Dartagan Shepherd

Madeliefste Oh wrote Who knows... we might as well be victim of Coffee and Power. Maybe in this whole year they did nothing but cutting the job in small pieces that can be bit on at the Coffee and Power site... Yuk, Coffee and Flowers, don't remind me. Phil did a flip flop on that one once already. First he said it's good for smaller simpler jobs (assuming less complex than shopping carts) but not for something like SL, which was on the order of an operating system. A couple months later he says they may start integrating it into SL. He got the magic formula fever I think. The illusion that what we have more is something more than the next iteration of virtual worlds and that it was due to things like the Love Machine or other concepts that over the long haul have shown cracks if they could open their eyes. Unfortunately I think he's contributed to what should be a mature company having a small time mentality. I mean, jeez Phil ... built this hybrid open/crowd sourced/commercial thing (which is all the love machine and friends are), televangelize people to fall for it and you're a living testament to the old Microsoft Halloween Papers. You'll never be a large scale venture until you lose the fluff bits and go pro with the offering level. Some of those elements will work here, where you can do that internally in a company you control and with users who eat immersion for breakfast, but ventures like that won't fly out there in the real world. Coffee and Flowers isn't a keeper and that magic formula that worked in LL and SL is about solid product, not half baked concepts and social engineering. That's why it's getting pitched to high heaven and isn't doing anything close to volume and the level of jobs listed are at the "will paint hearts on your boxer shorts for $2" level.

Peggy Paperdoll wrote: I just can't get my head around anyone using a virtual world that deals with a micro-economy convincing a judge or jury that real damage was done due to negligence or lack of protecting them from damage by the developer of a never been done before platorm. Answer the question.......put your actions where your mouth just went. This fellow appears to think it's worth a specialty: http://www.web20lawyer.com/electronic_payment_lawyer.html. Next, virtual goods attorney ads on late night tv commercials. Half joking there, there are other specialists in this particular field in legal. Of course like I say, you already agreed to not go to court and arbitrate for anything less than $10,000 in the LL TOS. The whole thing will see more legislation, more likely from larger game companies and Zynga, etc. Virtual goods and currency are nothing new or exclusive to SL. Virtual goods are a bubble in the billions now, not counting SL. Some court time and legislation are bound to follow as companies abuse virtual currency to get around other laws.

There's a comma at the end of the URL, just remove that.

Not sure what you're calling a civil contract or who's taking money and offering nothing. You can read those 10 pound documents for yourself, there are many policy docs with LL. Just about anything that can be disclaimed away, is. Why does my coffee smell like almonds?

Wal-Mart must refund by cash or credit for defective merchandise, among other things. They also don't have an arbitration clause for anything under $10,000 for instance on retail level issues. Wal-Mart buys its own product, if it sold other peoples, it would need to carry insurance and clear policies for the seller. It would be contractual in nature and wouldn't write off all responsibility. They couldn't. It's not legal. Yes, it's common to attempt to disclaim away any and all liability these days. On the other hand, something LL doesn't quite understand about its customer base. Between an average higher age demographic, despite a good dose of open-mindedness in lifestyle, sexuality, etc. and partially because of the pitch "your world" ... SL users expect something "more" than that from SL. SL is often perceived as an escape from real world corporate mentality. Unfortunately, it tries to play both sides of the fence somewhere between open/crowd sourcing and commercial. It doesn't work for a sophisticated product, as evidenced by a steady decline.

A bit spooky in that it was rather prophetic. Used to think those silly merchants just didn't understand ... these things take time, there's so much you don't know, you have no proof, etc. The customer may not always be right, but they're the only ones that can answer whether it satisfies whatever they expect from a product. Which means they're never wrong.

Not to be overly snarky, but it's amazing what happens due to the lack of a comprehensive manual format, the same document in help format in the client, on the web and as a PDF. Having a manual rather than info spread across a knowledge base, answers, a wiki, forums and user contributed information, etc. is an enormous help and has been for years in many large commercial software offerings. so it's not just for DVD players and shareware. The worst that could happen is an MSDN (also in downloadable format for offline browsing) with user contributed comments. Might want to consider that.

Darrius Gothly wrote: Welcome back Mickey. I thought you were perma-banned. At least, that's what you said in your tweets. (You remember the ones .. where you accused me of attacking and insulting you in the Forums because I knew you were banned.) Well, I can understand how it might have been construed that way. Apparently you didn't know she's gone again this time either.

