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Second Life is run on the free-market principle and there is already too much blockage of market transcactions, i.e. the ability to ban "no payment on file" avatars from shopping at malls or renting apartments, which is counterproductive and harms the economy.
If people are concerned about the scam objects, they can use the kind of script that the maker of the Money Tree has done, where she has an alerts system that kicks in if anyone comes near the tree with an invisible object, or with certain of the typical scams like the one "pyramid". Then you can rush to the scene and eject the person. Of course, autoreturn takes care of it too – it's merely an alerts system. If you want to maintain a private club where only those club members can buy or sell in your club, then set your land to group-access-only or to a list of access-only avatars, don't globalize your desire to block many people from transactions in the economy. As for the "selling in sandboxes" area, policing this can't scale, and automatizing it means people can't even check how a vendor is working, or how their permissions are set on an object they are working on in a sandbox. If the Lindens are tired of policing this, they should auction them off and let the private sector police them. How are tenants on group land going to undeed TVs, which currently can only be achieved by selling it back to themselves for $0? How would tenants in a rentals community be able to sell each other furniture informally or have yard sales if they wish if the regions are harshly flagged into "sales" and "no sales". It's up to the landlord to enforce his choice of resident and commerce, and blocking even informal sales of $0 and $1 globally only harms the freedom of the society and the economy. I'm a very free-market LIbertarian. I support this idea.
One of the central tenants of a free market is private control of property. In RL, the most sacred of property is the private ownership of land. On your own land, you have complete control. If I want to prevent people from selling things on my own private property, that is well within my rights. To say that it is anti-free market to give parcel or region owners more control over what happens on their land is a specious argument. If a land owner wants to forbid third party selling, they should be able to. Go set up shop in the parking lot of your local big box store and see how long you operate before a manager comes out and tells you to pack it in or they call the cops. There's no reason that in SL we should be forced to accept squatters or ban everyone. We should have the right to control the disposition and use of our own property. I quite like the idea of this flag, however, I would suggest : Fantastic idea, very important as well for security
Hi prokofy. There are a lot of dlaws in your argument. please allow me a moment to address therm.
1. Your idea about the alerts system. Has many flaws. For a start, this would require a sensor in every vendor, atm, etc, everywhere. More lag is something we do not need It would also trigger a lot of false alarms if transparent objects are a part of the build in which these vendors/atms are located. Also, scripts can't sense attachments, so this wouldn't help at all against someone wearing invisible attachments to intercept item transfers. Sensing typical objects is useless too, because apart from the limitations on sensors, (more below), it is just as easy for someone to change the name, and appearance of one of these objects, and have something entirely new. Farthermore, the alerts sytem has one MASSIVE flaw. There has to be someone there to respond to it. To go and clean up that mess. And it provides an avenue for griefing. once someone realises the landowner gets called every time they do something, they can do it repeatedly and causer a lot of trouble, or force a change through effecrtively bullying. 2. Maybe you misunderstood. My proposal is to limit who can recieve money. ie, only the landowner, or members of landowning group. If you want only your group members to be able to sell, closing acess to your land is stupid because then nobody can get in to BUY things. Businesses don't fare so well without customers. And if you allow everyone in, you become open to such scams. 3. Sandboxes. I meant this for the linden sandboxes, which they do not have the resources to police. There are many privately owned, resident run sandboxes. I run such a place. And while we have rules against selling, we allow testing of vendors, of course. There will always be somewhere to go to do things. But people have been exploiting sandboxes for far too long. Leaving scam objects lying around and such. And these DO actually work. Random newbies, fresh off the boat with their 250 signup bonus, see an object promising infinite money for a small investment, and go for it. I've seen this too many times. 