Try something more realistic like capping at a maximum 20L$/m2 or something? Actually .. you could put a cap at something seemingly huge like 50L$/m2 and still cut out a lot of extortionate selling. (Gives a max of 800L$ for a 16m parcel). But even so. The screaming if you try it will I imagine be really quite loud!

And if capping prices at 50L$/m2 is unacceptable for some "free market" reason. Then how on earth is capping value at 0L$ acceptable?

Happy New Year Prok May your logic never cease to amaze me!

The overwhelming number of sub-512 parcels are bought and sold by ad farmers. I keep some 16 and 32 pieces to put ads for peope in SEARCH for $30, for example, in a mall tower, where you have everyone on one parcel. But I don't need to sell them – I can just move them to myself for $0. Or perhaps a neighbour needs to even a parcel – I can trade for $0. It doesn't stop management. It stops extortion.

As for these damn sim monitors that scripters put all over other people's sims, they are often the only one on the sim with that 16 m2, all the other larger property owners have no need of their "monitoring". They've simply taken advantage of ad-farmers and cutters to insert themselves into other communities in a vain belief of "eminent domain" for their "science". Who needs their performance monitoring? More often then not, it's scraping of information for dbases involving land sales or search engines which are of financial benefit only to those people, and which devalue the sim's performance for everyone else. I don't see why any system has to be morphed around them.

And even if you make a case for these damn nuisances, you can make the case that they need not be sold for more than $0. If someone wishes to make way for these 'monitors," they can give their land for $0, and the monitors can trade it for $0. That should reduce their incentive for blighting and lagging other people's sims, too. (Yes, each one imagines they are special, and each one imagines their particular script isn't laggy; collectively, however, they are indeed a nuisance regardless).

Fluf, I'd resolutely oppose any capping of prices. There shouldn't be any capping of prices in a free market. That's what makes it so vexatious to have these 16 m2 – other means have to be found to cap them. Why? Because there is rare old terraformable mainland that is sellable for $40/m; there is land that you don't wish to part with that has some special feature, or that you need to sell for that price in order to buy two that would have to replace it – there are all kinds of reasons why land is set for high prices. Let it be sold by a willing seller and bought by a willing buyer at a free price negotiated by the market or by the two directly.

Sign extortionism is different in that the seller puts a $50 or $100 a meter price on it in order to force people to "buy back the view".

The mainland is a shared community, and that means that you cannot provide maximum freedoms, because when maximalized, they diminish the freedoms of others. The Lindens have harped on the idea of maximalizing freedom on land, based on Friedmanite ideologies, but in a community, giving one person to be free to put up giant spinning purple towers means the other person's land and ability to create and enjoy the land is diminished. They solved this by offering islands, and everyone stampeded to them as a result, as they hated having their creativity and peace diminished by the handful of script kiddies and builder gonzos who ruined their experience. Islands began selling more than the mainland.

Meanwhile, unscrupulous businesses, including those selling island villas and trying to deliberately blight the mainland landscape to force people to move to islands, began to infest the mainland with signs. This wasn't a massive problem before islands became popular and the population increased.

Now that we have this infestation, it means that people who spend hundreds of US dollars on the auction can have their purchase wiped out by an ad farm being inserted by a thoughtless slash-and-burn extortionist in the next sim over. That forces people either to buy the over-priced extortionist land, to get rid of the blight, which keeps them in business, or to move to the Lindens' newer sims. That's wrong. It needs to stop. It has grown to the point that new sims, even waterfront, is absolutely plastered with these ad-farms that nobody is even clicking on. You find entire sims, even, cut up to 16 m2!

This is a quality of life issue.

Secondly ... How would you make the smallest parcel allowed be a 512m? Would every single parcel smaller than 512 revert to Linden Land overnight? As above, legitimate land owners would loose purchased land completely unfairly. It's just not going to happen!

Yes we know it's annoying. But the single best course of action would be for everyone to stop paying for over priced 16m parcels. But that's not going to happen either Because people do get so upset about it, they will pay huge sums of money, which then gives them a 16m parcel that you now want to make worthless or give back to Linden Land???

I'd vote to close this item as totally unworkable. Do we have a second?

A variation though, could be to only allow a price above L$0 if the "Sell the land to:" is set to an individual resident.

People who value land connect it up, and work out with their neighbours how to keep its value. They don't sell it in isolation for $100,000 Lindens.

Because...Nobody does what you claim they do. It's not a valid use case. Oh, sure, maybe on Taber or Slate or Green or Blue or Chartreuse, those old geek colour sims, somebody decides to sell a prim land to another person they've known in Second Life for ages. But...this isn't the norm.

The real use case – the menace of Second Life! – is thousands – hundreds of thousands! – of ad farms all over the mainland, despoiling especially the growing northern and northeast continents. THAT is what has to be dealt with. There ARE NO neighbours on these sims – how can there be, when they are defaced and people don't move in next to ad farms?

If you make all land below 512 unsellable except for $0, you don't prevent people from agreeing among themselves if they are the good neighbours you imagine to give another person manually the money requested. That's easy to do, and far more reasonable to insert as an override to my plan to deal with the 99 percent of use cases than your plan that takes the negligible 1 percent and tries to blow them up to some kind of pattern.

And what's going to stop current Ad Farmers IM'ng everyone in the sim regularly to try and get a high price for the 16m they still have?

And if anyone is dumb enough to set land for sale at 0L$ and makes the mistake of not setting a "for sale to" (which happens often enough), while they transfer to a "good neighbour". It's going to get snapped up by a bot and turned in to ... an ad farm! Yay! Problem made worse!

And who trust who here? Lets say I've found someone who I've never chatted to before in my region. They have a reasonable looking building and say they are interested. Do I trust them enough to give them the land for 0L$ and wait for the payment? Or if someone approaches me with an offer I'm interested in, should I expect the land transferred before I give them the money? Or give them the money and watch them vanish in a suspicious "crash"?

The current Land Sale system exists to avoid those kind of problems. When the money is exchanged, so is the land.

Suggest you find a different way to reduce Ad Farms which is practical.

Still totally unworkable. Still voting to close this issue.

see

"Only another sim landholder would find them of value, and you can be a good neighbour and give him those 16m2 or 64 m2 for free, as neighbours often do. Sell them for $0. "

I decided to sell my mainland sim due to VAT payments. It was attracting no interest as a sim (other than joke offers of 3L$ per m2 for a market value of 11L$/m2) so I decided to parcel it up, but it had a double Linden road running through it. Due to the lie of the road I had to make several parcels less than 512m2 (e.g., 468m2) under this proposal I would lose the ability to sell that land, or at least it would be made much harder to sell all for the sake of someone annoyed at how 16m2 plots are used by advertisers. The latter do not buy 468m2 to advertise, as that is too costly in tier payments, but this request would make it very difficult for me to sell. The proverbial sledgehammer to crack open a nut?

If you wish to sell your parcels that are not contiguous, you can link them up. Are you aware that the tools enable you to do that? You use the join tool, highlighting across parcels, across parcels that are not your own, to include those that are, and they all join up when you press JOIN. You can sell it all together.

If for some reason you are not finding that possible, you set the price for the entire set on the part you can set for sale, and explain in the ad (and this is done all the time) that this includes X meters also on the sim. After the person pays the full price, you give them the smaller parcels.

I fail to see why, due to these very odd and very rare occurences that you might personally cook up as fitting just your own situation (or an abstract situation, as you are likely not even really selling that land), that we all have to be held hostage to ad farmers on kilometer after square kilometer on the mainland. It's absurd.

This is what happens all the time in Second Life. Someone cooks up an abstract argument "just to be right," and perhaps even tacks on their own imagined or even real special case, and the extrapolates that to the whole. Then no progress is made on a consensus to solve the problems.

But the whole doesn't contain thousands of people who have double Linden land running through separate parcels, Mercia, don't be ridiculous. The whole contains thousands of people with little 16ms ruining their view and property value and we have got to find a solution to that because it's killing the mainland.

As for you idea that they don't buy 482 m2 to advertise with, you couldn't be MORE mistaken. Of course they do. When they see separated parcels like that, set separately, less than 512 even by 16 m2, they get them and chop them further. I see it all the time. They know that people are unlikely to buy 512, especially if new and not having a lot of money or not willing to spend it, because they don't get all their prims! So because it won't sell, they chop it up!

