Commerce

Clearly the programming staff made yet another famous blunder. I won't defend that nor will I excuse it. But I do not believe it was done with bad intent on the new manager's part .. or on the programmer's part either.

I think none of the blunders were ever done with bad intent.

And I also do have some understanding for the position of the commerce team. They are not the ones responsible for the teens coming to the grid, but now they are send from above to manage the marketplace comforming the new rules that come with these new residents. They must simply enforce us to be part of this change. Both merchants and the commerce team are more or less in the same ship.

But is it a pleasant experience?  Does it make us happy customers? Not at all! The gab between what LL does and what merchants need to be able to survive to ongoing stagnation of SL is only growing.

Yes or No question.  Will assume No.

Brooke Linden wrote:

Here's the text of the email. We sent it to all merchants who currently have an active listing.

I have not received it at my official contact e-mail address.

Your listings have been automatically updated with new maturity ratings, based on keywords and other algorithms. 

Who tested this filter? Moe? Curly? Shemp?

Those algorithms are FUBAR ... almost everything I make is Disney-level clean and because I suggested that the items might fit in Gorean decor they became "Mature". The one skin I make, the one I had properly classified as Adult because  she has nipples on her chest, got downrated to "General".

And if you were going to automatically screw with my listings, you should have given me a way to sort my listings by maturity rating so I could find the ones you messed up.

GOREAN is a dirty word so rings get MODERATEd, but a mostly naked woman fingering herself is GENERAL !?!

I have a number of rings and a couple of kilts that have been 'allocated' a 'Moderate' label because within their keywords is the word 'Gorean', or 'Gor'. There is nothing in the product or the advertising of it that merits this. I'm sure it's easier for you to blanket cover all Gorean items as non-'General' but it is incorrect, misleadng and does not conform to your published guidelines. Following such a line will you make all bedroom furniture 'Moderate'?

On a second point, now that you have conquered this monumental task of recategorisation will you turn your attention to your Search engine, which is THE WORST SEARCH ENGINE ON THE WEB. The 'relevance' search is completely dysfunctional offering all sorts of spurious results while pushing highly relevant products to the back of the queue. Try typing in 'Rings', the chioce varies of course with the results being often ludicrous but even on a good day ... I tried it again now and on the top page of the relevance search for rings there were two sets of high heels, a water feature and a valentine's gift; only 50% of the 12 products on page one had 'rings' in their title. Please, please make the Title the primary source for a 'Relevance' search.  If you type in 'Chair' the very first item is a 'Love Hud'. Item number five is a 'Be My Valentine' set of poses with a lingerie clad bimbo spreading her legs and fingering herself - and this is in a GENERAL search .... what a cheek that you let this happen but consign rings and kilts to a non-GENERAL status.

You assume correctly, however if you had read these threads more carefully and paid more attention to my posts .. you wouldn't have needed to ask.

Nefertiti Nefarious wrote:

And if you were going to automatically screw with my listings, you should have given me a way to sort my listings by maturity rating so I could find the ones you messed up.

THIS. I think this is what gripes me the most, is the fact that MY listings that I spent hours of MY time on for MY products were torn through in the blink of an eye by a proverbial FU tornado. And then suffered on by a glitch that I can't even do anything about, and with LL's notorious track record, probably won't get any resolution and am on my own to lie down and take it, you know?

It seems so disrespectful and condescending. It's not fair. Then a mod rubs salt in the wound and moves my thread earlier. lol. If I wasn't so tired I'm sure I'd be hauling off and backhanding people's heads so hard the G-force would create a new space vacuum.

I've been cordial and nice about LL, didn't really have any complaints (only wanted test deliveries for the marketplace), but wow, good work on convincing me to jump the fence.

Mickey Vandeverre wrote:

Yes or No question.  Will assume No.

 

Selling life preservers to Titanic victims is only profitable if you can convince them that they're sinking. Otherwise you work for tips. But either way, the band plays on

I have a desk lamp that I put a Gor keyword on to check something for a poster here and forgot to remove it. Checking up on that will be an interesting experiment. Back later.

Is it just me getting the feeling of discrimination here?

If you do roleplay-stuff and put the keyword gor or gorean in it because it might fit in that environment as well, it doesn't matter if you sell shoes, chairs, houses, hats, you are labeled naughty!

My bad and dangerous ballerinas / ballet flat shoes even made it up to adult rating. Yeah, they're really dangerous and children have to be protected from them. Seriously!

Darrius Gothly wrote:

LL will never divulge the naughty word list. If people knew the list, then they would craft their listings to use similar words, much like email spammers use funny characters and odd spellings to circumvent the spam filters. Furthermore, if anything gets learned by this fiasco, it will be that depending ON that list is a fools errand. Let's see how long it takes them to stop using it .. and start engineering more intelligent solutions.

This doesn't really wash, when it came to the traffic policy LL outlawed camping on show in search places but added the caveat that any traffic gaming activites were against the rules, LL can do the same with the word list, circumventing the word list is an offence. The very least they could do is tell people which word is getting their listing flagged, it's time for a bit of grown up behaviour on all sides here.

Vilandra Miles wrote:

 

Is it just me getting the feeling of discrimination here?

If you do roleplay-stuff and put the keyword gor or gorean in it because it might fit in that environment as well, it doesn't matter if you sell shoes, chairs, houses, hats, you are labeled naughty!

My bad and dangerous ballerinas / ballet flat shoes even made it up to adult rating. Yeah, they're really dangerous and children have to be protected from them. Seriously!

