As SLMP Burns - LL Emperors Cower in Silence?

[Toysoldier Thor]

So this is a general comment and question moreso directed to Rodvik, LL Senior Management, and the LL Commerce Team as their DD deployment continues to be riddled with serious and sporadic problems that are calling into question the overall health, stability, and trustworthiness of the entire SL Marketplace.

Since DD's deployment, many of the problems in MP related to DD have not been resolved, new reports of corrupted listings keep showing up in the forums, and now the most serious and scary issue of LL's new DD executing sales transactions where the product is delivered and LL has actually collected the $ from the sale and all without the Merchants being aware their product was given away to the customer by LL.

THIS IS SERIOUS LL !  This latest problem goes to the heart of LL's MP not being a trustworthy ecommerce system.  The fact that LL is aware of the problem and not even communicating anything nor taking any known action is akin to theft.

So LL.... as Rome burns (aka MP is on flames in many places thanks to your poorly architected and poorly tested DD deployment) when will you feel it appropriate to provide the Merchants that your MP system is screwing some public announcement of what is going?  When will you provide us some details of how you will stop these serious flaws or at least put in a Delivery Notification into the DD so that we can more easily detect when MP has executed a sale with the merchant being paid?  Will LL push back the deadline for MB retirement until DD functionality has been proven to be 100%

 

THE MERCHANTS & CUSTOMERS OF MARKETPLACE DESERVE TO BE TREATED BETTER THAN THIS!

 

At least have the decency to communicating to your Merchants if you can't solve it.  We at least deserve that.

[Kampu Oyen]

>if you can't solve it. 

They still haven't tried creating an inventory folder inside which a magic box will behave as if rezzed on Linden Land.

So it's a bit soon to say they can't solve it.

Maybe it would be more accurate to say they don't even want to try?

[WADE1 Jya]

maybe upper management is too busy sewing their golden parachutes to do anythng else?

[Tamara Artis]

Maybe too many people are focusing on their MP stores, and not inworld shops? Maybe its time to move?, buy all those dead parcels and start to focus on inworld business? I'm not a merchant... just saying:) If MP stays as it is, people will have no choice then to give it up....

[Rival Destiny]

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Toysoldier Thor wrote:

So this is a general comment and question moreso directed to Rodvik, LL Senior Management, and the LL Commerce Team as their DD deployment continues to be riddled with serious and sporadic problems that are calling into question the overall health, stability, and trustworthiness of the entire SL Marketplace.

Since DD's deployment, many of the problems in MP related to DD have not been resolved, new reports of corrupted listings keep showing up in the forums,

and now the most serious and scary issue of LL's new DD executing sales transactions where the product is delivered and LL has actually collected the $ from the sale and all without the Merchants being aware their product was given away to the customer by LL.

THIS IS SERIOUS LL !  This latest problem goes to the heart of LL's MP not being a trustworthy ecommerce system.  The fact that LL is aware of the problem and not even communicating anything nor taking any known action is akin to theft.

So LL.... as Rome burns (aka MP is on flames in many places thanks to your poorly architected and poorly tested DD deployment) when will you feel it appropriate to provide the Merchants that your MP system is screwing some public announcement of what is going?  When will you provide us some details of how you will stop these serious flaws or at least put in a Delivery Notification into the DD so that we can more easily detect when MP has executed a sale with the merchant being paid?  Will LL push back the deadline for MB retirement until DD functionality has been proven to be 100%

 

THE MERCHANTS & CUSTOMERS OF MARKETPLACE DESERVE TO BE TREATED BETTER THAN THIS!

 

At least have the decency to communicating to your Merchants if you can't solve it.  We at least deserve that.

---

How do we find out if this has occured on our MP stores?  And just to be clear ... you mean the product is delivered to the customer and LL collects their % (or the price of the item?) and the merchant receives no $$??

And on another note, I see quite a few 'delivery partially failed' in my store sales records.  Now these notes are on individual products.  How can the delivery of a single product partially fail?  Does this mean the customer didn't recieve the goods and the goods are stuck in limbo somewhere???

 

[Toysoldier Thor]

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Rival Destiny wrote:

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Toysoldier Thor wrote:

So this is a general comment and question moreso directed to Rodvik, LL Senior Management, and the LL Commerce Team as their DD deployment continues to be riddled with serious and sporadic problems that are calling into question the overall health, stability, and trustworthiness of the entire SL Marketplace.