Oh, sure, ad farmers can chop up 1536, see THAT all the time too. But you go after what they do the most, which is take smaller parcels set to sale for reasonable amounts, or chop 512s into smaller amounts and re-sell them for exorbitant prices.

The responsible thing to do if you are caught in a situation with non-contiguous land like this is to link it up. Yes indeed it links up, I have stretched across sims and linked land like this and seen others do it. If for some reason you aren't getting it to work, the explanation in the ad and the higher price will work in most cases.

And I do indeed mean under 512, and will indeed leave it at that because that is precisely what is at issue.

Against, you are taking something said as an example giving most common examples, i.e. 16 m2 or 64 m2 as a literalism. The fact is, the real problem is under 512.

Fluf, it won't hurt you to ask a few people on your sim, or do as I've indicated Mercia could do, which is write "IM me for sale". I do this all the time, and I get the sale or I turn it over even for free. So do others. Done all the time!

As for people dumb enough to take land and sell it for $0, they deserve their problems. Due to the assiduous work of all the fanboyz and geeks, we now have three "safety checks" on land sale that all but the profoundly clueless will miss. These are:

o a template requiring that you chose whether to sell to "anyone" or "someone"
o a template requiring that you put in a price of $0 or another price
o a final check to see if you wish to sell all objects or not – if by this 3rd time you don't notice what the system generates back to you: "selling to anyone at $0" – and click YES – then it's your problem.

If you cannot trust your fellow man to turn over money to you, then don't? You don't set it to sale until he gives you the money. If he can't trust YOU to set it to sale after getting the money, then don't engage in the transactions? Set it for $0.

I speak as someone who, unlike the people in this thread, has conducted literally hundreds of these kinds of neighbourly transactions in the three years I've been in Second Life. The fear that these transactions will go awry is misplaced, and shouldn't be used to hobble progress in dealing with ad farms.

And it's not that unusual for someone with an odd sized parcel to want to tier up / down closer to the exact tier land level. In that case they don't want to sell the whole thing together.

Instead, your suggesting that they let what could be as much as 496m2 go for nothing, or use this half baked selling land for 0L$ but not really for 0L$ system which avoids all the careful checking built in to the land sale system.

It's a dead horse! Quit flogging it!

I tier up and down gadzillion times with all my groups. In the old days I could safely even abandon an odd amount like 96 m2 because it would not go to land bots or ad farmers – they didn't exist. It usually went to someone else in the sim who needed prims. Then later I had to start asking them to prevent abuse of the land.

My plan isn't half-baked because it will solve a majority of problems with ad farms: the profit motive involved in selling land that is less than 512. It's a brilliant solution that would easily mitigate a good deal of the ugly sign extortion. The tiny, tiny minority of cases that involve somebody haveing 496 m2 they can't unload even to a neighbour can't be allowed to hobble progress.

In fact, I'd be happy to wager that there will be so few of these authentic cases, that upon examination, if all remedies were exhausted and they couldn't be sold to anyone else on the sim or sold within 14 days by saying "IM me for sale" to a newbie happy to live for less and for cheap (I have land less than 512 that rents like that), then I could buy it for $7.5/m and put it in the land preserve. I bet there will be about 4 parcels : )

No, it's not a dead horse, it's merely an idea you don't like. You're flogging not real objections, but false ones that involve extrapolating to absurdity remotely possible cases.

We need to get rid of ad farms using a variety of methods. This is one possible one.

And 496m2 was a maximum case, not the only case where it's a problem, theres the full range from 16 to 496m2 parcels in there, all being a pain in the neck to sell (or even find to buy) if they can only be sold for 0L$.

So arguing it's a "tiny tiny minority of cases" isn't justifiable without some kind of backup, and you've said yourself you've had to abandon 96m2 plots in the past. If it happened to you, it happened to me, and it happened to Mercia, then that's a very significant percentage of people in this JIRA thread who have been in the situation of having less than 512m they want to sell or buy.

And I'm not extrapolating to absurdity any more than you are by claiming there will be only 4 cases of this in all of SL that couldn't be sorted out even under the bizarre conditions your proposal to make selling anything less than 512m for 0L$.
In fact my own assumption that your proposal would affect 100's if not 1000's of parcel owners of which some will be ad farmers doesn't seem unreasonable to me. I hesitate to say tens of thousands though looking at the numbers of land owners in SL, that's probably not such an extreme number either.

This proposal is a "possible" but deeply flawed and misguided method of dealing with floating rotating prims.

I'm still calling to close this JIRA issue. It's pointless.

I've abandoned plots in the past, back in the days when there were no ad farmers. Now it's too risky. And there isn't any reason to do this on any kind of mass scale. it happens only occasionally, when you need to even out tier. Most of the time, you can adjust it with neighbours.

I've already dealt with Mercia's supposed example. She links up all the land into one parcel for sale.

I've already dealt with your example – then sell it by writing on it IM me for sale. Some people put it in the land list at a higher-than-market price with that notice – IM me with offer.

Selling everything less than 512 for only $0 gets rid of a huge chunk of ad-farming. It's "down side" has get to be demonstrated to me, as in fact the reason people pick up little parcels is to prevent ad farming. I know I've been doing that lately and it's a pain, but worth keeping the view that way.

There is nothing deeply flawed about this proposal. It's one way of getting rid of the lion's share of ad farming. Others have said don't even divide it under 512! That's a viable proposal too that we could really all live with without fisking around for fake literalist examples just to make a contrarian point.

My proposal is even more flexible, as it enables cutting, but not for profit. Great! So cut away if you need adjustments and even leave it out for $0 to be bought, as an ad farmer could in theory put an ad on it, but he can't put it to that extortionist price to be resold to buy back the view. His "ad" doesn't generate any revenue, most of these sign towers have no ads that are authentic, except ads for their own empires.

There's nothing "misguided" about this proposal; that's just your subjective opinion. So no, you don't get to close it or pressure me to close it. Go work on proposals you do find viable and stop brow-beating me.

Lets say you are an evil "Ad Farmer".
You have 16m evil ad spinner and now you're told you can only set it for sale for 0L$.
So you don't. You use one side of one prim to say "IM me with offers". In garish neon colours.
When you get an offer you say "No. Not high enough. Try more like XXXXL$/m2"
Person annoyed by spinning ad offers larger sum.
PERHAPS the evil ad spinner is finally delighted with the offer.

Under your system, you are now left dealing with an evil "ad farmer", who wants hundreds if not thousands of L$, and you can't even use the relatively safe land sale system to do it!!!

Nothing you propose changes what the current situation is regarding over priced annoying parcels, and won't effect ad farming except to take it off the current land sale system allowing theft and deception.

My opinion is just as subjective as yours. And in my subjective opinion it's still one more pointless issue clogging up the JIRA. Why not close it and look at the other suggestions for reducing visible pollution in SL instead? You might like some of them.

"No, it cannot completely eliminate the blight, because there will still be people who don't set the parcels to sale, but acquire them, and put out ugly signs on them. It will go a very long way to reducing the problem, however, and knock the stuffing out of this lucrative market which is infested with unethical business people.

I was told by a Linden that this is technically possible, but requires a political and social decision by LL."

The problem with the technical mind is that it constantly sees everything in absolutes: all or nothing, black or white, on or off.

And that's not how you solve problems. What is needed is a cluster of solutions, some social/political coming from Linden Lab simply stiffening their spine on the usual default licentiousness and realizing that licentiousness harms freedom for everyone to use their property, and some coming in a variety of technical solutions which work in concert. Not any one policy or technical tool can solve the situation. The job here is to strike back and mitigate it.

Ad farmers include some who are malicious griefers who enjoy people suffering, but they also include just unethical people who wish to make a buck, and experience and grid lore has told them that people will buy back the view. If they can't put the land out for sale and forget about it until someone buys back the view, they don't have a 'business model". Their business model doesn't involve going around collecting "offers" – they have it more automatic than that.

So most of these farmers can be dealt with by my proposal that urges enforcement of CS 6 against spammers (repeat ad farms); a good chunk can be dealt with by this proposal, where the profit motive is taken away. The other proposal that says "let's not make it even physically possible to divide land" if it were down in the weeds below 128 might well work too, we have to consider it. All three of these proposals and perhaps a few others, they need to be studied, might work to get rid of MOST of this scourge.

Oh sure, there will always be some hangovers, some who, even on an 8192 they've acquired will put out an ugly spinning stupid sign so that they can't even use their own land for anything. That's what the Bush guy did on some sims, utterly bringing them to their knees. In time, the griefer gets tired; they have to pay tier.

