Were you UNDERcharged?

[Josh Susanto]

I realize there's no obvious incentive for anyone to report be undercharged or overpaid, and that might be a reason I don't see ANY reports of it AT ALL.

But if there began to accumulate at least a few really compelling reports of how the "bugs" have caused LL to undercharge or overpay someone, that might be enough to persuade me that such errors are comparably as common as the opposite type.

That might sufficiently falsify at least one of my hypotheses and help me to start seeing out from under my own conspiracy theory. 

And then I might eventually just STFU.

So, please, help me track down ANY documented example of someone being undercharged or overpaid by LL as a result of these "accidental" problems we've seen reported over the last week.

[Josh Susanto]

Well don't everybody try to talk at once!

[Tari Landar]

I have been overpaid, but it wasn't recently. It was after I first became premium(non longer am). When it was time for that $1000L payment, mine never came. I waited a good month before I asked about it, just in case, still never came. Then I contacted LL about it. Took them ages to actually answer me (about two weeks). I was given my payment that day. The next day, I got another one. I know most people probably wouldn't say a thing about it, but I did. I added the info to my ticket which hadn't yet been closed. I was simply told to "enjoy", since it was clearly their error.

That's not to say I am sticking up for LL, or saying it's common place. But I'm quite certain there are other instances out there. It's rather obvious that we wouldn't hear about them though, so not real sure why you're even asking people about it, lol. Not too many folks these days would admit to *any overage in their favor, much less one from LL.

[Josh Susanto]

Thanks. That's potentially quite a good example?

Was that before or after 8 August 2011?

[Ziggy21 Slade]

Yawn!

Yet another silly conspiracy theory.

Obviously errors of this nature are going to be much rarer. If someone purchases something, varoius things things can go wrong which could delay payment or stop it altogether, web communications being the most obvious, but also database errors etc, the transaction exists between the 2 parties but for whatever reason fails.

For someone to be overpaid, money which doesn't exist in the system has to magically appear from somewhere and then for no reason at all be put in your account, it doesn't take a genius to see that an error like this is a lot less likely to occur than the former.

Having said that, there was one week when every single premium customer got paid their weekly stipend twice, and we were allowed to keep it, so perhaps you would like to theorise as to what LL were trying achieve on that occasion.

If you were to apply this amazing imagination of yours to creating some products to sell, instead of wasting your time dreaming up nutty conspiracies I think you would be a lot happier.

[Josh Susanto]

I'm not interested in ancient history (yeah, I'm guessing, but why am I such a good guesser?).

Part of my theory (as explained elsewhere) is that the chief malefactor has borked search order to favor accounts older than 2 years because he/she intentionally uses a merchant acount that is older than his/her identity as a Linden.

These examples nonetheless also serve to illustrate how the thinking at LL has changed in terms of what it means to err on the side of caution. It used to mean that LL paid for its own mistakes. Now it means that the users pay for LL mistakes.

The idea that people can't be overpaid with nonexistent funds may have some merit, but they seem to be getting refunded with money that ostensibly was removed permanently from the economy, so this idea may turn out to be a little fuzzier than you realize.

Nonexistent money defnitely doesn't have to be used, though, in order for people to simply be undercharged.

Even some kind of imabalance would make sense for reasons you've explained, but only if ANY errors were happening in the opposite direction from what has thus far been reported.

Are there ANY current reports of anyone being undercharged due to the bugs of August and September?

ANY?

 

[Pamela Galli]

Let's say there are Linden alts with businesses, and that it would be an advantage to be both Linden and merchant. What are we supposed to do about that?

 

It's one of those things I don't bother thinking about because there is nothing I can do about it. I only think about problems I have some control over or some ability to affect some change, and this is not one of those things.

I also can't control Josh's posting about it but think I have heard enough to get the idea now.

[Josh Susanto]

I assume there are several, if not many LIndens who are also merchants, and I'm fine with that in principle.

I also assume that a majority of them would be pretty decent, respectable merchants and generally diligent LL employees.