Since DD's deployment, many of the problems in MP related to DD have not been resolved, new reports of corrupted listings keep showing up in the forums,

and now the most serious and scary issue of LL's new DD executing sales transactions where the product is delivered and LL has actually collected the $ from the sale and all without the Merchants being aware their product was given away to the customer by LL.

THIS IS SERIOUS LL !  This latest problem goes to the heart of LL's MP not being a trustworthy ecommerce system.  The fact that LL is aware of the problem and not even communicating anything nor taking any known action is akin to theft.

So LL.... as Rome burns (aka MP is on flames in many places thanks to your poorly architected and poorly tested DD deployment) when will you feel it appropriate to provide the Merchants that your MP system is screwing some public announcement of what is going?  When will you provide us some details of how you will stop these serious flaws or at least put in a Delivery Notification into the DD so that we can more easily detect when MP has executed a sale with the merchant being paid?  Will LL push back the deadline for MB retirement until DD functionality has been proven to be 100%

 

THE MERCHANTS & CUSTOMERS OF MARKETPLACE DESERVE TO BE TREATED BETTER THAN THIS!

 

At least have the decency to communicating to your Merchants if you can't solve it.  We at least deserve that.

---

How do we find out if this has occured on our MP stores?  And just to be clear ... you mean the product is delivered to the customer and LL collects their % (or the price of the item?) and the merchant receives no $$??

And on another note, I see quite a few 'delivery partially failed' in my store sales records.  Now these notes are on individual products.  How can the delivery of a single product partially fail?  Does this mean the customer didn't recieve the goods and the goods are stuck in limbo somewhere???

 

---

Not exactly Rival.... what has been noticed by some merchants these past few days is that the customer makes a purchase on MP, they receive the product from the Merchant's store in MP, LL collects the entire price of the item, but LL does not give any of the purchase price to the merchant nor is the Merchant even aware the transaction has taken place.

The only reason it has been detected is because some merchants have had customers go to them about a purchase that the merchant did not have recorded as a sale, OR some merchants have a Delivery Script in their MP items that emails them when the customer rezzed the item after purchase, or a friend was the customer and the transaction was mentioned and the merchant confirmed that there was no sale reported to them nor any $ from the sale provided to them from LL's MP.

 

[Rival Destiny]

OK so ... why would LL be collecting the entire price instead of just their percentage??? 

Is MP coded in such a way that LL receives the full price then delegates the price less their % to the merchant?  Because if this is what they are doing, IMO it's bass ackwards. 

[Kampu Oyen]

>Maybe too many people are focusing on their MP stores, and not inworld shops? Maybe its time to move?, buy all those dead parcels and start to focus on inworld business? I'm not a merchant... just saying**Only uploaded images may be used in postings**://secondlife.i.lithium.com/i/smilies/16x16_smiley-happy.gif" border="0" alt=":smileyhappy:" title="Smiley Happy" /> If MP stays as it is, people will have no choice then to give it up....

I'm pretty sure that has been the plan all along.

Just shutting down Xstreet and telling people to go back to doing business in-world could have been an even bigger disaster than providing a comparable alternative and then gradually crippling its utility.

I'm not playin' that game, though.

If the grid is too big, the grid is too big.

Messing with merchants' minds every day for a couple of years is not a proper solution.

[Flea Yatsenko]

From what I have seen, LL does not keep the money. Basically, here's what happens.

 

• A user tries to purchase an item.

• The item (I'm staying agnostic on the method of delivery, it seems like both can be affected by this) then delivers the item, but it fails to contact the SLMP website to let it know that the product was delivered.

• The website never hears from the Magic Box or DD, so it assumes the transaction has timed out and is partially failed.

• The website assumes the delivery has not gone through after a few hours, and refunds the customer their money from the intermediary account. This is the key factor because not a lot of customers are going to speak out and say they got your product for free. As a merchant, you only see a delivery partially failed that you didn't get paid for. This is what I am talking about when I say Magic Boxes fail without the user knowing (at least one of the ways). I am also pretty sure that Magic Boxes and the website fail to communicate before a transaction is even recorded for the merchant (think of it as a time when someone goes to purchase an item, they click on the purchase button and the website times out and they get a "connection to server was reset" message or something).

