Using "buy for $0" to transfer site-built content

How do site builders and designers -- those who create or arrange content on the customer's site -- transfer the objects they've placed to the customer's ownership?

My understanding is that a common practice is to set everything to buy for $0 and let the customer buy it all.

The reason I ask is because a recent thread brings up the problem of a new "sheep" bot that finds all items that are for sale and lists them by name and price. Of course, for normal builds like houses, most of these are simply "Object" or "Front door". However, for certain kinds of work -- like interior design -- it could include costly and well-known items.

In either case, a user of the sheep bot's website can find free items, teleport there, and buy the content for free. In the case reported in the thread, LL refused to intervene because the items were set for sale.

Is this a big issue for builders?

Is there a better way to transfer content?

I'm especially interested in the opinions of those who have to transfer content often as part of their daily business. Is the existence of this bot a serious problem or is there a good workaround?

Or do we need a new feature or an adjustment to existing ones to handle this?

Thanks,
Jeff

Don't set items for sale at L$ 0!
Just sell them for the price you agreed upon with your customer.

That's fine when you're selling a handful of objects. But what if you're doing a whole house or development with hundreds of objects, for a fixed price or per-hour rate?

With you there, Jeff. I often have to set an (interior design) object for sale for $0 for a particular customer, for a host of practical reasons. Would like to hear about safety issues, too.

You could temporarily only allow access to only you and the new owner and do the transfer then. Those that are not allowed access cannot even click objects in the parcel of land from outside (clicking results in a message that you cannot do that because you have been banned).

This is even easier if you are on an estate since the owner can essentially close the estate to everyone.

Yeah, that's the approach I would recommend, put up banlines while working.

EDIT: Actually, will banlines be enough here? Can you purchase an item on land you're banned from?

Well...if people have to physically be in my shop to do it, I don't think I need worry too much. I think I'll chance it.

Yep - you can even buy land that you've been banned from.

Interesting, Learjeff. I think you've got a legitimate concern, although truthfully it's always been the case that if you set something for sale for $0, then anyone can take it. Still, it would probably be good if the search engine weren't a potential source of increased mishaps.

I've alerted the search team at ESC to this thread, along with a suggestion for how to avoid the problem. I'll let you know when they get back to me if no one from the team responds directly here. Thanks for the heads up.

In any case, search engine or no search engine, it's good practice to restrict land access while conducting private transactions of any kind, whether it's $0 or $1,000,000. Be aware though that even if someone's off your land, they can still fly their camera in and buy stuff. The best thing to do in my opinion is to Rez Foo the build, and then drop the packaged product on the client's profile. That's ALWAYS secure.

Hopefully, you suggested that they only default opt-out for parcles that are listed as commercial. That will get their critical mass up quickly, probably the reason they defaulted to opt-out in the first place, and greatly lessen the number of people who are at risk of having their bedrooms TP'ed to.

After completing the build I always take a copy of it as one big object and then sell it to them for 0 L. No problems yet. Although many times I just give them the build, no matter the size, as one object so they can place it as desired.

If you are on their land and make a large build, selling the original is one way, ban lines another or package it and give them the package.

Another method is making a customer group, invite the client, put the whole building + contents to group property, then let the customer pick them up all at once and re-deploy. This sometimes causes problems with third party contents though, especially with scripts this can be a real pain to trace the source of any problems, but it works.

Learjeff: despite the widespread panic this situation is inducing, let's not forget a few things:

- this isn't like the landbot issue where bots respond to land sales which are immediately and universally broadcast over all of SL, and then proceed to actually make the purchase. An ESC bot has to run across your items in the course of a routine scanning sweep, communicate the info to the ESC site, then a regular non-bot person needs to find your items on the site, decide you have something worth buying, then TP in and purchase it in the usual manner. Note that ESC bots do NOT buy things. So the whole process takes time and a combination of circumstances. If you press the unfortunate people reporting these types of problems, *and if they tell the truth*, I'm quite sure you will will find every single instance was a result of marking things for sale and leaving them sitting out unattended for some length of time. Nothing else explains the result. So just use a little care, and do these types of transfers with both parties present.