All that my theory absolutely includes is one minimum malefactor and a dysfunctional mental climate at LL that has people believing they need to protect this person in order to protect the company and their jobs.

Other Lindens might not even believe in the one rotten apple, but they would have to be wilfully chosing not to believe at this point.

OTOH, as I've said, various subordinate hypotheses on which my theory depends are substantially open to falsification, and I invite that eagerly, inasmuch as I'm pretty confident that it is not forthcoming, ever.

[Pamela Galli]

But so what Josh? What is it we are supposed to do?  It's like confirming that aliens really exist. There's not much to be done about it. Why discuss it, much less mention it in every thread?

 

If you want to keep discussing aliens, there's only one conclusion I can draw.

 

[Josh Susanto]

The point is that the Lindens eventually have to start explaining things better (or fix the root problem, but don't hold your breath for that).

Ignoring things rather than demanding that they be addressed is just an invitation for problems to continue, and to escalate.

Is that what you want?

 

[Tari Landar]

lol it was 2008, so most definitely nothing current

 

I still don't think even if anyone has been overpaid, or undercharged by LL that they'd admit to such. People are a paranoid bunch, for all different kinds of reasons.

[Nefertiti Nefarious]

---

Josh Susanto wrote:

Part of my theory (as explained elsewhere) is that the chief malefactor has borked search order to favor accounts older than 2 years because he/she intentionally uses a merchant acount that is older than his/her identity as a Linden.

 

---

Give me plausible means, motive and opportunity for how this person can manipulate search to favor this person's alt/merchant.

It requires influencing the requirements team to get "increase weight for merchant age" into the search requirements, or being soooo high ranking that the dev team and market managers just say "Yes, of course boss, we'll jigger the search for you". Who has that much weight to throw around?

OR it means the person managed to get access to the right set of development servers (did they steal a password, call in favors to get a log-in ID, or what?), log in to the correct project, check out the right part of the code, alter the code, debug the code, test the code, check the code back in, and make it invisible to the testing process so the test cases turn out right but make it active only on the Marketplace.

[Josh Susanto]

I don't need to know how it was accomplished to know that it was accomplished.

If I need to dig up that thread, I expect I can do it before it gets "moderated" out of existence.

Shall I?

[Josh Susanto]

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Merchants/MP-Search-Algorithm-Borked-Changed/td-p/1039215

[Nefertiti Nefarious]

So based on one person's statement, and your experience, you concoct this conspiracy to make old Linden alts show up better in the Marketplace?

My products keep showing up where I expect them to. That's because the title and the first sentence of the description are descriptive.

Oops, I must be part of the conspiracy. My join date is 9/26/2006  

 

[Josh Susanto]

What he reported was correct in my observation at that time.

A smart malefactor, though, would have seen the post and shifted business to newer accounts. 

If LL wants to track that, the total transaction volume in money should be enough to notice in terms of what product line was shifted from older to newer accounts just after the problem was reported and (sort of) remedied. 

They can probably also narrow it down further by looking for merchants who always fell just short of qualifying for the old Xstreet discounts, but who have abruptly pulled ahead enough since thye were discontinued that they would now qualify if such discounts had been continued. 

Neither the older nor newer accounts, I expect, will ever have been used to flag anything (or much of anything), although competing items will have been systematically flagged by a small army of users who don't seem to do much else.

I imagine there's no way for them to check whether someone was consistently delisting items before deleting them even before I pointed out that this was a good idea (not that anyone is listening to such advice even now), but if there does happen to be some way, that would also be a good indicator. 

Aside from who actually published the knowledge base page on the order of delist/delete, I can't be certain whose decision it was to choose or continue the choice of the stated order, but such a Linden is the first person I would try to scrutinize from that end as setting up money flow anomlies that might later be exploited for personal gain.

I only see two Lindens associated with that knowledge base page. If I were the junior of them, I would be watching very carefully the actions of any other associated Linens not listed; moreover I'd expect them to be watching me by now, anyway.