Ad Farming Persists

[Always Incognito]

Just now, animats said:

Do they have some RP function? Aircraft guidance? Bombing targets? Or are they just there?

They are just there like the obelisk in 2001 a space oddyssey...

[animats]

4 minutes ago, Always Incognito said:

They are just there like the obelisk in 2001 a space oddyssey...

That was a grey prim. Not a pointy thing.

[Always Incognito]

40 minutes ago, animats said:

That was a grey prim. Not a pointy thing.

You are killing my efforts to build up some mystic conspiracy from outer space here 🥺

[Elena Blossom]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Do they have some RP function? Aircraft guidance? Bombing targets? Or are they just there?

Nothing, they are not even scripted

[Elena Blossom]

4 hours ago, Always Incognito said:

Conspiracy theory: LL wants ppl to move from mainland to Bellisseria or buy private land. Mainland cost them too much server capacity to be worth it. 🤑 ? 🤫 😜 🤐

Sad but true

[Setsuki Takeda]

Report, always report, I have had six of them that were visible from my parcel removed by LL since I joined. Check the ToS on ads and, if they break this, file a report. Most have been gone within two days of submitting the report.

One thing I do wish they had was a "Block Maker" and "Block Owner" option so I could simply block one of them with an extra little kick to normal derendering like the one directly across from my driveway that is not a blatant violation of six rles and have it take every spammy glowing giant particle spewing rotating monstrosity across the grid along with it.

[Prokofy Neva]

10 hours ago, animats said:

Do they have some RP function? Aircraft guidance? Bombing targets? Or are they just there?

 No, that's what is so fake about this. If they had some "game" function 15 years ago in teenager land, they don't have it now. There are no players. These are not scripted objects. It's merely about hegemonic presence like other projects in SL of this type.

[Prokofy Neva]

2 hours ago, Setsuki Takeda said:

Report, always report, I have had six of them that were visible from my parcel removed by LL since I joined. Check the ToS on ads and, if they break this, file a report. Most have been gone within two days of submitting the report.

One thing I do wish they had was a "Block Maker" and "Block Owner" option so I could simply block one of them with an extra little kick to normal derendering like the one directly across from my driveway that is not a blatant violation of six rles and have it take every spammy glowing giant particle spewing rotating monstrosity across the grid along with it.

None of those we have AR'd repeatedly have ever been removed, despite some quite egregious clusters accompanied by giant black boxes, in order to harass.

The Lindens don't need to set up fake annoyances to goad people into moving to Bellisseria; they do that anyway, in droves. They do avoid due diligence on enforcement of their TOS, however, as the customer service state gets expensive in terms of staff time. They worry about lawsuits and people bullying them about being against "creativity." 

I do think they have a passive and sometimes not-so-passive drift to encourage Mainland to turn into a sea of concrete transportation game sites, malls with stores, clubs, and various safari-type destinations that busloads of tourists or pod-riders can see. So the Mainland is like a strip mall or a US national park. They don't want people to live here, they demand too much customer service.

[Qie Niangao]

7 hours ago, Setsuki Takeda said:

Report, always report, I have had six of them that were visible from my parcel removed by LL since I joined. Check the ToS on ads and, if they break this, file a report. Most have been gone within two days of submitting the report.

Have any of the ones you've gotten removed been the obelisks discussed in this thread? If so, that's a very interesting precedent. I was under the impression that these things were being interpreted as "non-ads" or something because otherwise they're obvious violators, as I mentioned way above, "they're way taller than 8m, and also non-phantom."

Otherwise, yeah, Governance does generally remove violations of the Mainland ad rules (which I usually explicitly cite word-for-word when I report the abuse), although my reports don't seem to get quite such fast response times as yours. I've had to resort to multiple reports, sometimes for months, until maybe I eventually roll the number for the "good" Governance person, or maybe they just get tired of my reports and decide it's easier to finally relent and do the job.

Come to think of it, those three private regions make these Mainland obelisks more directly advertisement. I don't think the regions are commercial (I think one may have a club but nobody is making a profit here), but ads don't need to be commercial to be subject to the rules.

They talk a good game about reuniting long lost Teen Grid denizens, but how many of these things can it take to catch the bastards? Surely it's more like planting flags to claim the Mainland, continent by continent, for the Aqua-Spurting Regiment.

[Setsuki Takeda]

1 minute ago, Qie Niangao said:

Have any of the ones you've gotten removed been the obelisks discussed in this thread?

 

No, I have one right next to me, actually. It does sense people, and give region reports to the owners, they contacted me to ask how I felt about it being by my porperty. They do have functions, and work, just not much left for them to tie into with the game dead. The giant billboards all along the roads I've had zapped by LL, and a lot of land baron signs trying to rent empty parcels, the ASR Memorial Obelisk I see as no different from the spaceport in the next region over that I can see from my vineyard.