Chosen: this has been a high-profile issue for a week in the RA forum and elsewhere, fast approaching the "villagers storming ESC headquarters with pitchforks and torches" state; I highly doubt the people at ESC who would be interested aren't already aware there's an issue, certainly one of public perception and possibly a technical/policy issue as well. So you probably needn't take it upon yourself to get in the middle of it all. Of course any communication between ESC and SL residents (in either direction) can only be a good thing, so do feel free

Good idea, but it doesn't work:

A) the bot will scan even if banned, because it will rez into a nearby area and scan. If your banned area is large enough, things in the center won't be scanned.

B) Banning only works for property owners. Many in SL rent. And I think you're mistaken about not being able to right-click objects, because I have done that. Perhaps it changed in the last few months. (I was simply curious about the creator of an object I saw in banned territory. And I didn't try to buy; perhaps that would have been blocked.)

Unfortunately, for those of us who provide a service creating and positioning large quantities of in-world content, there is NO good solution to this. The ESC search engine makes what was once our only option now a high-risk proposition.

On a whole-sim build, which is part of what I do for a living in SL, you usually have the entire sim already set up as parcels, ready for sale. You can't rez-foo Linden plants. You can't rez-foo a build that covers the entire sim. And NONE of the object rezzers that I have seen can deal with positioning no-copy content like a sexgen bed. Nor can they position a build relative to the sim coordinates. So that home with a scripted swimming pool and a carefully sculpted basement excavation won't be positioned correctly if they didn't rez the rez box at EXACTLY the coordinates you placed it at when you packed the build. And in fact likely can't be packed at all.

Deeding items to a group breaks a lot of scripted items. And even then, that still doesn't make the client the owner of them.

Selling a land parcel with all items on the land does NOT always transfer everything, and makes you vulnerable to land bot swooping. It's also impractical or impossible if the contracted person doesn't have the funds or a Premium membership to facilitate a transfer by land sales.

It takes time to set each item for sale, even if you're not setting a price. It takes less time to buy each one. If they have to wait while I set each item, that can waste a lot of their time. Especially when it's hundreds of items...

I charge my clients by the construction phase, not by the piece. If I position a scripted bed or pool, or 40 pose ball sets, or other transferrable content as part of the build, then my fee for that content includes the purchase price, which may well have been negotiated to less than retail. (Some merchants are happy to give you a volume discount if you buy 40 pose ball sets at once, or 20 beds...). But when I buy those items and place them in-world, they no longer show the original purchase price. Without keeping a detailed list of the exact negotiated price I paid for each item, I have no way to set them back to the right price. And even if I did, someone might still think my volume discounted price is a great deal, and want to snatch it.

So far, ESC has made precisely ONE post in the other thread discussing their dangerous search bot. It amounted to "Gee, we're sorry our product caused a bunch of people to come and buy your stuff for a fraction of what it was worth. Out product is still in beta, and we're working the bugs out." No offer to compensate victims. No offer to shut it down until a safe alternative can be implemented...

Chosen, if you have any pull with ESC, there is a LOT they could do to improve their product and make it safer.

1: Shut it down until they fix it.

2: Exclude any items listed for L$10 to L$0. That excludes any object that the for-sale checkbox has just been clicked on, but for which you haven't yet set a price. It also allows content creators to transfer items at L$0 or L$1.

3: Trash the current collected data, and only allow scans of parcels marked "commercial", or which are listed in the Classifieds, or which belong to individuals who have intentionally opted IN to this service.

4: Force the bot to actually attempt to access any parcel that it is trying to list items on. That is the only way it will be sure if it is scanning a parcel it is banned from. Banning it now does NOT keep it from scanning your land!

There are also some things Linden Lab could do to mitigate this:

1: Make an option available to sell ONLY to a specified individual, as they did with land sales.

2: Allow items to retain the last sale price in the price field when "for sale" gets unchecked.

3: Allow a new price to be typed in BEFORE you click the "for sale" checkbox.

4: Support a parcel-level flag that bans use of scanners to scan the parcel by anyone other than the parcel owner.

Anti, I agree that this isn't as big an issue as certain others. And there are workarounds, but each one is a hassle in certain circumstances.

Chosen, thanks for your input & consideration. I hope we can find a suitable resolution. I think the concept of search bots is not inherently flawed and could prove to be useful.

The suggestion about different defaults for commercial vs. residential property sounds like a good one to me.

For those who suggest bundling and taking, how do you deal with things that need to be aligned properly when placed by the owner? For example, builds integral with landscaping?