4. Tenants on group land. There are two points of note here. Firstly, you are wrong. Selling back to youreself is NOT the only way. You can return your own objects too, and they go back to the previous owner. Right click the object > More > Return. The object becomes yours once more. Secondly, you seem to have misread. Group land. Eg, tenant is a member of the group. Eg, tenant has permission to sell. Now. the oft mentioned limitations of sensors. Th llSensor function is laggy. That's an unfortunate fact. Using it unecessarily is not a good thing. llSensor has a limit of 16 results per scan. If you scan with a given criteria, and there are more than 16 objects which match, it will return only the nerest 16. Given the prevalence of objects all over the place, and decent range scan will likely return hundreds. Therefore, the only way to effectively search for objects is to do many short range scans to cover an area. more scans = more lag. = not good. Farther to that, oneproblem with short range scans, is that they only pick up tings which are a short distance away. One known trick used by scammers is to place a megaprim in a neighboring parcel. Since the centre of the prim is a considerable distance away, it will not be picked up by sensors, nor blocked by preventing object entry, but can still overhang at a carefully placed angle to intercept transations to vendors I believe the freedom to do as one wishes with your oan land, is far more important than the freedom of those who are on your land, doing things you don't want them to do. If people want to sell things, they can get their own land too. And there's certainly no place in society for those who steal and scam to get their money. A side note. Blocking L$0 transactions. I'm not sure. Personally, I'd like to block that too so as to prevent people from dumping landmark spammers and the like. Agreeing with Gigs Taggart on the definition of free markets and property rights, which are altogether too shaky at present in SL. As for 0 Ls transactions, I would favor landowners being able to set any minimum Ls-quantity transaction they might choose, since I can't foresee, and doubt anyone else could foresee ALL conceivable, legitimate uses someone might have for their land and how that might translate in terms of setting limits on third-party, group member, or owner receipt of Ls transactions. A given owner might want, for instance, to create a flea market area, or set a group role for which vendor privileges are one of the perquisites of that role.
While not wanting to overcomplicate things, I would favor the widest range of flexibility in granting landowners effective controls over selling on their land, and allow the market to filter out those approaches that happen to be too restrictive and drive tenants and/or legit customers away. Personally I do think it may be unwise to restrict 0Ls transactions, given that I frequently find that the "Let anyone copy" tags do not seem to work reliably. BUT, the choice should still remain with the landowner, and WarKirby's 21 Aug example is a good counter-argument for why one might want to restrict 0 Ls transactions as well. Hmmm such a feauture sounds interesting. It would be nice to prevent the sales or giveaway of items on land to stop:
Even when blocking scripts, building and pushing, there are no ways to stop these yet. Though I would not use the option if it would cause to many lag, it would be very helpfull for a landowner to have the choice wether to do such a thing. By L$ 0 transactions, I was referring to anyhting that would show up as L$ 0 on the transaction history. This includes not opnly prims with a price of 0, but also taking copies, and giving items. Whether manually, or by script.
In case I haven't made it clear enough, these restrictions are for people who don't have permission. IE, you could block someone from dumping a landmark spammer on your land, but it would not affect YOUR ability to give things. Because you have permission. This would simply stop people giving or selling things to each other. Bumping this up one priority level to Major, primarily for this reason: The rules in Linden sandboxes have changed, It is now against the rules to cover up objects for sale. Doing so is likely to get one suspended. The only way we have left to keep the sandboxes clean is reporting the objects, which takes hours to cause any change. Even as I speak the sandboxes are being spammed full of objects for sale on a much larger scale than they could before when the sellers were being deterred by having their crap covered up.
The sandboxes are quickly becoming very crowded, much more than before, becoming harder to use and build anything in because of this. The sandbox merchants feel they have won and are rezzing their wares (interestingly they ONLY sell objects which are normally freebies) all over the place. I am one for the opinion that this should not block or affect 0L$ or free to copy objects though. My initial response to this was "oh hell no" but then I actually thought about it and it is a pretty reasonable proposal.
Im all for it but im still of the opinion that sandbox is for construction not selling if it becomes a marketplce choked with items to sell then building new products goes out the window and any progress due to new ideas comes to an almost complete halt so lets keep the sandboxes for construction and the rest of SL for marketing
 I have voted for this as a concept in principle but not necessarily as some have proposed. The original concept of an option to prohibit selling on land is a good one. Anything beyond that gets tricky and complex. This should be kept as simple as possible.
