Scrambled Listings: Has any merchant affected by this seen their listings fixed yet?

[WADE1 Jya]

Wow this bug has been going on a long time & Lindens still have not quashed it :catindifferent:

Has anyone seen their scrambled listings (wrong pic, wrong merchant name, or wrong product name) fixed yet? If so, was this solved after specifically contacting Lindens for individual help?

Wondering if it is a waste of my time to fill out JIRA with all the info about it or go explain it in a support case for my bugged listings? I know its affecting so many merchants and Lindens already aware of it so thinking my additional requests would possibly be quite redundant.

Thanks :cathappy:

[Spica Inventor]

Nope. My one is still not fixed yet. But it doesn't seem to be hurting anything, so im not worried about that particular problem.

[Zanara Zenovka]

It is hurting things - it's making our stores look like a dog's breakfast.

And it's ridiculous that we've had no update on progress yet.

[Spica Inventor]

hehe. A dogs breakfast? :-D

[Czari Zenovka]

When this issue was first discovered I had 3 mixed listings (wrong images for my product). I filed a ticket, which resulted in some inane responses from the "Scouts" followed by a request from Brooke Linden to file another ticket and Dakota Linden apologizing for the Scouts.  I'm not sure how soon after this those listings disappeared, but they did.  (Interestingly, even though the listings are not in my store, they can still be found in the MP via search.)

However, I now have 3 more borked listings. This time I apparently sell shoes.  I have not filed another ticket.

[WADE1 Jya]

Hmm... thanks for the feedback. I don't think I'll contact them about it then. Sure don't want the issue spreading to more items! I had heard that had been happening too...

LOL dog's breakfast aptly describes this mess :matte-motes-sick:

I know I can't touch it either or the problem spreads. It's like an infection.

Did you only have your top selling items affected? That's the really curious part of it... but that could be unlucky coincidence maybe only happen that way to my store :catsad:

I hate it most not because of the obvious (lost income) but I hate it most because no customers will ever think it was Lindens who messed it all up. It is my store. Now my store looks stupid & that just reflects poorly on me.

Clean up your mess Lindens... you're making us all look bad :catmad:

[KittyCat Rosebud]

I just got around to transfering my things to the new Direct Delivery system.

 

I am clicking through and it looks like all of my listings have Images from other merchents listings.

 

I'm trying to figure out where and how to report this wreck.  I lost my Hard Drive (it's not missing, it's just been damaged beyond repair), so it may be impossible for me to recreate the images that have been lost.  I was expecting more forums on here for some reason and a place for Bugs and Support.

[WADE1 Jya]

oh wow i'm so sorry to hear that happened to you. yikes.... i just knew DD would be a total disaster!

try searching google cache to see if you can recover your images, google remembers all if you know where to look. also if you look on merchant's name you see on your store & go to their store, maybe your images are there. just a guess...

hopefully LL hires (or rehires) some real brains quick to fix all these insane issues before it all amounts to rearranging deck chairs.

after reading your comment, wow.... just wow... only way i am abandoning my magic box now is if Lindens pry it out of my cold dead hands.

[Marcus Hancroft]

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WADE1 Jya wrote:

only way i am abandoning my magic box now is if Lindens pry it out of my cold dead hands.

---

 

Wade,

Not everybody has these problems.  I, for one, moved to Direct Delivery and have had no cross linked listings whatsoever, my outbox works perfectly and April has been the best month for sales for me ever!

From what I'm reading, it is those who were around for the migration from Xstreet to Marketplace that are effected most.  I feel terrible for everyone who does have these problems.  Luckily for me, I am not one of them. 

As far as your statement above:  In a couple of months, that's exactly what they're gonna do!  If you have an alt, you might try creating a new store and listing a few things with direct delivery.  That way, you'll know the process and will be ready when you will be forced to migrate over.

[Kampu Oyen]

>fixed yet?

I understand what's in it for you to get it fixed.

But what's in it for them?

[WADE1 Jya]

I do wonder what's in it for them.

When we see Lindens being let go as soon as they complete jobs, there might actually be a huge motivation there not to complete things & to work as slowly as possible. It's a common motivational problem in negative corporate working environments. I am a little scared that over the years the lab has turned into one of those places, full of frightened temp workers.

