My last post was about a landbot was able to buy for only eight cents the Second Life™ land that I had planned to sell for $150. Today I wrote a column on examiner.com that tells more about it. You can read it at www.examiner.com/second-life-in-national/don-t-let-a-landbot-take-your-second-life-land.
Landbots have been a problem in Second Life for at least four years. Linden Lab won’t do anything about it. Opinions about it range from outrage that a landbot can take your land instantly if you make a careless mistake to smug belief that if you made the mistake, you deserve to lose your land.
I believe there should be a waiting period after it’s marked for sale before it can be purchased. Not a long period, just a few minutes, to give the seller the opportunity to find their mistake and correct it. At the very least, the seller should be warned before completing the transactions that there are landbots who will buy the land instantly if there are any errors made in marking the land for sale.
For me, going for two days believing I had lost my land and not even able to enter the land because the buyer had banned entry was like electroshock treatment. I had been planning on buying a Second Life private region, but cancelled those plans and instead have begun creating my own OpenSim virtual world that will soon be on the hypergrid. I’ll be writing a lot more about the process.
This doesn’t mean I’m leaving Second Life. I love Second Life and have no intention of leaving. I had been looking forward for months to buying a sim and developing it, but I’m finding that creating an entire new world is even more of a thrill, not to mention a lot cheaper. I’m fortunate in having the technical skills and computers to host it myself, so my currently four sim world has so far cost me exactly nothing.