Ugg, have to go back and qualify some of that, even though I don't think I was misunderstood. Not saying that the marketplace isn't an LL property or that the employees aren't LL employees or that the marketplace isn't a valid department of LL. Could be entirely wrong on this one, of course. but I've seen and made plenty of those revenue share offers. Saves money on payroll. Easy to make, not so easy to back out of. I think it was CouldBe that made a point that when you look at the whole thing as a spread for LL, they can look at these problems as reasonable and small as they stated in the sticky ... only a small amount of users are affected by this issue. If they're judging commerce teams performance by the amount of money the marketplace earns, there's not much wrong at all. If they want to judge by customer satisfaction or ecommerce requirements it's a disaster.

Well, not so much shadowed as dot-bomb methodology. Here, take this, run with it and I'll give you X. You're the boss, here's your title. I'm sure they have commerce team t-shirts.

True, I hate to venture too far into conjecture territory, but this thing has all the signs of some independent arrangement with LL. They wouldn't touch the MB scripts at "all". You would think way back before DD they would have said "let's build a direct pipe (our own version of llGiveInventory) rather than rebuild an entire delivery system. Rather than sanely re-work XStreet they decided to do a from-scratch project (always something to be avoided where possible). It reeks of some independent deal for the acquisition, that they couldn't legally modify MB code or further modify the old XStreet code. The way this team operates doesn't seem to have any sort of accountability to LL. Most management would be looking for new hires about now. I've often thought because of the way things appear that the commerce team gets a commission or their pay from how the marketplace performs, which would explain how and why they optimize it for themselves rather than a product that meets bare minimum ecommerce requirements for their customers (which aren't many or unreasonable). It seems far too autonomous to be part of a responsible company. Rod won't even touch the issue, so doesn't look like much help for management. They're leaking customers, banning more, losing trust, etc. How much incentive do you need before you jump in and get HR involved? Aside from not bearing the same legal responsibility as all other business in the U.S. Funny money (to them) or not, would love to see an independent audit on this puppy. But who knows, making sense isn't on the feature list.

Amen to that, really not getting why the company itself hasn't stepped up here to start getting control of this entire situation, if they care at all about their customers. Also helps if you're going to whisper to a small group of people instead of public announcements when you're catching up with billing that people can actually verify those amounts and specific charges. Now I'm sure if you'd pre-announced publically, out of frustration of the poor performance lately, some people may have emptied their balance in advance (which was at least a choice they can make, on the 5% commission, they don't have that luxury, or of assured refunds on marketplace mistakes). It's kind of a basic concept for everyone out here in the world. You get billed, you get a list of charges. The funny thing about billing is that it generally includes itemization, back charges, credits, adjustments and so on. In fact, it's a requirement.

Surely an attempt to refund advertising to merchants during this bug season gone wrong. Sorry to hear of your search, I mean listing, err, that is delivery, err ... BILLING problem. It appears to be a huge, I mean ... small, err ... ISOLATED incident. You may need to call support to be told to file a ticket to be told to file a Jira to have it consolidated into another Jira to be closed.

Tell me about it. Tens of thousands of products incompatible with DD. Perhaps by their self-imposed deadline of June.

Ariel Vuissent wrote: I've noticed some merchants that seem to copy and paste keywords into ALL of their products. For instance, someone who sells farm animals, buildings, and equipment might use the keywords "pig, lamb, farm, horse, fence, tractor, sheep" etc. for their barn, all of their animals, their farm vehicles, etc. Which is extremely irritating when you're just looking for a horse, and you get other animals and barns and tractors popping up, too. Right, and as long as they allow bulk edit on the keyword field, you'll find some sellers with the same keywords on many products. Doesn't help that they perpetuate the problem.

Czari Zenovka wrote: Toysoldier Thor wrote: how do u easily get a list of all your listing numbers? I relisted 19 of my listings that were unlisted prior to DD. I relisted them as DD. so far no problems with any of my DD as well as my main MB listings. I'm not sure how to "easily" get a list of all my item numbers. If someone knows how I'd love to know that as well. All I've been doing is going into edit my items, then hover my cursor over the item in that list and the item number shows up in the URL at the bottom left of my browser - the item number being the last of the string. Nothing without some involved work. You could download one of many web spider programs and put in a bunch of filters and from that crawl the marketplace and parse your own product list from a list of returned product URLs. If you can find a decent spider and a fairly painless process to get those product numbers, but it's going to involve experimentation. Shell scripts and some wget magic if you're on Linux, but again this is work. Either way you have to parse your own list of product codes from URLs. I tried to push for them to add some RSS feeds so that people could add their products to their own websites, etc. (short of an affiliate program which would have allowed people to sell marketplace product on independent websites). They finally added some RSS feeds and left out the most important one ... an individual seller or store item feed (go figure). The RSS feed had they added it might have been a way to programatically parse out product numbers a bit more easily. A CSV dump of "inventory" would be nice complete with total number of sales for each item (from zero and up), which would include an easy way to parse those numbers.