Truth is we don't know their motivations & it doesn't necessarily align with ours whatsoever. I always keep that in mind.

For all we know they don't even want an economy, aiming more for a giant ball of free content, free labor.

Anyone making significant money in SL might be seen as an imbalance in their system to be rapidly smoothed out & eliminated.

Not to say that I necessarily believe this, but who knows??? They sure don't communicate much so we can only theorize.

 

[Czari Zenovka]

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WADE1 Jya wrote:

... only way i am abandoning my magic box now is if Lindens pry it out of my cold dead hands.

---

You and me both.  Regardless of some people having a seamless transition, many of us who have and have not migrated to DD are having horrible issues.  I'm not blaming it on DD necessarily, but I am one who NEVER had any problems with Magic Boxes - no non-deliveries, etc.  In my opinion it's an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" issue.  At this point, many merchants' MP stores are now broken.

[Kenbro Utu]

Yes I have.  I had 2 bad listings to begin with.  My pictures, someone elses product name and creator name.  One day, maybe from this or just coincidence, my listings changed.  One I had inactivated was completely gone, the other changed to the correct information but wrong picture, and a new popped up with correct information but wrong picture.  I reactivated the one listing, and changed the pictures on the other two, and all has been completely back to normal in my store since.  

[Flea Yatsenko]

Marcus, you're a prime example with your sales increasing about my theory on magic boxes. I believe they were silently failing transactions without a trace. The only items that would work properly would be the first 5-15 items you placed in the box. Rezzing additional magic boxes wouldn't solve it either. I also thing that they had a problem with continually functioning over time. I kind of believe that simulators were rate limiting requests that the magic box was making, causing function calls in the LSL scripts to fall out of the event queue and silently fail. This is entirely possible and it's expected behavior from the simulator when a script makes too many calls and tries to do too many things. The simulator just starts to ignore what the script is doing after a while. The laggier a sim is, the more likely it is to give up.

If you want to look in my other thread and give me some information about sales data (like if you saw products sell consistently or if you saw big fluxes in popular products for no reason).

As for the listings getting fixed, LL has a huge mess on their hands. Somewhere there's a database and it has a listing ID number. There's another table in that database that says listing ID number gets this picture. The problem is that if you have listing 140344, the database should find the picture that goes with 140344 and put it with the listing.

But, the number that goes by your picture is probably corrupted. So, the database has your listing ID, and your picture with someone else's ID on it. It's pretty much impossible to fix and I'd be amazed if LL managed to fix the listing themselves. Because things are probably stored in a table that just has listing IDs and pictures, there's no way to tell a bad listing from a good one just by looking at them. There's literally no way to determine which listing has a bad picture and which one has a good one. And if it has a bad one, which one is the right one.

LL is quiet on this issue because they know it can't be fixed. They probably don't know how to say that the database has been severly compromised, they can't fall back on a backup because the errors showed up two years ago and everything that's happened since then would disappear, and that if your listings are broken, you're out of luck. I've worked with databases and web applications before, and an error like this doesn't get fixed. It gets swept under the rug as far as publicity goes and if you care about your customers you do what you can to make it up to them by giving them free things.

My advice to everyone who is going through this is to just make a new store on a new account with the same stuff. Copy paste your listing text. Don't even bother changing the store name, just upload the pictures and change the account it's linked up to. Tell your customers of the switch and let them know you're doing it to serve them better.

[Kampu Oyen]

None of the problems described here are problems with magic boxes.

They are all problems with parts of the system connected to magic boxes.

When everything connected to the boxes is working correctly, the boxes work correctly.

That's why it'sso urgent to get them disabled and deleted before it becomes only more evident that direct delivery is not an improvement.

[WADE1 Jya]

I guess nobody is getting stuff fixed. Mine sure isn't fixed either Kampu.

I do think its only going to get worse from here, and Lindens know it, which is why they are so quiet about it.

 

Why oh why did Lindens have to buy & then destroy Xstreet? It was such a nice place. They should have just let it be.

I feel it was somehow like the beating heart of SL, with the cool forums, friendly staff, & everything there worked perfectly :heart:

Then Lindens came along and ripped that heart out & ever since all facets of SL have been in steepening decline.

