More Stealthy Updates to the Marketplace

[Darrius Gothly]

In keeping with their penchant for adding code to the Marketplace and then not telling anyone .. the Marketplace Dev Team has been busted again! I just got done with a rather interesting conversation with a good friend of mine. He was in the process of updating several of his products that all have similar names but have varying text in the title of each. What he spotted was a bug in the Marketplace whereby it believes all of the products he uploaded were in fact the SAME THING! Even though each folder had a difference in the middle of the name and NOT on the end (as multiple copies of the same item will have when dropped into the Contents tab of an object). Nevertheless the Marketplace pronounced them all the same and dang near forced him to do them one at a time.

Here's some screenshots he gave me. First off the "Notice" on the Manage Listings page declaring all four items as being the same:

Notice how it has declared four items as being the same .. i.e.: "multiple items with the same name." Now check out the REAL names:

As you can plainly see the first difference in each is way before even the middle of the name. In fact it appears in the 11th character when each name is more than 30 characters long.

When you put multiples of the same named item into the Contents tab of an Object, each one is given an additional numeric ending ... Note "ending" .. not middle. So that if you drop four copies of "Some Thing" into the contents tab, you get:

• Some Thing
• Some Thing 1
• Some Thing 2
• Some Thing 3

That's an easy pattern to spot and use to decide that multiple items are in fact the same name. But did they follow this SIMPLE pattern? Oh heck no!

All you folks waiting for Limited Quantity items to be supported by Direct Delivery .. brace for impact. The rest of us? I suggest you report to your muster stations and don your life preservers soon.

Oh .. and btw .. this change in the Marketplace is completely without notice, indication or explanation. YAY for Communication!

*grumble-gripe-crab*

[Pamela Galli]

YOu know it's like there is trainwreck sitting there and the Commerce Team keeps sending more and more trains slamming into it. 

I have no more sympathy for them. It's inexcusable.

[Deja Letov]

I'm not so sure this is new though. This same thing happened to me months ago when I uploaded a subscription based product that was named the same except with months. What a pain in the keister though!

[phaedra Exonar]

I noticed that beside all the variations being in the middle of the names, the variations are all so numbers, so may be what ever change was made, is not reading numbers now ?

[Darrius Gothly]

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Deja Letov wrote:

I'm not so sure this is new though. This same thing happened to me months ago when I uploaded a subscription based product that was named the same except with months. What a pain in the keister though!

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Interesting. I'll have to hunt down Glom and ask when his last update was, but I think it was a few months ago. As for the pain factor .. I would think so. Tack on the confusion factor (and from my experience, Glom is a pretty sharp guy but it bent him for a bit) and you've added some needless confusion.

If it's not new though .. SHAME on them for not realizing how screwed up this is. I've got to believe it's more of their inept "Regular Expression" skills showing. They've made the same type of errors when writing pattern matching regexes for the word filter here on the forums, the word filter on the Marketplace and in their handling of in-world search too.

I think someone .. or a bunch of someone's .. needs to go back to *nix school and relearn how Regular Expressions work.

[Deja Letov]

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Darrius Gothly wrote:

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Deja Letov wrote:

I'm not so sure this is new though. This same thing happened to me months ago when I uploaded a subscription based product that was named the same except with months. What a pain in the keister though!

---

Interesting. I'll have to hunt down Glom and ask when his last update was, but I think it was a few months ago. As for the pain factor .. I would think so. Tack on the confusion factor (and from my experience, Glom is a pretty sharp guy but it bent him for a bit) and you've added some needless confusion.

If it's not new though .. SHAME on them for not realizing how screwed up this is. I've got to believe it's more of their inept "Regular Expression" skills showing. They've made the same type of errors when writing pattern matching regexes for the word filter here on the forums, the word filter on the Marketplace and in their handling of in-world search too.

I think someone .. or a bunch of someone's .. needs to go back to *nix school and relearn how Regular Expressions work.

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If it helps any...it happened to me in the very beginning of July. It was on the initial upload, not an edit.

 

[Darrius Gothly]

To wit:

[2012/10/10 11:07:56] (Glom): End of May I think. I didn't check the dates. Does it matter?
[2012/10/10 11:08:13] Darrius Gothly: Not terribly. Okies .. thank you.

So before your first notice .. by a month or more. Anyone remember when Josh last said he started seeing odd things? LOL

(And yeah, he said I could post the chat. Nyah nyah!)