Honestly, as out of place as it looks, I prefer it to the "Live, Laugh, Love" type who moved in just past it and immediately slapped up banlines and an orb that 0 second ejects to home anyone who flies over it (only reason i knew I had a neighbor, or saw the cheap collection of bad mesh vomited out by the road, is that I was flying to a heliport south of me and got kicked back to home when I flew over at 750m.) to protect her cheap prefab that looks like it was built from discarded cereal boxes and a privacy screen of hideous 2D "trees" all around the parcel.

But then my main complaint about mainland has always been the abuse of orbs, that they can whole parcel eject everyone (No issue with blacklist ejections, if you add people who are an issue and need to stay off your land it is done with names of people who are a problem not random passersby, or orbs set to a radius or zone around your actual home, that doesn't kick people a km away from anything) even at flying height when you can't even see their universally terrible "builds" from there.

 

It's the benefits of mainland that is also the curse, though. I can have my vineyard, put up a vechicle rezzer so people can borrow a semi to do GTFO runs, or rez a weather system to make it rain in the woods which a lot of places with a covenant forbid. Same thing lets people do things I find to be antisocial and completely abhorrent, though. In Belliisaria I can't even put out a donation box, let alone rez an affiliate vendor when someone asks where to get something. Here I can. I just have to put up with things I hate since SL isn't PvP and I can't launch nukes at Brittney over there.

[Prokofy Neva]

42 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Have any of the ones you've gotten removed been the obelisks discussed in this thread? If so, that's a very interesting precedent. I was under the impression that these things were being interpreted as "non-ads" or something because otherwise they're obvious violators, as I mentioned way above, "they're way taller than 8m, and also non-phantom."

Otherwise, yeah, Governance does generally remove violations of the Mainland ad rules (which I usually explicitly cite word-for-word when I report the abuse), although my reports don't seem to get quite such fast response times as yours. I've had to resort to multiple reports, sometimes for months, until maybe I eventually roll the number for the "good" Governance person, or maybe they just get tired of my reports and decide it's easier to finally relent and do the job.

Come to think of it, those three private regions make these Mainland obelisks more directly advertisement. I don't think the regions are commercial (I think one may have a club but nobody is making a profit here), but ads don't need to be commercial to be subject to the rules.

They talk a good game about reuniting long lost Teen Grid denizens, but how many of these things can it take to catch the bastards? Surely it's more like planting flags to claim the Mainland, continent by continent, for the Aqua-Spurting Regiment.

As some of you know, I don't buy this theory about the "reunification" project at all, have ample reason to believe it has other motivations, but these need not be rehearsed here.

Let's see if there is any merit to any argument involving any group of the lost Teen Grid doing anything of this nature.

What was the concurrency of the Teen Grid? My hazy recollection was that it was something like...5,000. Maybe it was 10,000? But the main grid itself was not that big in those days so I can't believe it was any bigger.

My son was on the Teen Grid along with his pals from our neighbourhood when others with reunification claims also rezzed, that is, starting around 2005 or so -- which means 17 years ago. My son is now 30 years of age, a grown man with a wife, newborn, and business with several employees that he and his wife have run for some 5 years now. When I was his age, I was in my junior high or high school band; poetry and literary magazines; even field hockey. I assure you I have not engaged in any of those activities in 50 years so if SL was somebody's after-school club, so to speak, it's likely they dropped it long ago.

More to the point, he does not remember the obelisks at all from back then, nor any game like this despite having similar interests and games on their own group land. He has come on SL now and then to help me with the rentals, sometimes for longer stretches (and now, is hardly available at all) but he has had plenty of times to view, contemplate, and study the obelisks, and, despite being an avid fan of various "space" and "alien" type movies (he used to avidly make lists of how we could prepare for the Zombie Apocalypse), does not like them.

He doesn't remember any type of war game of this type with spawn points or markers. Maybe they came in later. Again, he was only on the Teen Grid for perhaps 2 years or so, with a group of his buddies, and then they began to drift away.

As you know, the war games sim with "safe" turned off was simply deleted by the Lindens when they merged Sharp with the main grid. They do that, you know! After Jesse and unsafe sandboxes, the Lindens decided they didn't want to be in the war-games business. They may have deleted one other sim?

In any event, that particular war-game sim was one of the sims my son and his friend had a mall, where they sold WoW type armour, had a quest game called "Sewer Safari," had a mall with stores which they rented, and various events. They were in the top 10 malls, but then the Lindens broke their little hearts by allowing the camping script into the Teen Grid, so that wealthier kids who could afford to pay out for camping (I made them pay for their tier with their earnings) could buy their way past those with organic success from genuinely attractive content into the top ten. 