I've looked all proposals for reducing ad farms, and I like this one. I don't call it perfect or an absolute 100 percent solution, but it has a great deal of attractiveness because the Lindens often resort to simple tools to solve problems, and this is a simple tool: no sales.

Somebody who lives on the other side of the frigging world in real life is not going to get up in the morning to do anything, lease of all to buy a parcel less than 512 m. It's not a valid use case. It's not even a valid outlier. It doesn't happen. Not in a world where there are 16,000 frigging sims, and you have loads and loads of parcels to chose from.

If they need to sell a parcel they can use what we like to call "an IM" and also what we like to call "a description on their land" which they can put in search for a mere $30 or in classifieds for a mere $50, and say IM me for sale.

No need need to hold the entire world of adults who spent hard-earned money on their land which is devalued by ad farms up for a person who needs to sell a 496 parcel. Let them IM their neighbours, let them put ads up, let them solve their problems other ways than by devaluing everyone else's land through enabling ad farms.

This is a big world. It has 16,000 sims, not 16, with little Taber and Boardman and everyone having to worry if somebody doesn't like your house style. If you somehow can't make up enough prims, you don't fret about how to buy the undersized parcel of someone not on your time zone, you go and find a parcel with more prims, my God there are gadzillions of them.

And if you are in the other situation, you don't fret that you can't find a neighbour to buy your very rare and odd 256 or 496 m2 parcel, you set it to sale to yourself or to an alt and you write "IM me for sale" and you move on. That way a ad farmer can't take advantage of your need to leave and grief up the rest of us and extort all of us on the sim who remain to buy back our view.

All of you who claim to be "the community" and always thinking of "the community" are the least community minded of all. Think of the community. The people who live on the sim. Why devalue all their land because you have an odd-sized parcel you are unwilling to bestire yourself to give to one of the people on that sim, or unwilling to take a few extra advertising steps to sell it to a newbie who might get use out of a cheaper smaller parcel with a little newbie house (I have people in my rentals who do just that, sometimes just making a little garden).

Possibly you think my comments were about the issue on a whole, they were not they were in response to the antagonistic comment you made on my variation, which you obviously don't like, which is fine this is your proposal.

So IM'ng the owner isn't going to work in a significant number of cases anyway.

Am sure Proc will now tell me I'm only talking about 4 parcels in the whole of SL again. (I can find at least 6 of these "no show" owner parcels in one small area of my sim.)

So lets sum this up:

• It removes the protection offered by selling land through the standard system.
• It devalues land owned legitimately by many many residents.
• It makes smaller parcels of land harder to find for buyers and sellers.
• Any land owned by "no show" accounts will be completely impossible to purchase.
• It doesn't stop people having annoying 16m parcels and demanding excessive prices through IM rather than the standard sale system.

Am sure I've missed a couple. But overall it clearly makes the situation worse, not better.

You're creating artificial problems. It's very easy to tell who to contact on a group-owned land – the highlighted name with the officers. And yes, you are talking about a tiny minority of problems. If these parcels are set to sale right now, then under my plan, if implemented, all those microbarons will have to decide if they can maintain these fake ad empires without the extortionist land sales.

And guess what, they won't be able to. Because...they aren't really selling ad space. If they do, those ads aren't really getting clicks. It's not a sustainable empire, and most will quit once they lose revenue from extortion. They make that extortion by sheer number of repeats across sims. Put in place TOS enforcement against spam, back it up with inability to sell under 512 for anything but $0, and you're done with a huge whole bunch of these unscrupulous scammers.

Oh, your particular sim with group-owned no-show land is left not for sale? But if it repeats, then my proposal to enforce anti-spam will work on that. Oh, you have a group-owned no-show non-repeating unique ad? Then congratulations, you have a rare, perhaps you can sell tickets for people to come see it. The whole reason the groups exist is to do this all over the grid, and with a tier bonus, duh.

Buyers do not need to be hunting for 16 m2 parcels. That's a canard. They are not needed in the market. If you can be free to run a scam and extortionist business with them, sure, they make "good business sense" the way stealing from stores makes "good business sense". But if you have to run a real ad empire, they don't, because most residential sims with a handful of people on them will not click the ads; if they do by mistake or in exasperation, they will not tp to the stores advertised. They don't work. They will dry up once the extortion mechanism dries up.

So what would anyone buy a 16 m2 for? Or even 64 or 128? Not for prims. The prims you get aren't worth it. If you need more prims, you need not 20, but 200, and then you need to get 512s or 1024s or move to another sim with larger lots. So you're not making any kind of rational, practical case here.

No-show accounts, if they don't show up and turn off the sale option, once this law goes into effect, will be dealt with by the Lindens. They will be warned, and if they are no-shows, and don't take the land off sale, they will have their land seized – or more likely, an automatic default will go through the system turning it off everywhere automatically. No-shows can be abuse reported.

As I've said now about 100 times – let's try 101 and see if that will do the trick – there will always be some persistent tiny minority of cases of microbarons who will keep a 16 m2, and put an annoying sign on it, and not put it to sale.

So? That's not a reason to trash this proposal, which would deal with 99 percent of the cases, and create a climate where microbaroning extortion will be forced to end, deprived of its enabling climate.

There isn't any reason in hell to extrapolate up from this tiny, tiny minority of cases to hobble progress on the 99 percent that will be stopped. You're sitting on your sim and trying to warp the entire world around your tiny sectarian need (and I dare say it's faked up anyway just to be obstreperous). But there's a demonstrable need all over the grid to stop news sims from being glommed on by extortionists who stamp out hundreds of signs everywhere and set the land to 10,000 or 100,000 Lindens. If you can deal at least with all of that, you've made progress. Eventually you come to deal with these hold outs.

You don't stop progress on part of the problem out of some hysterical overweening need for symmetry and totalitarian logic. You progress on the part you can deal with; you then come eventually to the other more difficult problems.

My proposal will solve 99 percent of the current new ad-farming blight problems on new sims, if not all over the grid. For the sake of holdouts on your land, I don't see why we need to stop this. And btw, I have just such a parcel like that with a holdout on it – 2 holdouts in fact – and I wouldn't dream of hobbling progress for all the new people buying land just because on my old sim I have 2 of these idiotic micro holdouts.

I own 128m2 on the mainland (ironically, surrounded by ad farms) for just that purpose, I would have bought smaller but due to this very issue smaller parcels are way too expensive.

They don't need to be for sale for anything but $0. People can store servers on anything; it doesn't have to be on a 16 m2, that's silly. There are malls all over the place, including mine, and also server storage lots, where for $15 or $25 or $50 you can store a server.

Nobody needs these servers that tekkies strew all over the grid to harvest data, scraping everything they can get their hands on. I fail to see why we all have to stand idly by, have our vast tracts of land all over the continent of Governor Linden devalued due to rapacious ad-farmers, merely for somebody to have their little data-scraping server on my sim where I own all the land except that 16 m2 (and I have several sims with that situation.).

Go find another place for your servers, you don't have to have them on a 128. And besides, I'm sure the tools can be set up on new sims not to divide lower than 512 except for $0, and grandfather old sims. But that's not even necessary. Because my proposal isn't about not dividing – divide all you like. Ask your friends to divide. Ask strangers to divide for your little JEVN servers if you honestly have no other place for them (and I find this totally fake). Just don't buy and sell them for more than $0, so that a solution can be found to discourage ad farms.

Again, you're just being utterly phony here, Harleen because you are playing a manipulative game, voting for the proposal, claiming you support it, trying to say flattering things about "respecting me" blah blah blah but all in a bid to be obstructive and then keep thinking up fake obscure use cases.

Unimpressed.

There is no need to set up a marketplace of 16 m2 and 64 m2 to hold servers. They don't need to be on dedicated parcels by themselves just because they are small. They could be put anywhere on your vast holdings of Parrot Islands, Harleen, and you know that. There is no need to park a server on some 128 m2 on the mainland except to create a phony case to try to stop the solution of ad farms. It's just insane. There's no need to buy any parcel like this to hold a server. None. So it's definitely some weird manipulative game.

If my proposal is a bad one, and doesn't collect votes, the Lindens won't assign anyone to it, and it need not trouble you. That's no reason to close it however, as people should review the options available for dealing with the ad-farm menace, and perhaps elements of different proposals will eventually be used. The idea that proposals must be closed because of "whatever" is one of the banes of the JIRA. They don't need to be. If you don't like them, don't vote, and move on.

