Commerce

Help! with this two... I can find what is wrong!

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Anyu-Rapa-Nui-Hombre-box/508517

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Anyu-Rapa-Nui-Mujer-box/508528

Darrius Gothly wrote:

 

Mickey Vandeverre wrote:

Curious....does this affect any of your listings?

ROFLMAO!! Make up your mind Mickey .. which am I? Someone that speaks for others and doesn't have a voice because I never talk about how it affects me ... or someone that is solely focused on my own needs and world and couldn't give a damn about others?

Someone who likes talking.

Vilandra Miles wrote:

 

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!!!

 

They probably did consider this but didn't believe the 'we would have done so' part.... and when you say we, perhaps you mean you.

Rya Nitely wrote:

 

Vilandra Miles wrote:

 

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!!!

 

They probably did consider this but didn't believe the 'we would have done so' part.... and when you say we, perhaps you mean you.

Sure,, but a voluntary first sweep would certainly have generated goodwill.

Anyunie Daviau wrote:

Help! with this two... I can find what is wrong!

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Anyu-Rapa-Nui-Hombre-box/508517

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Anyu-Rapa-Nui-Mujer-box/508528

 

It seems that the word Rapa may be the culprit. Try removing it from the title, the listing description and the keywords.

Yes, I know its not logical but that is LL for you

Gavin.Hird wrote:

 

Suella Ember wrote:

 

Having said that, it would be handy if LL could somehow find a way to publish the list in a location ...

The logical thing to do would be to send the list to the email address of all registered merchants, in addition to post it in the wiki.

It is not like 16 yos have never seen such words before if they stumbled over the wiki page...

 

That sounds indeed the logical thing to do. Would have been best to have added 'highlight banned words' into the software for the merchant convenience, for a smooth and painless transition though.

I am not convinced that a list of words would even help. Words as 'cyber' is flagged as adult and 'tie' as mature. I personally can not see the logic of  someone at LL or a dev rating those words manually as such. It's all automated by software looking for partial words and letter combinations, hence this problem where normal words are being flagged (by the software). Long live the technology.

Brooke Linden, I dought that you will read this but I would like to toss a few things you way. Something to think about.

 

Key word filtering does not work and should NEVER be suggested as a solution to a problem like this. The person who suggests it should be FIRED!!!!

 

You see, back about 10 years ago AOL decided to do some key word filtering and to remove everything from there network that was not kid friendly. So they created a big list of BAD words, ran the filter, and deleted all the adult stuff. However, in there zeel to be "Kid Friendly" they added the word breast. I am sure they thought it was as bad as t*t, or b**b, what they did not think of was all the ways this word could be used. So away went the "Breast cancer support group" and the "Breast cancer survivors group".

Now to my second point, I have a teen daughter as well as a brother that is a teen. From talking to them I can say that your "Adult Verify" system is about as effective as a screen door on a submarine. It would seem that EVERY TEEN out there is well aware that your system will adult verify them provided they look up the information of a dead celebrity and enter it. Every teen I know that is on the grid has an adult verified account.

So, from my point of view most of what you are trying to do is a waist of time. It has been tried by many companies and no one has ever gotten it to work right. Most give up and go to simply asking "Are you over the age of 18" If they say yes, they get adult access. If it is a teen and they lied to you, it is not your fault, you asked. They also give the people the tools to self regulate. Then kick and ban the troublemakers who repeatedly violate the rules.

Suella Ember wrote:

 

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.

The C word for you equals Cheese young lady.

Automated censoring systems fail every single time, Scunthorpe and Clitheroe are just two examples. However, to be fair, this system is new, but if LL insist on automated systems being the be all and end all, rather than common sense, then we're in for some pain.

Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

Selling life preservers to Titanic victims is only profitable if you can convince them that they're sinking.

Rather than couch your response in some impenetrable yet mildly accusatory double-speak ... why don't you attempt some direct honesty and say what you really want to say? Wouldn't direct honesty serve a much better purpose?

ab Vanmoer wrote:

...

It seems that the word Rapa may be the culprit. Try removing it from the title, the listing description and the keywords.

Yes, I know its not logical but that is LL for you

OK no historical Easter Island simulations in SL to showcase the Rapa Nui Civilization then.