Ela Talaj wrote: Perhaps if self-styled prosecutors didn't crowd the aisle rushing to the podium to demand conviction every time the Lab does attempt to comunicate it would be doing it more often. Mingled in there is a bit of highly critical but important and useful feedback. And ...

Belated de nada. The privacy policy clutched in the hand of the body obviously meant this body was not to found. The strangest thing ... next to the body was a green bear burning old crates originating from the company. Alright, getting obsessed with the bear, although it lends to new terms for advocates. Bear hugger. Green noser.

Darrius Gothly wrote: (fictional letter found in my imaginary mailbox) "Dear Customer of Big Box Retail Store, Thank you for contacting us regarding your credit card being double-charged after your purchase at our store on April 1st, 2012. Please have your credit card company file a bug report with our software development's Technical Support staff. As soon as they do, we will be happy to resolve this matter for you." Heheh, good point. Thought the image of the child exposed to the green bear was fitting, as well.

Czari Zenovka wrote: Dartagan Shepherd wrote: I've only seen them use email for marketing type announcements for quite a while. There has always been a problem getting an often updated single coherent space for information. Knowledge base is sometimes updated, info sometimes given on the merchant group in-world, occassionally on Twitter, a rarely updated page for marketplace development on the wiki. also a search related page on the wiki I believe for the marketplace that hasn't been updated in a while. And of course that old standby, the Jira. I'm not even getting the marketing announcement updates via email. I think my not receiving them any longer coincides with the approximate time the old forums were shut down and these forums instituted. *Puts on my Sherlock Holmes cap and gets out a huge magnifying glass and starts sleuthing* Found buried in a deep dark hole of a privacy policy: http://lindenmktg.p0.com/resubscribe.jsp

Oh, wait ... I got it! It was right under my email from my cable company refunding me for a pay-per-view movie that was accidently ordered twice and above an offer of free advertising from another online marketplace.

I've only seen them use email for marketing type announcements for quite a while. There has always been a problem getting an often updated single coherent space for information. Knowledge base is sometimes updated, info sometimes given on the merchant group in-world, occassionally on Twitter, a rarely updated page for marketplace development on the wiki. also a search related page on the wiki I believe for the marketplace that hasn't been updated in a while. And of course that old standby, the Jira.

Brief is relative. There's a cancel payment and chargeback kind of brief, and then there's a delivery or refund kind of brief. If we're talking about signups and user retention, that's more like a quickie kind of brief.

Arwen Serpente wrote: Bump. Keep this thread on top. Update on https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-4596 Direct Delivery product purchase orders stuck in the Being Delivered State (Non Unicode products) Please take a look at what's happening on this JIRA - Please set it to "Watch" because the issue is growing and since it deals with the Financial transaction integrity of the MP, it is a serious issue to all of us. Edited to add: This is no longer just a Direct Delivery issue. The reports are also from Magic Box users. ~ Support is directing people to go to the JIRA to request payment for stuck orders (I've had some paid, others are sitting there unpaid). ~ There are now orders stuck "Queued" where Support tells the Merchant to contact the Buyer to file a Support Ticket (even though the Merchant has already filed a Support Ticket). ~ The "Delivery Partially Failed" Message is now (in some cases) being tied to delivery of product + refund for the Buyer (so, essentially the Buyer is getting the item for free). Support is directing the Merchant to contact the Buyer to request direct payment. It gets stranger and less like business as it goes. Problems caused by the company need to be refunded by the company, in a timely manner, on the first attempt at support if the required information has been given. All that's needed is an order number, period for support to do its thing. If the merchant didn't get the money, LL needs to refund the merchant for the purchase. Support should have set up a extra people at the very least in their normal support channels to handle these extra problems, especially as they're financial in nature with liability. A Jira for customer support? This isn't a code/bug problem to a customer, at least not with any company above a lemonade stand. Voluntary bug reports are one thing, forcing Jira on customers in the first place for any reason as a support mechanism is just, well. It does increase the number of people who give up requesting support and refunds while going through the "sit, stay, beg" phase though. It should be able to be resolved by any normal support means quickly. Phone, chat, support ticket.

Sera Lok wrote: hm, well as long as we're not all on the same cycle, life will be just fine. ^^ I really tried to stop, it's a weakness. "“Once a month, some women act like men act all the time." -- Robert A. Heinlein The unfortunate thing for men though is that supposedly women see more colors than men, which gives them a serious competitive advantage as merchants. Not that men have any sense of color generally speaking.