Inconsistent Maturity Rating Enforcement

[Ilyra Chardin]

Yes, I’m still on this topic because LL is facilitating harassment by allowing individuals to single out competitors or anyone who irritates them with a simple flag.  I ran a search just now that showed only general audience products with the keyword search of bar (which yielded over 1900 pages of items,) and tavern (which yielded over 1300 pages of items.)

Commerce Team, I urge you to find a way to make this fair and stop providing a platform for people to harass others.  It should be ALL or NOTHING.

*looks up and blows a stray hair out of her eyes before saying…*

That’s my two cents (L$5)

[Drake1 Nightfire]

i get an automatic adult rating on a skirt because it comes in XXS.... not sure why.

[Fabiano Viper]

This system is just a joke. i got a Cap flagged yesterday  as Adult because it had the number 420...  Which is just that, A Number.

[Tari Landar]

Their whole secret list of naughty words has been a huge thorn since they took over xstreet. It's extremely annoying.

I agree wholeheartedly they need a better system. I also believe that while they encourage us to flag things-and they've done that a lot-they really need to pay closer attention to WHAT is being flagged, and why. Sometimes, I think they do. I only think that because there have been things I know were flagged, that were removed. I don't normally flag other people's stuff. It's actually quite rare. On the listings I have flagged (2), it's been because of something pretty serious.

I think now, though, a lot of things that get flagged never really get looked at by the person removing them. I know what the commerce team has said about it, I just don't believe them. They have said they always look at the reports and determine if something should be removed. I just don't believe they actually do in many cases. I think they either skim or just click a pretty little remove option without checking. I'm sure it's not the case for all flagged listings, but I do believe it happens with most these days. It never used to be, ok maybe never is a bad word choice, but it wasn't as bad as it is now. I don't believe they pulled things as often as they do now. I think they paid much more attention at one time.

There are always going to be trigger happy people that flag for no reason, or just to be annoying. Which is why we need people that will actually check those reports carefully, and the listings carefully, before taking any removal action.

I had something flagged once, and I darn well know it wasn't because the commerce team happened across it by accident. Imo them monitoring the MP in that way is above and beyond their idea of what their job entails. It was during that "mad style" promotional thing. A cheapo hat I sell got flagged because, according to the "we've removed your listing" message, I had that phrase in my keywords and my product didn't fit the promotion. I actually did not use that phrase, anywhere. The hat's name has mad in it. People were getting trigger happy during that debacle because they didn't agree with certain products falling under that particular tag. In some cases, probably a valid complaint. But there were a TON of things removed and flagged that didn't even have the phrase in keywords. My best guess is once people got riled up about others using that phrase, which they didn't believe the merchants should use, they just started searching the term "mad" and flagging willy nilly. If you search the forum you'll find the thread(s) discussing it. Was a nasty debacle, imo.

[Ilyra Chardin]

Thank you for your very well written post.  You've expressed my frustration very well. 

Even when the items do fit the guidelines of "mature," the commerce team is extremely lax in enforcing their policies.  Why are only some residents penalized while others' products with similar characteristics continue to be listed as general and open to anyone who has not logged in as mature or adult? 

I did a search today, setting my preference to general only, with the keywords of: bar, tavern, wine, tequila, alcohol, and beer and each time the results were in the hundreds to the thousands.  I opened a case and pointed this out to the commerce team, whose response was essentially, "we'll get to it when we do" and "you can flag those items."

*head desk*

[Tari Landar]

I don't think I will ever understand how, or why, they do things, to be honest. Of all the staff at the lab, I think the commerce team annoys me the most. Not that I'm a huge advocate for bashing the lab, generally they do plenty of things right, too(in my experience anyway). It's just that they've had so much time to fix some of these issues, and I believe some of the fixes would be quite easy. I realize not everything can be fixed overnight. Some things might never be fixed. But they're really going downhill a lot more than I expected. Probably more than many expected. It's starting to get to the point that a lot more merchants are upset and being monetarily punished by the lack of...I'm not sure what word to use here so I'll just say action, from the commerce team. I'm far from a fan girl, by any means, lol. I did have faith that them saying "this is on our to do list" actually meant it would probably get done though. Terrible assumption on my part.

It's a good thing the benefits of having an MP store outweigh the bad, for me, for now anyway.

I've had perfectly pg things flagged as adult. There was one set I never did figure out what keyword, or what word in the description  was setting off that flag. It was a set of glow products. I never did relist that either, this just reminded me I probably should.

If you look at some of the previous threads about this, you can see exactly how obscure some of their naughty words really are. Things like plain numbers(numbers that represent nothing, really) are even liable to set it off. Absolutely no rhyme or reason. I think, if I'm recalling correctly as this was a while back, someone got flagged for using the number 5 once.

 

[Ilyra Chardin]

LOL!

There is a very old thread on this board that read "I go crazy!  why is my aquarium adult?"

Not only is there no rhyme or reason, but here is an apathetic response when you raise these issues to the Commerce Team... almost as if you're bothering them with your problems.  I wonder if LL feels equally bothered when they have to extract their monthly payments for the island and tier for the mainland parcel?

Some things just make you go, "hmmm"