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Reverend Herzog added a comment - 18/Apr/07 02:10 PM
Bad idea. Scripters often use 16s for non intrusive, non advertising networks that provide a lot of services, such as data gathering, inter-sim broadcasting, etc. Your idea would eliminate or severely cripple that. Also, parcels smaller than 512 are useful to builders as prim land when you only need a couple of dozen extra prims to finish a build instead of having to pay for a full 117. It's also impossible to cut most sims, especially when they have road sites in them, evenly into 512s. This would badly limit the way sims could be laid out while parceling.
I agree wholeheartedly with the aim of the proposal, but, like Rev H., I agree that we need to be able to edit land into smaller chunks than 16m2 for varying reasons.
I am hoping that somebody can come up with a workable alternative that we can all vote for without reservation! This is a difficult and aggravating problem – but what do you suggest for constructive uses of small parcels, such as subdividing your own land so you can have different media streams?
The actual limits are only a suggestion. There are probably many other ways to handle this and I would be quite happy to support those too.
The problem right how is there are so many more bad ways to use these parcels than good ways. I have never actually encountered a location feeding different streams to a bunch of 16's, but I have seen literally thousands of spinning advertisements filling up the skyline. Another possible option would be to limit the abilty to sell parcels smaller than a certain size. You could chop and re-arrange all you want, but not sell. As was mentioned above, this was only a suggested limit. I tried to think of some solution where the ad farms could not easily get around the limits. The limit on sales of small parcels will work to some degree, but could be gotten around in a few ways. MISC-116 is a request for expansion of the ban list to ban buyers of land to. This woudl be a good option but can be bypassed.
Perhaps a combination of several methods.Limit sales to parcels over a certain size, allow the banlist to prevent purchase, and limit the minimum size to somewhere between 16 and 512. This suggestion seems like a good idea, but it's fraught with complications. What if I want to divide my 512 plot into two 256s and set them to different groups, set different options, etc? I agree that 16sqm plots are part of what's severely wrong with the mainland, but a solution isn't obvious.
Innes' suggestion sounds nice, except that I can buy a 512, then sell 496 of it, resulting in a net purchase of a 16sqm. How about this solution: make the minimum "buy-in" into any simulator 512sqm. If you're not holding at least 512sqm worth of land, you're... breaking the rules. I'm not sure how to enforce this, or how to work it so that you can buy two 256 plots in the same sim to satisfy the limit. All in all, almost any solution we can come up with has seroius drawbacks. Restricting size of parcels won't really help because ad farmers will simply rent out bits of a larger parcel they own, but I've voted for this because I think its a serious problem too.
I think its a fundamental issue about any kind of antisocial building being able to trash the value of nearby land plots. It requires some kind of planning / zoning rules to solve as in real life. Maybe land owners in a sim should be able to vote for some kind of height restriction e.g. no building between 50m and cloud level. Or else some kind of a penalty or tier increase for building at certain levels. I believe from my reading of www.slhistory.org that there was some kind of prim cost increase for higher prims in the early days. This may be totally impractical but another possibility might be that nearby land owners could vote that an eyesore parcel appeared empty if you were viewing it from outside it. I believe the ability to break up parcels for streaming, but also don't like the ad towers. I think the best solution is not allow sales of parcels that have 16's broken off next to them, or them themselves. Keep a moderate constraint of 16's by setting a mid-level margin around the parcels.
That may not make sense to some, but hopefully does to the appropriate folks. (kind of a.. "if this, then that.") Well not being able to sell 16s is not a good idea, these people will still do it. Net result then would be these ads were permanent, and you would end up with more of them littering the place as the would be unbuyable and mergeable.
The two most effective things would be to stop all land resale for a certain time (at least a month, preferably 3, maybe with exceptional cases referred to Linden or a body set up for the purpose for emergencies, but able to spot abusers of the system, and maybe parcel splitting for the same time), and the second would be to maintain lists of these people so the population as a whole could ban them from their lands. This of course should also apply to Estate Owners, so people know whether or not they are trustworthy before they lose Lindens, since EOs will be outside of AR control and effectively able to break ToS without punishment. Thirdly (there are three most effective things) would be a list of companies who ad with these creatures and boycott their shops, products and services. Fourthly (shades of Monty Python, there are 4 lol), some of the genuine reasons for splitting could be addressed in other ways, certain system changes. eg while it may not be feasible to add in parcel splitting by height, perhaps the ability to have rough levels assigned, so another stream could be added, say 6, might be useful and certainly for things like apartments. If certain functions could be split without splitting the parcel itself, bingo. Another way of looking at the problem...
