Lock this too, Cyna..... it informs residents, after all

OMG. actually he did offer to be MY friend. i've been paying him that monthly 1500 but i haven't seen him. let me check my friends list ....

OMG ... he's not on my list anymore!

i'll have to stop those payments. anyone else interested in being my friend?

Glad you all met my alt! *runs*

@Chris: Sucker!!

Mandy C

You know the old saying, "Nothing is foolproof to a talented fool...."

This is totally not fair.

Some people have created a bot that does what no human could.

Nobody knows or expects such a thing.

LL is neither disallowing this nor warning people about it.

coco

These conversations always remind me of a conversation taking place in the real world, which would go kinda like this:

Bob: OK, Sam, we have a store here, and we don't want it broken into.

Sam: Well, we have the locks on the doors, and the burglar alarm.

Bob: Well, someone could still throw a brick through a window, or disable the alarm. Thieves are clever, you know!

Sam: OK, let's put cement blocks on all the windows, and quintuple locks!

*they do*

Bob: Still got a problem, Sam. When we're open, we get shoplifters!

Sam: Hmmm, okay, let's put tags on everything and have them walk past a door where there's a buzzer.

*they do*

Bob: Well, Sam, we've done all we can, and somehow we still have theft. What's worse, people are starting to steal from each other in the store! No one wants to come in as a result!

Sam: Well, Bob, we have reached the end of what we can do. We've fortified the store as much as possible, yet we still have theft. And of course we can't tag other customers' items, so . . . I guess this is just the way it is.

Bob: You're right, Sam. Nothing we can do about it. Might as well just limp along until nobody comes here at all anymore.

Sam: So true, Bob. It's not like we have any sort of laws in this country. If a person is clever enough to steal something, they can have it!

*they stand around twiddling their thumbs and sighing*

Bob: Guess we're screwed. Oh well.

Sam: Hey, I know! Let's move to another country where they have laws against this sort of thing!

coco

Or maybe just add a sentence to the first pop-up saying something like: "Automated land-buying programs are active that can and will buy land selling at or below predetermined prices per sq. m. within tenths of a second of your approving this sale."

What is your problem with that? Not that it would do a lot to dry up the pool of easy suckers to take advantage of, I hope?

my problem? i have no problem with any of this. in fact, i have a 512 that i will be selling shortly. and at a low enough price that i DO hope a bot comes by and grabs it as soon as i put it up for sale.

but this statement, har, would be just something else that ppl will not read. they obviously don't read what the pop-up says now. why would this be any better?

It would be better because LL would be fulfilling its responsibility to give people fair warning that this can happen to people on their servers. And because then, truly, the people swooped upon would have no-one to blame but themselves. "Oh, you didn't take the time to read the big sign that said Warning! Bridge Out?" Gee, that's too bad...

Like I said before, I am not of the school that presumed adults are not responsible for their own actions and therefore have to be protected from themselves by some super-Big Brother. I am of the school that you warn people who are your customers you want to keep around when you know something like this can happen to them on your own premises. If they then go ahead and do it anyway, then, yeah, maybe they ought to drop out of the gene pool.

But SL should not be a giant "Gotcha!" game. It is too important a phenomenon to become a little portable card table for three-card monte grifters.

When selling your land, please check the for sale - mainland list first and then set your land to L$.05 per meter less than the first per meter price on the list. That way you are getting more for your land and still having it sell immediately. Plus a human will pick it up, not a bot runner, spreading the wealth around to other brokers. Unless you like paying off those that have the monopoly on the good deals.

Land bots are good for LL, they probably pay more tier than most non bots users.

meh they probally spend all day flip floping plots with other bots stifling any development or creativity

anywho i dont like the land biz, but ive delt with the land process a few times before and i never agreed to anything before i ->understood<- everything i was doing

i have no pity for the others that couldnt bother

I'm a little dismayed, but sadly, not surprised, at the levels of vehement objection to the idea of improving awareness of consequences.

I have to wonder what the rationale is for being so violently opposed to better clarity in land sales interfaces...

My only objection is once people get into auto pilot, they ignore all warnings no matter how explicit. I would rather make it harder to set land to Anyone or install a captcha for the buyer, or have some sort of one hour escrow period where a seller could get his/her land back if it was set or sold by mistake.

asked ... and answered.

there is a warning already. how many more should we have? 2? 5? 10?

no matter how many, many will just click thru them all UN-READ and then complain that they weren't warned enough.

the only way out of this is for some linden to be on call for anyone wanting to sell land who will then come and hand-hold the seller thru the entire process.

to avoid all this nonsense, why not just sell the land to a real estate company and be done with all this? pay them a commission on the sale. of course, selling the land TO the real estate company will just revisit these problems.

there IS no solution. ppl need to be aware of what they are doing, be careful and double check what is happening ... and own up to any mistakes they made.

and as for bots... i was looking at a piece of land once form the air. it had been up for sale for a few weeks at an inflated price. the owner then appeared and reduced the price to something reasonable. i bought the land immediately. could i be considered a land bot? what is the difference between me buying it immediately and a bot coming by and doing the same? nothing.

