Feedback on Ad Farm Post - Part 2

Making money in SL certainly cannot be a bad thing.
Indeed it has been my motivation to stay in SL... what else is there to be done anyway which isn't perverted or waste of expensive RL time.
I mean, when i choose to give SL many more than normal user hours for fun, i should compensate my loss of business time in RL... Pardon, but money still makes us eat and have a roof over our heads.
We should not do things however that we should not do in RL. ( That is except - pardon - for the US... where super capitalism is collapsing ). What i mean that doing business with sincere principles is more than OK. It's our bread and butter, also in SL, but it must be kept healty.
Putting up these Ad Farms certainly is an severely unwanted thing.
Glad LL is handling it.

Now... the megaprims... i do hope

You've no doubt seen them lots of times, but didn't realise it. Examine floors and roofs when you're next out and about

So if someone blocks view with 16 10mx10m panels joined it's ok but a 40mx40m is not?
Evil monster megaprims eating other prims................
Have you actually built any buildings with and without them to be knowledgeable on their usage ?

Linda, the only problem with megaprims nowadays is the few people who misuse them. As Phil pointed out before me, you really need to examine some of the builds around you. You'd be surprised how many you'll find. I use megaprims of one sort or another in almost all my builds nowadays. I'm sure that if you asked any top builder in SL you'd get a similar answer. As a matter of fact, sensibly applied megaprims tend to go unnoticed for what they are as people only see the end result (the build) and not the components (the megaprims). If LL were to remove all megaprims (which, apparently, they can) you would notice them by their absence within minutes.

Hmm. Consider the real world. If I get an email stating that I can lose 15 stone in a week using Factor X pills.....that is random targetting.....THAT is spam. The sender has no idea who the recipient is, or their interests.

If, on the other hand, some person sees that I create and sell music, and emails me to say ' hey...I run a great site where you can sell your music'........that is not spam.....it is a genuine business opportunity from someone who has specifically targetted me.

Now....that latter is what is now against TOS in SL !! ALL forms of 'solicitation' are against TOS.

Lol ! So....next time I am on a dance floor and some guy IM's to advertise himself by asking ' Hi....how are you ?'...........well he is CLEARLY in breach of TOS and advertising something ( himself ).....and I will abuse report.

You are right - unsolicited communications are not spam, and never have been, although some people argue that they are.

Totally correct, Phil, and the only issue for me is whether LL apologize to my partner ( who sent the 'solicitation' and receive a suspension ) before of after the matter appears in the news.

It is absolutely crazy if a business person on SL cannot contact another business person directly without violating TOS. The media would have a field day on that one.

And frankly.....the entire 'shoot first, ask questions later' abuse system is so open to abuse itself that I can't help but wonder if it was modelled on the Stasi. Not far off the days when all someone had to do was cry 'she's a witch !' and immediately the stake would be built.

I have a nice skybox that's all contained in a 40 meter sphere, with a spherical projection of a *real* sky on it. From the inside, it's much nicer than the Windlight sky. From the outside, if you could see it (which you wouldn't unless you were flying around at 3000 meters) it looks like a planet.

I don't use megaprims at ground level, but Hyasynth Tiramisu uses them to good effect as ground cover in Silent Sparrow.

I have been on the net at my current address for almost 20 years, and I get dozens of such "specifically targeted" spams a week. And, yes, they ARE spam. If you are sending out enough of such messages that you would describe it as "advertising", then you're a spammer. It doesn't matter if you look up people's websites by eye or you have a script that looks for keywords and email addresses. Unsolicited broadcast email... email that is not 1:1 (and 1:1 is not "advertising" or to people you already have an active business relationship with, does not scale, and can not be accepted.

No that is complete nonsense ! You have obviously never done real world business.

Thousands of good honest companies across the world contact each other every day...are you seriously telling me that the first time any business contacts any other to..er...DO BUSINESS....it is an act of spam ????

Away with such nonsense !

How the **** do you get that 'active business relationship' in the first place without such contact ? What do you think most large companies have marketting departments for ? Precisely for the business of contacting other companies to do business !

I too have been on the internet for over 20 years and handle over 10 million emails a day. What you are describing is unsolicited commercial email. If the recipient did not ask for you to send them your advertisement for your business, then it is considered spam and in the *real world* your internet domain name and / or IP address would eventually, in minutes or days, end up on many black lists. That is how it works.

Just because (for example) your business is music and somebody likes music, that does not nullify that sending music related [edit: MARKETING] email (or in SL - the IM) to the recipient is ok if they first did not invite you.

A newer term of "Bacon" refers to solicited spam where a business send advertisements to customers or other businesses because they subscribe to the sender's email list(s).