Allow sell for $0? I have seen people selling demos of products in sandboxes for $0, along with an LM to their shop where you can buy the actual item. You can get pretty much everything you want free at the freeb shops and that is a much safer place to pick things up anyway. Sandboxes are not meant to be freebie stores. Not to mention this is like saying we should allow people to turn on AOs even in no script areas. Nice idea but as soon as you put even one such exception on anything like this the programming becomes much more complex. I think you will get much more interest from the programmers if it is a straight forward block with no bells or whistles. However, there is another issue I see a lot. I think the best examples are the Blaze stores-in-a-box like the head shop and party lights store. They are packaged, as are many BiBs, to rez in for sale state. A friend of mine was setting up a club and asked if I had any club lights. I said "Sure!", dragged him to a sandbox and rezzed the party lights store with the intention of gleaning from it what we wanted to use for the club. I never got the chance. The Anti-selling vigilantes descended on me like lightning. I realized immediately that they weren't going to allow me to get what I needed out of the store so I just started trying to delete everything. That is a tricky job as it is, since it isn't all linked, but it was nearly impossible with them slapping large prims with nasty statements all over the ojects I was struggling to delete. I finally had to switch to select only my objects and sweep select the area. I'm still not sure if I got everything. The best way to implement this would be how scripts are done. You can rez an object with scripts in a no script area but they won't run. You should be able to rez an object for sale in a no selling area and have it rez but it won't sell. That way people could rez the BiBs to get what they want from them without all the hassle. I have often done the same with scripted items I wanted to examine without the scripts running. Just rez them in a no script sandbox. I would love to see a sandbox with selling disabled that I could use that way. You make a good point there Cotytto, however I believe Selling at 0L$ should still be allowed, since there are legitimate freebies that one might want to give away there. If we stop that, how far should we go? Blocking free to copy as well? Blocking direct transfers too, so people can't walk up to people and say "I'll give you this if you pay me x L$"? I think those shouldn't be blocked. Even just blocking regular sales of 1 L$ and up (and disallowing paying objects) will significantly reduce the amount of selling in the sandbox.
Yeah, Phantom, I see what you are saying but that is kinda the slippery slope argument. There is no perfect answer. Blocking all non owner sales does still leave free to take. that leaves a loophole for giveaways without extra programming. Blocking that too would actually defeat my intent...to keep it simple.
Any way we do this will be a compromise. There won't be a perfect solution so let's go for the one that is cleanest and simplest...easiest to implement and overall most effective. That would be to simply set the for sale option like the script option on the parcel. Either on or off for group members or all members with no exceptions This will eliminate sales and reduce spam without closing the door completely on giveaways. It would be clean to implement with the least amount of programming. interestingly, since I posted here earlier I have, for the first time, put something nice I made in the Morris sandbox as free to copy. It has been removed almost immediately each time while items for sale for $200 lindens right next to it have remained there for days in spite of me reporting them twice. I'm not sure I am understanding what is going on. I'm just trying to protect the inexperienced new residents from spending money on things the original creators were kind enough to make free for all of us. It would be nice if we could get some better feedback from the lindens as to how best to accomplish this. I can see from the SL "crime blotter" that they do indeed take action on selling in sandboxes. I have kind of adopted the approach of just quietly reporting everything I see for sale for more that L$0. After reading the comments here I don't cover them now, but can someone tell me where that rule is posted? The response is so random I am not sure the lindens see my efforts as a help or a nuisance. I kinda feel like I am flying blind. Anyone else feel that way? Hmm.. Well if it's easier for them (it probably is) to have it disable the for sale flag entirely then that's fine with me. Being easier so it gets done sooner is really the only advantage I see to having it disabled entirely rather than still allowing 0L$ though..
