Marketplace Release Notes: September 13, 2011

[Pamela Galli]

Thanks Arwen.

 

/me wonders why

[Pamela Galli]

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-4119  a jira for that

[Darrius Gothly]

---

Pamela Galli wrote:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-4119

  a jira for that

---

Thank you Pamela. I've not been this fuming mad in months. This is absolutely unacceptable. I feel used and personally abused. How in the WORLD could they get this wrong. It's just flat unacceptable.

@Rodvik - I DEMAND AN EXPLANATION!! And .. you might want to consider rolling some heads too.

[Pamela Galli]

Hence my "My blood runs cold" remark in the other thread.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

On this, I'm completely behind you. Hadn't realized that you provided an ANS tester for them. Thank you for that as well. Deep breaths, bud.

[Arwen Serpente]

It appears that the no-reply@marketplace.secondlife.com emails with purchase confirmations and information have stopped coming through (at least for purchases from my store). Not sure if it is just a delay or a result of the deploy.

To the other Merchants reading this, would you check and see if you are getting the emails as usual? I am hoping I am the only one having the issue and that it is temporary or just a delay.

[Darrius Gothly]

---

Dartagan Shepherd wrote:

On this, I'm completely behind you. Hadn't realized that you provided an ANS tester for them. Thank you for that as well. Deep breaths, bud.

---

Thank you. I am breathing deep .. but I seem to have melted the letters off my keyboard, so please excuse any typos.

[Pamela Galli]

Mine are getting through Arwen. But the last one was an hour ago so if a more recent development would not know.

[Darrius Gothly]

I am still receiving sales emails several days delayed. The one I got today is for a sale from the 11th. But it's been that way for months and months, so no change here .. so far.

[Arwen Serpente]

Thanks Pamela and Darrius, then it is some kind of delay and not a result of the deploy (which is good news). Right now, anything out of the ordinary/norm makes me wonder "is it me?" or something else.

[Pamela Galli]

But anything that effects detente between the guys can't be all bad. Right?

[Brooke Linden]

We are actively working to fix the ANS reports of L$0. This is a bug that was missed during testing. I'll update the merchants once we know when we will be able to deploy the fix.

Brooke

[Couldbe Yue]

---

Brooke Linden wrote:

We are actively working to fix the ANS reports of L$0. This is a bug that was missed during testing. I'll update the merchants when we know that we will be able to deploy the fix.

Brooke

---

you missed it?  really?

so does that mean you missed the order details/customer name from the website transaction history too or is that a deliberate "enhancement"?

[Josh Susanto]

I predicted that they would do things that hide what somebody already did, and this is the second such incident.

Making it more difficult to process your own transaction records is a deterrent to showing shifts in transaction patterns consistent with systemic abuse.

It also stands to disrupt the refinement of marketing strategies as informed by sales trends.

Of course, there are merchants who will not have as much difficulty putting this data toegther for themselves, because they are also Lindens.

BTW, Dart:

Do you have supernatural mental powers or not?

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Out of food at the moment, sorry.

[Khayman Karlsvalt]

Hi Arwen and sorry for late reply. I notice it takes about 30 to 45 minutes for the in world balance to catch up but it shows. At first it didn't but when I stopped doing some editing I glanced at the balance and it changed. After the next sales came in I paid more attention and indeed its a 30 minute to 45 minute delay in the in world profit balance to be show.

 

However your transaction page reflects all sales. I haven't seen the 0 balance for the transactions and I cross my fingers on that. Hope that helps.

[Darrius Gothly]

I also notice that Freebie sales are being echoed to the Second Life Transaction report. During the final stages of the initial Marketplace rollout, Brodesky asked the forum population in general if they felt it was necessary to include Freebie sales in the main transactions ... with the resulting consensus being no, there was no need to have those transactions reported.

While you're adding the sales detail back in, please disable reporting of freebie sales into those transaction logs.



09/13/2011

16:20:42

ecb998e0

Source: Commerce Linden  MKT2 Item Purchase

L$0

[Brooke Linden]

I have created a JIRA to track this. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-4121. 

Brooke

[Legend Hye]

Every time I hear about a new LL project I cringe and wonder what's going to be messed up this time. 

 

[Brooke Linden]

I have updated the main post with the JIRAs we are tracking for this release. Please file any additional issues as JIRAs.

Thanks for your patience.

Brooke

[Topa Adamski]

I just recive my first sale for today... i was wondering  what is wrong till i read what happend... so  i hope this is good sign that issues was fixed ...or fixed soon. 

09/13/2011

19:16:37

7f772250

Source: Commerce Linden  MKT2 Item Purchase

L$570

[Blaze Nielsen]

Brooke et al, I believe the great frustration we feel as merchants here is the methodology of using us as beta testers for your "upgrades". Many of us have our livelihoods on the line. The money we use to buy food and gas and pay mortgages. For many this is far far more than a hobby. We see again and again and again sloppy code disrupting our businesses here while the bugs are ironed out. From the server, the client and the marketplace you obviously feel your tinkering can be done with the general population instead of in an isolated testing environment. This needs to be discussed at the highest level of management and the policy changed. 