Unfortunately I guess for your friend, LL does not have such opt-in features for IM, so, if you send an unsolicited commercial email advertising your business to someone who did not ask for it, then it is spam. Same thing for SL Groups - just try and advertise by saying something like "I have open space at my mall - contact me for info" in some of them such as Builders of Second Life or Hippo Technologies User Group and you will be AR'ed in seconds.

Please join the Virtual Knitting group today!

PS - you are welcome to send me the notecard in question one time for a FREE analysis.
PSS - When some business marketing company contacts me via email for something that I did not ask for, they get blacklisted fast

Mega prims are one of the best ways of prim saving, from profile cut 20m torus to less complex squares, they have now become an integral part of many large builds.
Sure a few people put up walls around their land using them but these should start to come down as much of the blight begins to be removed.
Possibly LL will insist upon removal of some unecessary walls as they begin managing their estate.

Making money isnt bad in SL, its not making money thats bad, its the way some people do it.

The megaprim debate is a moot point now. The physics problems were all but wiped out with Havok 4. When the exploit back in May allowed better sets of megaprims to be created (since the originals had rather buggy behaviors and a very limited selection of sizes) that removed the last solid argument against them. They function fine now and you'll rarely know they're there unless you check the prim structure. LL hasn't removed megaprims, in fact they modified the physics to better handle them. Megaprims are here to stay. The "war" is over. It's been over for a while.

As far as abuse, it will happen whether you have megaprims or not. 15,000 10x10x10 Cosby cubes will bring things to a halt just as well as a 1024x1024 megaprim rezzed in the middle of a sim. Same goes with walls, glowing signs, etc. If megaprim methods are removed, there's always going to be something to replace it so you didn't really accomplish much except to screw over the responsible builders.

Now then, can we stay on topic, please?

You are mistaken. SL is a game, it always was a game, and it always will be a game. There is gameplay, you see. Right now, SL is what each individual makes of it, including a Game.

I still don't understand what the story is here. Unless one's exclusive market is exceptionally clueless newbies, no business relationship will result from an adfarm display. (There indeed are such ads--usually for private estate land--specifically designed to lure just the least-informed into a "pump and dump" scam.)

Mass messaging is about the same: it will turn off anybody who's been in-world for a while, especially somebody who runs a respectable business. But I'm not clear if that's even the situation here. If there was an attempt at one-on-one contact (analogous to the "some guy on a dancefloor" case) and it was Abuse Reported, then it may have just been a bad AR that could be appealed. If, in contrast, the same notecard was sent to a bunch of businesses, yeah, that's spam; I can see how someone might make that mistake, but it's a good lesson from which to learn because, again, the kind of businesses one might hope to attract will be very much turned-off by any amateurish communications--it could poison more potential relationships than it could ever attract.

But again: nothing has changed in the ToS to make it any more or less sensitive to that sort of thing, except from adfarm parcels, starting October 1. And even then, it won't even be the same team: not Governance, but rather, Concierge. Anyone who thinks G-Team already dinged them for something that's covered in the future Concierge adfarm policy is simply mistaken.

[ETA: I meant to say something further off-topic, w.r.t. the megaprim thing. It's not just that these things can save a bunch of floor and ceiling prims, but also that they can form shapes that are just impractical by any other means. Recently, for example, I've used a very small segment of a megaprim cylinder to make a particular shape of arched roof support that would have taken hundreds of regular prims (and a lot of math) to even roughly approximate--and the result would have lagged horribly, because of all the prim geometry.]

Yep, mass messaging sucks, one chat group has been great for about 2 years, and continually chatting which seems to annoy somepeople but it's a chat group for that reason, a silent group would be uselsess to bother having for fellow countrypeople. There were occassional posts about an Aussie hangout, maybe one an hour and usually from different places, but a new club has been posting every half hour or so, and lately the chat has been near nil, I suspect many have left the group.

... Unless you have a blatant warning in your profile stating only your contact list friends may IM me. Gotta respect that.

I draw the line though at unsolicited objects, LMs, and group invites (excluding automated givers from flying through someone's parcel of course).

No illusions. I use megaprims sparingly for my garden wall. It certainly saves on the primcount. I've learned the basic rules: the center of the prim is located on your land (which people can lose track of when it's a cutpath object), and they are not placed on the edge of a sim.

I haven't had the need for a screen - hey I paid for the view. On the OT: I don't ever want it to ever come to needing a screen after searching extensively for a decent place. Anyone north and west of me will not see my holographic grid in the backyard from their homes; their views of the water to the south remain unobstructed.