I am aware that a lot of you question my thinking behind this, but I've not only seen proof that this is happening, but I've seen comments made by a customer who did purchase something and got it for free. It is not my evidence and it is not my customer so I am not going into details out of respect for the person who was brave enough to tell a merchant they got something for free and the merchant who has delivered proof that it happens. My explanation for what happens with Magic Boxes doing this makes absolutely perfect sense from a scripting and server standpoint, but no one knows enough about DD to make any hypothesis about it. How DD works is still a very big black box and no merchants have any clue about it.

From the evidence I have seen, LL does not keep your L$, but they still give your product away for free which is just as bad. It is extremely damaging and it will only keep high quality modelers and programmers away and on sites like TurboSquid instead and it will instead encourage a grid full of recolored templates and in world builds. Of course, this doesn't mean they aren't keeping your money, I just haven't seen any proof of it yet.

Obviously, the idea behind DD is to remove these communications limits that an LSL script creates. However, it seems like LL has not fixed these issues with DD as the problem is much deeper than Magic Boxes or Direct Delivery and instead depends on the servers and software that help all of the parts of Second Life communicate with each other.

From what Dakota and Brooke have said, they've known about these issues for a while. Instead of admitting them, they have tried to sneak in a fix with a new feature. I don't think they expected anyone to notice but it sure seems like people are starting to figure it out.

I don't know what more you guys want as proof that Magic Boxes are unreliable. DD is a step in the right direction but everything is so broken at this point that LL has taken one step forward and three steps back.

[Kampu Oyen]

You still haven't explained in what way the boxes "fail".

If the SLM isn't communicating properly with a box because the region is borked, that's a region problem, not a box problem, and the SLM should be able to instead communicate with a duplicate box on an unborked sim.

That is, any such problem that can't be solved by putting boxes on multiple sims is a Marketplace problem, and we might as well expect it to also affect DD (which- hey, wow - it apparently does).

So if you don't like the performance you're getting out of your box, you at least have some kind of alternative by moving it to a different sim.

But if you're having what appears to be the same problem with DD, what's your alternative?

How is having fewer alternatives an improvement?

If DD worked as well as it was supposed to, it would outperform boxes attached to avatars while on Linden land.

It doesn't.

That's why I say it's not an improvement, even if it does replace the problem of borked sims with a bunch of newer and more interesting problems.

I think we can agree, though, that the box/DD question is sort of a moot point as long as the Marketplace, itself, is dysfunctional when connected to either thing.

Meanwhile, I'm not suggesting people shouldn't be allowed to use DD if they really want to.

All I'm suggesting is that the urgency in eliminating the boxes as a continuing alternative to DD is probably related to the fact that DD neither is, not was intended to be an improvement; that it was intended to be what is now, and what it even more will be when the boxes get shut off; a mandatory service downgrade calculated to persuade you to start taking your business in-world where you will have to pay for land.

[Zanara Zenovka]

Premium members just got a survey for feedback re "Wilderness Areas".

I filled mine with MP complaints. Maybe others might like to too.

Arse-about yes, but hey it's a communication channel - don't seem to have many of those atm.

http://secondlife.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_023LkuhkI9Dk2hu

[Flea Yatsenko]

Well, the boxes would drop events when it's waiting 20 seconds after making an llEmail request. Emails wouldn't get sent, emails wouldn't get received. etc. If you've ever dealt with scripting and getting a website to communicate with an in world object and vice versa, you know that most of the LSL tools are extremely unreliable and will randomly give CAP errors or connection errors.

But just because the boxes are broken does not mean that it's the only thing that is broken. I'm only saying I've found one problem out of a very, very long list. The biggest problem with magic boxes is that there is no reliable way to have in world objects communicate with websites and vice versa.

Given my sales since April 30ths, DD and marketplace are far from perfect and right now I am far from happy with how things are going. But I am trying to find concrete examples of what is broken and have evidence to support it. Getting angry and mad  at LL isn't going to make anything better given the way that LL behaves. It's rather clear that they are either understaffed and can't deal with our concerns or they don't care.

[Toysoldier Thor]

Flea, you say in your posting that you dont think that LL is taking or keeping the money, but yo uhave read the same postings from your fellow merchants that have 100% proof that an MP customer received the merchants item and they PAID LL for purchase.  So if the customer paid LL MP the full price for the item they received (their money is gone from their account) and the merchant not only did not receive the $ but wasnt even aware of the transaction.... who do you think has the $ that LL took?

Did the $ float away to the ether?  The money is in the control of LL still.  They must have it.

