Here's a dump of my wall of text, since I know a few here can't read there:
WARNING: wall of text ahead. Prepare for major tl;dr.
Wow, I have to admit I'm pleased after reading the post, when I went into with great apprehension. As someone who has owned land on the mainland for almost 5 years, and never on an island, it is good to see some proactive steps being taken. Off the top of my head, some ideas:
(1) For plots 512sqm or less, give all neighboring residents an exclusive one-week grace period to purchase the land before non-neighboring residents can. Or, perhaps, allow neighbors three days; then allow anyone in the sim an additional four. Keep it in the family, if possible. This will minimize a lot of the current problems with land extortion - the current M.O. of the bad guys seems to be: buy, mark-up, put up ugliness, never visit the simulator again (except perhaps to extort by putting up more ugliness).
(2) Min / Maximum building height configurable by sim - if you have a flat sim at water level, and set a + / - build height based on the water level, you could preserve views automatically, and provide the popular "beach front / suburban" options without having to play police.
(3) On advertising: this is much trickier. I hate the "Impeach Bush" ad-farm problem as much as the next, yet I've been involved in legit advertising in the past. I always tried to keep it road-side, to fit in with the decor, in the SLBoutique days, and would always sell to a neighbor at my cost, upon request (in fact, I made some good friends that way). I also provide value in advertising with my free Gogomodo Trivia game; it is free for anyone to use, but I cover the bandwidth and server costs by driving revenue by advertising. It is quite popular with over 200 locations, but with many of them going 24/7, the bandwidth adds up. The revenue driven by our sponsors offsets this and provides a free game a lot of people enjoy. Our sort of implied ToS is, "Show our sponsors, and you get a fun communal game to play."
(4) Better controls for the mainland. I'm not going to touch "shared ban lists" as this is too controversial, but how about ability to change textures on a land plot? Or a whole sim, by vote of residents by square meter ownership? Philip's argument against this was that the mainland would look too much like patchwork - but honestly, ever flown in a place? That's how RL looks, especially over the farmland of the United Kingdom! If you want to encourage the mainland to be a place of themes and collaboration (I'll echo eltee here), giving self-organized communities the ability to vote themselves to develop the neighborhood in new and interesting ways in an automated fashion would be huge.
(5) Better ability to route people to continents where they speak the language. This is already underway, but perhaps tagging each region on each continent on the map with a predominant language spoken would help new residents find their target destinations. Sorry, but the newbie HUD doesn't cut it.
(6) Build a historical area around Morris / Ahern / etc. Ben's is dead. So is Luna's. A lot of that space is completely unused now. There was talk of building an SLCC museum in the area, with memories of each year. The same could be done for major events, like one for birthday celebrations (perhaps details new features added that year, and pictures from the event). Giving people a sense of how
SL evolved over the years... and a reminder of just how much it has improved... would be a good used for that space.
Just a few ideas. I'm sure I'll share more later.
Regards,
-Flip