I report things for sale regularly as well. Sometimes it gets cleaned right away, sometimes not at all. Sometimes when I report it as being spammed across multiple regions (and list the regions I see it in in the AR), it gets cleaned from all of them, sometimes only from the region the initially reported object was in. Sometimes even only one of the many spammed around the same sim. (I'm glad I'm not the only one who reports these sandbox merchants..) The rule about covering wasn't really posted anywhere except in the support ticket I opened when I got suspended for covering some stuff up.. You can take the risk and cover things up but I don't recommend it. So I feel pretty much the same way.. Seems like the Lindens don't think of sandbox selling as a significant issue. There are clearly aspects of this situation that are beyond the scope of this fix. The ones I am having a problem trying to figure out how to deal with are the builders who use the sandboxes for subtle promotion. I think the best example of this is that sim scanner thing by Mandy Medusa. For as long as I have been in sl there has been one of those handily placed in every script allowed public sandbox every day. They are there right now. Sometimes placed by Mandy herself and sometimes by others. But there is ALWAYS one there.
She doesn't need to set them for sale. People will check the builder profile and find her store. I did when I first started going to sandboxes. I remember my first visit to a public sandbox took me straight to her store. I am certain she has sold many items through this thinly disguised sandbox promotional campaign and I am also certain it is deliberate and that she isn't the only one. There have been many times I have seen the sandboxes jammed with items set out by the creators that are for sale in their shops listed in their picks in their profiles. It is tempting. I have a really nice castle that would get a LOT of sandbox attention and draw a lot of traffic to my shop. I could put it out and just kinda leave it there with full impunity. the few times I have rezzed it even for a short time in sandboxes it has gotten me traffic in my shop. But this seems as much a danger as outright selling to the true purpose of sandboxes...places where everyone can practice building. If they get filled up with promotional builds, that defeats the purpose. It would be really hard to pin down what is promotional and what isn't. The few times I have rezzed my castles I have been working on something specific about them and didn't have space at the moment on my own land. But when it is a clear, day after day after day of the same product by the same person like Mandy Medusa, should that be reported as selling in a sandbox. That is really what it is and it does interfere with legitimate use. Hmm, yeah, that is a problem, but it certainly does go beyond what this jira issue can fix. There is, kind of, a way to fix it, having the sandboxes return objects as soon as the owner leaves, but then if you crash your build gets returned, possibly in pieces making it difficult or impossible to reassemble. Quite some controversy about that which shouldn't be discussed too much in this jira issue; SVC-101 for discussing that returning idea. (I don't like the idea.)
I don't think the people who currently rez objects there just for publicity (indirectly selling) are too much of a problem, as it's not that common, doesn't use much space/prims, or can serve a purpose in helping the sandbox's visitors/regulars, except for ii Singh (think that's how you spell it) with his massive ships that use up 7000+ prims and cover half of the sandbox map. Endimion Zenovka has been selling these "**Milenio de Plata *** 2.6" spacecraft here in Sandbox Goguen for several days now. I have reported him at least 5 times.
Now he has taken over at least 1/4 of the region with a display model of the ship for sale backed by two walls made up of 18, 8x8 meter, professionally done advertising boards in full bright. There are several smaller versions of the same ads around the ship on the ground, The display is completed by a 40x40 meter megaprim of the same promo. (see included screenshot) Edit: just rechecked and those promo boards are 8x10 meters not 8x8. he has two more relatively small displays in Sandbox Cordova. One with the ship on display with two of the promo boards next to the ramp up to the open side hatch. The second display is a wall of 9 of the 8x8m promo boards along with a smaller vendor board on the ground. I reported all this over an hour ago, with screen shots, and I am positive I can't be the only one reporting it. I don't think I need to make any commentary on this. The simple facts say enough. I have been making over 40 "selling in sandbox" ARs per day. And to be fair they are getting good responses. I think the abuse team is doing a good job. But we could save everyone a lot of time if we could simply shut off the ability to sell in these areas. I understand this would need serious consideration before taking such a step. That is why I am posting this. Facts like this need to be included in such consideration. Clearly a lot of the reports I am making are simply clueless box openers. Some I have approached personally about it, avoiding the necessity of an AR and even making a few good friends in the process. And some situations I don't even bother to report like when I find an empty, default prim cube for sale for L$5000. That is NOT seriously selling in a sandbox an no one needs to waste time on that. I'm hoping we can get a solution where none of us need to waste any more time on any sales in sandboxes. I took quick look at Cordova and Goguen about 10 hours later. The ships are still there for sale, but all of the big signs have been removed. I suspect the ships may have been removed as well and just put back. The point, though, is that this problem is taking many man-hours to deal with both for the people reporting it and the abuse personnel responding and the current system is not working. It is a huge waste that could easily be avoided.