As fro your proof that MB's have experienced this same problem.... post all your proof to the JIRA that was just created and shows 100% prrof that the merchant WAS NOT PAID for the item a customer received and paid for.  If your proof is in the hands of a friend merchant... get them to post this.  Lets see this evidence that a MB has the same problem.

As for Brooke and Dakota actually chiming on on this issue..... WHERE WHEN?  How did I miss them actually speaking to us about any issue - much less this one?  Provide me the URL to where Brooke & Dakota stated that LL MP has been stealing $ from hidden sales that kept the merchant out of the loop of the transaction?

I would love to read that Brooke has been aware of LL's MP sales transactions not paying the merchant for sales for quite some time.  And all this time we were not aware of this and LL has not done anything to address this ASAP???

WOW!

[Toysoldier Thor]

As for shooting down MB's stability and reliability.... I have been using the SAME MB since 2008... and other than the times with LL has screwed up the over all MP or XSTREET, my MB has been nearly flawless all these years.

I have had my MB on a laggy mainland sim for 2 years and before that under a tree at a very busy rock club sim.  You can knock MB all you want but you will never convince me that DD will be any better than the near perfect service that MB has offered me so far in addition to the better reporting from MB (i.e. delivery notices) and easier administration of items in MP from a MB vs all I have seen with DD so far.

Its all a moot point though... LL will wipe MB off the face of SL soon and we will all soon be forced to live with the poorly architected and deployed and tested DD and all that this new system has done to corrupt MP and make MP and untrust place for merchants to sell their products.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

^^ This

Other than a a failed delivery once in a while, and mainly after LL took over MP,  I've never had issues with MB's.  As far as I'm concerned it has been a case of trying to fix something that was not broken and then pushing out the fix way to early before it was properly tested and debugged.

I find it particularly disturbing that support tickets have been filed with proof of specific times that product was delivered and money collected without merchants being paid and those tickets are languishing in the dust.  To my knowledge no one has been paid yet..  Further if product was delivered and not paid for, then the customer should be given the choice of being  charged (after all they did buy the item), or the item should be removed from their inventory.

If this is some type of plan to force more inworld stores is a poorly thought out one.  First inworld search is serously borked.  It is rare that I can find a place there even if I type in the exact name, let alone specific items I'm interested in buying. 

Second, from a consumer point of view, I wouldn't be buying near as much as i do now from the MP, probably way less than half.  I don't find shopping entertaining and it just takes to long TP'ing from one shop to another and waiting for everything to rez then trying to find a specific thing in disorganized stores.  I have other things to do in SL that are way more important to me than spending time shopping

[PeachJubilee]

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Flea Yatsenko wrote:

From what I have seen, LL does not keep the money. Basically, here's what happens.

 

• A user tries to purchase an item.

• The item (I'm staying agnostic on the method of delivery, it seems like both can be affected by this) then delivers the item, but it fails to contact the SLMP website to let it know that the product was delivered.

• The website never hears from the Magic Box or DD, so it assumes the transaction has timed out and is partially failed.

• The website assumes the delivery has not gone through after a few hours, and refunds the customer their money from the intermediary account. This is the key factor because not a lot of customers are going to speak out and say they got your product for free. As a merchant, you only see a delivery partially failed that you didn't get paid for. This is what I am talking about when I say Magic Boxes fail without the user knowing (at least one of the ways).

---

 When the MB delivers a product it sends two messages.  One to the marketplace and one to the merchant.  If the marketplace does not get or fails to process its message, the merchant still knows their box sent something, who it was sent to, and what was sent.

 

[Czari Zenovka]

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Toysoldier Thor wrote:

As for shooting down MB's stability and reliability.... I have been using the SAME MB since 2008... and other than the times with LL has screwed up the over all MP or XSTREET, my MB has been nearly flawless all these years.

I have had my MB on a laggy mainland sim for 2 years and before that under a tree at a very busy rock club sim.  You can knock MB all you want but you will never convince me that DD will be any better than the near perfect service that MB has offered me so far in addition to the better reporting from MB (i.e. delivery notices) and easier administration of items in MP from a MB vs all I have seen with DD so far.

 

---

Same experience with my MB here as well, Toy - also since 2008.   It has been in several of my homes on a mainland sim, in tiny satellite locations within large, laggy malls, and most recently in my shop on a busy estate sim.  Most of the time I had two boxes rezzed - wherever I lived and wherever my inworld shop was but sometimes I was in transition and either didn't have a home or shop.  Wherever I put my MB, I still got sales.

