Marketplace issues with my descriptions.. . a guessing game?

[Cimone Blackburn]

Have been utterly frustrated with the Marketplace the last few days, tryign to add something as simple as some Easter Baskets have turned into a nightmare.. for some reason the ads keep getting banned for desc. text.. so I go through it a hundred times.. try to find duplicate words of the word Easter that might be the cause..

nothing works until I delete the WHOLE description..   the banned text depends on how things are worded.. for instance you can say it worded one way, but not the other, which I might add will be even more confusing to those whose English is not their first language.. anyways.. now with the desc. deleted its now telling me there is something wrong with the words in the key words box.  

Ummmmm...

Isnt that where we are ALLOWED to list the words like easter chocolates eggs toys etc.?

Ive been using marketplace forever for my stuff.. and never once had an issue as ridiculous as this.. I mean really come on!  It's an easter basket!!!  You'd think I would run into issues with more of my xxx stuff. :S

MY QUESTION TO LINDENS:  Since your eager to tell me in a red banner that there is a ban and the ad wont be listed, could you also at least show the user WHERE the error is?  if its words that have been searched & recognized,  than surely you can somehow HIGHLIGHT them in the ad for me so I can delete them?  this guesing game is super frustrating!!        TELL THE MERCHANT WHERE THE ERROR IS PLEASE!!

.. & thank you :)

- Cimone Blackburn

P.S.  please fix the rating system on the marketplace to how it was back in the day and do us all a favour ;)

[Josh Susanto]

>Isnt that where we are ALLOWED to list the words like easter chocolates eggs toys etc.?

That would seem to explain the timing of this bork, wouldn't it?

You have to bork Easter a little bit in advance because people tend to spend a while decorating for it and such. 

Valentines Day is different because almost all of the sales to be put off for another whole G##d###ed year by the bork (thus wasting listing enhancement investments) are gift sales, and will thus be ordered on the same day on which they are to be received by the final recipient. 

[Ilyra Chardin]

To have a Master Plan and execute it, you have to be extremely organized.  Nuff said?

As for the descriptions and keywords, there was a post on this thread over a month go entitled "I Go Crazy - Why is my Aquarium Marked Adult."  

Whatever logic and rules went into governing what items fall into general, mature and adult - they're a mystery to merchants.  There should be detailed explanations, but there aren't (cause...um...that requires organization.)

I would look through your description and check to see if you haven't inadvertently referenced a real world brand name of some sort.  Other than that, I don't have any suggestions.  There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason for how things are categorized and / or banned.

[Cimone Blackburn]

thanx for the reply guys!  I just ended up deleteing all the key words and most of my description.. they really outta fix it so they can at least tell the merchant (or better yet show) exactly where the problem lies... lets keep hoping for an update on this as well as ratings *keeps her fingers crossed*

[Paladin Pinion]

I had a similar thing happen in another system (not SL) and the rationale for not telling users the actual error was that if they made a list of banned words known, people could work around it. Also, the list was constantly being modified, so a published list would be out of date immediately.

I was not satisfied with the explanation, but it might be what's happening in the market.

[Ilyra Chardin]

I went back and read that old thread.  The issue was that starting a sentence with the word "Some," triggered an adult listing.  

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/I-go-crazy-why-is-my-aquarium-marked-quot-adult-quot/td-p/1395637

 

It doesn't appear that there is any real logic to this and, even if there are clear business rules, it's not clear how the code applies them.  

Never underestimate the ability to take a simple process and make it extraordinarily complex.  See Rube Goldberg.

 

[Josh Susanto]

>Whatever logic and rules went into governing what items fall into general, mature and adult - they're a mystery to merchants.

The logic is NO logic, and it's working GREAT.

[Anaiya Arnold]

I also do not buy that rational.

If they do not tell us how it's supposed to work, and essentially leave it as a "black box" then it's much easier to sweep the borkage under the carpet. 

"No that's intended behaviour and a feature, not a bug" works better when you've not told anyone how something is supposed to function.

[Josh Susanto]

Unless the real point is to both produce a bug and do such a bad job of denying it that people eventually just get disgusted and stop using the whole website... presumably returning to in-world commerce and ushering a new era of high demand for commercial land rentals.

Not everyone would have to be in on this for it to work.

In fact, one person in the right position might be able to get all the necessary cooperation one way or another. 

[UncommonTruth]

That is a diabolically genius plan... So that can't be it.

[Josh Susanto]

>That is a diabolically genius plan... So that can't be it.

It only requires 1 genius. The other people could all be idiots.

Really, it's time that they all realized they're being played for idiots anyway.

[Paladin Pinion]

---

Ilyra Chardin wrote:

The issue was that starting a sentence with the word "Some," triggered an adult listing.  

 

---

"Some"? "Some"??? Must a new kind of street slang I haven't heard of yet, so I looked it up on Google and the first hit is:

 

SOME (So Others Might Eat)

www.some.org/

SOME has been serving the homeless and poor in Washington, DC for 40 years.

 

Aha! Eat, get it? It all falls into place now...astounding logic, this.

[hoohaa Anaconda]

If you are writing your description in another application like Microsoft word or Open office. When you copy and paste the text into the marketplace it can also copy some hidden characters and the marketplace text felids don’t like them. Some times these characters get flagged them as adult words.

A simple trick that helps me alot is to open up notepad or a similar basic text editor on your computer and paste your text into there first and re-copy and paste it into the marketplace. This reformats the text and removes any unwanted characters. Then your listing should save with out any problems.

[Darrius Gothly]

Cimone, there is a logical way to find out what words are triggering the ban. It goes like this:

1. Open Notepad (or some other plain text editor) and copy your entire Extended Description and all the keywords into a new document.

2. In the listing, delete the entire Extended Description and Keywords.

3. Copy the first half of the Description into the listing, just the first half only then try and save it. If it saves then the banned words are not in that half. Copy that half to a new document (this text is okay to use, so keep it safe).

4. If the listing gets banned, delete the last half of what's in the Description and try to save it again. Keep deleting the last half until you can finally save it. Whatever text you deleted last contains a banned word.

5. Put the first half of the Extended Description back into the listing then delete the section that contained the banned word (from step 4). Try and save it. If it saves then the section you left out contains the only banned word.

6. Delete the entire Extended Description then put the last half of the Description into the listing and try to save it.

7. Repeat the process of delete the last half, save, etc. until again you can save it okay. That tells you which words if any are banned in the second half of the full Extended Description.

 

By doing this in "halves", you can quickly find the part of the description that contains banned words. Usually things you wouldn't think would cause a problem .. in fact DO cause a problem. One of the most insane "words" is anything that begins with "XX". Sometimes folks use X's as divider lines, so this can really trip them up.

At one point in time there was an extensive list of banned words posted on the Forums. However LL took that list down and they insist on hiding, removing or deleting any listing they find that tries to build a "banned words" list. Their stated reason is that if people know which words are banned, they will find creative ways to write the word that skirts the rules. Their use of a banned word list also causes problems when banned slang is also a valid and very innocent word in another context.

Best of luck finding the word or words that are causing your listings to get "The Red Letter of Shame". If you do succeed in finding it, don't post the offending word here, it may get your post or the whole thread deleted.