I assumed most any college graduate would know about the Rapa Nui. Or cable TV history channel watchers. Or even movie channel watchers. Pretty damn hard to not know about Rapa Nui IMHO. Especially since the Rapa Nui (the dark part of their history) are a textbook example of what is going to happen to humankind if we don't change our ways.

Mickey Vandeverre wrote:

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 

Interesting. When I took exception to the lame and clearly flawed release methods of the Marketplace, you took exception to me being blunt and honest and chastising LL. Now, when I see some of the same failures, but I ALSO see that they are rushing to fix the problems .. and I honestly point out the difference between this time and the prior .. again you take exception to me.

It's just me you hate, isn't it Mickey? It really doesn't matter what I say or what side I take, you'll take the other side.

Ahhh .. how delightful of you.

Rya Nitely wrote:

Darrius Gothly wrote:

 

Mickey Vandeverre wrote:

Curious....does this affect any of your listings?

ROFLMAO!! Make up your mind Mickey .. which am I? Someone that speaks for others and doesn't have a voice because I never talk about how it affects me ... or someone that is solely focused on my own needs and world and couldn't give a damn about others?

Someone who likes talking.

GUILTY! Especially when I have something of import to say.

Hi all,

Well, it wasn’t perfect, but it could have been much worse. Let’s focus on what we have now and how we can improve next time.

On the Linden side, here is what we’re doing:

• Currently working on a bug fix that incorrectly flags some items as moderate and adult. We plan to release this fix on Tuesday.
• Reading through the forum posts and filtering out comments that appear to be issues.
• Reviewing  the decisions, processes, testing, etc. done prior to the roll out to  identify actionable changes that can be made going forward.
• Monitoring  gross market value for the Marketplace as a whole and the listings that  were migrated to determine if we are seeing a change in behavior. At  this point we do not have enough data to make an assessment and will  review on Monday.
• Reviewing listings that you all have sent to us and modifying our filtering to fix any issues.
• Working on getting phase 2 rolled out (advanced search options) to make it easier to find listings marked as moderate and adult.

On the Merchant side, here is what you can to do help us help you:

• Keep going through your listings. There are no additional planned changes to the Listing Guidelines. Note that the logic is checked on save, in addition to during a weekly process, so just editing the listing will only help once we have updated our ratings logic. Which leads to the next bullet...
  
• If  you have a listing that is getting incorrectly flagged, add the URL to  PJIRA WEB-3583. This PJIRA will be looked at on Monday, and a new one  will be created for the next set of listings that need to be reviewed.
• Please do not post keyword lists on Second Life forums. We will have to remove those posts.
• Keep providing feedback. I’ll be reviewing and think that it makes sense to take a portion of the next office hour to discuss.

For  those who didn’t receive the email, please make sure you check your  spam folders. I did a quick check and your names were on the list we  submitted to send.

Okay, I’m off to review some filters to see if we can’t get some cleanup done before the weekend.

Brooke

PS--There  was a miscommunication earlier on where this blog post should live, and  it was moved into the private forum. Once I realized the mistake, I had  it pulled back into the public forum.

Thank you heaps for that feedback Brooke.

It will go a long way to helping people understand that you are listening and working your socks off to make things better. We all make mistakes (because we are human) - the important thing is to acknowledge them and then make them right

If you get chance I would love to hear your reasoning behind not providing a copy of the filtered words somewhere. I understand (and agree with) those words not being published here on the forums and that they will be removed. However, is there not some logic to having them somewhere which is restricted to only age verified accounts maybe? Although I do also appreciate that you may have concerns about doing this because it gives unscrupulous people the means to try to get around the filters. I can see both sides of the argument for publishing the keywords and keeping them private. I imagine the Lab could probably convince me why its a bad idea to publish them if you do think its a bad idea. I'd still be grateful if you can give me your reasoning to convince me though.

Because that would make sense.

You could go a long way by telling us the naughty words. Why can't we know them?