I still have a problem with "screaming chairs" two parcels over. The two properties of people between us left. I'm convinced they only keep the things because I said something to them, because no one makes money with something randomly screaming every 10 minutes on a 512 unless they believe either the neighbors (hah!) or a constant stream of fly byers (hah!) would be prime targets.

You are mistaken. You said "incoluding a game", which is true. If some people add gameplay to bits of it, then those bits are games. But SL itself is merely a platfrom, with no gameplay, and therefore it is not game.

I get well over 1000 spam emails a day, and I hate the bloody stuff, but not all unsolicited emails are spam. Spam emails are not targetted - they are sent to every email address they can find. Non-spam emails are targetted to those who are known to have an interest in the subject of the emails. E.g. a new hotels directory is being created, so they email all hotels they can find. That's not spam. It's genuine business communication.

Dropping information about spaces in a mall on every avatar name is spam, because every avatar doesn't have a store that could use such space. Dropping the same information on store owning avatars is not spam - it's a genuine business communication.

I get such info dropped on me quite often, and I reject them all instantly, but just because I'm not interested, and didn't ask for it, doesn't make it spam. Just because I'm not interested doesn't mean that other store owners are not interested and would actually want to know.

The idea that it's spam if I didn't agree to receive it, is simply untrue.

To get back on track, what do people think of the new rules? People are going to try and game them, so should they be clarified, added to, the spirit kept, or what? It still allows some practices we know and loathe: changing textures, multiple ads on one location, full bright, etc.

No, that's not what I wrote, and that's not what I meant.

I wrote that if you are using that mechanism *as advertising*, then you are not just "contacting a business", because to use that mechanism as advertising you have to send out bulk quantities of emails, and *that* is spam.

You look for businesses that specifically solicit such contacts through email, or you use contact mechanisms that are not flooded with spam such as telephone calls or physical mail, or you contact them through your social and business networks that you have already assembled... so that the recipient won't treat the solicitation as spam.

Real Life companies also TELL YOU how to contact them for doing business. And TELL YOU what kind of business they're interested in. If you're really in marketing at a legitimate company, you will already know how to find these contacts and which ones are acceptable to use. In Second Life, that includes visiting the store, looking for policy documents and posters, visiting their web pages if they have them, and finding out how they're interested in being advertised to. You will probably be surprised by how many have FAQs like "Q: I have this really cool business idea...; A: I don't want to know. Really. I mean it."

If you do that kind of research, you won't get ARed for spamming people. If you don't do that, you should.

Yes, that is spam. In some other universe where the spam problem didn't exist and you only got targeted direct mail from people who researched their targets instead of blithely sending mail to every name they can come up with that they think might be interested, then perhaps you might find some happy medium where people could send these targeted unsolicited direct mails legitimately. But that's not this universe. The economics of direct email are such that it's not possible to use it for *advertising*, and that's true for ANY medium that has similar economics... including IM and notecard drops.
If it's BROADCAST to people who didn't agree to receive it, it's spam.

And... 1000 spams a day? I wish my spam level was that low. Over the past decade and change I have had to block entire countries from emailing me because simply *rejecting* the spam put me over my traffic limit... I was hit with a $750 surcharge for spam bouncing one month. Just blocking China cut my mail volume by at least 3/4. Then I use a set of checks for the TYPE of program that's contacting me, blacklisting addresses that start sending without waiting for the initial banner, or that respond inappropriately to delays and timeouts. That leaves maybe 5% of the mail attempts to actually get dealt with. 90% of that is to addresses that don't exist and never existed. Of the remaining half a percent, maybe 5 percent of that gets past my first level mail filter at my server.

And so, out of 0.025% of the attempts to deliver mail to me, I still get about 100 messages a day, and 1/3 of them end up dumped into my "junk" folder.

My mail logs show maybe 40,000 spam attempts a day. Filtered down to 70 legitimate messages. There is NO ROOM for unsolicited advertising email in a world where that kind of thing is going on.

I would say SL has become an advanced game that allows some degree of educational use.
It depends on a persons view, building is a form of game play for me, even scripting is part of the gameplay.
SL is fun and can be educational, but at the end of the day what do most people do here, make houses or clothes for their avatars, or buy clothes and houses for their avatars.
They don't see SL in the same way as its creators, they log in to play.

The rest of your post was wrong, and this bit of it shows why...

Just because you have no room for it amidst the spam, doesn't mean that it's not a perfectly good business email. Just because spam emails exist doesn't mean that genuine business emails are therefore spam. Your idea of what is and isn't spam is simply wrong.

I agree that, to most current people, SL is a playground. But that doesn't make it a game. Games have gameplay and game rules - like going up ladders and down snakes. SL is merely an environment in which to do things, and not a game.