[WADE1 Jya]

I think I know what happens next.

First we all slowly realize MP has become irreparably damaged, untrustworthy & hazardous.

Next some merchants & shoppers alike (for different reasons) begin to apply pressure on Lindens to shut MP down.

Then Lindens graciously 'comply' with these demands. After all its what residents want.

Finally SL returns to be as it was long before --- an inworld-only shopping experience.

I don't see another very likely outcome.

[Lasher Oh]

LOL - Snap! - I took the the same opportunity to get some home truths off my ches. It feels good to vent from time time.

 

^L^

[Lasher Oh]

> As for Brooke and Dakota actually chiming on on this issue..... WHERE WHEN?

Maybe at all those exclusive by invite only secret merchants meetings that CLT hold from time to time - we'll never know unless we suddenly find ourselves on the 'teachers pet' list

^L^

[WADE1 Jya]

Since everyones in the dark, might as well share this tiny bit of info from my support ticket with Dakota:

I was correct to recognise this issue for what it is -- data corruption is what we see happening.

I'd asked if fixing images (the ones I found I was able to edit) was safe (I was scared of causing error cascades) ---:

"Fixing the image was the recommendation from the Marketplace Dev Team themselves while they worked to locate the cause of the corruption and address the corrupted data on the product listings.

They haven't released any information to Customer Support regarding the exact cause of the corruption, nor have they provided a projected resolution/fix date yet.

Hopefully they will have information to release soon and when they do, the Jira Tickets should be updated, and based on past notifications, Brooke has posted to the Merchant Forum when there is an update to the existing Jira Tickets that the Marketplace Dev Team is working on."

Based on what she says, Dakota in Customer Support is as in the dark as we are, perhaps Brooke knows nothing yet too. Considering possible motivations for 'Marketplace Dev Team' to not share any info, I see it as a bad sign they can not share info after all this time! I predict no fix will ever be found, because I know basics of what's involved here.

I say marketplace is dead & its only a matter of time before Lindens are forced to admit it.

I predict they quietly shut it down in near future.

Marketplace would have been fixed within same day/hour if they had appropriate safeguards/methodology in place. Fairly obvious they didn't have anything in place to protect against this, so I can infer all original data lost here is most likely just gone, overwritten (and thus lost forever) ,replaced with the scrambled nonsense we now see everywhere.

[Sassy Romano]

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Rival Destiny wrote:

OK so ... why would LL be collecting the entire price instead of just their percentage??? 

Is MP coded in such a way that LL receives the full price then delegates the price less their % to the merchant?  Because if this is what they are doing, IMO it's bass ackwards. 

---

This is exactly what it does.  You pay "Commerce Linden" and then Commerce Linden pays out.

With Direct Delivery, this is dysfunctional and unnecessary architecture.  I wrote this up in https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/web-4508 which was closed as "Expected Behaviour".  

I take it from this that dysfuncational is expected and as architected.  Now I know officially, i'm happy to accept it for what it is!

[Sassy Romano]

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Flea Yatsenko wrote:

Well, the boxes would drop events when it's waiting 20 seconds after making an llEmail request. Emails wouldn't get sent, emails wouldn't get received. etc. If you've ever dealt with scripting and getting a website to communicate with an in world object and vice versa, you know that most of the LSL tools are extremely unreliable and will randomly give CAP errors or connection errors.

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Magic Boxes use XML-RPC, not llEmail.

[Spica Inventor]

I am now convinced that Flea Yatsenko is an undercover LL agent here to spread propaganda. ;-)

 

Flea could we hire you as a double agent so we could get some much needed insider info from LL? hehe ;-)

[Toysoldier Thor]

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Spica Inventor wrote:

I am now convinced that Flea Yatsenko is an undercover LL agent here to spread propaganda. ;-)

 

Flea could we hire you as a double agent so we could get some much needed insider info from LL? ;-)

---

In SL ... no one ever knows who is speaking behind the covers as Alts... but I am not convinced Flea is a member of the Commerce Team.  I would have expected more passion behind the convictions if Flea was an Alt of LL.

I just think Flea's view of what is going on is not of a perspective that properly catches the current situation and Flea is making unproven assumptions and escalating them to FACT status.  As such, with these perceived FACTS in mind... the conclusions being made would be rational.

   A step back to "prove the assumptions are facts" needs to happen first.