SPAM

[Giuliana Verrazzano]

Thank you Noc for bringing up this sensitive topic in the forums!
I have had this idea in my mind for a few days as well. I am one who thinks that if you don't advertise your cats at all you cannot blame anyone for not knowing about you and your shop, but still I do believe the current spamming practices in the Secondary Market have become unbearable for any user, both those of us who can log in daily and those who for various reasons cannot.
I personally confess that in the past few months my mute list has been populated by avatars called xxxxkittycats or -insert user name here- advertiser. Any similar bot-like name whose solely purpose is to fill up my entire screen with ASCII characters and traits nomenclatures suffers the same destiny on my end.

The fact that some people think this is a valid and successful way to reach every single avatar under the prim sun worries me, but there are not many other resources to let us know about what are you breeding, what have you achieved in your breeding projects and maybe how much your lines have improved since the last time I visited your shop.

Advertising is necessary, but you must drive this practice in an intelligent manner so it can pay off, I strongly believe that the repetition of one same message every hour is unnecessary as it leads to annoy the costumers, rather than appeal them.

The forum offers a great platform to advertise and showcase your breeds, I don't personally have a thread to show my cats pictures but I do upload pictures on Flickr and add them always to the KittyCats Addicts Flickr group (if you don't know about it, you can find it and join here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/kitty_cats_addicts/pool/) which has proven me to have a broad exposure as I have got comments and IMs from people from all corners of the KittyCats Community.

I feel there must be something else we could do. I love walking around the markets and to have a look around people's shops. I love to look at the boxes on the back walls, inside the shops as that's where you find the treasures... those lines that you put long time and love to breed but once your lovely project was finished and you produced this gorgeous kitty, the traits were a thing of the past in the rapidly moving Secondary Market trend and therefore are no longer sought after.
However, I wish we had a system we could use to locate easily a cat with a certain trait along the grid. Sometimes I have hours to spend looking here or there, fighting lag and even surfing through the seemingly endless list of group past notices in case someone has what I need on that moment. But some other times I don't have much time or I simply don't wish to spend hours to no end walking around shops, clicking every single item that looks like a pedigree giver hoping to find the traits I need either shown or hidden.
A web listing of KittyCats, with an advanced search system sounds heavenly to me. A website where you can enter a few traits and get all the hit results of which cats have this specific trait you're looking for, who is the owner and a direct tp to it's location if it's rezzed in world. But even in this I can spot a flaw: it will list the shown traits while the probable hidden won't be listed, but if a pedigree link in included in the website it can help you determine whether or not that kitty is what you're looking for without even having to tp to it's location, saving the time to walk around and the possibility that you walked past it and missed it altogether. I even think a system like this would help reduce the amount of spam some shop and sim owners send daily. It might have a big impact on traffic, though, but really... who pays attention to those? Traffic, unfortunately, it's a manipulable number and doesn't traduce in success or profit.

Spam groups in general are hard to control, not many people read the rules or are willing to comply if they do. Some even answer back at you in an irritable manner if you remind them of the rules, even when you have the decency to do so in IMs without exposing them in group chat. No matter what you do people will always do what they want when they want. I hope you can find a solution that suits you to your group, however I wish we had more alternatives to avoid the excessive group chat spam and group notices because I do believe it's not really helping anyone.

/1 rant mode off

Thanks again for bringing the topic up for discussion!