There aren't any plethora of parcels as you imagine. Again, you extrapolate from tiny samples and try to enforce this as some sort of tribal norm. It's silly.

Second Life, in case you haven't noticed, is growing constantly. It's now 884 square kilometers – bigger, because Philip said that a few days ago and more is adding. The mainland growing tip is constantly growing, and this is NEW land where there aren't any no-shows, but just ad-farmers who are very much shows, not no-shows, so your argument is specious.

I don't see any serious disadvantage. If someone is a no-show, and has left SL for months at a time merely toggling their land to some extortionist price, forgetting to turn on autoreturn, in the hopes that "someone will be stupid or desperate enough to pay it," I fail to see why they get to be rewarded, get to hobble progress, and get to be wielded by you as an argument against dealing with ad farms.

The Lindens turn off the ability to sell land under 512 for less than $0 – hey, that might make those no-shows show up in a hurry and cut out that nonsense and give away their land to their neighbours.

Your infantile throwing of words back as if they somehow stick speaks for itself; minorities need to be protected. Special cases need to be looked at. But you're throwing them up to stop a proposal, not find solutions. You're throwing them up fakely, without any real massive numbers, to stop dealing with a problem. Worst of all, you're invoking them to close a proposal, which is silly. You can cite your argumentations, and if enough people find them persuasive, I guess they won't vote. Meanwhile, the proposal can be left open to collect votes and also be reviewed for ideas on how to solve this issue.

We need to stop ad farms and extortion with small parcels. The people in this category you've described who stopped logging in and left out extortionist parcels hardly seem to deserve special dispensation, nor the power to stop progress.

People who put out land to sell at extortionist prices always do the same thing. They write the most ridiculous ads on their parcels. "PRIME PROTECTED LAND!" 'GREAT LINDEN PROTECTED VIEW!" that is, heh, they might be right that they are on a prime protected Linden view...but they're the ones despoiling it lol – and nobody is going to buy a 16 m2 for it's protected view...upon another extortionist-priced 16 m2.

And one of the things they write is that you can use it for servers, I imagine. But I have to Laugh Out Loud at the idea that somebody puts their servers on the crashy mainland, which is down every few days almost by the clock, as their "back-up" ROFL.

Your probably right, the ad farmers most likely bloat the marketplace of all the other uses of these small parcels, that does not mean they categorically do not exist.

And as long as my backup servers are up when the region where my primary servers are not, what do I care if the region they are on is crashing every few days, that is why they are the backups.

There are 50 land owners
27 of those land owners have less than 512m (54%)
13 of those have 16m parcels, the rest (52% of small parcel holders) have a range from 32 to 496m.
10 have exactly 512m
14 land owners have over 512m
Of the 14 who have more than 512m, 4 don't have a multiple of 512m (28.5% of the 14).
So altogether, 27 with less than 512 (including a 496 and a 480) plus the 4 with land that doesn't divide by 512 is 31 of the 50 parcels (62%)

Proposing something that effects 62% of the land owners in this one region is not a statistical insignificance. Finding that 28% of the people with over 512m have odd sized amounts is also not insignificant.

So I don't feel I'm deliberately highlighting the problems of a tiny number of people just to make some kind of point or be annoying. I'm trying to highlight real problems with the proposal.

(Group owned land accounts for about half of the region, but it's harder to resolve with a script who owns how much.)

As someone close to the "core of the group" here, you don't feel as if you can support it. So don't vote for it, think up a better one, move on. It wouldn't be necessary to argue and debate and take a very stern tone with some of the hecklers here if they weren't heckling. Take your lectures about flame-bait to Fluf, who is just endlessly fisking and trolling and extrapolating the tiny to the large in an effort to bully me into closing a proposal I don't wish to close. He's not sincere, as anyone can see.

If a mainland sim has 50 owners, that's a sign of severe sickness, that the Lindens have totally allowed things to get out of hand. It's a symptom of a severe management problem and even overbooking problem, because 50 landowners can't even get home to their property on such a sim; only 40 would fit on the avatar slots available, and not even comfortably. So that's hardly any endorsement of anything but idiocy.

Especially when we hear that 13 of these people looking for a sim slot have only 16 and many others have only 32-496 – that's a disease, not a justification for a policy. It sounds like a particularly venomous version of the disease, too. I'll bet most if not all of these people have signs and are extorting. I doubt they have Arbour program trees on their tiny lotlets.

I hardly think this silly example that exemplifies the horror of the mainland problem is an argumentation against using my proposal – and others – to begin to combat the scourage of sign griefing.

I don't believe these 16 m extorters should at all be equated with people paying tier on 512 or above, making homes or businesses or non-profit establishments. They are blood suckers, sucking out value of the sim, not producing, and not even helping the need for advertising, which is critical, but just extorting. If there are "a majority" of them as landowners, their land holdings are in a distinct minority – and totally crippling the sim, bringing it to its knees as fas as development.

The right thing to do is to take these 62 percent of the micro barons and deprive them of the ability to extort by making it impossible to sell those tiny chunks for anything for $0. What will happen next is that most of them will abandon the land or offer it to neighbours for free or for arranged prices An escrow company could play a role here.

THose hold-outs won't last forever, as the entire ad-farm industry is deprived of the core of its sustenance: extortion.

I don't think these "68 percent" should be somehow majoritarianized to offset a 28 percent who are good householders, people who develop land, live on it, have businesses, and contribute to civilization and own the majority of the sim's land, by contrast with these viral menaces. The 68 percent are the de-civilizing forces in the mainland, and must be addressed – with this proposal and others.

When all new sims are rolled out with the impossibility to sell for anything but $0, eventually, this Dutch Elm disease of the mainland will be cured.

I also could point out that I own land on 65 sims. Not a single sim that I own land on, or neighbouring sims where I cooperate with neighbours, has a situation like that you're describing. Not a single one. Just the opposite. Instead, these sims are characterized by I would say 28 percent or less sign griefers who have seized a 16 m2 here or there and use it to harass others with prices of $8000 or $9935 or $100,000, making it impossible to rent some land or sell it sometimes for a year on end. I've dealt with a dozen really intractable situations like that, it's appalling. Their names are all well known.

So your example here is an outlier, not typical of the problem, and not a rationale for not fulfilling this proposal, in whole or in part.

As for sims cut up into 512s, we all have to deal with that. Land barons constantly chop up to 512s, especially when land prices skyrocketed because that's what people could afford, and that's what sold the fastest. Each land baron is racing against time to his tier date. I'm still dealing with a sim that was blighted by that greed for a year, as the last 512 remains still at a $20,000 price tag which by today's standards is just extortion, in the theory that the majority owner will then be desperate for prims, or desperate to prevent clubs or griefing. I'm pretty much immune to that kind of stuff these days.

It also strikes me in this long winding tale you're telling that in the end, the 486 was bought by someone who bought a 512. Bingo! And you can sell it for less than $0 to those nice people, or join it up to the 512 and sell it pro-rated.

What evidence would it take to demonstrate to you that I'm not talking about minority cases in outlier sims?
Several of the neighbouring regions to me are in roughly the same situation.
I guess they are "outliers" as well.

And you still haven't taken on board that all forcing people to buy and sell land though IM will do is make the process less safe, not change the sums demanded.

If you could assume people would behave in a spirit of consideration for others and the public good, you could go with proposals like my proposal to make ad farms a TOS offense, or rather, enforce existing TOS language against them. But because people don't behave, and the Lindens want the least amount of policing, then automatic measures are needed, and land not selling for more than $0 is as stark and effective a measure as you can think of to take the wind right out of the extortionist planning on a sale.

There's also the internal ad-farmers market, in case anyone noticed. There are some people that put a 16 m2 to a high, but still "normal" price like $400 or $1500, not $30,000. And they get bought out by the more virulent who then turn the parcel to $100,000.

Oh, I already answered many times that land this size should be sold for $0. That's what it's worth. Once people come to see that only land of decent size to put a home is worth something, they will stop this frittering and cutting it up into bits. The ONLY reason it is cut up into bits now is because of ad extortion.

I recall the first two years of my Second Life. There was only a few of these ad extortionists around – it just wasn't done. Most people bought larger parcels and kept them intact.

