SPAM

[Nocshadue Balbozar]

I'd like to know what ya'll think about spam.

I have a spam group, that recently I feel has become fairly useless and I'm attempting to change that.

I see the purpose of spamming. If you want people to buy your cats, it helps to advertise them. But there is a fine line here.

Is it really neccessary to spam every hour on the hour or more???

I know when I see that happening, I turn off notices for the group and have left some spam groups that were just too damn annoying.

On the other hand, I like knowing what is out there for sale and how much it's selling for, and reading some spam can help with that a lot.

I know people are on SL at all times of the day and my evening might be the middle of your workday etc and so spreading some advertising throughout the day can be good, but there's no need for the overload. It just turns people off, makes the seller look desperate and people just click that little X in the corner, or... leave the group entirely.

So, I'd like to know honestly.. when and how do you read and send spam?

~Noc

[Kayleigh McMillan]

I spam as little as possible because as you say I think it is annoying when people go on and on and I think as well it reflects as if the seller is desperate for sales.
The only way I advertise, besides via my forum signature, is via the forums only and not via groups at all and if I can I like to re-use the same thread for it.
The same goes for reading adverticements I only read those via the forums as well and only if it doesn't get annoying or if people do not take a zillion threads to do so.
Should I have a cat for auction I use a new thread on the forums which I bump one time when my panel is almost up or when the auction starts.
I use a showroom model to show what breeds I have and I also like to use Flickr to connect with other breeders and share pictures there.
I personally am no member of any spam group, I'm super sensitive for ongoing spam I just can't stand it, and if I need to be in a group to be able to rezz for my rental I disable chat and groupnotices in Phoenix.

I think though I'm not so avarage in my way of dealing with spam XD

[Luna1987 Resident]

I have recently turned off notices for a lot of groups, when i am getting around 300 + a day and most are double and triple ad's every hour because the same person spams 2 or more groups every hour. If i send a notice it's one time per day, per group.

[Liriel Garnet]

Personally as an auctioneer, I try to spam 3-4 times in the 24 hours prior to an auction. I also spam once or twice for classes (and that includes the 'starting now'). I post everything in the forums as well. I feel any more is intrusive.

Personally, my way of controlling spam is to mute the spammers that spam every hour or two, especially those who annoyingly scroll the chat with lots of white space, etc., designed to push other spam out of the way. Those that spam a reasonable amount (once every 6-8 hours) I will leave up in order to learn what cats are about.

[Dario Maesar]

There are so many people selling their cats and all are really well breeded kittens. I don't spam at all as I think there is not much I can do other than offering my wonderful breeds in my store. I think, if you want to sell your cats, you will need to think about a new way of offering your cats. Just reading the traits, will probably not make a good sell as I think. Beside that, I noticed I turn blind reading the spam. One looks like the other... all cats look similar... No offense, but spamming the traits in a group for example where everyone spams their traited kitten, will make yours be one of many. Most people that are member in such advertising group, have the receival of IM and Group Notices disabled and spam their own cat. So basically what you do is, spam your cat and no one seeing it. Same applies to those that spam in IM of groups.... at some point I put the spammer on the IGNORE list and will no longer see their text if it really bothers me much. Having like Kayleigh a Showroom where they show off their most prettiest kitten, is something that can help to raise want to have this or that kitten in the own cattery, I think. Or display them on a blog... that again although it could be a new way... will be difficult at the start, because it will need to be seen... traffic for the blog... The new way of kitty sale is not to spam till people mute you, but to be decent as seller... show what you have without appearing desperate.

It might sound horrible for many of you, but I regulate the market by sending my traity kitty also to the menagerie if they aren't asked at all. I keep the breeding but I stop selling their offsprings to some points. I can always buy food for my cats off it or wait for maybe a megapuss tiger and then use them for that.

The new way of selling cats is surely not spam away.

Darios five cents.