My son looked for that sim, and had it still existed, and had land for sale or abandoned land on it, he might have purchased it for nostalgic reasons, and even got one of his buddies to come back online. But it wasn't, so he didn't, and made do with some Sharp land I found where you can at least make sort of outlooks and bunkers on a mountain.

 

Edited February 2, 2023 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

19 minutes ago, Setsuki Takeda said:

No, I have one right next to me, actually. It does sense people, and give region reports to the owners, they contacted me to ask how I felt about it being by my porperty. They do have functions, and work, just not much left for them to tie into with the game dead. The giant billboards all along the roads I've had zapped by LL, and a lot of land baron signs trying to rent empty parcels, the ASR Memorial Obelisk I see as no different from the spaceport in the next region over that I can see from my vineyard.

Honestly, as out of place as it looks, I prefer it to the "Live, Laugh, Love" type who moved in just past it and immediately slapped up banlines and an orb that 0 second ejects to home anyone who flies over it (only reason i knew I had a neighbor, or saw the cheap collection of bad mesh vomited out by the road, is that I was flying to a heliport south of me and got kicked back to home when I flew over at 750m.) to protect her cheap prefab that looks like it was built from discarded cereal boxes and a privacy screen of hideous 2D "trees" all around the parcel.

But then my main complaint about mainland has always been the abuse of orbs, that they can whole parcel eject everyone (No issue with blacklist ejections, if you add people who are an issue and need to stay off your land it is done with names of people who are a problem not random passersby, or orbs set to a radius or zone around your actual home, that doesn't kick people a km away from anything) even at flying height when you can't even see their universally terrible "builds" from there.

 

It's the benefits of mainland that is also the curse, though. I can have my vineyard, put up a vechicle rezzer so people can borrow a semi to do GTFO runs, or rez a weather system to make it rain in the woods which a lot of places with a covenant forbid. Same thing lets people do things I find to be antisocial and completely abhorrent, though. In Belliisaria I can't even put out a donation box, let alone rez an affiliate vendor when someone asks where to get something. Here I can. I just have to put up with things I hate since SL isn't PvP and I can't launch nukes at Brittney over there.

1) How can it sense people when it has no scripts in it? Have they learned how to fuse RIFIDS into SL building materials?

2) They don't contact people to see how they "feel" about having them near them; they plant them deliberately, more and more, to grief them. 

3) I "Live" on the Mainland; I "Laugh" and "Love" much less often with those eyesores around.

4) Orbs that TP people home are worse than eyesores, but just because something is worse, why tolerate it? You don't have a full picture here, as you have bought "the line" on them which may be true of the ones deployed near you but ARE NOT TRUE of many others.

5) Not surprised that you favour acres of concrete parking lots on the Mainland.

6) Plenty of people launch nukes all the time, with little deterrence.

[Setsuki Takeda]

3 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

5) Not surprised that you favour acres of concrete parking lots on the Mainland.

This one has me so puzzled that I completely forgot the other points you made, and I just read them.

[Setsuki Takeda]

Well, Plus has been a *wonderful* thing for the Mainland.

 

Spend a few bucks on a trash account, get 32 16m2 parcels to throw up roating glowing garbage on every roadside across the mainland.

 

LL needs to stop letting people maintain microparcels. Period. If you can't even put a %^$&ing tree on it it needs to be reclaimed by "Governer Linden."

[animats]

Quote

microparcels.

Just round up tier for each user in each region to a minimum of 256m^2. You can still have a 16m^2 microparcel, but it will cost 16x as much.

[elleevelyn]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Just round up tier for each user in each region to a minimum of 256m^2. You can still have a 16m^2 microparcel, but it will cost 16x as much.

alternatively the region server could set the LI available to 0 when an owner has less than Xm on the region. Xm could be say  256. Given that to own mainland the min. sqm tier is 1024 then 256 is probably not unreasonable. 4 x 256 parcels on 4 different regions

[Qie Niangao]

Either way, land impact or tier, the transition would be difficult.

For example, I acquired (for the VRC group) a bunch of 16s along the SLRR back when the Lab encouraged  rail groups to sop up the glut of abandoned adfarm microparcels. We eventually gave most of them to neighbors, but the remaining few now host local traffic probe servers (and a few old full-perm locomotive givers). They could all be replaced with a few weeks work re-routing the probes to only use VRC's larger holdings (with some loss of redundancy during sim restarts). And given enough time for migration, I'd be completely fine with that, but what if I couldn't do that work on the schedule of a new policy, or somehow simply didn't? Just automatically raise my tier to the next increment—an additional US$42 per month? Or just take the parcels and return the scripted servers?