[Toysoldier Thor]

---

Blaze Nielsen wrote:

Brooke et al, I believe the great frustration we feel as merchants here is the methodology of using us as beta testers for your "upgrades". Many of us have our livelihoods on the line. The money we use to buy food and gas and pay mortgages. For many this is far far more than a hobby. We see again and again and again sloppy code disrupting our businesses here while the bugs are ironed out. From the server, the client and the marketplace you obviously feel your tinkering can be done with the general population instead of in an isolated testing environment. This needs to be discussed at the highest level of management and the policy changed. 

---

Well said.  This evening I have brought today's unacceptable and disrespectful level of management professionalism within the LL Commerce group to Rodvik directly.

This is not the first time that this group has displayed this level of immature system deployment and lack of proper communications with the Merchant community.  But I pointed him to this thread as well and told him things in this group are in serious need of an overhaul with management and a development team that understands proper management of high profile customer / merchant operations and systems.

Deploying this magnitude of changes and doing under a shrowd of secrecy UNTIL AFTER the changes have been executed??  And not testing some of the more obvious functions that most system testers should have caught easily??

I would suggest that other Merchants approach Rodvik too.  This dangerous high-risk form of running the MP service needs to be reviewed and addressed.

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Well, if you got Rod to watch this thread, here's my L$2 on some of the subjects in your rant ...

To some extent, I agree with you about certain flaws, but before we get to that, a couple things should be pointed out.

First, that software update details usually aren't announced until after the fact.

Secondly, in many, many cases bugs that aren't found in development often aren't found until they're released. Not that some of this reporting bug shouldn't have been caught, been trying to harp on the value of reporting lately. Or that the ANS should have been caught, they could have adapted the tool Darrius provided into a unit test which catch this kind of thing.

Generally the above points are a given though.

What I do agree with, is that the community should be far more involved in the process from the very beginning, before Lindens make up their minds on what ideas they're going to implement, not after the fact when we can only suggest small features on top of things, or report bugs on features they've already decided on.

Listening to a recent podcast by Charlar Linden brought to remembrance a couple of points that are true of any tool that allows users to create something with, which was that 1) Users will use your tools in ways that you didn't predict or expect and that 2) Users are more intimately familiar with the tool than the developers of the tools.

That said, going under the assumption that the Lab still operates with small, mostly autonomous teams, which make product design decisions. Bad idea.

The reason is that they will often make decisions among themselves, and possibly other Lindens that chip in with feedback, but not properly analyze user feedback.

This results in the misfires that we've experienced for years in SL, which is a disconnect in the fixes and features users ask for, and features that LL implements which are often the wrong features, or the right features and fixes in the wrong order.

An example from earlier today, I'd suggested a way of merging marketplace and in-world products in a way that would make it more attractive to own land and have an in-world store, in a way that would increase land sales, revive in-world sales and make malls a viable venture once again. This can't happen because it's not really compatible with direct delivery.

Because we weren't brought into the process early enough to possibly come up with a better solution than direct delivery and the team came up with it on their own, effectively outside of user input.

To fix this, what we need are product managers (and not very many are needed, more than one product manager can be over multiple LL products) who are outside of these development teams, gathering both user and team feedback, and then blending them into a list of tasks to be done, which are then pushed down to the development teams, with deadlines.

These product managers need to be aware of the above points that I mentioned groking from the Charlar podcast.

To accomplish that, we need more extensive User Groups and discussion (more than an hour or so a week, or bi-weekly, or monthly) in order to give time for these ideas to form, as one users inspires a better idea from the second user and so on, until ideas mature and become ready for implementation.

This of course requires a staff large enough to put in that face time, and less of a reliance on a few employees to come up with these ideas which are more in the interests of the company, and not necessarily of its users. This explains why LL can pump out lots of work, new features and still have flat numbers.

For this to even be feasible, user input needs to be guided but not hindered in good parental fashion.

In your case, tone means everything. If you want respect, you've got to have a respectful tone and even tempered feedback once you do get those ears, otherwise it's a bust.

I know it's great sport to criticize the Lab and their blunders, but at some point that needs to give way to dialog that works, in a company that knows how to optimize and use it. So there needs to be a clear dividing line of where one stops and the other begins.

[Edited, minor cleanup]

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Ugg, had left out another point from that above long-ish post, in that yes, open beta's with more people are preferable to smaller closed beta. Again, it's an issue of staff dedicated to understanding and organizing that feedback, to make it work.

Your "black ops" point is valid, but you're also showing why that's sometimes needed, in a team too small to use public open beta in a sandbox environment.

Another good point in that Charlar podcast ... users who take the tone of complaining, add more bulk to feedback to have to sift through in order to get to the real bits. That makes it more time consuming and possibly unrealistic to do. That again relates to tone, and to how well users can present their points.