Then the Bush Guy came and wrecked total havoc all over the mainland. It took a long time to get rid of him – finally he was gone, sunk by a variety of things having to do with his harassment of people, his parcel encroachment, etc. so that the Lindens could find a way. But that opened up the door wide to the idea that any brainless thug could extort people by cutting up a sim.

As more bots and scripts began to be used freely with the Lindens ceasing their pushback on them, more and more people could automatically cut and sell land this way, and did.

There is nothing sacred about this thuggish practice; it's a disease. There was no network of 16 m2 doing all those supposed useful things you're imagining like holding info cards or JEVN venders. People put those on larger parcels for years.

Therefore there is no need to create a false problem and turn oneself into a pretzel to solve it, worrying about the "safety" of $0 transactions. $0 transactions are very very safe. You...can't lose money on them because...they are only for $0 : )

Now, if someone makes some private bargain to sell them for $500, it's like anything else in SL – you have to work it out, trust the person, and live with it. As I just posted, perhaps an escrow company could play a role.

But you don't endlessly preserve the thuggish anti-civilization of ad-farming as a practice and then try to cook up solutions to its problems created like "how to sell for not $0 when the tools are now made to sell only for $0". You just sell for $0. You end the idiocy. Sure, there will be some special cases, and people will work them out – or not. That can't be allowed to hold up progress on ending this disease.

There are 50 land owners
27 of those land owners have less than 512m (54%)
13 of those have 16m parcels, the rest (52% of small parcel holders) have a range from 32 to 496m.
10 have exactly 512m
14 land owners have over 512m
Of the 14 who have more than 512m, 4 don't have a multiple of 512m (28.5% of the 14).
So altogether, 27 with less than 512 (including a 496 and a 480) plus the 4 with land that doesn't divide by 512 is 31 of the 50 parcels (62%)

Proposing something that effects 62% of the land owners in this one region is not a statistical insignificance. Finding that 28% of the people with over 512m have odd sized amounts is also not insignificant.

So I don't feel I'm deliberately highlighting the problems of a tiny number of people just to make some kind of point or be annoying. I'm trying to highlight real problems with the proposal.

No where in there do I make any assumptions about which parcels are ad spinners or junk prim collectors. I'm purely expressing that a LOT of people will be effected. I still don't see you admitting that though.

And also .. to sum this up:

• It removes the protection offered by selling land through the standard system.
• It devalues land owned legitimately by many many residents.
• It makes smaller parcels of land harder to find for buyers and sellers.
• Any land owned by "no show" accounts will be completely impossible to purchase.
• Any land owned by non open enrolment groups will be very difficult to purchase.
• It doesn't stop people having annoying 16m parcels and demanding excessive prices through IM rather than the standard sale system.

Am sure I've missed a couple. But overall it clearly makes the situation worse, not better.

I still don't see a reasonable response to those points either.

/me sits back and waits for a lengthy reply that totally fails to take on board anything anyone else raises as a valid problem with the proposal.

I can see that you're annoyed about ad-farmers devaluing land Prok, and on that at least we can agree. But they do not reduce land value to 0L$. Adjacent land still sells even on junk filled mainland.

Your proposal though perhaps a well meaning one appears to me to be an over the top solution possibly spurred by an overly emotional response to the perceived problem of ad-farmers.

"As someone close to the "core of the group" here,"

/me falls off her chair laughing. My first issues created here had Torley threatening to ban me (especially after I had dared to comment on the non-response on a Second Life Herald article), I am no more FIC than you are. I frequent the site a lot, but to try to put in the viewpoint of the bog standard small time estate owner (i.e. 1 or 2 regions not 20 or 30), who has little clue about coding. Sometimes I wander why I bother, when was the last time a resident-requested feature request was implemented?

I will support anyone making a good case, but I think this is a bad issue with a ceiling of 512. I have supported you before in issues, Prok, but you will get a sharp response from me if you call me a liar, and I will not support you if the case is a bad one.

If you're not close to the core, um, my sympathies, but you're certainly in the "regulars" group and often aligned with the core so it's easy to be, uh, confused.

If you don't want to support this issue, you don't vote "yes," and you move on. The idea that you have to battle to close it is preposterous. Just leave it alone.

Fluf, you're trolling, and not sincerely. This is indeed monkey math if you are invoking as "62 percent of the owners of the region" people who own a tiny fraction of the sim. They own it so as to extort. They are committing crimes. They are violating the TOS by spamming and ruining the enjoyment of SL for others, under Community Standards 6. So your artificial elevation of them to equal interest with other people who own full parcels, and possibly even the rest of the sim, is completely fake, and you know that, and you're just trolling.

I've already answered elsewhere, that I don't intend any one proposal, or mine or anyone else's, to solve this social problem that cannot be solved with tools.

The social problem is that poor people and conniving people use the freedom of SL to extort others. They've found a fertile climate not only for spam ads, but extortion, something they couldn't dream of on email, because you can't make people pay you to go away on email; you can in SL.

That social problem, which is essentially a problem of criminality and rapacious cut-throat business tactics, will require a variety of measures to eradicate, both in the form of tools and in the form of TOS enforcement and POLICIES.

By getting rid of the extortion profit motive, you've dealt with a huge chunk of the cases. They will desist. Some minority will remain to spam. Then you invoke the anti-spam proposal I have, enforcement of CS 6, and you deal with those. That leaves you then an even tinier minority who may still annoy. But at least they will be only on one parcel, not repeating so as to spam, and not extorting. If we are left with 5 or even 15 percent of the problem, that shouldnt' detract from the amazing success we've had with solving 80 or 95 percent of it for most people, especially on new sims.

This tekkie propensity for "all or nothing" in the coders' view of on/off switches and black/white is pernicious to building fair social policies in a world like this. The argumentation for argument's sake of obscure cases and tiny percentages of interest is just that – the desire to have black/white on/off control of everything through code, and be the ones to decide the social policy governing the code.

And I'm here to say – back off with that. It's unacceptable. You don't get to help ad-farmers devalue our land. If you don't value your land next to all these malicious usurpers, then that's your isolated problem. We do value our land. Your willingness to mount fake, insincere, baiting arguments on their behalf as "majoritarian owners" on a sim by sheer numbers is insane, it defies common sense for all to see.

I don't have any "overly emotion" response to ad farms. What you have, however, is an overly-emotional attachment to black/white zero-sum solutions as a coder. And that's unacceptable.

I've been working around the ad farm thing now for nearly 3 years, especially the last 2 years, with varying degrees of success. I've gotten some of them to clear out by asking politely; some to clear out by concerted boycotting and exposure; others to clear out by waiting until they put the land to a normal price; still others by abuse reporting when they encroach or harass; and I think we are increasing making the point to the Lindens that they have to come up with some set of solutions out of the proposals out there.

For example, if they made new sims that were PG non-profit zoned with NO money transactions allowed in them (not my idea – I think it's stupid) you couldn't very well fault them for finding THAT as a solution if it were on new sims, and not your sim. If you really are thinking you need to stump for the rights of a gaggle of extorters you seem to enjoy on your own sim, then most likely you'll get to go on doing that, as it will only be new sims that have some new aspect to them of zoning or tools or polices to stop ad-farming.

You aren't sincere about ad-farming, and are willing to troll to make a point even against your own land value.

Nor am I trying to "help ad-farmers devalue our land". I've made no claims to support the selling of land for inflated prices, or for people putting up deliberately ugly prims to exert pressure to pay for land. I don't support that behaviour in the slightest.

My own suggestion further up this entry was to impose a LL determined land price cap at say 50L$ per m2. That is a far less black and white solution than reducing the maximum sale value of all land under 512m to 0L$. This places your solution in the category of an extreme coders solution.

I am not mounting a fake, insincere or baiting argument. I'm simply stating a lot of problems with your proposal for the benefit of anyone that might consider voting for this entry without properly thinking through the consequences for a large number of "legitimate" (for want of a better word) land owners or purchasers in SL.

I am sincere about the extortionate selling of deliberately annoying parcels, and believe strongly that an upper limit land value cap which would allow buying, selling and finding land through search functions, and would eliminate all those $10,000L 16m plots overnight, would be a much less troublesome curb on extortionate land selling than the one proposed here.

I'd urge anyone considering voting for this proposal to read my concerns posted above, consider the numbers of ordinary SL users that would be adversely affected, and NOT vote for this issue.

"I fail to see why, due to these very odd and very rare occurences that you might personally cook up as fitting just your own situation (or an abstract situation, as you are likely not even really selling that land), that we all have to be held hostage to ad farmers on kilometer after square kilometer on the mainland. It's absurd."