I'd heartily support a policy that land must be some minimum size to be set for sale. At one point, 144m² seemed the natural minimum back when most viewers—except Firestorm—complied with that minimum size for land sales search. (Firestorm still shamefully lists 16 m² microparcels for sale, whereas the new standard land sales search interface now seems to list only 512s and above, which is also the minimum size for Events listings.) Anyway, there should be a reasonable minimum size not only for search, but also for sale. Own something smaller? Abandon it for L$0 and the Governor will take care of it.

But if the Lab can't bestir itself to implement any new policy, they could at least have Governance turn over adfarm violations without undue hand-wringing. It's really not hard to tell there's a violation, so when they find one, return everything, revert the terrain, and force-abandon the land. No reason to mollycoddle the violator and give them time to "fix" the violation. Get it done, make it gone, and move on to the next abusive microparcel.

[Qie Niangao]

Governance may be slow responding to bots and adfarms, but they make up for that by being even less responsive to old-timey racist griefing. For those craving a little nostalgia, you can visit this today on Spangle:

No need to rush, it's been there a while—at least since I reported it on February 27th:

• Abuse: E:1 P:1 |Spangle| (http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Spangle/133/94/60) [Harassment > Targeted behavior intended to disrupt] {bigbodyherm} "MANY physical Patriotic Nigra cubes (on 0 autoreturn land)

Which will happen first, you suppose: the photo get removed from the forums for the griefer's obscenity, or Governance do something in-world to actually maintain the service for which we pay?

[xDancingStarx]

22 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

it's been there a while—at least since I reported it on February 27th

Well I can relate. Waiting to get a protected water channel unblocked for weeks. And I do believe that Governance is working as hard as they can, issue is that officially everyone is encouraged to create an abuse report for everything if they have the slightest doubt. Of course there must be loads piling up. Furthermore I sometimes have the feeling that only a 2nd report will actually trigger action, which I don't know if it's true or not (Linden will of course say it's not true), but the long wait time in conjunction with getting no response leaves people wondering of course.

[Qie Niangao]

50 minutes ago, xDancingStarx said:

… Furthermore I sometimes have the feeling that only a 2nd report will actually trigger action, which I don't know if it's true or not (Linden will of course say it's not true), but the long wait time in conjunction with getting no response leaves people wondering of course.

That's the thing: They can say it's not true, and we can try to believe them, but ultimately we know they react when enough people flood them with reports. Once the Mainland adfarm policy was finally adopted, Arbor Project was forced to resort to the tactic, and of course it was effective.

Would it be effective now? With enough accounts reporting the same abuse around the same time, they'd eventually find it quicker to respond than to bury all the reports. But that's an inflationary spiral: the more the tactic is used, the better they'll need to get at ignoring them, so the more reports will be required each time to make it effective.

Either way, we pay for it all. 

[Claireschen Hesten]

7 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

No need to rush, it's been there a while—at least since I reported it on February 27th:

Speaking from experience of something the same happening on my mainland home region If you can get on to live chat they'll have it dealt with quickly.

[Qie Niangao]

Thanks @Claireschen Hesten, I was kinda hoping to handle it as a normal abuse reporter would, using the normal process, which so far didn't work in this case of obscene/racist prim griefing. On the other hand, your response prompted me to go back to check on four adfarm violations I reported on February 8th, so a couple weeks before the prim griefing, and it appears they were all acted on, so at least some reports are handled eventually. (I should have checked on them earlier.)

Although they eventually got Governance responses, the adfarm results were not uniformly successful. Governance doesn't actually confiscate the parcel and replace it with land in some dedicated adfarmer cornfield region, so another (rather worse) "ad"-griefing build replaced one of them at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Chiron/78/178/34. And coincidentally, while I was checking on another, I stumbled on a second copy of that replacement somewhere I hadn't noticed before at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Orache/34/210/111.

So they're proliferating again. The specific policy violations in these cases are that they exceed 8m in height and are not set phantom.

They're also hideous but that's not a violation, nor is their ridiculous "offer":

BECOME A RENTAL AGENT
EARN 50% OF RENTAL
PAYMENTS CLAIMING
VIRTUAL COINS AND 10%
RESIDUALS ON FUTURE
PAYMENTS

Lol.

 

[BilliJo Aldrin]

Linden Lab has a clearly stated policy for advertising parcels. If all the rules are followed, what is the problem?

I suspect it comes down to ad parcels offend some people's esthetic, so they must be eliminated.

If anyone would like a list of my ad parcels, IM me inworld, and you can visit them to check for violations.

😂

 

[diamond Marchant]

16 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

For those craving a little nostalgia, you can visit this today on Spangle

Could not this Spangle situation be addressed by the parcel owner?

[Ardy Lay]

6 minutes ago, diamond Marchant said:

Could not this Spangle situation be addressed by the parcel owner?

Yup.  Sure could.  They could be good neighbors and enable auto-return and optionally turn of build for "everyone".  Or, they could not be absentee, but that's assuming a lot.