[Nocshadue Balbozar]

Thank you so much for these excellent replies! I knew that some breeders like Kayleigh have "show rooms" here in a forum thread and I think that's awesome. I love seeing pics of the kitties.

And what Dario described is pretty much what I thought was happening. What good is spamming if EVERYONE has their chat and notices turned off?

Back in the day it used to be kinda fun to 'follow the spam" and TP around looking at cats, but it's just too overwhelming now.

I think you are right and it's time for a new way..the last thing I want to do is add to the onslaught of stuff no one ever reads anyway.

One thing I do seem to read still is auction and bid board notices, if I can find them among the many others.

In the group I was trying to salvage, it's basically 10%, actually less I think..doing 90% or more of the spam. I don't think I will even try to save it now since no one has replied to my requests to limit how often they spam. Maybe it can be put to a new purpose, we'll see. I'm sure there are plenty of others out there to spam in.

[Deer Thistle]

I've had to leave several groups due to not just group notice spam, but the chat spam accompanying it. I think the worst form of spam is when an individual uses more than one bot to advertise the same store so they don't get in trouble for spamming more than once an hour like many of the groups' rules state "One notice per hour" so that's their workaround, and it becomes pretty obnoxious.

It can get frustrating to reach out to so many people about a cat they may have interest in at your shop but I think it's the wrong approach to potentially irritate your prospective buyers by trying to compete with the flood of other spambots in these groups. In my opinion, utilizing the forum sales section is a great way to not irritate people (assuming you don't bump your thread every 2 seconds LOL) and reaches out to people of all time zones with using one post versus an overabundance of 2983487234 notices in-world.

A bot reminding me every 30 minutes that its owner's fantabulous 8-traited salt & pepper is for sale or for auction with a ~*~*super exclusive & special opening bid*~*~ isn't going to make me buy it any faster, it will probably make me less apt to make a purchase. Anyone who is investing money into KittyCatS is most likely on Second Life for more than an hour a day and will see these notices quite a few times like myself so it gets a bit silly for these bot owners to feel it's necessary to spam even once an hour or every 30 minutes, they will reach everyone anyway even without so much excessive spam.

I was going to include a picture of what my Yahoo! spam folder looks like for all of these KittyCatS groups and the frequency of some of these spammers but I didn't want anyone to be offended if they saw their bot or store listed in my screencap LOL It's pretty ridiculous though and very, very unnecessary. I highly doubt the spam will stop flooding though and ultimately it will take the leaders of these KittyCatS groups to change their rules to "one notice per every two or three hours" from "one notice every hour" to make staying in these groups more tolerable.

[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!

[Malayaa Resident]

I've pretty much quit reading spam, and have most notices and chat turned off...otherwise IMs get capped too fast. I do go to the group notices before an auction and pull them up, and visit the forum to see what's happening. I find myself on the forum and Flickr a lot, they are great communication tools! What "sells" me on cats is
1) live cats at auction instead of boxes (except for collectibles)
2) pictures of cute live cats (not boxes!) on the forum and on Flickr
3) I use area search in the secondary markets and put in keywords. I think the last search I did was for "wild tiger" (ears). So boxes and cats that have the special trait in their names, pop up. Spelling the trait right helps too! Otherwise it doesn't come up in the search.

My pet peeve is people who friend me after some conversation, then relentlessly try to sell me their cats.

[GhostCollective Resident]

(06-10-2013 07:24 PM)Giuliana Verrazzano Wrote:  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!

I agree with you and I'm not sure if KC team could make this work or not but I also breed Fennux and one option they have one their website that seems to help is like you said being able to put in certain traits; coats, ears etc, and then a list with tp links to see that particular one you are looking for. It seems to work very well especially when you have an idea of what you want but the seller doesn't always name their box beyond "new born kitten" so it can be tricky to find that perfect kitty outside of posting on the wanted forum.

Just my two cents
*sneaks back into the shadows*