"I've already dealt with Mercia's supposed example."

And this after my proposal began

"Let me set a true scenario."

True as in if you accuse me of making up supposed scenarios, you are saying not that I deal in abstractions and what ifs, but that I claim something to be true that is not. TP to Serpentata and see it for yourself.

BTW, I never asked for the issue to be closed, I asked you to change it to 128m2 after your comment on 16, 64, 128 plots. You should open your eyes more and read what posts say and not assume that just because someone disagrees with you that they are part of some JIRA gang out to get you. You may be paranoid, but that does not mean I am out to get you.

Let's go over it again.

Did you link up your land that was separated from each other? You did.

Did you sell your land? You did.

So...where is your valid example of some hardship created by selling a piece under 512? There isn't one. This isn't about "accusing you of lying," it's about reading what you write, and drawing the simple conclusion that there is no case here...because you linked and sold the land. Hello?

I have other proposals that involve enforcing policy (like interpreting the TOS properly and fairly to concede that CS 6 is violated by ad farm spam), but knowing the Lindens, I know that they fear policies, and fear social solutions, and imagine they won't scale (after a long enough time of their customer base not scaling, either, with that kind of nonsense, they may change their minds). And that they favour technical solutions. I don't favour them, but knowing they favour them, I offer them.

$50/m is not at all any solution, as is any cap. The land market pricing should not be interfered with. There is land that is worth $50/meter in SL, and people get that for it, and that's normal, say, old core sims with 40 meters terraforming. Caps on pricing aren't acceptable and too subjective to place, and interfere too much with the market.

There isn't any market in land below 512 except the market of extortionists. A handful of obscure use cases of people evening up tier or holdings on a sim can't constitute a market.

/me sticks fingers in ears, closes eyes and repeats "I'm not listening and you're horrible!" loudly...

No Prok. Your interpretation of the figures I gave is "monkey interpretation". And you add more and more detail in your fantasy world each time you revisit it. The figure plainly show that mainland established sims now have a range of plot sizes that are NOT multiples of 512. Even if you decide that all 16m parcels are ad-farms (and they are NOT). It doesn't change the basic FACT that a lot more people will be disadvantaged by you proposal than you are able to concede, accept, imagine or conceive.

—

/me Does a "Prok" ... sticks fingers in ears, closes eyes and repeats "I'm not listening and you're horrible!" loudly...

Again, monkey math, monkey perceptions, literalist, taunting harassment, that's all, like a monkey. Everyone knows that ad farms are destructive of the mainland, and the overwhelming majority are extortionist. If there are any 16 m2 that are not ad farms, you need not worry, as they can be passed on to others for $0 if someone doesn't wish to pay tier on them. While they still may put an ugly sign on them, they'll be less motivated in a world without extortion.

There isn't any "basic fact" as you imagine – nay, hallucinate – based on your tiny sample of your own sim, which you aren't even describing in good faith. Name the sim and let's talk to the other people on it to see if they imagine they are as happy as you are, and love the ad farms, and wouldn't want to do anything to remove them because that might mean someone with a "legitimate" 16 m2 would be harmed rolls eyes.

I'm always amazed at the ability of tekkies to stick stubbornly to this kind of literalism and disadvantage the entire rest of the grid.

I never claimed to have done that someone else discussed my point and may have done so, but I am not going to data-mine this monster of an issue. In fact as I pointed out linking far apart parcels is very difficult if you own the intervening ones as well. I sold separate parcels it was up to the buyers to link them. The only case in which I did it was for rentals.

"Did you sell your land? You did. "

Yes but that is irrelevant, this feature request is not implemented yet.

Did you sell the land linked, or not? That's the issue.

And sorry, but the issue of sale even not under my system but the existing system is relevant.

If you couldn't link it as you claim, and sold it separately, you still solved the problem by selling these pieces to the same buyer. So you could have told him to pay, say, $10000 on a 512, and then he could get the 16 set to his name for zero, under my system. That is, if you got enough agreement from him to buy the two parcels separately, you could come to an agreement about one selling for the full price, and the other for $0. This situation isn't at all common, and to try to extrapolate it and trump it up into a deal-breaker for this proposal is folly – it's not convincing.

As for your claim that you can't join parcels that have intervening land in between, well, possibly, but I guess you don't do the prudent thing, and don't have a separate group for just selling land in, rather than risk selling it and having it distribute to those who are members of a group but didn't pay for it. So obviously the workaround if you really suffered from this, which seems implausible to me, but let's just say you did, would be to put both parcels into the same group separately, then link them, and as a separate group, the command to join would ignore the land in the other group intervening.

Again, let's come back to the crux of the matter: did you sell your land? You did. You sold it even though it was in these tiny parcels, even divided, to the same buyer. So you could have easily done so under my system as explained.

"Lets say you are an evil "Ad Farmer".
You have 16m evil ad spinner and now you're told you can only set it for sale for 0L$.
So you don't. You use one side of one prim to say "IM me with offers". In garish neon colours.
When you get an offer you say "No. Not high enough. Try more like XXXXL$/m2"
Person annoyed by spinning ad offers larger sum.
PERHAPS the evil ad spinner is finally delighted with the offer.
"
and also explained here on this forum post : http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=233952&page=7&pp=15

it would just be a little more work for the small plot owners as they would have to go across the grid setting the plots for sale.

Fluff, it's a bit strange that you say that dealing with land sales via ims is something hard to do and on the other hand you say that this is what extortionists will do to bypass that limitation... (remember too that you actually asked me to set for sale to you some small plots for more prims via ims without me ever advertising my land for sale... )

So unfortunately, we're stuck with having to think up a dumb, mechanical, simplistic solution in absence of political and social will coming from Linden Lab's CEO.

That means that none of the dumb, simplistic, mechanistic solutions we might come up with will be perfect, they will always leave something to be desired – that's why they are inherently stupid and inflexible, like all machines that aren't human, after all – and we will have to make the best of it.

The proposal calling for land never to divide at all under 512 m2 is strangely lacking any commentary from all of you with your knickers in a twist about rare and unlikely occurrences in being unable to sell land under 512 – and you aren't banging on that guy's proposal, in part because he's not me, and in part because you may imagine the Lindens will "never" do it that way. And yet, there's nothing more simplistic, dumber, and mechanistic than just making 16 ms go away by making them really literally go away forever, forcing ever single nit who wants to ad farm to pay at least 512 m2 in tier per sim that he wants to spam up with this crap. So that solution, while blunt, may be better, because once an extortion can only be launched per sim and per 512 it gets very expensive, and loses its mass spam capacity.

My solution attempts to be more flexible by realizing that there are times when you need 512 m2s to be broken down – and heck, they already are broken down so you have to figure out how to deal with them.

Kant, use some pragmatic sense here. People who have 16 m2 out of sale, upon finding out that they can no longer sell them for anything but $0 – they have all disappeared out of the sale list, they are all disabled as to an extortionist tool – can put a garish blinding sign up that says "IM me for sale". If they won't sell them for $154 or whatever the normal market price is then, by setting it to your name for that price, and they wish to continue to practice extortion, how long can they last? They'd have to continue now to tier their entire 16 m2 empires with never a sale. Nobody will be IMing them for sales. People will pay $500 of $1024 or even $9900 inworld automatically, to get rid of an annoyance, but they are 10 times less likely to actually bargain, live, with a nuisance extortionist.

I don't see why, that you ALREADY suffer from these ad farms, that you'd want to HOBBLE a solution to get rid of them for others, and get rid of them especially on new sims.

I don't understand that logic. It's really the pernicious logic of the coder and the tekkie, that unless you have a 100 percent yes/no black/white answer fitting every single damn use case, you can't do something. You can't fix a problem 99 percent or 92 percent for a huge class of people in a society (not just some narrow users of your widget in real life). That's just plain wrong.

You ALREADY suffer from ad farms and don't buy them and have to worry about how to sell a 16 m on the open market. So, if you continue to suffer what you ALREADY suffer, what of it, if 99 percent of the other cases can be solved, and you create a climate whereby finally, your extortionist has to give up. After all, part of what made the Bush Guy get gone is that people banded together, and really practiced solidarity in not giving in to his blandishments to buy back the view.

I also agree that Fluf has an inherent contradiction, in saying on the one hand, that IMs can't be used among neighbours to settle up scraps of 16 m2 here and there, but it can be used to bargain with extortionists.