[Kampu Oyen]

>Why oh why did Lindens have to buy & then destroy Xstreet?

Because, as a medium of commerce, either XStreet or anything that functionally replaces it threatens LL's core revenues, which are land revenues, by allowing commerce to occur without merchants paying anything significnt for land use. 

 

[Zanara Zenovka]

Bump.

[WADE1 Jya]

Oh man this is bad.

I did not update or change any listing or change anything with my storefront since this issue began & now more of them are scrambled. So it seems the data corruption is ongoing. It's spreading, just as I first thought it would.

Looks like Lindens made one of the worst mistakes possible in data management & also failed to plan any sort of redundency systems. Either that... or they have had the misfortune that someone (probably a LL employee or one of their outsourced coders since it would most likely take an insider to do this) has purposefully inserted some malignant bad code, essentially a virus-like program that is now slowly eating away at the marketplace.

RIP marketplace :catindifferent:

 

[Marcus Hancroft]

I'll say this, everbody...if it were me and MY store had been a scrambled mess for this long, and knowing that newer stores are unaffected, I would have created an alt and an all new storefront long ago and moved all my products to the new location and pointed my customers to the new store.  Leave one item in the old store.  A notecard.  Set to sell for $0L.  With information and a link to the new store.

Yes, I know you would lose all your rankings, your reviews, and your relevencys doing that.  But I keep having one saying run through my mind as I'm reading all these crazy Marketplace issues...

"If it is to be, it is up to me."

10 two letter words to live by. 

Yes, that would be starting over.  But sometimes maybe it's GOOD to start from scratch! 

My store remains unaffected by all the issues and my sales have been fantastic, and older items that never sold once have started to sell as well! 

I still have to help customers find their purchases from time to time because they don't know about the Received Items folder, but I've not had any failed deliveries.

In the end, what I'm saying is that; if you want to continue selling your creations in Second Life and making a little bit of money, you have the means to do so.  Take charge of your own store.  Create a new one if you have to.  Realize that Linden Lab isn't going to be able to fix this mess (or fix it within the next month or two). 

Yes, starting over would be a P.I.T.A.!  But I bet I could get a new store up and running long before the Lab can get their database corruption repaired (if it even CAN be repaired, which I'm betting it can't be).

[WADE1 Jya]

Hmm... excellent advice for most normal real world things... but why I think that is bad idea here is because data corruption is still ongoing problem. Whenever this started I reviewed my store & found 4, now today there is 16 infected. What's to say I go through all that work you suggest & my new store gets infected too? What do I do then? Start over again?

No thanks, that could end up being like trying to swim up a waterfall, and I have much better things to do with my time :catvery-happy:

I'd suggest everyone to keep checking over your listings to make sure they stay intact. All you can do is report to JIRA if one day they are not. I finally had a chance to properly fill out the appropriate JIRAs today... for whatever that is worth. I think I know sort of what is going on & I agree that it may not be a fixable issue.

Reverting to the old Xstreet site might be the best idea now, unless they deleted everything there already.

Hope you continue to have the good luck that this hurricane doesn't blow over your way.

[Kenbro Utu]

I keep checking my listings at least every other day, sometimes more.  Everything is staying on track since I got my small mess straightened out almost 3 weeks ago. 

[WADE1 Jya]

Oh how did you fix it Kenbro?

You're the first person I've heard to successfully fix it.

[Marcus Hancroft]

The way I understand the stores and listings that are cross linked is that, since the problem began during the migration from Xstreet to the Marketplace and all the scrambled listings are in the 14xxxx range, any NEWLY created store would not have those issues, and it is only the stores that were migrated over from Xstreet and only the 14xxxx listings, right?

Or have new listings been discovered cross linked as well and I just haven't heard about them yet?

If those things are still correct, one should be able to create a new store and it not be effected.  Or so I'M thinking. 

At any rate, I would have tried that a couple of weeks ago had it been me.  I can only take so much rigamarole and then I gotta act.  Do something to fix it.  Heheh! 

[Kenbro Utu]

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/Scrambled-Listings-Has-any-merchant-affected-by-this-seen-their/m-p/1513329#M22499