Definition of Theft?

I'm finding that out.

My passion is teaching. In addition to loving to teach, I had planned on the income plus tips to be my spending money in SL (including paying rent) so I no longer would purchase lindens. As fate would have it, right when I was admitted to faculty at this particular school, it closed. And this was a school that had been around a long time. (I took my very first SL class there and for the longest time thought it was the only school in SL...lol.)

I had been dabbling with selling things I made via SLX/XStreet and having a yard sale now and then where I sold items I no longer wanted and added a few of my products in as well and was amazed when they sold.

After the school closed, I decided to go premium and get a 512 parcel. 117 prims would provide PLENTY of space for the few items I had and planned on making. (Sidenote - yes I could - and still might - investigate other SL schools, but I chose the one I did because overall I felt it had the best quality of instructors. I have taken classes at most of the schools in SL. Some are better than others, some are very dependent on the particular instructor for a class, but none have the same "feel" I got with the other school.)

Shortly after purchasing the 512 parcel, an adjoining 1024 came up for sale during the time land sales were really low so I purchased it since the small monthly tier was manageable. Errrr....then another adjoining 1024 was for sale and I purchased that with another bump up in tier...still about the same as if I played EQ monthly.

Since we were still renting land for our home and now had enough prims to have our home and a small, quaint shop on my land, we moved over.

I had attended some classes on starting a SL business and marketing even before I met Jojo, but began paying more attention now. Then I got the impression from reading the forums that one thing the merchants had in common that had a lot of sales was a lot of items. The quaint little vintage shop that I had envisioned couldn't handle a whole lot, so I ditched that shop and, yes, purchased two more parcels so I could build a 3-story structure and expand.

So now I'm following all the marketing tips for keywords, etc. and thinking ahead to a large store, when I still have only a few products because I've spent all my time reading the forums on how to promote a business I really don't have yet. Plus, by the time I do all that, when my partner comes online I'm dead tired from that (apart from RL) and we don't have the fun we used to. Everything is about "the business" and now I *have* to make a certain amount of sales to at least offset some of my tier.

I now have a choice - continue on and figure that I'm in the building process of my business and once I get the building situated and more products made (whenever I can find time for that), I won't have to spend as much time on it.

OR

I can scale back, sell off most of my land, and go back to the small, quaint shop I wanted in the first place and enjoy other things in SL again and spend the time I would on marketing on creating new classes to teach...even on a volunteer basis or for tips because that is what I truly love to do.

*Sighs* and wishes I had just stuck with my first idea.

Just a thought, but have you thought about making teaching your business? I mean not working for someone else, but starting your own school, maybe in that litlle shop, for starters? You may be spending a lot of time promoting it and what not, but they effort may seem more rewarding.

If you want to create a truly heated Bot thread you need to Have Bots in the title.

Just saying.

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Ill sum up this Bot thread and Every trafficbot thread ever.

Phil and Marcel wont see any issue with using Bots.

Some people will resist extremes either way.

And the rest will be Against the bots and incredulous at all the pro-bot Spin some posters will come up with.

I'm finding that out.

My passion is teaching.

I can scale back, sell off most of my land, and go back to the small, quaint shop I wanted in the first place and enjoy other things in SL again and spend the time I would on marketing on creating new classes to teach...even on a volunteer basis or for tips because that is what I truly love to do.

The amount of people against bots is not larger then the amount of people seeing no problem. The amount of people that simply do not care, is the biggest group of all. They are the shoppers that come into our stores, not caring whether there are bots or not. The ones that spoke that opinion out in this and other threads can hardly be ignored. The fact that Phil always has customers in his shop cannot be ignored either.

Shonky advertising works, who knew? Apparently adfarming works as well, how about that?

The fact that most people don't care about things like bots is pretty much irrelevant. Most people don't care about most things, unless it looks like it might directly effect them. Most people didn't care about spam until it got to the point where they couldn't ignore it. Until the sky started falling, those of us who were fighting spam got treated like Chicken Little.

I'd love to learn various things, like building, clothing making, anything I don't already know about SL basically. Lol. Let me know if you want to tutor anybody! Or if you begin a class.

You could try selling things in other people's shops - maybe that would be cheaper than running a land parcel?

I am so blessed to now have the space in Rhia's Primal Art area she made for those of us in this thread ) So that was a long way of saying....if I set up the small shop on my land and it does well, yes, doing satellite shops would be a way I'd go.

