Who owns auction times?

[Arwen Swordthain]

Ownership of auction time slots has always been a contentious issue, there will always be people that think the auctioneers should own them and others that say the sims do, but in reality as Tad said, no one actually "owns" a time, the auctioneers & sim owners work together for the most part to ensure good auction coverage for all time zones with minimal overlap and in my opinion thats how it should be. A community working together to ensure everyone gets the best possible results.
From what I have seen over the years most issues arise when an auctioneer takes a break and after a few weeks its noticed that the time slot has no auction so someone else moves into it, then the first auctioneer decides to return and is upset that their slot has been "stolen". Of course this is where communication is key, anyone looking to auction should be sure to cat to other auctioneers and sim owners and if they are looking at a recently vacated slot just check it really is free with the previous auctioneer to use it. Of course saying I'll be back in 3 months is no guarantee that a new person won't go ahead anyway but as with anything keeping the lines of communicattion open is always the best way to resolve isuues, along with keeping any conflicts between those involved and not opening it up to everyone on the forum. For the record I'm not refering to this thread with that comment. A thread like this seeking a general clarification is part of the conversation and therefore valuable.

In response to Minx's comments about why people don't attend auctions I'd like to say that for information purposes a thread might be helpful. I used to attend a lot more auctions than I currently do and stopped for several reasons, some RL related, some SL related and none actually related to the auctioneers themselves. It could be helpful for auctioneers and sim owners alike to be aware of why people don't go, reasons are many and varied from spam to lag to annoying local chat during auctions to just simply not having time.