayed that your bot got it instead.

Although I have been told that there's nothing I can do legally, I would like to respectfully ask you to sell the parcel back to me. I am willing to pay you (insert a reasonable tip here) for your assistance in helping me to correct my mistake.

Sincerely,
artandalottaotherstuff Avatar

Another way to lose land to a bot without meaning to is to omit a digit when typing the price.

The selling dialog does show a calculation of the Price / metre. I always double-check that before setting the sale.
As I remember, there was a time when that indicator was not supplied.
I suppose it was added for this very reason.

I saw it happen once. A neighbour was setting a beachfront 8192 for sale, and left out a trailing 0 in the price.
He noticed his mistake and went back cancel the sale.
Too late! It only took seconds, and there were multiple bots in the sky above.

He was lucky that it was an Elanthius bot that won the race. He got the land back.

If you're still watching here, a question: Why did you set the parcel for L$1 instead of L$0? Did you try L$0 first?

As Wildefire points out, at L$0 it would have required that you specify the buyer, which is intended to reduce the likelihood of this sort of thing happening. I have a hunch, though, that L$1 is too common of a "nominal fee" used in RL contracts, and that this happens to folks who might not just automatically raise the price to L$2.

(Yeah, there are many better ways to prevent it--and trying to ban landbots isn't one of them, as you'll someday understand when you want to dump Mainland--but just raising the minimum "anybody" price to L$2 is probably easy, if it would help.)

I propose that from now on, no one can sell any land until LL sends a rep to the seller's house to hold the seller's hand while they press the "For Sale" button.

And this is where you just lost all credibility. You had time for all the warning windows in the world. There's absolutely no way for you to have even set the land for sale without seeing every last one of them.

If you chose not to bother to even read the warnings, well, then that's your fault, warnings exist for a reason.

I hope the person running the land bot that got your land is willing to work with you to get it back, but please, spare us the completely obvious excuses for your own failings.

But the rep does have to bring a clue stick to smack the seller on the head if they still insist on ignoring all warning windows and the reps advice and guidance. otherwise people will still find a way to mess up.
I'm still waiting for a misconfigured landbot to try and grab land at my estate, would be a lot of fun to play with it and see how much I can get out of it before the owner realises his mistake.

The good thing about most unfortunate occurrences in SL is that they give us clues as to the lessons we need to learn, without the high cost such knowledge would demand in real life.

Rejoice! And learn from this.

Land bots = nothing new, unfortunately. Sorry you learned the hard way.

It's *possible* that, if you IM the land owner (look for the group, and then, the group owner's name), they will sell it back to you at a reasonable price.

It's also a case of OK disease.

People get tired of reading warnings and dialogs in their O.S's and just keep clicking the OK button to get to what they want done.

It's also how Malware gets installed on their computers.

LL tried to make people read the warnings by making the dialogs brighter but "It was more impatience than anything."

I like land bots. Much better than abandoning the land. They dont take 5 minutes either they land straight on top of you.

This happens too many times and people can get all high and mighty about warning windows but it keeps happening, people simply don't expect their land to be purchased in five seconds if they aren't aware of the existence of bots. This should have been addressed long ago.

At one of Jack Linden's OH meetings, it was suggested to wait a few minutes before listing parcels for sale in search. I guess it would prevent this from happening if the land was sold within that time period.

But, the seller is given warning and even if it were a big red box and it asked if you were really, really, really sure 10 times, some people would still make this mistake.

How should LL address the problem?

Maybe require a short grace period for land sales of L$1 where the seller can buy it back for L$1.

Warnings don't help, people just click through them.

Introducing a transfer land option, most of these issues arise when people are trying to transfer land.

Make it more troublesome to sell to anyone than it is to sell to a named avatar is another option.

Maybe LL should put a 48 hr grace period before it sells the land so you can be sure hell no make it a month just in case you fail to read the warnings. Then when the month is almost up you get 20 emails letting you know its about to be listed are you really rally sure you want to sell it then the day before you get flashing lights bells and whistles so you cant miss it.


Come on PP if LL did anything to slow down sales you can bet there would be threads saying " I want to sell my friend this land but its taking so long why do we have to wait to sell it i dont have all day"