I've seen non-builders try to realign things they've accidentally moved. It's funny but sad.

Frankly, I think we really need a better mechanism to transfer property in-place.

Meanwhile, I think it's important to stress two principles:

1) builders beware
2) folks taking advantage of this should be aware that they're being unethical

Folks who do this innocently and inadvertently: no problem, simply return the goods on request. Minor hassle, no serious harm. (Just be sure to check your account log and don't return an item to someone you didn't buy it from.)

Ceera, thanks for sharing the benefit of your experience.

Not yet.

It would seem that site built objects named "Object" or "rock", or "mound" set to sell for $0 or $10 would attract few vultures, and you can refund (if needed) the $10 per linked object to the owner after they have bought it all.

Since the transfer of site built objects can be very time consuming it would seem important to establish with your customer up front exactly what will be expected and paid for.

Possible options* (starting with the least expensive first) are:

* excluding no copy or no transfer items.

1. You build everything and leave it in place in your name as owner and group member, no transfer takes place. This is the cheapest option possible as there is no work or time required of either party. No back-up copy is made for later use. (OPTION: You use "select all" and "take a copy" to make a back up copy that you give or sell to the new owner.)

2. You build everything and leave it in place. You then set everything for sale for $0 or $10, and the Owner has to buy it all. There is no back-up copy made or provided unless the owner makes one. (OPTION: You use "select all" and "take a copy" to make a back up copy that you give or sell to the new owner.)

3. You build everything and then put a copy into one or more rezzer boxes (such as Builder's Buddy) and sell the rezzer box to the new owner for whatever final purchase price you agreed to for the finished product. This is more time consuming for the creator to put it in the rezzer box but less time consuming for the new owner and creator to transfer the build. It also immediatly provides the new owner and creator with a back up copy if the original on the ground is somehow corrupted or deleted. Put the XYZ coordinates of the rezzer box in the box description or name and the owner can always accuratly place the box and count on installing an accuratly placed copy of the build.

4. .... I feel like I'm missing an option here but it escapes me at the moment... its been a long day

No-transfer items are obviously not an issue here, as they can't, by definition, be transferred. When I do a build that requires no-transfer items, I have to have the client purchase the item and drop it in place, for me to move while I have mod rights for their stuff.

Things you buld yourself are also not much of an issue here, as you should, presumably, still have the ability to take a copy into inventory as a backup, before selling it. Of course, this can't apply to really large and complex builds. There is no way, for example, to back up the positioning and location of 500 to 1000 trees and shrubs sim-wide. But then again, it's unlikely that some poacher will want to buy all your Plumeria and palm trees...

The sticking point is usually on the transferrable purchased content. Stuff that is no-copy, especially, and which often is also no-mod. What DO you do to transfer a swimming pool that you have managed to perfectly place and landscape for a user? How can you safely transfer 40 sets of pre-positioned pose balls?

For most high-ticket scripted items, whether it is a scripted bed or a large swimming pool, if you're not the actual owner, you can't fully control or configure it. Even some really simple things like fish rezzers break if you deed them to a group. I've tried, and I've seen them break. In some cases, the attempt to deed them completely destroyed them. Complex scripted items are almost always assumed to be owned by an individual.

Linden Lab desperately needs to come up with a method that will allow a contracted person to safely transfer ownership of one or more items to a specified individual, while those items remain in-world.

I don't know if I'd really call it "high" risk, but it is a little higher than it was before. The more visible ANYTHING is, the more at risk it is, for any of a million reasons.

That having been said, let's not lose sight of what the search tool is really for. The benefits of a well searchable world far outweigh the one drawback we're discussing here. Also, be aware that while this problem does only affect a relatively small group of people (yes, we professional builders are a small group), it is being taken very seriously, and solutions are being discussed as I write this. I think we'd all do well to keep those things in mind before this spirals into a complaint fest.

Oh, and please don't think that last comment was aimed at you Ceera. I'm not saying your post is a complaint fest at all. It just happens to be the one I'm replying to since it contains a lot of good points. All I meant was that I can smell a little smoke starting to rise in this thread, so I'm trying to pour some water down while I can before it needlessly blows up. I think everyone can understand where I'm coming from on that. Let's keep this discussion useful (because it is), and not let it melt down. Okay, nuff said on that.


Good point. I wasn't thinking of Linden plants when I suggested Rez Foo.