Nope. There is no warning about landbots. How many should we have? Onw would do nicely thank you.




LOL!
Back in post #85, I wrote:-
For whatever reasons, we have people here who seem to be working up to a posting along the lines of:
"Oh so what you want is for the Lindens to set up the sales for people via live help? "


Precient?
Nah! It's just that the ridiculous extreme straw man arguments put up by those who seem opposed to helping people for whatever reasons are so lame and transparent.
Next up?
--- The only other solution is to have Rosedale visit people's RL houses in person, sit down at their computers and set up the sales for them.

i hate the "but (sniffle cry whimper) there was no warning about landbots" crap

you set your land for a buck on the open market there was always a chance it was gonna get swiped from under you

now its just a guarantee

So why not tell everybody it's a guarantee at the moment they are going to sale?

Oh, I forgot; people won't be able to screw them then.

Just include the following disclaimer in the final sales dialog if the buyer is "anyone":

"Upon clicking OK, your parcel will be IMMEDIATELY placed in the land sales search tool and can be IMMEDIATELY purchased by ANYONE. Do NOT use this mechanism to do land transfers to a specific person; in that case, cancel this transaction and specify the avatar's name in the "sell to" field. Linden Lab is not responsible for land sales to unintended parties and encourages you to double-check all land transactions for correctness before submitting them. By continuing this transaction, you indicate your acceptance of all responsibility for its outcome."

or somesuch. Problem is, there will STILL be people who blithely ignore that warning, get botted, and then come here and whine about it. Worse, there will still be some apologists for their behavior even then.

Personally, I don't get how people, in the age of the Inter-"I WANT IT NOW NOW NOW!!!"-net, can possibly think that sales would not be instantaneous. I guess some folks are in for a serious wake-up call, though.

This would be good too. You can't really protect people from themselves. But you can protect - or at least warn - people of risks they do not know about and cannot be reasonably expected to be aware of. Then, at least, they are equipped to take care of themselves. And if they don't, too bad, better they go play with their rubber duckies.

But SL should NOT be about blindsiding people, and playing "Gotcha!" with the unwary for sometimes significant amounts of real money, and then saying, "It's your own fault, Noob." If that is what you want to do, go to the local day care center and steal candy from babies for your kicks.

Yes - because they have NOT actually been warned of a very real danger by that sorry excuse for a "warning". That "warning" might as well have warned them to knock on wood for all the good it would do them.
They'll think. "OK - so it can be bought by ANYONE in theory, but there's nobody else here to buy it."





It's very, very simple. If they were posting something for sale on a website, they wouldn't set for sale to Anybody if they intended to sell to Somebody.
However, they are in an immerive 3D world that is very like real life (at least in comparison to websites). They will have seen the way that land-buying works. (There's a detailed page in the Help/Knowledge Base. You right-click on the parcel and click 'Buy Land'.)( You 'obviously' have to be there.) They will tend to react to that environment as they do in real life. There's nobody around, so it's safe.
They have not been warned about something that is very likely to happen. It's not their fault.

If they had been warned about that danger, and had ignored that warning, it would be their fault.


There's a history of this happening. It continues to happen. There is something wrong with the current interface. It is not fit for purpose.
Why would anyone not want to warn people?
Why would anyone argue against giving that warning?

I'm looking around jira and I'm not finding any proposals to fix this. There are a lot of potentially good ideas for partial fixes:

- Even more warnings of various types built into the interface.
- A delay before land set for sale is actually listed.
- A fee to list land for sale.
- Requiring a confirmation from the seller before a sale is finalized.
- Automatically making land set to sell to 'anyone' an auction.

I'm not necessarily advocating any or all of these, but if people are so upset about these issues, isn't jira the place to propose new features and get people to vote on them? Are any of these ideas in jira waiting for people to vote on them?

Arguing these ideas over and over again in this forum is kinda pointless, writing a good proposal for jira and encouraging people to vote is not.

"There are a lot of potentially good ideas for partial fixes:"
- and so a lot of potential Jira proposals - maybe all proposing different/same/mixed actions.
Which one to vote for? All? Or some? Or maybe the 'right' mix isn't there, so propose a new mix to be voted on?
Do we transfer all of the debate from Forums to Jira?
In Forums the debate is very accessible. In Jira..........??


The issue of landbots taking advantage of people who are unaware of their existence is different in essence to the technical issues for which Jira might be more appropriate. It goes to the heart of the culture of SL.
It is not a technical issue. It is a moral issue.

I personally disagree.

While it may be a 'moral' issue, eliminating bots will not fix anything. If you eliminate bots and don't change anything about how SL works, then people will simply be back to swooping by manually refreshing the land search. The problem will be almost exactly the same except that land swoopers will take 5 seconds to swoop in and buy land instead of 1 second. Land swooping has been happening long before people were even talking about bots.

Technical changes by LL would do much more to address the issue than simply blaming 'bots' while not addressing the land sale system. Besides, I think some of the things that people have proposed have merit on their own. Why aren't there proposals for them in jira and/or why aren't people voting for them there?