Why not allow the owner of a parcel bordering a 16m parcel to have say 10 prims per facet adjacent purely for putting up neutral hoarding and blocking the adverts. That's a 100m high ad-blocker which would probably need it's own in-world "hoarding" setup script to prevent abuse in itself. Many people use up their own prim counts for adding junk blocking which doesn't seem fair. Ok so as a system to implement it's a pain... but... Am I adding any mileage? Second dumb idea... Third dumb idea... I'm trying to think of more social ways of getting round the problem. Getting people to collaborate to solve a problem. Shrugs... Small parcels are very useful for many reasons. For example, I use one to allow one of my tenants to bypass the teleport redirect the rest of my land has set., which creates privacy for tenants.
I'd suggest to close this issue and open a new one directed at ad farms (your real concern) rather than parcel size limitations. I think there's a very best solution for that prob: let me make invisible (for me) the ads, from the adfarms and the 'for sale' ads, or better: let me make invisible for me any object i don't own, so i can escape from some horrrrrrrrrrible things i see sometimes.
Hope this helps a bit. I disagree with imposing such a global limitation on all residents as a result of a small part of the community bahaving badly. Let me reply to this issue in three parts:
1. If this kind of advertising breaches ToC/sim rating or local covenants, i believe the proposed new abuse reporting system will allow formal ways for residents to report these kinds of things to sim owners or LL. 2. Why not extend the "mute" feature to allow a resident to visually mute (render transparent) a non-attached object from their PoV? This list would be maintained in the client viewer, so no changes to the grid would be necessary. The prim would show up under ctrl-alt-t (view transparent) as would other prims. Another alternative, also doable solely from the client viewer, is to "mist out" visually muted objects, making them appear as if shrouded by a haze of mist, and barely visible. Both of these things are easy changes to the client rendering code. 3. If the advertising does not breach ToC, sim ratings or covenants, then there is no right of complaint. If a resident decides to move to a location with no covenant covering visual pollution then that is their lookout. isn't this somthign the owners of the sim should be controlling instead of forbidding it all together?
I have resolved this as "misfiled" since it covers more than one issue. One being directed at ad farms, and the other being new feature request to limit parcel size to solve the ad farm issue. There have been changes already implemented to help with search for such concerns.
I'm not for eliminating the ability to make these squares: I am for a) putting in a function whereby they cannot be sold if under 512 except for $0 (that would deter extortionists terribly, as they mainly buy these parcels to extort people to buy back the view, or trade among themselves, not really for the sake of the ads); b) enforcing existing TOS offenses on spam and disturbing the peace.
Reverend Herzog, I don't get this idea that scripters are to have eminent domain on every sim, by everyone else's property, spreading their networks all over hell's half acre. Why? No one asked for these scripted devices and most of the time, they merely serve some geek's project to scrape and analyze data against people's will, without their knowledge, or to run landbots for their land business. I've witnessed the making of these scripters' little micro-empires over the years, and I've seen them be used only for a) ad campaigns that these scripters think are "worthy" but still spam the land b) nothing c) data scraping; d) movie sales or sales or other "performance status" or such that no one really needs to have delivered *in this format". I can't think of a single scripters' micro-empire I've ever seen that has any reason to exist near my land. Torley, um, how can you dance on a parcel that is 16 m2 with a different stream on it? Come on. You might break up parcels to have different streams or functions like banning or group-only, but not on *that small a parcel". I am reopening this issue because I think it was incorrect to label it as "misfiled" merely because it also contains criticism of ad farms.
The proposal is to prevent making parcels smaller than 512 m2. The motivation is to have a hedge against ad farms. That all sounds eminently reasonable. I don't favour the proposal, but I fail to see why it needed to be closed, and the voting on it, which was considerable by JIRA standards, forced to cease. At this point in the project, I'd raise the limit to 1024sm on the Mainland.
Yes this should be left open, I strongly disagree with it but the Comments allow me to say so. 1024m2, Khamon, is however utter madness. How is someone on a tight budget going to use their free 512m2 land allowance if 1024m2 is the limit. And how do you divide land into just 1024s when most (Old) Mainland sims have Linden protected hills and roads running through them?
Having re-read my previous comment, I now realise that this is a completely unworkable solution to the problem. It was my comment about carving up land around Linden protected land that reminded me of that process. The region I so divided had a double Linden road in a V shape. This forms part of a continent wide road going across the Old Continent. It does not run straight but in a diagonal. The reason that diagonals can be created is that 16m2 parcels can be created then later rejoined. 512 as a minimum would require only straight roads. More to the point, those in the Old Continent could not properly divide parcels along the roadside, as that is a laborious process of creating 16m2, 32m2, 48m2, and 64m2 parcels to follow the diagonal of the road, and then you rejoin them to produce your 512m2 parcel or whatever. So this should probably be resolved as won't finish because it would uglify SL by removing the ability to handle diagonals in terrain editing.
As the original creator of this JIRA entry I believe that it need to be closed and other options need to be explored. In the 9 months since I entered this I have learned a lot about SL and how things work. My original idea is not a workable solution, and was created after being forced to watch a sim destroyed in a matter of weeks. Being told that you have to pay 500 to 1,000 L per sq M to remove this stuff is nothing short of extortion. Needless to say that sim is essentially just a laggy wasteland and I am no longer involved in anything there.