No, but you can set up a grid of Rez Foo packages at fixed intervals, so you can pack up a whole sim into a very small number of packages. Depending pon what you're doing, there are lots of viable options.


I'm not sure precisely waht a sexgen bed is. I guess I don't get out enough.

Anyway, no-copy items can be placed into a rezzer and rezzed once. They won't be there the second time around, but hopefully there won't be any second time needed. Drop the package object into the customer's inventory, have him rez it and give you mod rights for a minute, then you place the package where it belongs and hit Rez. When you're done, have the customer turn off your mod rights.

Will that work every time? No, but the $0 thing isn't practical in every situation either, even without the search engine. You wouldn't ever want to set something to $0 in a high traffic area, for example.


True, but I fail to see the relevance of that. If you do what I said above, there's virtually no chance of the customer screwing it up. Just record the packager's position before you take it, and put it back in the same spot once it's re-rezzed. If you're really concerned, it's easy enough to drop a script into it to force it into position automatically.


No-mod items can't be packaged, nor can unscriptable Linden Trees, but other than that, what are you worried can't be packaged?


Yeah, deeding is not a good way to go.


It's been a while since I've sold land, but isn't there a setting to sell to a specific person? Seems to me, as long as you remember to do that, there's no danger of land bots jumping in. If you forget, that's your own fault.

As for not everything transferring, as I said, it's been a while since I've bought or sold land, so can you educate me? What things don't transfer?


I guess if you're talking about selling a car or something, that might hold up, but if it's something like that, why not just drop it on the client's inventory? Seems to me, the only danger is in large builds that need to be in a specific place. Tell me if I'm missing something in what you're saying.


Even without the search engine, it's a huge danger if you just set stuff for sale and leave it for the customer to buy later. Anyone can happen by and take it. I wouldn't recommend EVER setting something for $0 unless the intended buyer is there right at that moment. Search doesn't change that.


Now this is a really interesting point. The danger here is one of perception. Customers could potentially be angered by seeing an 'advertized' price appearing lower than the actual price. This to me seems to be something that might be a lot more common of an issue than the $0 thing. I'll definitely pass this one along.


Why should ESC or anyone else compensate "victims" for actions of third parties? The search engine's intended purpose is to help EVERYONE by offering a convenient method by which to find items for sale since SL's existing searchability is quite poor. If some people choose to abuse this too, it's unfortunate, but really, how can you hold ESC responsible for that? People abuse all kinds of things.

Anyway, I myself hadn't seen that other thread until just now. Most people at ESC are way, way, way too busy to look at these forums. I barely have time to do it either, but I happen to enjoy the teaching aspect of the Building & Texturing forums, and it's important to me that they remain useful, so I make time for them as much as I can. I almost never look at Resident Answers anymore though. There's just not enough time, and something had to give.

What I can tell you is that everyone at ESC are some of the brightest, most positive, most forward thinking people you'll ever meet, with a sense of excitement and purpose about virtual worlds like you wouldn't believe. I've been with the company six months now, and I'm continually blown away by every single person in it, no exaggeration. If you knew half the stuff that was in the pipeline, you'd probably be pulling a Cartman, and freezing yourself for a few months, just so you wouldn't have to wait for all your cool new toys. Believe me, all any Sheep wants to do is help make things better for all of us in SL, and they're doing a fantastic job of it, whether the public sees it or not.

These things take serious time and incredible dedication though, so will there be unintended snags along the way? Sure. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done though. Many of the things ESC is doing quite frankly need to be done (by SOMEONE) if SL (and virtual worlds in general) is ever to reach its potential.

Does improving SL necessarily mean reading these forums though? Absolutely not. I'm probably ranting a bit more than I should here, but what I'm getting at is if complaint threads go unanswered, don't mistake that for ESC not caring. It's no one's job to read these forums or to reply to them, nor should it be. I can promise you that everyone at ESC is extremely dedicated to the betterment of SL, and virtual worlds in general, and if you knew the kind of hours and personal sacrifices people put in order to make that happen, you'd be truly amazed.


I'm not on the software team, of course, but I've discussed this topic today already with the president of the company and the head of the search project. Both are aware of the concerns and dedicated to doing what can be done to alleviate any problems.


It's not broken. Sorry, but there's really no other way to say that. It's still in beta, still under development, of course, but it doesn't need to be "fixed".