I'm glad you've also cited a real example from inworld about Fluf actually doing this in IMs, because in fact that is a normal practice and we could expect this normal practice to pertain if the 16s could only sell for $0.

Eventually, when ad farmers see that tools are being developed to cut the ground out from under them literally, they will dry up. They thrive on fear, ignorance, and the sheer massive number of their extortionist plots now. As they begin to be deprived of them, they will go away. It's not a worthwhile business. It's not an ad business even. It's an extortionist racket, and it can't work, long term, unless it finds willing victims.

Stop being willing victims of extortionists, and find a solution that people can lobby the Lindens to implement.

There is no problem with asking people via IM if they want to sell land you're interested in. And yes I have done that. If they want to, they can then set the land for sale and it can be safely purchased at the value they set. No big mystery there.

The problem is relying on IM's and an honourable exchange of land and money when you can no longer use the land sale system.

Of all the people in SL. The one's I would least like to give money to just on the basis of an IM conversation that they will then sell me the land at 0L$, are plot cutters. I imagine the complaints to LL along the lines of "I just gave this guy x,000L$ for a plot of land and they didn't set the land to sale for me" would increase dramatically.

Is that clear enough?

And yes. There's no point chasing the "make the minimum parcel size 512m" entry because it's just not going to happen anyway.

Remember how, when they couldn't solev the problem of everybody 'terror-forming" their land to annoy their neighbours, creating huge lake sims or mountains of earth pushing against their neighbours' parcels? They just ended the ability to terraform 40 plus or minus meters – full stop. No more terror-forming. Gone.

In the same way, they might, in their game-god wisdom, decide that simply removing the ability to make anything less than a 512 is just the ticket to end this lament that actually harms their bottom line, too, because people won't spend as much on the auction for fear of having a loss due to ad-farming.

Even if he thinks his proposal should be closed, I don't see why it should. I'd be happy to keep it open as one of many solutions proposed for the Lindens' contemplation, to get votes or not. It has a simple beauty, MISC-129, because it means that each ad extorter has to limit himself to one 512 per sim. No more trying to make $9935 off a 16 m – he can only make it off something that costs more to tier now, 515 m2.

FLUF, once again: your use case is a tiny minority of theoretical cases. Most people can solve their odd 16 m2 problems on a sim by IMing someone and selling it. If all else fails, and they find it hard to tier, they can leave it to Governor Linden who will then turn it over to anyone who owns property on 3 sides – or just leave it. So it's a non-issue.

And once again, I don't suggest at all that you enter into an IM arrangement with a land cutter and extortionist. I suggested you enter into it with neighbours and people you trust if you really have an authentic problem on a sim – which you and others claimed here – that involves 16 m2 that are NOT owned and trying to be sold by ad-cutters – as YOU CLAIMED. Remember?

I already wrote that the position to take on the ad cutters who say "IM me for a sale" is to ignore them. Eventually, in a new climate where they are deprived of new sims and sales of their tiny land, they will evaporate.

If they don't for some people, such as you claim yourself to be on your sim, then you are no worse off than you were before implementation of this proposal, are you FLUF?

You aren't going to spend extortionist sums when it can be bought in the land list; you aren't going to IM them either. So why must the entire world wait to solve the problem for everyone else because you imagine it will go on affecting you?

Once again, I charge you with not being sincere: you are trolling, as anyone can see, and trying to trump up fake theoreticals just to annoy me, but more to the point, because you refuse to give up the coders' claim to these little parcels, which is part of your worldview of "I can do WTF I want on my property" and that coders must have an eminent domain in SL to plant their little data scraping servers. So, sorry, but I'm unimpressed, and I will go on promoting this as one among several solutions.

Just because you can't comprehend or perhaps agree with what I'm saying...

There is absolutely no need to be so offensive!

I'm tired of you either deliberately or genuinely (I have no idea which it is) misunderstanding what I'm saying and firing back at me like I'm some kind evil JIRA user intent on creating fictitious issues just to annoy people!!!

Do try to use some manners when posting.

And no... There's no point even entering anything on a "Prok" dominated thread like this one. I only re-posted because once again your posts were personal enough and annoying enough to prompt me to. THAT IS TROLLING

Any sane person can read my comments and understand my point of view. I'll gladly discuss those views with a polite rational person.

If they were genuine, if they represented some argument in good faith, they'd be recognized as such. But they aren't. We all know full well that the overwhelming majority of ad farms are extortionists devices to extract money out of people unfortunate enough to be near them. We see it all over Second Life. We all know exactly what is up with this.

So for you to keep pestering and bludgeoning with this extreme case that you yourself even didn't abide by (you just IM'd somebody and made the sell!) is really acting in bad faith.

Your point of view would be legitimate if sincerely held, and if practiced by you. But you yourself sold your 16 m2 with IMs. So...put up or shut up. You don't have a case. There is no need to impose hypotheticals on a process for a solution.

Your bad faith is especially visible in trying to claim that ad farmers who make up a majority on a sim, even with a tiny minority of land, should get to decide what happens on that sim. That's how it is now. They get to decide that everyone else has to be held hostage. That is wrong. That is criminal. They should not be allowed to do that! We all paid good money and want to live in peace, without spam and interference. That's what this is. To pretend otherwise and keep up these assanine abstract arguments just to be stubborn and antagonistic is really unacceptable. I urge you to stop it.

If you don't want to be construed as an evil JIRA imposer of false and fake extreme examples, don't put up examples that you yourself didn't even follow in actual practice!!!

But...

Whatever...

"Fluff, it's a bit strange that you say that dealing with land sales via ims is something hard to do and on the other hand you say that this is what extortionists will do to bypass that limitation... (remember too that you actually asked me to set for sale to you some small plots for more prims via ims without me ever advertising my land for sale... )"

SO you're going to get technical and say they weren't 16 m2, but only small lol? If you bought and didn't sell – so what? The same point pertains: it is possible to buy and sell with IMs, not for extortionist prices! Hello???

I don't sell 16m parcels and do not wish to be associated with that activity. Thank you.

I didn't "buy" the land via IM. I negotiated a sale and the land was then sold through the standard system (if I actually bought land off Kant .. I can't be sure). I didn't give money outside of the current land sale system and then expect the land to be given to me.

Your proposal removes the ability to safely sell land within the current land sale system. It can only be sold for 0L$.
Under your method, I would have to send the money via the profile page and hope the land did indeed get set for sale at 0L$ to me. I see a lot of opportunity for theft under this idea... "Oh sorry I crashed." .. "No I never got the money" .. "Ooops I set it to sale to the wrong person and now they have it... you'll have to talk to them".

Why is that so difficult for you to comprehend? Do try!!! Please!!

What on earth are you going to use it for except a) ad extortion or b) data scraping with a scripted object???

If you think there is a good use for it, then you can do the same thing on 512 which will have value.

When people trust each other, if for some exotic and rare reason, one of them needs to acquire 16 m2 or 64 m2 off another person in a sim, they can send the money manually. It's not a real case. I give 16 m2 to people for free, and they give them to me for free – they don't want them on their tier. If I ever need to adjust tier or get rid of anything in a sim, I put it to sale now for $154 to get rid of it quickly – but nowadays, I'd look around first to find someone to give it to for free to avoid griefing everybody with the subsequent ad farmer – or not sell it at all.

Your use case is exotic and contrived. There isn't going to be a case where you'd need to sell land like this to a stranger you can't trust. You wouldn't sell it then – and you wouldn't be able to except for $0. They couldn't sell it, either, except for $0, so they would no longer have any motivation to acquire it.

Sorry, you're reaching and trumping up stuff. DO try to understand, please!!!

You're trying to drive home the point that people can't be trusted in land transactions when you don't know them, can't know their motives or intentions, and can't trust them with a manual payment for land they might never turn over to you. Any idiot knows that – that's why you never transfer land that way except with people you do trust. And who would that be? People you got to know, neighbours in a sim, people who aren't going anywhere, people who are known, people who will not likely screw you over.

You're confusing the problem of not trusting people in a ridiculous type of transaction NO ONE should ever resort to, with the actual existence of 16 m2 that now have to be transferred. Give them away for free, Fluf, go ahead, have a heart, stop trying to squeeze every last Linden out of your fellow resident.

A very nice example of your standard trolling behaviour!
Well done!