Get someone else to do your marketing, Honeybear hinted at it. Obviously this won't change your mind and if your heart isn't in it anymore or you're feeling that it's not worth it then that's really the most important thing, it's what you feel is best for you that should take precedence.

Just as relevant as your opinion Argent.
The fact that some anti-botters shout louder then the silent mass, does not make their opinion more valid then others.

The simple truth is that a few people in here are anti (traffic) bot use, and a few think it is perfectly okay to run them. The anti bot people think they have ethics on their side, but the people who think they are okay have the owner of this world on their side: LL. Linden Labs does not only think inflated traffic numbers are okay, but makes use of them as well in the figures they publish.

Comparing it to ad-farming is a nice one, more people have tried that, even though there is no similarity whatsoever. The only reason LL finally did something about it, is because they saw mainland get empty. Because ad-farmers do not have 1 parcel with 50 ads, they have 50 parcels with 1 ad, and try to extort their neighbors with ugly ads. Compare that to a few dozen bot farmers with 20 bots high in the sky or buried in the ground. You see how much sense this compare makes?

Anyway, the good part is that the people who think running bots is perfectly okay, wish you all the luck fighting that right. Take 2 examples: I do not run bots, and get listed higher in Places if no one does. Phil does run bots, but already stated he rather see them banned (though later he changed that into removing traffic as a metric, which would be much smarter indeed). So we wish you luck in lobbying with the Lindens to get either traffic or bots/campers/models banned.

Whether you want to compare yourself to Chicken Little or not, is up to you. What I do know, is that the place to rant about bots is in Jira's or at office hours. Honestly I do not think you will be very succesful, because LL seems to like their inflated numbers, but I sincerely wish you will succeed. But before you start, I would really consider how important traffic bots really are in the world of Second Life. A few anti bot activists do not make it an important issue suddenly

Why Satellite shops, I still ask. Since Search All was introduced, the need of satellite shops seems almost useless nowadays. Myself I tried a dozen locations, and sold about nothing from there. When I put all my effort in my own store/parcel, things worked out a lot better.
Then again, it might just be in what you are selling Apparently furniture is not well suited for satellite shops.

Morality and ethics are to be defined by what you or others can get away with.

all this thread has become is a advertising board to a few who will just keep commenting replies, nothing more. Many pages back everything was covered yet a few just keep pumping out replies to get advertising for play games in SL.

Satellite shops in places the get walk-by shopping traffic should be good, imo - even for furniture. Examples:-

1. I recently started allowing someone to sell her stuff as a store within a store at my place. She hasn't been there long, but already she's sold more there than in all the other places she's in, and been in, combined.

2. I recently started allowing someone else to put her stuff in my place - art. She did, and she set the prices to 500% more than I sell art for. The following day, I IMed her to suggest that they were a bit expensive and suggested that she might want to reconsider her prices. Her reply was that 2 had been sold an hour after she put them up, and another one later the same day. What do I know?

So, imo, satellite shops with walk-by shopping traffic can be good.

So don't read it any more. Easy when you think about it, huh?

QFMB!!

(Quoted For Moral Bankruptcy)

It's an interesting argument there.
Morality and ethics are to be defined by what you or others can get away with.
If we consider the LL cheat on numbers, then it's OK for us to cheat on numbers.


The ad-farming thing illustrates this.
Ad-farming was a perfectly OK activity because not enough people put enough pressure on LL to stop it.
When ad-farming became targeted by LL, it was no longer acceptable practice.

But hey!!
Was it *ever* ethical or moral to do it? Even when it wasn't forbidden?

Just as relevant as your opinion Argent.

What, people who have no opinion are just as relevant as people who do? I know some people believe stuff like that.

Traffic bots are useful to LL because they inflate the inworld figures, and they're useful to the people who use them because they inflate their traffic figures, but they increase load on the grid and provide no benefits to the average resident. They're worse than campers, because those at least have the benefit of keeping lindens circulating. And of course once people start using them the rest of us are stuck in a prisoner's dilemma.

I'm not strongly anti-bot, and I wouldn't have said anything if someone hadn't brought up the bogus "silent majority" argument. But it is bogus... apathy doesn't correspond to approval.

Why Satellite shops, I still ask. Since Search All was introduced, the need of satellite shops seems almost useless nowadays. Myself I tried a dozen locations, and sold about nothing from there. When I put all my effort in my own store/parcel, things worked out a lot better.
Then again, it might just be in what you are selling Apparently furniture is not well suited for satellite shops.