We went through this at the time of the adult content changes inworld, people argued the same points, plenty of buildings that are perfectly PG reach out to the Gorean community because it's a sensible target audience, LL took it off the naughty word list for a while but the teens coming in has seen it put back on the naughty word list.

This is something LL and Residents should have been working on for months. It shouldn't have been sprung on everyone at the last second like this. That alone stinks of incompetence.

The fact that the maturity level setting is completely arbitrary based on a mystery set of keywords is even more silly. This will never work.

Agreed, they can state that "attempting to avoid maturity censoring by altering your listing is a punishable offense" .. or some such language. However they didn't cough up the list when it was added to In-World Search and slammed a few innocent folks, and they've been silent on it whenever they've used it before .. so it stands to reason they have no intention of publishing it now either. It's just a shame they can't understand that its use is once again, just like it has been every time in the past ... WRONG!

This is the problem with any automated word filters, it's why the Scunthorpe problem came into being.

With about 50.000 merchants, we will have that list in no time, when everybody reports his forbidden words on a third party site.

Ciaran Laval wrote:

This is the problem with any automated word filters, it's why the Scunthorpe problem came into being.

Yeah, but to be fair, I went to university with someone from Scunthorpe and he assured me everyone from there is a c...................

What I don't get. The ratings worked before just fine. Simply relying on common sense and merchants being aware of merchants. Sure, have the two was rating now split up into three way ratings does mean work for all of us. But to generally suspect items to be naughty just by keyword and or description is just wrong.

What's so hard about trusting in the old system to work just fine with the new rating system?

Why is it necessary that LL generally thinks us being too stupid to rate things ourselves?

Right now, I'm simply pissed like hell. I'm sitting in front of 1.5K listings that are ALL messed up. Not to mention the amount of lost sales. Damn it! If you had just announced the change and left it to us to take care of changing the rating of those items that might need an up-rating. We would have done so!!!

What's the problem with trusting and communicating with us? What are we? Some kind of lab-rats? And of course the system started on a Friday... So we would loose the weekend sales and the Lab sits home and probably laughs about us stupid rats running around the labyrinth.

I defended marketplace in the past, but now I'm actually thinking of turning my back to that system at all.

I was fine with this change until I went onto my market place and saw a few items marked "adult" that were not adult AT ALL, they are food and lumber mill items furniture, etc....nothing violent or sexual or over 18 about any of it. I tried to mark them general and update but the maturity rating of adult still stays!!! I understand some of my key words may be considered "adult" , I really think it is because I put Gorean and Gor as some of the key words, but the product is NOT adult by any means, not even mature, unless you consider lumber and food and a couch (NOT a sex couch just plain sitting couch) adult I think you need to fix your system! I am sure other Merchants have run into this also, some of us were excited by the possible new buyers we could reach but with this keywords based on maturity rating it looks like we will not be reaching anyone new. It looks like LL really does not want the teens to be happy by not allowing them access to general merchandise that could enhance their SL experience. Shame to lose even more possible customers because of their keyword rating snafu.

 

Tayla

Vilandra Miles wrote:

 

What I don't get. The ratings worked before just fine. Simply relying on common sense and merchants being aware of merchants. Sure, have the two was rating now split up into three way ratings does mean work for all of us. But to generally suspect items to be naughty just by keyword and or description is just wrong.

What's so hard about trusting in the old system to work just fine with the new rating system?

Why is it necessary that LL generally thinks us being too stupid to rate things ourselves?

The grid merger, that's why this is happening. Although having the same levels of maturity ratings as inworld would have made sense anyway, it's the grid merger that's behind these changes.

There's a bug that's not allowing filter rating changes no matter what you do. That might be what you're experiencing.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-3581 Vote here.

Suella Ember wrote:

 

Ciaran Laval wrote:

This is the problem with any automated word filters, it's why the Scunthorpe problem came into being.

Yeah, but to be fair, I went to university with someone from Scunthorpe and he assured me everyone from there is a c...................

Ciaran Laval wrote:

What?! I'm just saying! He did tell me that! (Although he was also drunk and trying to chat me up ... which was a big fail. Using the C word isn't the best chat-up line)

Anyway, stop making me digress. Where was I? Oh yes - keyword filters = headache. So I'm just going to procrastinate until tomorrow.

Suella Ember wrote:

 

Yeah, but to be fair, I went to university with someone from Scunthorpe and he assured me everyone from there is a c...................

Chav?

Ciaran Laval wrote:

We went through this at the time of the adult content changes inworld, people argued the same points, plenty of buildings that are perfectly PG reach out to the Gorean community because it's a sensible target audience, LL took it off the naughty word list for a while but the teens coming in has seen it put back on the naughty word list.

Actually there are two issues at play. The first is the super secret bad word list which seems to have been thrown together without much thought or any regard for context, the other is the asinine decision to categorise listings based on keywords in addition to the listing content.

Other than obvious profanities the keyword list should not have any effect on a listings maturity level. This way a house described as "gorean slave quarters" will be marked as Mature, whereas a regular building that may also be marketed to Gorean shoppers will correctly be marked as General.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-3582

Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

 

Mickey Vandeverre wrote:

Yes or No question.  Will assume No.

 

Selling life preservers to Titanic victims is only profitable if you can convince them that they're sinking. Otherwise you work for tips. But either way, the band plays on

I have a desk lamp that I put a Gor keyword on to check something for a poster here and forgot to remove it. Checking up on that will be an interesting experiment. Back later.

 

probably not a bad tactic to toss a rather large preserver (8 paragraphs?) to the captain first, though! (particularly if captain has email notify set).  sly...unfortunately a bit too obvious.  amazing how people's senses and reflexes are on heightened alert during a disaster