Many of the arguments against my original solution make no sense to me. The same goes with the arguments and threats that I received after posting this. Carving up land to you can have a different media stream for different levels of skyboxes was one that I was told about. Since you have to be standing on a parcel to hear/see the stream that would be of minimal use. After all, how many people cxan stand in the same 16 sqm? Because of the way land must be selected when divided there are times when you are forced to divide down that small, although it is not necessary that it be left that way. I have seen very few uses... actually none that I have actually seen for real, only ones I keep hearing about, that are legitimate uses of small parcels. The concept of 'data aquisition networks' sounds a bit questionable to me. There may be some, but none that I have encountered. Placing objects in my sim to snoop on coming and goings, or record inter object communications and forwarding them to someone is not a legitimate use in my eyes. Perhaps some other solutions is feasable.. Maybe when the parcel is smallar than some arbitrary limit its prim limit is zero. Maybe parcels smaller than a certain size cannot be sold, or can only be set to sell for zero lindens. Maybe there is some other idea entirely that would work. For me, I am done with the JIRA. When I found that it does not take a Linden to close an issue, then saw how many issues are closed just because someone else does not like what was said, or because they want their version to be 'the one', I have no faith that it is of any real use for this type of problem. My solution has been to never do business with anyone that advertises in an ad farm. It may not make much difference, but at least I know I am not helping encourage it. Thanks to everyone for your comments. There are lots of uses for smaller parcels, prim land, server land (and not just sim monitors and such, the can also be legitimate servers like networked vendor servers), as Torley said controlling your media stream (and nowhere did he say it had to be 16m2 parcels or just for dancing), if you had an exhibit of some sort each piece in the exhibit could have it's own media stream explaining the piece for example.
And as the OP, if you think this should be closed then why did you not close it? Closing this as the OP wanted it closed. I suggest that it is only re-opened by the OP, and that anyone else wishing to continue the debate create a new issue so that they are the OP for the new issue.
Re-opening because it is an existing, perfectly fine JIRA, there is no need to force people to open up the same issue all over again, this one has gathered 17 votes that might be hard to gather again, and no, you don't get to close issues just because you don't like them, Mercia!
Normal priority seems appropriate for a solution that the Lindens have not responded to, and may not adapt, but it surely deserves to remain open, regardless of what the OP is believed to have said – the OP is capable of closing it, but I don't see why we need to lose 17 votes and start over again just because of opposition to the idea!
Prokofy, I did not want it closed, the author asked for it to be closed, I thought you were in favour of authors being able to have issues closed.
Darkclaw Cortes - 23/Jan/08 05:13 PM - "As the original creator of this JIRA entry I believe that it need to be closed and other options need to be explored."
I'm re-opening this issue because it is definitely live again due to this announcement:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/02/22/linden-department-of-public-works-update/ See, when the Lindens want to, with a single check off box on their Linden Estate, they can decide to make new land not be subject to "join and divide". These fancy new double-prim city parcels they will be selling will not be able to be cut up into ad farms, SLEX box holders, scanner holders, or little um "mini parks" in any way, shape, or form. The ability to divide or join is turned off at the Estate level. That sort of gives the lie to everybody trying to make the argument that "the Lindens won't finish" this proposal. They not only finished it, they are launching it in world, for 1024s. There's no reason it can't be done at the 512 level, either, on any new sim – when they feel like it. It's a check off box on any sim, that's all there is to it. They can even open the bid higher because people will pay more for sims that aren't able to be divided or for that matter, joined. It means people trying to make little internal communities, or open rental communities or nonprofits with living, etc. would have a fighting change on the mainland against the ugly ad farm scourge which continues despite the new policy, merely in new forms. If the author feels he can't sustain this proposal with its 17 votes anymore, and still has to close it, fine, I'll just re-start it under a new name with slightly different content – and that's the sort of things that busybodies on the JIRA supposedly try to avoid. "That sort of gives the lie to everybody trying to make the argument that "the Lindens won't finish" this proposal. They not only finished it, they are launching it in world, for 1024s."
Not really, there is a big difference between turning this off for specialty sims and turning it off for the entire mainland. The argument for won't finish is they would not do this for the entire mainland. Also this proposal is for making 512m the minimum, turning off Allow Land Join/Divide would not allow joining or subdividing of any size. I am not sure how a 512 m minimum size would stop adfarms... since they cd just build "fugly" stuff on larger parcels. The only advantage wd be that the cost of entry would be higher. Adfarms have been declining anyway, since no one is renting the ad space.
However, there are good reasons to make smaller parcels... for rentals. for landing points, server space. |
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New Feature
Closed
Normal
Limit parcel division to a minimum of 512 sq. meters, to slow the growth of 'ad farms'.