In the sandbox island extension this morning there were two objects emitting the Mario particles. To make a long story short, after a close investigation I determined they only functioned when I got within a certain range. Other avatars could walk right over the objects with no reaction. I could turn them on and off easily by moving closer and further at the sensor range of the object. While I was doing this several people moved through that range area with no effect.
It occurs to me this might be there to warn individuals when certain avatars come within range. Particularly those of us known for working against selling in sandboxes. I wasn't certain if this was specifically pointed at only me or perhaps a list of people. So I left it alone for several hours. The next time I checked someone had placed arrows pointing to the particle emitters and particle suppressor objects nearby. So clearly there are other people on the list that triggers these. I would be interested in hearing from those posting here if they are one the list. The objects are at Sandbox Island Extension 44, 171 and 172, 151 just under ground level. Let me know if you set them off going near them. Again this makes the point that we have pretty much a full scale war going on here and members trying to help are becoming targets. It would not surprise me if everyone who has voted for this issue is on the target list. The sooner we do something about this the better. Cotytte, particle spammers like that are quite common objects spammed around sandboxes. Small objects like that are only loaded from the server when your client gets close to them (within a certain range depending on your draw distance, but for small objects that range is considerably smaller than your draw distance), and there's even a threshold distance for small objects that is impossible to surpass no matter how high you set your draw distance. When you move far from objects, they are no longer rendered or handled by the client.
Particles from an object can only be seen when your client has loaded that object, partially because particles are rendered entirely client side. In conclusion, these particle spamming objects you found were constant, and worked for anyone, but could only be seen by people who venture close to them. Thanks for the feedback, Phantom. I had thought of that possibility but I had never noticed one respond so abruptly while I was still well within the area the particles covered. that was what made me think of it. the particles easily covered a 128m diameter but disappeared when I was only maybe 25 meters away from the object. The objects were very small though so that seems a reasonable explanation. Better than someone targeting a specific list. It just seems like some of these guys are really determined. After a few alts come back to get even you get a bit nervous
 Cotytto, particle spammers are the "most friendly form of griefing", cause one just can disable the rendering of them in the own viewer. Really more annoying is a full or lagged parcel, cause someone spams the region with huge amounts of objects and prims with a selling intent.
I agree that the selling option should be categorical disabled in Linden Sandboxes. Even that does not solve all problems, but it's the best approach, I think. The spacecraft thing I mentioned and posted a picture of here on June 22 is back for sale in the sandboxes as of yesterday. It is a different avatar name selling it this time. So clearly the abuse team did put a stop to it but they have come back as an alt. I have noticed that obvious infractions like this tend to influence others to do the same. The ability to shut down such sales would clearly save Linden Labs a lot of resources. I am sure the abuse team has more important things to deal with.
I like the selling in sandboxes. Very helpful to newbies ...
looks like everything has been said about it . a few points though...