Please understand, I'm not trying to say the problem we've been discussing isn't real, but a search engine is a search engine is a search engine. If you don't want your stuff included, you can opt out, similar to the way you can opt your web content out of Google if you really want to. I'm sure you'd agree though that the benefits of being Googlable are huge while the drawbacks are very few. In time, you'll absolutely be saying the same thing about ESC's seach engine for SL. It's a good thing; trust me.

(And by the way, I'm not saying that because I work for the company. There are certainly projects that have me going "What the heck is the point of that?'. Search isn't one of them. This something SL has needed for a very long time.)


Unfortunately, that would also exclude items that are intentionally free or intentionally cheap. My suggestion was to have the system hold off on publishing free items for a period of time, and then do a check to make sure they're still there before publishing. That way the kind of temporary sale items we're talking about would never appear, as long as they're sold before the check. I don't know how easy or hard this would be to implement though. It just struck me as a logical thing to do.


I'm not sure what you mean by "maked commercial". My land isn't so marked, but I have plenty of items for sale. Is your land marked commercial? I don't think anyone's is.

In any case, the idea here is to make the world as easily searchable as possible, without anyone having to do anything special to be found. On the web, Google will find your website all by itself, unless you opt out. It's the same principle here, and it's absolutely the way it should be.


That's a good idea. Again, I don't know whether it's easy or hard to implement, but it makes good logical sense.


Please! Been wanting this for years.


Both good ideas.


Not a good idea. There are tons of good uses for scanners. The fact that they CAN be used for things you might not like doesn't mean they should be stopped.


I hope these unofficial comments from someone at ESC (me) have been helpful. Again, I'm just an artist for the company, not part of the software team, and I certainly wasn't asked to say or not say anything here. Everything I've written is just my own opinion, but hopefully it gives a little insight into what we as a company are doing.

Thanks to those who have posted workarounds.

I think the essential problem outlined by Ceera remains.

After some talk, if there's any support, I'll make a feature suggestion post. My suggestion would be another box on "make availabe for sale", where you can add a resident's name. In addition,

(a) we should be able to enter the name and value before making avaliable for sale
(b) when we turn off 'for sale', the price and name, if any, should remain if we turn it back on
(c) it should be possible to do this to a group of selected objects in one operation.

Frankly, I'd like to see (c) for setting permissions as well; it's such a hassle when making complex products with lots of contents, to keep changing each individual item when changing between selling directly to customers versus selling to resellers who need copy/xfer capability. Of course, (c) might be scriptable, if they would actually implement the LSL function to set object permissions. But that's another subject!

Really? I find an object needs to be copy/mod in order to rez it from within another object.

Furthermore, they can't be put inside the rezzing object without deleting them from the world in which they've been placed.

I believe Ceera is 100% correct that there is no way to transfer a build containing no-copy objects using scripts and rezzing objects, without changes to LSL functions.

Also, Chosen, I think that if a parcel owner wants to ban scans inside his property, that's a reasonable thing to ask for. Frankly, it's less onerous than ban lines that keep me from walking between buildings or in water to pass around parcels with ban lines! Ever notice how hard it is to simply walk from here to there in some places?

Why would you feel the need to scan into someone else's property, if they didn't want it?

Finally, I feel that ESC's site abets people who essentially steal property by buying things that are intended for sale to a specific individual. The SL features don't support this concept, so we 'abuse' the 'buy' feature and adapt it to this purpose. Unscrupulous people take advantage of this practice and ESC's site and essentially take what is not rightfully theirs to take.

I agree that listing $0 items is useful, but I feel that these items should ONLY be listed for 'opt-in' cases, until ESC finds a better solution.

Meanwhile, ESC's site unintentionally poses a significant threat to builders, who must use much more cumbersome workarounds or require the customer to be coresident on the site at hand-off time, making builds take more time and therefore become more expensive, at a cost to all SL residents.

A much better solution is for LL to implement the 'for sale to' feature, and then the ESC bot becomes merely a privacy issue (which I would rather not discuss in this thread, and no I'm not concerned about it).

I think I still like my grouping method best, and so far it worked good enough. Just have to explain the land owner he has to set the building to group, and temporarily give me privileges to edit and move his objects. Then I can adjust all I need to adjust untill he's satisfied, and he can just take the item away from the group, abandon the group, and retract my privs when I'm done