Plus, Brooke, you need to understand how many times we have had to redo our listings for LL's new site, that we never asked for. It's not hours of our time wasted, it is days and weeks and months. Creators like to create, not redo listings everytime LL changes something. We make money by creating.

the more important question is:

why can't we change the maturity ratings of the wrongly flagged items ourselves?! even if we completely remove all keywords and all text from the listing?! i have dozens of wrongly flagged items i cannot change anything about, do you want all those links in the jira??

I'm not sure if this means the filters will be running until next week or running continuously from now on, either case, Brooke's first point seems to indicate that we're not going to get any fixes until Tuesday of next week.  In retrospect, it was a monumentally bad idea to begin this process on a Thursday, as we now have a major disruption to a lot of Marketplace businesses that will run over the course of a weekend (prime time in SL).  Brooke, if you get the time to read this and care to elaborate, that would be great.

In my opinion, continuously running filters are the worst possible idea.  It will only encourage people to 'game' the system, there's already been a lot of talk about people posting known filters/ratings and changing the keywords they use to get around the filters anyways.  On day one, that's a fatal flaw.  Continuous filtering only wastes processing time, and makes things difficult for customers and legitimate businesses.

Brooke Linden wrote:

For  those who didn’t receive the email, please make sure you check your  spam folders. I did a quick check and your names were on the list we  submitted to send.

 

Then there is a flaw in your system. -  Every time I buy or sell L$ through LindeX Exchange I get email notifications, my offline IMs are delivered properly to  email, sales notifications from the marketplace are delivered, Jira notifications, etc etc. yet your email is not to be found in either my spam folder or in-box.

At one time the commerce team made use of the marketplace "Merchant Home" page which is otherwise blank for important status messages. Many of us got into the habit of checking this on a daily basis. Perhaps you could consider using it for the same purpose.

Brooke, you need to understand how many times we have had to redo our  listings for LL's new site, that we never asked for. It's not hours of  our time wasted, it is days and weeks and months.

 

Perfectly stated

^L^

Lasher Oh wrote:

Medhue Simoni wrote:

Brooke, you need to understand how many times we have had to redo our  listings for LL's new site, that we never asked for. It's not hours of  our time wasted, it is days and weeks and months.

Perfectly stated

^L^

That is the crux of the matter, so needed to be repeated more forcefully.

The SLM has cost merchants thousands and thousands of wasted hours for nothing, as it still doesn't yet have the functionality that xstreet had.

ab Vanmoer wrote:

 

Brooke Linden wrote:

For  those who didn’t receive the email, please make sure you check your  spam folders. I did a quick check and your names were on the list we  submitted to send.

 

Then there is a flaw in your system. -  Every time I buy or sell L$ through LindeX Exchange I get email notifications, my offline IMs are delivered properly to  email, sales notifications from the marketplace are delivered, Jira notifications, etc etc. yet your email is not to be found in either my spam folder or in-box.

 

Same

So...a perfectly normal rustic table, because I'd like people furnishing Gorean homes to be able to come across it, because it's appropriate decor for them, will have to search for 'rustic' to find it, based on the word 'Gorean' alone? That's, to put it quite simply, Bovine Stuff, and tantamount to assuming that a female with female cuddle should be tagged adult because it's appropriately keyworded with 'lesbian'.

To put it bluntly, they should NOT be relying on their little keyword parser to figure out what the rating is. They moved plenty of animations with such charming names as 'blowj**-4' in General, so the blasted thing doesn't work anyways - so trust us to tag things appropriately, and follow policy for reporting and forcing changes on those that people flag as being mistagged - while some of them may make mistakes, it's been a LOT less often than this piece of slipshod software. But when I tag something 'General' and the software changes it back to adult because of a keyword like 'Gorean', that's crap.

Hi Brooke, well, whatever email went out announcing this, I never got it. In any folder. And I do get my emails from the Marketplace and Lindex, etc.

However well intentioned this change is, it is a mess. I've redone my listings countless times trying to keep up with the changes that are being made to this Marketplace, and just when it seems to have settled down somewhat, there's yet another one to contend with. This one was poorly thought through and poorly executed and now is going to lead to another round of JIRAs when the first couple of hundred of them haven't been addressed.

The sooner this change is undone the better because it is costing the Merchants valuable time and sales. And when a Merchant loses sales so does LL.