I read in 1 comment that covering up the for sale objects and advertisement is not alowed... i did not even know that, I never have been suspended for it and frankly I would find it pretty unbelievable if it would happen. I cover things up most of the time and IM the resident in question about it. If the resident keeps setting things for sale only then I will report it. In the AR i then include the IM log that i have warned the resident several times about it. This seems currently the most effective way to get the objects deleted...and even then to many times nothing is done about it....or atleast not with the first report. I am purely talking about the sandboxes here. The key word that i havent heard here yet is "moderation" . If it werent for all the good residents (you know who you are) that watch over the sandboxes it would be a constant mess there. The lindens stop by occasionaly, but that is not enough to moderate a sandbox. And even if they are there, they mostly only clean up the mess that has been reported and leave the other TOS violations alone. I have seen it lots of times that they are standing next a bunch of vendors with sale active and they clean only the car that was reported. It is not so hard to look around and go over all the objects with your cursor. I am not trying to talk down on the governance team, i know they have a difficult and busy job. I just think that there are not enough Lindens on duty to moderate the Linden sandboxes very well. They just do not have the time for it. If I would stop covering up things and report every abuse i see in the sandboxes, i can send on average 10 reports every hour. I do not think the Gteam would apriciate that. I am all for sandbox moderators. Its an old idea and it is mentioned many times. I know why the lindens think this is a bad idea, but i see this as the only logical solution to keep sandboxes peaceful and clean of spam, advertisemens, for sale items, etc. And honestly i think the reason why LL think it is a bad idea is weak. They underestimate the residents, There are plenty of good residents that are mature and calm enough to keep an neutral and objective view on things... and i am not talking about myself btw. Just like how mentors are trained, the same can easely be done for sandbox moderators. All i ask for is some active residents with the power to return objects. And when they do, they have to log it ofcourse with a screenshot and possible other evidence. Personaly i do not think it is all that hard. Just have 1 linden supervise the moderators (keep an eye on them) and give them a short training. I can recommend atleast a dozen residents that would be qualified for it and are active enough to make a difference. But to come back to the jira... i am all for this idea. It would be a step forward so to say, although it will still be possible to advertise and place notecard and landmark givers. So yeah it has my vote. I would like to add that when reporting repeated selling in the sandboxes not a thing is being done about it atm....
There are several alt accounts that are only being used for ToS violations/selling freebies in sandboxes and you can report it all you want, but nothing is done. The alt account logs in, places freebie cars set for sale in all the sandboxes and logs off again...and the alts do that several times a day, every day. I myself reported 1 of those alts atleast 20 times in the last month without any result, that guy just keep on going at it. It almost seems that the Gteam only comes in to action when the PN starts messing up the sandboxes... I can understand that selling is not the highest priority, but i as a resident that takes the trouble to report repeated violations by an account and see nothing is done about it...makes me wonder about the functionality of the whole Gteam. I personaly can even understand why residents use weapons against griefers etc, instead of reporting it. and seeing that this jira is still unassigned after such a long time, makes me and everyone else that reads this think that LL simply dont care one bit about it. Yeah I might be a bit outspoken, but thats just the way I am. Its mostly frustration talking here.... Allow the selling. I am sick of the control freaks using BIG-HUGE boxes to fill up the sandboxes while covering stuff. Finally those nitwits will cease and desist, maye ...
<end-of-story> Big huge boxes wouldn't be necessary if there wasn't four copies of a big huge store filled with big huge quantities of resold freebies and other junk. Voted.
Here's a view of some car spam that could have been avoided if the no selling flag from SVC-422 were used on the Linden sandboxes.
I agree,something that allows people to block transactions would be a good thing. Of course, it could just be as simple as completely disallowing them or something more, but its definitly something to be looked at.
Thats what some of these guys said to me and i post it here for the documentation.
[12:31] erick Galtier: as loq ue quieras |
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New Feature
Open
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A solution to scams, money theft - etc. New parcels Flag "Block Transactions"
Plus, if you added a way for estate owners to force this to be enabled on a per-estate/region basis, you would have a very effective way of zoning some land "residential only" as commercial activity would be limited.
Enabling the "no payments to objects" flag on a parcel won't stop someone building a mall next to you, though it would sure help in some sandboxes.
But enabling it on an entire region will quickly create a residential-only area.