I don't squeeze any money out of any residents. I don't sell over priced parcels. I don't deal in parcel cutting. I don't make any kind of living out of buying and selling land.

Stop being so offensive!!!! Get your facts straight before you accuse people of things!!! An apology would be appreciated!

If you don't sell over-priced parcels, don't ad-cut, or make your living buying and selling land – none of which I have accused you of! – then what on earth are you worried about???

Link up y our land, and sell it at a normal price. If somehow you are caught with some strays, let them go for $0, if my plan is executed. Let them go. How many of such parcels of 16 m do you have on this sim that you fear being unable to sell, that we must all be held hostage?

Go to the Brown region, a Linden-zoned mixed commercial and residential area. Look at who has a LOT of land there. And then look at all the parcels (the zoned shop areas) that are under 512m that the main proponent of this must be drooling over and would love to get for $0.

Not only is this ill-advised as a solution, its also quite obviously self-serving for the main proponent, and I am closing it.

I have plenty of land in Brown and do not need any more. I have no need to buy any land in Brown for $0 or for $100,000. In fact, you should talk to the person who has more than a third of brown hoarded, and for sale at absolutely outrageous prices, including some of the small parcels. Apparently Mr. Thielt isn't aware that I own land on 65 sims, and really do not have any need for any small parcels anywhere? That it's absurd???

This proposal was discussed with the G-team last week, and Lindens did not say "oh, this is impossible" – and certaintly wouldn't dismiss a proposal because it was tendentiously and falsely portrayed by a resident in this matter. It would be immaterial, anyway, whether a resident wished to buy land for $0 or $100,000.

My proposal would do a lot to end extortionism all over SL, and help many, many people get their land value back. I myself have no need objectively to buy any of these parcels; in fact I urge that people currently not buy them even when only $154 for 16 m2 so as not to feed the extortion machine.

Michael Linden commented at the G-team meeting that they dislike these ads as much as the next person, but that he envisions that ad farmers would just do the exact same thing on 512s that they do on 16 m2.

I disagree, as do others. I think that once they begin to have to actually pay tier on extortionist land they can't sell, and can't have 32 16 m2 in a sim to spam across it, but only have 512 m2, it will make it much harder for them to achieve the blanketing of SL that they try to achieve to get a sale – any sale, anywhere. It just cuts the rug out from under them, and makes it that much harder.

In my view, no resident should ever be marking a proposal of another resident as "won't finish" because it's a characterization only Linden Lab could make – and frankly, they can change their mind at times on this, too.

And once again, I do not support any cap on the land market. None. No free market can have caps on it, or quotas, or restraints. It must remain free, and other social, political, and technical policies must be put in place. There is nothing inherently "god-awful" about this proposal except merely your dislike of it. It is not biased as you imagine, but merely a simple and very technical solution as the Lindens love, and are far more likely to use than policies, and certainly price caps, which they'll never use. My proposal is merely an offshot of the one that says no cutting whatsoever should take place below 512 m2, and gosh, I sure don't see all you trolls over there banging on that proposal cough.

There isn't any "massive" response to this one, just the usual suspects.

The "no cutting below 512 m2" was an equally "no f-ing way" proposal, which the originator himself turned his back on, having learned more about the way things work.

MISC-894 is a much more mature version of this poorly thought-out proposal. In fact, I might even say Prokofy's dis-endorsment of that one might be one reason so many people like that alternative.

Removing it from the market is just as codeable as the "price cap" – which is too much interference in the market, and the Lindens will never do that. In fact, it DOES address content, making some special kind of land that has to have special prices "just because".

Putting it for $0 is merely a way to deal with the putative remaining very small number of use cases that might pertain for those with 16 m2 who keep complaining that removing ad farms would somehow "harm uses of 16 m2s". They haven't made any persuasive case to me, but I am happy to concede them their need to move 16 m or 64 m or even 468 m back and forth among neighbours or businesses, and therefore they can do it mechanically for $0. If they have some overwhelming need actually to sell these spare remnants that rarely occur, they can do that, either through trust or the use of an escrow company.

The originator of the "no cutting at all below 512" was brow-beaten by others on the JIRA and even if he turns back, his proposal does make good sense, as there is really very little you can reasonably use a parcel under 512 for.

I don't see that "so many people" like MISC-894 – that's just the usual tendentious bully-puppeting we've come to expect here.

Prokofy Neva on MISC-894 - "The ultimate price cap is one I've already suggested: $0. "

Color me a cynical, malicious left-wing literalist, but: 'duh', indeed.

Mr. Neva's other comment on MISC-894 (tiered price capping) applies equally to this issue : "This is unacceptable interference in the land market. " The caps below 512 are simply set to 0 in this one. It is a seizure of assets with a demonstrable market value, whether you consider it "land" or merely "licensed content service".

It might be practical, and fair, to implement either sort of policy in newly-created mainland sims, given full disclosure – but then again, estate sims already have what amounts to zoning. (Or "feudalism," if you prefer.)

For those fond of insisting that SL is "a country" or the like: consider that even in RL a (USA) community can implement restrictions on use, in balance, but cannot seize or destroy the value of property without due compensation – and generally not without a valid public purpose. If you want zoning on the mainland, propose a zoning scheme – but be prepared to have it cut both ways, just as in RL.

When land is given a value and is in the market, to apply a cap to it is seizing assets with demonstrable market value. So unfortunately, wrong again.

If you're the cynical, malicious left-wing literalist you say, why are you for selling land at all? It should be expropriated from the expropriators and distributed to Teh Ppl, eh?

Who says anything about "seizing"? You sell for $0. It's not valued. Are you worried that you paid an extortionist $10,000, and now can't sell it to some other hapless nit for $12,000? Too bad for you.

If this policy is applied going forward, on new sims people will accept when they buy the whole sims or the parcels on the auction, that they can't cut them up, because they can't sell them for anything but $0. Secondary buyers will also have to accept this.

A reminder that my preferred proposal is a social policy that advocates enforcement of existing TOS language on spam (Community Standard No. 6) and interference with the enjoyment of SL of another, and disturbance of the peace.

But given our Lindens' preference for tool-based solutions, hey, you want tools, I have tools for you. Tools for industry, tools for defense! And at $0, a bargain.

This remains as a possible solution to the ad farm extortion problem, which is back, full-blown, despite being abated for awhile with the Linden's policy of making extortion a TOS offense.

It's back everywhere, and other remedies need to be studied actively.

The Lindens made it clear that Bay City is an exception to their rules everywhere else that parcels can be joined and subdivided, so there is no reason why this function suggested as a solution to the ad-farm problem can't be designed and turned on except for Bay City or for that matter, become an optional feature that might make some new sims have enhanced sale value on the auction.

The idea isn't unworkable: the Lindens just made a set of sims, Bay City, where they made it impossible to cut land and join land. The Lindens can and do make unique settings for some sims that aren't on other sims. They have older sims with settings on the mainland to terraform plus or minus 40. I think it's quite reasonable to posit that if they wish, the Lindens can create a setting for sims that doesn't apply universally – indeed, the whole division into "PG" and "M" and "island" and "mainland" lays the groundwork for such divisions.

I don't see anything to indicate that it is mechanically impossible. "First Land" used to be set to sell only for $1/meter, and only to those accounts that had never made a purchase of land before. If that is possible, it's surely possible to write a program that says "never sell for anything but $0 if less than 512 m". It's one of a number of proposals that are posted in order to deal with the scourge of ad farming, that has proven resistant to the Lindens' TOS policy again, and has returned in even worse form.

"Unworkable" is a subjective idea until a Linden coder comes in and says it, quite frankly, and if they provide extensive enough reason on the mechanics of its impossibility, rather than the politics of its impossibility, it may be persuasive, we'll see.

If Linden Lab's new proposals actually amount to anything then this request could become moot but the option proposed here is most certainly more favourable than banning cutting parcels into sizes less than 512M and it's definitely more favourable allowing the status quo of plot extortion which devalues the product as a whole for everyone. In that regard this proposal adds value.

However, the new Linden policy against ad farms is now working sufficiently well, with the Lindens cleaning up huge swathes of ad farms and extortionist microplots, and forcing many microbarons out of business or into selling land for a normal price, that this issue is well on its way to being solved by a policy, rather than a code change, which is always the best way in a democratic society.

So as long as that good policy and good work of the Lindens keeps up, I am not for attempting to make mechanical means to solve social problems in this particular instance. If the issue changes, I will re-open this proposal.